"Gamers seldom make passes at players with classes"
Dorothy Parkour

This is the first formal announcement of the release of MekArcade 0.4 this August. We are calling this 0.4 release the 'Developers Edition', because we need your help taking it further (mappers at the ready!) and we still haven't decided if this should be a public release or just within the Cube community. You can see some pictures and an old vid at the http://www.moddb.com/games/mekarcade, and you can keep up with our plans at the SF site. While it is really only about half done, it is in fact fully functional - one of the benefits of forking from a working cube engine game like Red Eclipse. Now the spruiking is over......

The first major change to the RE code base is the implementation of a player class. Indeed you can think of MekArcade as RE + playerclass + Mek content + a few other bits and pieces. Quin has done a splendid job implementing 'cube with classes'; and it is classes I want to talk about, as there are many potential uses for a player class, and quite frankly I don't think I have the wit to think through all the possibilities. I also feel we have a significant responsibility to do this right. Obviously it makes class based games possible like TF2, and vehicle games of all types, implementing special class based abilities (eg the light engineer mek will be able to carry stuff) and will also aid us in building defensive weapons. I am sure there are many of you with your own thoughts about classes and what could be done with them, please share.

Currently the player class is simple and there only a few attributes at this time, below is the relevant code:

const char *classmodels[NUMCLASSES][3] = {
{ "actors/mek1", "actors/mek1/hwep", "mek1" },
{ "actors/mek2", "actors/mek2/hwep", "mek2" },
{ "actors/mek3", "actors/mek3/hwep", "mek3" }
//{ "actors/mek4", "actors/mek4/hwep", "mek4" }
};
#else
extern const char *classmodels[NUMCLASSES][3]; //3
#endif
#define CLASSES(a,b1,b2,c1,c2,c3,c4,c5) \
GSVAR(0, class##a##name, #a); \
GVAR(0, class##a##health, 0, b1, VAR_MAX); \
GVAR(0, class##a##armour, 0, b2, VAR_MAX); \
GFVAR(0, class##a##xradius, 0, c1, FVAR_MAX); \
GFVAR(0, class##a##yradius, 0, c2, FVAR_MAX); \
GFVAR(0, class##a##height, 0, c3, FVAR_MAX); \
GFVAR(0, class##a##weight, 0, c4, FVAR_MAX); \
GFVAR(0, class##a##speed, 0, c5, FVAR_MAX);

// name health armour xrad yrad height weight speed
CLASSES(mek1, 300, 80, 3, 3, 15, 200, 65); //80 recon flyer
CLASSES(mek2, 400, 100, 3, 3, 15, 300, 50); //50 base beholder medium
CLASSES(mek3, 330, 90, 3, 3, 15, 250, 60); //70 light engineer ?carry health
//CLASSES(mek4, 500, 100, 3, 3, 15, 350, 40); missile mek


For the 0.4 release we will have 4 or 5 classes, some very similar to TF2 classes. (Why not!) Jumpjets and hover should be attributes of a class by release time.

The 0.5 release later in the year should bring in a destructible entity, next gen weapons, possibly defensive weapons. Underpinning this will be a change to using multiple weapon tag points. There are a few implications for this in terms of modelling (the weapons will make up part of the mek shape), the weapon management will be less FPS like.

0.6 will bring in a Mek/heat cycle like MekAssault had, and a few other bits and pieces that got missed in 0.5. At that point the MP game, as planned, will be mostly be in place, and we will then decide whether we need to continue to develop the MP game play further in 2013 or work concentrate on single player.

I'm new to sauerbraten but I've come to find out you can mod a couple of little features, such as cross hairs, game interface menu and textures. What I've been trying to do lately is mod the player models, such as Mr. Fixit, specifically just changing the skin colors. I go packages under Sauerbraten, onto models, then to the Mr. Fixit Folder. I click on the images of the body and change the color of them using GIMP, but when I go to play, it is still the same default colors. Could someone please tell me how to do this correctly or if it is even possible. Thank you!

I noticed an increasing number of topics being closed. This is not a bad thing by itself (on the contrary, it might be necessary if an off-topic flamewar emerges). But it also looks like a very small amount of moderators is closing the threads, which is also not a bad thing in itself, they are active and they care. But the same people... what the hell, Raz and Sui, I'm talking about you guys. You get involved in a lot of arguments, which, again, is not a bad thing. But please, step back a bit from time to time and think about what it looks like when you fight an argument, have the final word and then close the thread. There might be some situations where a little more "laissez faire" would be beneficial.

Feel free to close this thread :)

I recently heard about Tesseract, which from what I heard is a modification of Sauerbraten that uses all dynamic lights and directional model lighting. However, I also heard that it requires a really good computer and it has trouble rendering maps with a lot of lights, and since the rendering approaches are so different maps with lots of lights will simply be unplayable.

Here's an article: http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2012/04/tesseract-cube2-next-gend.html

So what I'm wondering is, what's the future of Tesseract? I really want to see this mod go places, but I don't want to have to give up all the graphically-intensive maps.

Also, even though I'm not a huge fan of Minecraft, this mod pretty much paves the way for a free, open-souce Minecraft with graphics a million times better than the original. An even cooler idea might be to somehow combine Sauer with Minecraft's buildability, so you can have deathmatches with destructible environments where you can build up defenses. (It might not even be as far-fetched as it sounds, there's already a Minecraft map importer on the Cubic Matter forums.)

So was there a user pruning? All of the sudden my account was missing and I had to recreate it. All of my forum posts/maps are missing as well.

The game maker. Cause i have played alot of other game makers that some how have to have some 3D program installed in and they never mintioned that in it. So all i am saying is do i need specil programing or is it all ready set for me once i download it?

Is there a way to play Sauerbraten in Single Player Cooperative mode? Like Quake 2, Unreal, Doom 3 with the LMS 4 mod. And does anyone know why SP Coop seems to be so unpopular?

Hi everyone!
I've been seeing some people talking about some users who have been cheating in sauerbraten. I personally saw a user flying (hacker) in my early sauerbraten days, and I didn't know it was not a normal thing.

Well, these hackers and cheaters are ruining the game for some of us. So, to stop this, I think if we had 3-5 sauerbraten moderators that could ban / kick from any server, then that would help the situation.
I know, some people value their "Master" power, but nobody goes on those servers normally.
Hope you agree!
--
Monkie

I noticed the discussion here about Humanity Pending http://www.quadropolis.us/node/2965 and someone mentioned Proper Games had ported a game based on the Cube engine to Xbox Live. I think Flock games also had an Xbox game based on the cube engine. Does anyone know how they did this? I don't think MS provide openGl support on the Xbox at all, so I am guessing but they would have to either have to write a wrapper to intercept OpenGL(and SDL) and turn them in a DX9 functions, or they recoded all the OpenGL/SDL code in cube to use DirectX/direct draw libraries.

Somewhere I have seen a discussion in one of the cube related forums about trying to use the glass material in a curved fashion; it seems you can't. It is the Cube engine after all.

My interest is mainly to do with recreating those round glass transport tubes you see often in scifi imagery of the surface of Mars. Using RE I used the translucent entity property applied to a hollow model , didn't look right, then I thought maybe I could use a custom shader on the model. I looked to see if someone had done a glass model shader but could find none. I experimented for a long time (had a lot of fun) but didn't get anything to look how I wanted. So my questions are:
1. is it possible?
2. has anyone done it? (and know a link)
3. if it can be done, but hasn't, can anyone point me in the right direction.