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Already have Xonotic on your machine? There’s no need to download the game again to get into the action. Use the following steps to upgrade your client to the 0.8.0 release:

1. Navigate to your Xonotic installation folder
2. Navigate to the misc/tools/rsync-updater folder
3. Execute the update-to-release.sh (for Linux or Mac) or update-to-release.bat (for Windows) and wait for it to complete
4. Profit. You’re done!

Here are some features to get you excited while you wait:

We have three new maps for the “Capture The Flag” game mode. Catharsis, by Justin, is an indoor map with a central, violent focal point. Plus, it has crystals! Implosion, by MintOX, is a space floater with fantastic jump pads for a lot of midair fun. It also has a perilous lower infrastructure for you risky cappers out there. Vorix, by packer, is an open-air indoor arena with beautifully designed corridors. Watch out for its lava pits though!

Archer has been hard at work making immersive sounds for the game. His latest track is called X-Force, which can be found on Implosion. Nice!

Melanosuchus created a wonderful way to add variety to your server: a game type vote screen! This feature allows server administrators to allow their players to choose the game mode used in the next map. It is shown before the map vote screen.

The menu system went through some major updates. It now sports a tiered server browser that categorizes the available servers so you can choose the right one for you. Player statistics are also integrated. Accessible via the “profile” tab, you can now view your most vital statistics from XonStat without having to open a web browser. Lots of other menu options have moved to the forefront as well. All of these changes are to help you configure Xonotic to your taste easily.

All of our builds have switched to using the latest-and-greatest major version of the SDL: version 2.0. This version brings with it several performance improvements and a ton of new capabilities.

A brand new weapon concept: the Arc! Similar to lightning guns in other games, the Arc is a hitscan weapon with medium range. It shoots a bendable beam of electricity as its primary fire and has a burst mode as its secondary fire. It has a limited capacity and thus overheats after too much constant use, so administer your damage with care! The Arc is available to server administrators who choose to enable it. It will take its place as a Xonotic core weapon in the next release.

The physics and weapon balance have both been tweaked after a long round of feedback from the community. Many settings were taken from sessions on the “Reversion cup” servers, and a great many of games were had in the process! The weapon balance is the first step in a large re-tooling of the weapon system. Look for more updates coming soon.

This release introduces monsters! We have five different types of monsters for you to frag: Zombie, Wyvern, Mage, Spider and Shambler. Mario created a new game mode called “Invasion” that uses these monsters. In this mode the player must fight off a swarm of the aforementioned monsters within a small arena to win.

New powerup-like items called buffs can now spawn on maps if enabled. They can replace the existing powerups or spawn in random locations. Buffs give players special powers when picked up, and they last until the player is fragged. Adding these to servers is sure to turn up thier craziness level to 11!

Join the discussion about Xonotic 0.8.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video covers some of the major new things in 0.8. I hope you enjoy it!

A big thank you goes to Archer, who made the intro music to this video. Thanks!

Thank you Jupiter Broadcasting for having me on the show!

The Core Problem

For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume the scenario is that I want to capture frags to make a “highlight reel” video that I could then share with my friends. The problem is that I have a bunch of demos sitting on my hard drive along with a hand-tabulated list of times in which my highlight-worthy frags happened. Pairing these two together is a highly manual (read: annoying) process – I have to bring up Xonotic and fast forward through the demos until the alotted time so I can capture only the pieces of interest and nothing else. While it is great to watch all of these demos and reminisce about the fun times I’ve had, I’d rather be back out on the servers making more memories!

