I wish I had a good computer back in the day so I could record all the things I did back in NS1. But all I had was my craptop that could barely run anything lol. The first time trying to run Ns2 and my laptop ran amazing as a slideshow.
This is on iD software and Valve. There's multiple layers to this shit sandwhich. The engine had good demo recording that resulted in a tolerably small file. But while recording a demo it stuttered; it didn't perform horribly, it just stuttered with regularity, probably because it was doing something stupid like spinning in a while-loop until a disk write finished or something. Every few Half-life updates they would break old demos and there wasn't a good way to tell which HL version and which NS version they were recorded with so you could re-install everything, patch it to just the right version and play the demo back correctly.
Performance of the game itself was also unnescessarily awful. The Half-life engine is the Quake engine with coloured light maps and a bunch of scripting stuff tacked on. The Quake engine was designed for software rendering and 3D acceleration was tacked on later. You used to be able to log the gl calls with gl_log 1 or something in console and look at what it's doing each frame. The renderer has no concept of draw calls being expensive, because they don't exist in software. It rendered W_POLYs (the world) in openGL immediate mode, using glBind to bind a different lightmap between each goddamned call and it used very slow GL_POLYGON instead of packing it as triangle strips or fans or anything else that would have been faster. Later drivers were increasingly less and less optimized for games behaving this way as it was a kind of legacy behaviour used during the transition from software renders and ATi and Nvidia optimized for things like Oblivion and Half-life 2 and didn't care much about legacy software . HL did not run at a perfect framerate on an core 2 Q6600, that is how unoptimized it became eventually; it ran worse than a pentium 4 2.4 northwood C back in the day but better than the pentium III 600 MHz slot 1 with TNT2 M64 I had when the NS launched at least. Finally in 2013 or so Valve desided to batch the draw calls and remove immediate mode and fix the performance and now it runs at 2000 FPS easily on an i7 4690k if you uncap the framerate completely. They could have done that in 2000 and made Counter-Strike, Science and industry (still a thing, BTW), DOD, NS etc run perfectly during the peak of Half-life.
In 2000 it was already obvious that quake III's method of doing it was vastly superior and 3D acceleration was not going away (some people really did believe 3D accelerators were a fad before 2000; they could only do rasterizing and the future is going to be like real time raytracing on 10 GHz pentium 4's, which intel will release ca 2003 or so; just wait and see, Carmack will do it; accelerators can't do correct reflections and there are only so many pixels on the screen so it will make more sense to dedicate more general purpose computing on each pixel instead of just spitting pixels onto the screen; accelerators then integrated triangle setup and clipping, lighting, shaders and nobody gave a damned about technically correct reflections as long as they could fake it well enough).
The philosophical question then is; let's say Half-life had been upgraded rendering technology similar to the much faster quake III engine and all those engine performance limitations like not having more than 500-700 W_POLYs visible at any given time had gone away, would NS even be the same game? Would it have soaked up the additional performance and targeted 10k triangles per area, used more real time lighting and shadows giving it a more quake-III-ish feel and become so cluttered that the fantastic movement system was lost (kind of how NS2_eclipse is a cluttered mess that nobody wants to play and it's very easy to get stuck on little ledges and lips all over the place in most NS2 maps) and maybe even lost the abstract suggestive level design where textures suggest a function that you don't have enough geometry and detail to actually represent.
NS1 sucked at balancing espcially because of map, and the 3 hive system. ns_tanith is said to be the one the most balanced map. But when you get Waste as main you KNOW it's gonna be harder...
NS1 sucked at balancing espcially because of map, and the 3 hive system. ns_tanith is said to be the one the most balanced map. But when you get Waste as main you KNOW it's gonna be harder...
Dunno for NS2 haven't played enough yet.
NS2 maps are harder to balance with the introduction of random spawns, it's basically more random spawns to balance... This introduces the issue that the starting areas have to cater to both teams, instead of being able carefully and specifically design the areas for each team. Resulting in either lackluster or imbalanced starting areas. This could've been fixed by adding dynamic map areas, which would spawn in or open up based on which team stars there.
And because NS2 has been changed quite a bit with the introduction of the powergrid and "dynamic" infestation, the original NS map style (3 random hives vs 1 MS) are even harder to balance or in other words, simply aren't working as intended.
