Oh, one more thing I missed from the good old days.. Even though Onos using ladders was bad, it did allow a more interesting map design. I missed the old mine shaft with the sewers. Over all, with ladders it allowed more gang ways and such and I feel the maps were generally more varied.
I think NS2's movement system forces a certain kind of map design. For example skulks need to be hugging walls or obstacles most of the time, which dictates a lot for the map design.
In NS1 aliens were very vulnerable in open spaces, but they still had their main movement abilities available and could react to incoming threats quickly. The aliens were also very good at travelling through any aerial space they found. This allowed very varied room design and also made the rooms to play out in memorable ways.
Map design is much more dictated by the fact that marines can shoot and aliens can't. You have to get the room size just right, make sure there's no overly long line of sights and put convenient cover everywhere, all without turning it alien favored.
The whole point is that in NS1 design the size, amount of line of sight and right amount of cover were much more flexible things. Melee vs ranged dictates some stuff here and there, but it doesn't have to be as limited as NS2 maps seem to be.
By comparison, all that you need to make a skulk able to wall jump is a wall. Most rooms have walls
'Just a wall' is quite a lot to ask when you're navigating a big hangar or cargo bay and there are bullets flying around.
Why even bring the wall in there? Without the requirement you can use all kinds of open ledges ( = skulk spots!) and walkways freely, navigate all kinds of ceiling objects, railings and all that. You also don't end up being a sitting duck in case you find yourself more than an arm's lenght away from a wall after munching away at the first marine.
If you've got access to NS1, load up something like NS_Tanith and check out Chemical. It's a huge room where half of the ambush possibilities don't involve a wall next to you. It also happens to be a really cool room for engagements because of all the possibilities.
You're right, though, especially when it comes to detailing. But the underlying mechanics of the game dictate map design much more.
For map design as a whole, there's loads going on obviously. Meanwhile for the design of a single room, the movement mechanics are huge thing.
I can't state enough how much more I enjoy skulking in NS2 than in NS1. I'm on the opposite of folks complaining about clutter in NS2, since half of the fun for me is engaging marines while breaking line of sight and using cover to plan approaches while trying to get a nice parasite off with a flick on my way there. NS1 seriously suffered from the limitations of its engine re: map design and coming from the advanced movement systems of the other big twitch games bunny-hopping just never impressed me (and I'm not a total stranger to air control either). Who wants to play in a bunch of sparse corridors in 2014? That time is over. I prefer wall jumping because it allows any player to focus on what is actually skillful about engaging a marine - setting up the best attack while taking as little damage as possible in the shortest amount of time. I can explain most of what you need to know about the skulk movement system in under 15 seconds to a brand new player as opposed to something as archaic as bunny hopping.
DC_DarklingJoin Date: 2003-07-10Member: 18068Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver
Its been a very long time so I may not remember the ns1 skulk completely correct.
But I also prefer walljump to bunnyhop. Yes I could bunnyhop, and my ns1 gorgy did it... often.
But it was a anoying to use mechanic involving way to many keys and was not really usable out combat.
Walljump can sort of be used in combat.
I dont mind either the more clean maps in ns1 or the more cluttered in ns2. Both work for me. I would indeed however like to see more colour.
As someone mentioned before, the future has paint surely.
Performance was not superb in NS1. The aging quake engine was at first quite efficient, but became less so every new generation of GPUs.
It used what is now ridiculously inefficient: openGL in immediate mode (glBegin() ... glEnd()). It bound two separate textures for EVERY w_poly being drawn (lightmap and level texture). It drew every single polygon in the map as a GL_POLYGON (which is tesselated into triangles on the fly by the driver), passing each vertex using glVertex3f().
It ran much better in 2004 on a lowly pentium III than it did a couple of years ago on a much faster chip. The non-existant mouse lag really saved it in the end. Even when NS 1.0 was released, quake III was WAY ahead of it in draw performance, simple because it drew batches of triangles.
In 2013, Valve got their thumb out of their butt and decided to update the Half-life engine to draw batches of triangles. I don't know why; possibly to support CS. Now NS runs like a bat out of hell; 500 FPS rock solid no matter what you do. It's still not anywhere close to efficient, but if we had this in 2003 (when it was already obvious and half-life was still going strong) it would have been a huge deal for NS.