MephillesGermanyJoin Date: 2013-08-07Member: 186634Members, NS2 Map Tester, NS2 Community Developer
Right now maps in ns2 are usually set up as 1 fixed marine spawn and a semi random alien spawn. This allows the mapper to design the marine start and the naturals to design it for marines while the rest of the map will be balanced with alien territory in mined (with the exception of the center of the map)
ns2 imposes to many restrictions when compared to ns1.
No areas connected via just ladders due to fact drifters and cysts need ramps (stairs) to reach higher elevations.
No elevators, probably due to the cyst and ai mechanics of ns2.
No water areas due to ns2 (spark) not supporting swimming and underwater effects or animations.
Map layout became heavily restrictive due to the way tech points work in ns2. This means the vast majority of maps end up in a sort of summit like layout.
No real level interaction, no buttons to push, doors to open, elevators to use or vents to weld up.
Ns2 is still a half finished game imo when compared to ns1 and this is mostly due to spark not being developed as far as it needed to be.
No real level interaction, no buttons to push, doors to open, elevators to use or vents to weld up.
This.
This is my biggest gripe with Spark :P I know there's a classic entities mod, but basically it's only used by siege maps
I've played on like 2 custom maps (modified stock maps) where there were weldable vents.
Also, push-to-toggle doors. We need those.
I could live without elevators though, they were so buggy in ns1 it sometimes literally hurt to use them
HandschuhJoin Date: 2005-03-08Member: 44338Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Community Developer
You just died if a skulk jumped on your head while moving upwards or you could crash a server (if you don't die) if you stay under an elevator/closing dooor from the top
You just died if a skulk jumped on your head while moving upwards or you could crash a server (if you don't die) if you stay under an elevator/closing dooor from the top
Ahhh.... ns_nothing, the trollest of troll maps!
The only reason to get cloak was to hide on the ceiling of elevators, and jump on marines when they used it
ns2 imposes to many restrictions when compared to ns1.
No areas connected via just ladders due to fact drifters and cysts need ramps (stairs) to reach higher elevations.
No elevators, probably due to the cyst and ai mechanics of ns2.
No water areas due to ns2 (spark) not supporting swimming and underwater effects or animations.
Map layout became heavily restrictive due to the way tech points work in ns2. This means the vast majority of maps end up in a sort of summit like layout.
No real level interaction, no buttons to push, doors to open, elevators to use or vents to weld up.
Ns2 is still a half finished game imo when compared to ns1 and this is mostly due to spark not being developed as far as it needed to be.
While I would like those things in Ns2 and used them extensively in the NS map I made, they generally didn't make for high quality games. The maps in heavy rotation in NS were similar in architecture to NS2 maps. The maps that heavily used water, elevators, ladders, multiple levels, were either simplified over time to remove them, or got played less.
pSyk0mAnNerdish by NatureGermanyJoin Date: 2003-08-07Member: 19166Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Silver, NS2 Community Developer
True except for Origin to some extend. Although the elevator entrances in Biodome were removed, when the map was remade and fixed by fans for NS1...damn those were messy.
ns2 imposes to many restrictions when compared to ns1.
No areas connected via just ladders due to fact drifters and cysts need ramps (stairs) to reach higher elevations.
No elevators, probably due to the cyst and ai mechanics of ns2.
No water areas due to ns2 (spark) not supporting swimming and underwater effects or animations.
Map layout became heavily restrictive due to the way tech points work in ns2. This means the vast majority of maps end up in a sort of summit like layout.
No real level interaction, no buttons to push, doors to open, elevators to use or vents to weld up.
Ns2 is still a half finished game imo when compared to ns1 and this is mostly due to spark not being developed as far as it needed to be.
While I would like those things in Ns2 and used them extensively in the NS map I made, they generally didn't make for high quality games. The maps in heavy rotation in NS were similar in architecture to NS2 maps. The maps that heavily used water, elevators, ladders, multiple levels, were either simplified over time to remove them, or got played less.
A lot of the stuff was fine as a side-dish. Veil has elevator near pipeline, Origin has some too. Tanith has the smaller pool at double res and so on. I don't think those were really the most important things in the game, but gave the maps a bit more characteristic locations nevertheless. Given infinite development resources I definitely would have been curious to see what kind of melee vs ranged dynamics such stuff could do when the engine is actually designed to handle such stuff properly over multiplayer.
In general,I think the thing that struck me mostly in NS2 was how much clutter the maps had. NS1 had more tools for aliens to navigate & fight in open spaces than most iterations of NS2, which then meant the maps had more variation between open spaces and cramped locations. You can see this in the Veil design in both games for example, in NS1 it's kind of clean and easy to understand whereas the NS2 one has all kinds of random boxes and small nooks throughout the whole map.
Kouji_SanSr. Hινε UÏкεεÏεг - EUPT DeputyThe NetherlandsJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16271Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
edited April 2018
Most likely the idea was that the aliens have evolved to become slower, yet can take more punishment as a sort of way to make aliens more accessible (I guess...). That second part isn't working out, them alien type creatures still melt from level 3 weapons and are now lacking speed as well So in an attempt to "fix" this issue, the maps are now indeed cluttered with all kinds of doodads as wel as the game being cluttered with visual obscuring things and random fluff.
Which TBH only adds to the chaotic nature, making to harder to navigate or track/twitch shoot enemies. While it was meant to widen the possibilities for everyone, very counterintuitive. What was that thing Charlie said waaaaaay back, paraphrazing here, but it went a little something like this:
"Stip down a game to it's bare minimum, if it is still functional, this is the core to build from."
Instead we've got a game with too much stuff, restricting the possibilities to balance properly, because it's all reliant on one another. But hey this has been discussed to hell and back
Heh, reading this discussion reminded me that I always wanted to have tram carts with buildings on them. Imagine a commander having a turret factory/Obs/NS2 vehicle shifting around a tram network depending on where it's mostly needed. Also neat for providing a gren launcher to some poor marine squad that's trying to push through a fortified position or so.
I think weldables are a really cool idea in terms of providing the potential of a RTS-like decision to bring a welder and take time welding while also putting it into a really cool context that could easily fit into the screenplay of Aliens or such. Often NS has struggled to combine the two worlds, but I think the concept of welding fits both quite nicely.
I think level manipulation in general would fit NS very nicely. Unfortunately it is non existant in NS2.
I mean there are things like dropping armories to block aliens, block cysts, using armories or mines as ladders... that is pretty cool and there could be much more things like this. Like droppable doors that the commander can open / close after being built or weldable vents or dropping ramps or destroying objects or infesting more than just the surface on a texture level... the only real option for that at the moment is gorge clogs.
The doors have always been a bit spooky for aliens because they're so reliant on hit and run stuff. However, even from strictly pessimistic viewpoint I think there still could be all kinds of slower interactions that manipulate the map paths and such. Simply slamming down a small doorway is sort of overpowered against a retreating an alien, but slowly shutting a huge hangar door or activating some kind of quarantine doors or whatever could still be doable.
I guess the main thingy would be to give mappers flexible tools and let them get creative and experiment on what actually works.
I guess the main thingy would be to give mappers flexible tools and let them get creative and experiment on what actually works.
Yes.
I mean yes level manipulation would have to be slow, but that is not a problem. Commander controlled doors or other things could close slow so it can't be used mid engagement. It could also have some sort of proximity block if an alien is too close.
Kouji_SanSr. Hινε UÏкεεÏεг - EUPT DeputyThe NetherlandsJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16271Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
edited April 2018
Just for reference, my map had all of these:
A weldable resnodes, disabled at the start of the game. Ony marines can repair it, after it was repaired it's just a normal resnodes once more. This was to counter to the Bacterium Lockdown Nodes
Bacterium Lockdown Nodes, aliens could disable Hive based resnodes if they had a hive there. This was in NS2 for a while using the infestation.
An alien only through wall teleporter, depending on the presence of the hive in that area
A huge two button door, requiring a Gorge spit/use combo to hit the buttons, two marines or a commander and a marine
Water drainage repair/weldeable
+ 6 more weldables throughout the map.
As you can imagine, I find NS2's mapping beyond lackluster IIRC the faces NS2's world is built with (brushes) are unable to move like entities such as the good ol' func_door, func_train, func_plat, trigger_push, func_breakable etc... So all fancy shizzle has to be animated models or cinematics and are still really limited
No areas connected via just ladders due to fact drifters and cysts need ramps (stairs) to reach higher elevations.