I liked how more people weren't hardcore competitive. Some communities would do silly things quite often, and it was actually fun. G4b2s comes to mind. Fun communities made that game for me.
I played a lot on Nuclear Gamers back in the day. What kept me playing so long was that that server had so many different game types on rotation. I think it had Classic, Combat, MvM, Siege, GorgeZilla and Gorge Race.
I had 0 interest in comp, and didn't honestly know that it existed until I played NS2, and had enormous fun playing NS1 for several years.
Performance was not superb in NS1. The aging quake engine was at first quite efficient, but became less so every new generation of GPUs.
I played it from ~2004 on an Athlon 2600+ and 9600pro and when I upgraded to Core 2 and 8800 the performance was pretty similar and I regularly went down to 40-50fps. I wondered why it ran so badly.
Back in the day Combat was much better than classic, and it had buildmenu (pgs, turret factories for blocking and sentries) and xmenu which is what Standalone Combat seems to be taking a lot of inspiration from. You could normally only get 10 upgrades in Combat and this unlocked more
There were some good Marine vs Marine maps, including CS ones. It was basically Combat with Marines unlike MvM in NS2 which has buildings and res towers.
Lots of crazy maps: dig-siege, stargate and there was a Simpsons one ported from CS, lots of heavily vertical novelty maps and a tetris one.
You didn't need to use the minimap as much on aliens because the update rate on it was about every 0.5s and you could see aliens/marines/structure markers through the walls much farther than in ns2.
Healing at armories was done by facing and holding E which also made you move at about 1/4 speed while healing. And healing was 10 per tick.
Fade had an Acid Rocket as a third ability that you could never really hit marines directly with but if you were under a walkway and shot upwards it would do damage through to the top side which everybody exploited. It also did AoE splashdamage downwards when it impacted. With a Lerk doing Primal Scream (double attack rate) it would pretty much kill most campers if you aimed at the ceiling above them.
Lerks could "Pancake" and fly up and down vertically super fast. I could never do it very well but it was nerfed/removed at one point.
NS1 was a lot more interesting than NS2. Matches always had a constant swinging of balance, it was a much more balanced game. The other thing I liked was the ability to build anywhere as a marine, doing this could throw off your enemy into a searching spree, and having secret bases was quite interesting. Aliens didn't have commanders so Gorges had more of a purpose. The match only ended when everyone was dead, which was cool to cheer on your team.
NS2 turned out to be a mess of sloppily thought out content, terrible balance in terms of keeping a game interesting between the two sides and incredibly poor performance. NS2 classic is still fun, it uses most of NS2's graphics, if you think that's bad, how could you stomach NS1. xD
I see them as totally different games, NS2 wasn't ever supposed to be NS1 and I think that's great. If I'm honest I enjoy NS2 more but that is helped a lot by the great group of guys I play with.
I still think we should get an NS1 server up and all have a play some time.
We tried. It plays like absolute shit. Don't let the nostalgia glasses fool you. As usual in life, it's best to leave the past in the past.
NS1 plays endlessly better than NS1c. This is about 90% because Dragon wants to use the worst feeling movement possible instead of just porting NS2 movement and leave everything else NS1.
NS2c has movement like vanilla NS2 as its default now, and the original option was re-created hl1 movement. There are many reasons why ns1 plays better than ns2c, but the movement was quite similar. For someone who was very familiar with ns1 movement, they should be able to pickup the 'advanced' movement in classic easily, the differences (while noticeable) are not hugely impacting.
I did not play the game extensively enough to develop any strong dislikes, apart from everyone being so much better than me (part of the reason I did not play extensively enough) but I will tell you what I did like.
The combat was much faster and deadlier than it is in NS2, but the pace of the game as a whole was much slower (marines could not spring, a common res pool had to be split between tech and equipment, and the maps felt bigger).
In ns2 I find that the combat (more so with pub play but even against good players) tends to drag out (I suspect because of the shit collision and different model size ratios) and as a result everything feels weak. But games on the other hand are often decided in the first 10 minutes, with the subsequenet 10-20 min being an inevitable grind towards often inevitable defeat or victory.
I also liked the complexity and diversity of ns1 maps, by comparision the ns2 maps feel like copies of basically the same (not very interesting, basically the same pattern of tech room-corridor-resroom-corridor-techroom) floor plan with moderate variations in layout and different colour/prop schemes.