No elevators, probably due to the cyst and ai mechanics of ns2.
Couldn't drifters have been made to use ladders and map makers given some special property they could apply to ladders that would allow cysts to be placed above/below?
It doesn't even make sense imo that cysts can't climb. I mean infestation is spreading the whole room, also the ceiling. Cysts really shouldn't depend on nav mesh.
With the introduction of clogs land bound aliens like onos and gorges could get anywhere with a little preparation. There could and should be areas that have this like elevator shafts, walkways, balconies etc. What makes cysting not work with ledges and stuff?
It doesn't even make sense imo that cysts can't climb. I mean infestation is spreading the whole room, also the ceiling. Cysts really shouldn't depend on nav mesh.
commandrs would need a spectator style freeroam view if the game ever stopped being strictly top down
It doesn't even make sense imo that cysts can't climb. I mean infestation is spreading the whole room, also the ceiling. Cysts really shouldn't depend on nav mesh.
commandrs would need a spectator style freeroam view if the game ever stopped being strictly top down
That would be cool, but not necessary. I am just talking about removing the restriction for cysts to only work on nav mesh. You could still drop it normally on the floor, but you could also place it on objects and you could climb things with the infestation.
Comments
This is on iD software and Valve. There's multiple layers to this shit sandwhich. The engine had good demo recording that resulted in a tolerably small file. But while recording a demo it stuttered; it didn't perform horribly, it just stuttered with regularity, probably because it was doing something stupid like spinning in a while-loop until a disk write finished or something. Every few Half-life updates they would break old demos and there wasn't a good way to tell which HL version and which NS version they were recorded with so you could re-install everything, patch it to just the right version and play the demo back correctly.
Performance of the game itself was also unnescessarily awful. The Half-life engine is the Quake engine with coloured light maps and a bunch of scripting stuff tacked on. The Quake engine was designed for software rendering and 3D acceleration was tacked on later. You used to be able to log the gl calls with gl_log 1 or something in console and look at what it's doing each frame. The renderer has no concept of draw calls being expensive, because they don't exist in software. It rendered W_POLYs (the world) in openGL immediate mode, using glBind to bind a different lightmap between each goddamned call and it used very slow GL_POLYGON instead of packing it as triangle strips or fans or anything else that would have been faster. Later drivers were increasingly less and less optimized for games behaving this way as it was a kind of legacy behaviour used during the transition from software renders and ATi and Nvidia optimized for things like Oblivion and Half-life 2 and didn't care much about legacy software . HL did not run at a perfect framerate on an core 2 Q6600, that is how unoptimized it became eventually; it ran worse than a pentium 4 2.4 northwood C back in the day but better than the pentium III 600 MHz slot 1 with TNT2 M64 I had when the NS launched at least. Finally in 2013 or so Valve desided to batch the draw calls and remove immediate mode and fix the performance and now it runs at 2000 FPS easily on an i7 4690k if you uncap the framerate completely. They could have done that in 2000 and made Counter-Strike, Science and industry (still a thing, BTW), DOD, NS etc run perfectly during the peak of Half-life.
In 2000 it was already obvious that quake III's method of doing it was vastly superior and 3D acceleration was not going away (some people really did believe 3D accelerators were a fad before 2000; they could only do rasterizing and the future is going to be like real time raytracing on 10 GHz pentium 4's, which intel will release ca 2003 or so; just wait and see, Carmack will do it; accelerators can't do correct reflections and there are only so many pixels on the screen so it will make more sense to dedicate more general purpose computing on each pixel instead of just spitting pixels onto the screen; accelerators then integrated triangle setup and clipping, lighting, shaders and nobody gave a damned about technically correct reflections as long as they could fake it well enough).
The philosophical question then is; let's say Half-life had been upgraded rendering technology similar to the much faster quake III engine and all those engine performance limitations like not having more than 500-700 W_POLYs visible at any given time had gone away, would NS even be the same game? Would it have soaked up the additional performance and targeted 10k triangles per area, used more real time lighting and shadows giving it a more quake-III-ish feel and become so cluttered that the fantastic movement system was lost (kind of how NS2_eclipse is a cluttered mess that nobody wants to play and it's very easy to get stuck on little ledges and lips all over the place in most NS2 maps) and maybe even lost the abstract suggestive level design where textures suggest a function that you don't have enough geometry and detail to actually represent.