We tried playing NS1 shortly after NS2 came out and it basically ruined all my fond memories. Never again.
lol wtf what ns1 did you play and in what setting, it still feels great going back and playing it.. everything is instant and plays smooth.. the movement and gameplay are all still there
the "ns1" ns2c movement actually feels pretty good it just takes some getting used to if you're heavily practiced in the ns2 vanilla movement
Ns1 seemed to have more/closer communities/clans. That was a niche game. Ns2 is a combo of niche and popular. Also, the competitive side wasn't... the main priority; fun seemed to be the priority, no matter the server size. Weird, fun maps.. weird, fun mods... weird, fun admin commands... twas the good times.
DC_DarklingJoin Date: 2003-07-10Member: 18068Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver
Well we had out fair shares of evil matches also, lets be realistic there!
Thankfully it was quite easy to notice bad comms. And with the game going much slower, a lil more time for a eject id recon.
Hands, who remembers the 1.04 time period when aliens could ALSO use phasegates?
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
People seem to be remembering the emotions that the first game invoked, but forgetting about all the frustrations. NS wasn't balanced, but players developed strategies around the imbalances, and communities created custom rules using admin mods. It was without doubt one of the best games available at the time, but it had it's problems that everyone was complaining about right up to the end.
In fact, there are very few games that aren't full of bugs, issues and general problems, it is just the quality and enjoyment of the game that enables people to play through the experience.
NS had problems, as does NS2. Neither game will ever be perfect, but both are great for what they are.
DC_DarklingJoin Date: 2003-07-10Member: 18068Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver
Completely true.. How many servers didnt have rules against certain glitches and stuff.
I remember, regardless if you ment to or not, that when a gorge dropped a structure it could glitch through the floor. If the fall wasnt to deep to the bottom of the map, you could still benefit from lets say heals, without the marines being able to do a single thing about it. Sieges often didnt hit that deep down.
In NS1. as alluded to by some in this thread, the 'competitive' aspect came about after an interesting and fun-for-many game mod was created, NS2 had this 'competitive' aspect in mind from the start.
Comments
'Just a wall' is quite a lot to ask when you're navigating a big hangar or cargo bay and there are bullets flying around.
Why even bring the wall in there? Without the requirement you can use all kinds of open ledges ( = skulk spots!) and walkways freely, navigate all kinds of ceiling objects, railings and all that. You also don't end up being a sitting duck in case you find yourself more than an arm's lenght away from a wall after munching away at the first marine.
If you've got access to NS1, load up something like NS_Tanith and check out Chemical. It's a huge room where half of the ambush possibilities don't involve a wall next to you. It also happens to be a really cool room for engagements because of all the possibilities.
For map design as a whole, there's loads going on obviously. Meanwhile for the design of a single room, the movement mechanics are huge thing.
But I also prefer walljump to bunnyhop. Yes I could bunnyhop, and my ns1 gorgy did it... often.
But it was a anoying to use mechanic involving way to many keys and was not really usable out combat.
Walljump can sort of be used in combat.
I dont mind either the more clean maps in ns1 or the more cluttered in ns2. Both work for me. I would indeed however like to see more colour.
As someone mentioned before, the future has paint surely.
Ow yeh.. hive egging.... aaah..
It used what is now ridiculously inefficient: openGL in immediate mode (glBegin() ... glEnd()). It bound two separate textures for EVERY w_poly being drawn (lightmap and level texture). It drew every single polygon in the map as a GL_POLYGON (which is tesselated into triangles on the fly by the driver), passing each vertex using glVertex3f().
It ran much better in 2004 on a lowly pentium III than it did a couple of years ago on a much faster chip. The non-existant mouse lag really saved it in the end. Even when NS 1.0 was released, quake III was WAY ahead of it in draw performance, simple because it drew batches of triangles.
In 2013, Valve got their thumb out of their butt and decided to update the Half-life engine to draw batches of triangles. I don't know why; possibly to support CS. Now NS runs like a bat out of hell; 500 FPS rock solid no matter what you do. It's still not anywhere close to efficient, but if we had this in 2003 (when it was already obvious and half-life was still going strong) it would have been a huge deal for NS.