Dunno for NS2 haven't played enough yet.
NS2 maps are harder to balance with the introduction of random spawns, it's basically more random spawns to balance... This introduces the issue that the starting areas have to cater to both teams, instead of being able carefully and specifically design the areas for each team. Resulting in either lackluster or imbalanced starting areas. This could've been fixed by adding dynamic map areas, which would spawn in or open up based on which team stars there.
And because NS2 has been changed quite a bit with the introduction of the powergrid and "dynamic" infestation, the original NS map style (3 random hives vs 1 MS) are even harder to balance or in other words, simply aren't working as intended.
No areas connected via just ladders due to fact drifters and cysts need ramps (stairs) to reach higher elevations.
No elevators, probably due to the cyst and ai mechanics of ns2.
No water areas due to ns2 (spark) not supporting swimming and underwater effects or animations.
Map layout became heavily restrictive due to the way tech points work in ns2. This means the vast majority of maps end up in a sort of summit like layout.
No real level interaction, no buttons to push, doors to open, elevators to use or vents to weld up.
Ns2 is still a half finished game imo when compared to ns1 and this is mostly due to spark not being developed as far as it needed to be.
This.
This is my biggest gripe with Spark :P I know there's a classic entities mod, but basically it's only used by siege maps
I've played on like 2 custom maps (modified stock maps) where there were weldable vents.
Also, push-to-toggle doors. We need those.
I could live without elevators though, they were so buggy in ns1 it sometimes literally hurt to use them
Ahhh.... ns_nothing, the trollest of troll maps!
The only reason to get cloak was to hide on the ceiling of elevators, and jump on marines when they used it
While I would like those things in Ns2 and used them extensively in the NS map I made, they generally didn't make for high quality games. The maps in heavy rotation in NS were similar in architecture to NS2 maps. The maps that heavily used water, elevators, ladders, multiple levels, were either simplified over time to remove them, or got played less.
A lot of the stuff was fine as a side-dish. Veil has elevator near pipeline, Origin has some too. Tanith has the smaller pool at double res and so on. I don't think those were really the most important things in the game, but gave the maps a bit more characteristic locations nevertheless. Given infinite development resources I definitely would have been curious to see what kind of melee vs ranged dynamics such stuff could do when the engine is actually designed to handle such stuff properly over multiplayer.
In general,I think the thing that struck me mostly in NS2 was how much clutter the maps had. NS1 had more tools for aliens to navigate & fight in open spaces than most iterations of NS2, which then meant the maps had more variation between open spaces and cramped locations. You can see this in the Veil design in both games for example, in NS1 it's kind of clean and easy to understand whereas the NS2 one has all kinds of random boxes and small nooks throughout the whole map.
Which TBH only adds to the chaotic nature, making to harder to navigate or track/twitch shoot enemies. While it was meant to widen the possibilities for everyone, very counterintuitive. What was that thing Charlie said waaaaaay back, paraphrazing here, but it went a little something like this:
"Stip down a game to it's bare minimum, if it is still functional, this is the core to build from."
Instead we've got a game with too much stuff, restricting the possibilities to balance properly, because it's all reliant on one another. But hey this has been discussed to hell and back
I mean there are things like dropping armories to block aliens, block cysts, using armories or mines as ladders... that is pretty cool and there could be much more things like this. Like droppable doors that the commander can open / close after being built or weldable vents or dropping ramps or destroying objects or infesting more than just the surface on a texture level... the only real option for that at the moment is gorge clogs.
I guess the main thingy would be to give mappers flexible tools and let them get creative and experiment on what actually works.
I mean yes level manipulation would have to be slow, but that is not a problem. Commander controlled doors or other things could close slow so it can't be used mid engagement. It could also have some sort of proximity block if an alien is too close.
As you can imagine, I find NS2's mapping beyond lackluster
Couldn't drifters have been made to use ladders and map makers given some special property they could apply to ladders that would allow cysts to be placed above/below?
commandrs would need a spectator style freeroam view if the game ever stopped being strictly top down
That would be cool, but not necessary. I am just talking about removing the restriction for cysts to only work on nav mesh. You could still drop it normally on the floor, but you could also place it on objects and you could climb things with the infestation.