I had 0 interest in comp, and didn't honestly know that it existed until I played NS2, and had enormous fun playing NS1 for several years.
I played it from ~2004 on an Athlon 2600+ and 9600pro and when I upgraded to Core 2 and 8800 the performance was pretty similar and I regularly went down to 40-50fps. I wondered why it ran so badly.
Back in the day Combat was much better than classic, and it had buildmenu (pgs, turret factories for blocking and sentries) and xmenu which is what Standalone Combat seems to be taking a lot of inspiration from. You could normally only get 10 upgrades in Combat and this unlocked more
There were some good Marine vs Marine maps, including CS ones. It was basically Combat with Marines unlike MvM in NS2 which has buildings and res towers.
Lots of crazy maps: dig-siege, stargate and there was a Simpsons one ported from CS, lots of heavily vertical novelty maps and a tetris one.
You didn't need to use the minimap as much on aliens because the update rate on it was about every 0.5s and you could see aliens/marines/structure markers through the walls much farther than in ns2.
Healing at armories was done by facing and holding E which also made you move at about 1/4 speed while healing. And healing was 10 per tick.
Fade had an Acid Rocket as a third ability that you could never really hit marines directly with but if you were under a walkway and shot upwards it would do damage through to the top side which everybody exploited. It also did AoE splashdamage downwards when it impacted. With a Lerk doing Primal Scream (double attack rate) it would pretty much kill most campers if you aimed at the ceiling above them.
Lerks could "Pancake" and fly up and down vertically super fast. I could never do it very well but it was nerfed/removed at one point.
NS2 turned out to be a mess of sloppily thought out content, terrible balance in terms of keeping a game interesting between the two sides and incredibly poor performance. NS2 classic is still fun, it uses most of NS2's graphics, if you think that's bad, how could you stomach NS1. xD
I still think we should get an NS1 server up and all have a play some time.
We tried. It plays like absolute shit. Don't let the nostalgia glasses fool you. As usual in life, it's best to leave the past in the past.
NS2, even with all its flaws, is a much better game. It's just people have grown up and changed. Most of them, anyway.
NS1 plays endlessly better than NS1c. This is about 90% because Dragon wants to use the worst feeling movement possible instead of just porting NS2 movement and leave everything else NS1.
We tried playing NS1 shortly after NS2 came out and it basically ruined all my fond memories. Never again.
The combat was much faster and deadlier than it is in NS2, but the pace of the game as a whole was much slower (marines could not spring, a common res pool had to be split between tech and equipment, and the maps felt bigger).
In ns2 I find that the combat (more so with pub play but even against good players) tends to drag out (I suspect because of the shit collision and different model size ratios) and as a result everything feels weak. But games on the other hand are often decided in the first 10 minutes, with the subsequenet 10-20 min being an inevitable grind towards often inevitable defeat or victory.
I also liked the complexity and diversity of ns1 maps, by comparision the ns2 maps feel like copies of basically the same (not very interesting, basically the same pattern of tech room-corridor-resroom-corridor-techroom) floor plan with moderate variations in layout and different colour/prop schemes.
lol wtf what ns1 did you play and in what setting, it still feels great going back and playing it.. everything is instant and plays smooth.. the movement and gameplay are all still there
the "ns1" ns2c movement actually feels pretty good it just takes some getting used to if you're heavily practiced in the ns2 vanilla movement
oh god, he went there
Being a gorge was half of my fun, building little heal stations and all that. Nowadays you're relegated to spraying hives and dying next to an Onos.
Thankfully it was quite easy to notice bad comms. And with the game going much slower, a lil more time for a eject id recon.
Hands, who remembers the 1.04 time period when aliens could ALSO use phasegates?
In fact, there are very few games that aren't full of bugs, issues and general problems, it is just the quality and enjoyment of the game that enables people to play through the experience.
NS had problems, as does NS2. Neither game will ever be perfect, but both are great for what they are.
I remember, regardless if you ment to or not, that when a gorge dropped a structure it could glitch through the floor. If the fall wasnt to deep to the bottom of the map, you could still benefit from lets say heals, without the marines being able to do a single thing about it. Sieges often didnt hit that deep down.
The OP literally ends with "Please, sell NS2 back to me. "
...
Read matso's threads on hitching, part 1-3.