The Setup

There are two things that can ease the process. The first involves tuning the default recording profile that comes with Xonotic. While the out-of-the-box settings are sufficient for viewing what you’ve done in game, they are far from the production quality that we want to put up on YouTube. What we want is something that saves us disk space, encodes quickly, but all the while looks superb. Fortunately a few simple cvar changes can make that happen. Enter the following in your config.cfg (in ~/.xonotic/data/ on Linux, $YOUR_USER/Saved Games/xonotic/data on Windows):

cl_capturevideo_ogg 1
cl_capturevideo_ogg_theora_quality 63
cl_capturevideo_ogg_theora_bitrate -1
cl_capturevideo_ogg_theora_keyframe_bitrate_multiplier 2
cl_capturevideo_ogg_theora_keyframe_maxinterval 500
cl_capturevideo_ogg_theora_keyframe_mininterval 1
cl_capturevideo_ogg_theora_keyframe_auto_threshold 80
cl_capturevideo_ogg_theora_noise_sensitivity 0
cl_capturevideo_ogg_vorbis_quality 10

These changes essentially max out the builtin ogg-theora settings that ship with Xonotic. I’ve found they produce a great balance of quality and speed.

The second piece of the puzzle is an easier way to connect the timestamp values of highlight-quality frags with the demos in which they happened. One way to do this is to take a screenshot right after you make such frags during games. This has the advantage that Xonotic provides the bind for taking the screenshot (F12) out of the box, so you simply hit a key after you have a highlight frag to record the moment. The problem with this is that you have to manually cross-reference the screenshot’s filename with your demo filenames to figure out when and where you need to hit the record button. This is messy and error-prone. What we’d really like is a screenshot name that contains the map name and the wall-clock timestamp when it was created. It would be even better if we could also capture the in-game timestamp of when the frag occurred for precise timing (since in-game clocks don’t tally the time spent in warmup mode). Finding the right demo and time then becomes a breeze with this information at our disposal.

Fortunately there’s a simple bind script that can easily get us this information. Place the following into your config.cfg:

alias topfrag_ts "prvm_globalget client time  _thetime"
alias topfrag_cmd "scr_screenshot_name \"topfrags/${cl_worldbasename}-${_thetime}-\"; wait; screenshot; wait; scr_screenshot_name \"$scr_screenshot_name\""
alias topfrag_ss "topfrag_ts; topfrag_cmd;"
bind BACKSPACE "topfrag_ss"

What this does is set up a special screenshot command that binds to the backspace button. When you hit backspace in-game, a jpg file will be created in your Xonotic “screenshots/topfrags” directory with a file name that contains the map name, the wall clock time, and the in-game timestamp. Easy! It is now dead simple to cross reference your highlight frags with the demos you made them in. The remaining piece is just for you to record them using the times provided.

Recording

At this point you have a command that sends specially-formatted screenshots into a directory. Having collected a bunch of these screenshots, you now probably want to record the sweet, sweet frags they represent for posterity’s sake! Fortunately, this is the relatively easy part. The first step involves mapping the screenshots to their respective demo files. While you can eyeball the screenshot to demo relationship manually, I prefer using a simple Python script to do the mapping for me. If you choose to use this, edit the directories at the top of the script to match your demo and screenshot directories, run the script, then finally save the output for later.

Output of the screenshot mapping script.

The last piece to the recording process is telling Xonotic to render our demos into playable videos. This is done most efficiently with Xonotic Demo Recorder by GreEn`mArine. For the rest of this post, I’ll illustrate this process.

First you bring up the demo recorder with java -jar NexuizDemoRecorder-0.3.jar from your console of choice.

The demo recorder’s main screen

Next, set yourself up with a usable template for the future by hitting the “create” button. You’ll be prompted for a few things, but the most important piece is the location of the Xonotic binary you’ll be using. In the screenshot below I’m using the Linux+SDL binary provided in the autobuilds. Choose the one that’s right for your system. When you’re done, hit “create.”

The demo recorder’s template screen

Next, set up a recording job in the lower panel. To create a job using the template you just made, click once on the template name you want in the upper panel, then choose “create from template” in the lower panel. This is the part where the screenshot to demo mapping becomes truly useful. With the output of that script in hand, select the appropriate demo, enter your start and end seconds (I’ve chosen here to record for 10 seconds), and finally enter a filename, without suffix, for the resulting video. Click “create” to finish the process.

The demo recorder’s job screen

Repeat this process of adding jobs – using the template to make your life easier – until you are done with all of the clips you wish to render.

The main screen after configuration

Start the render by hitting the “start processing” button at the bottom and you’ll have the material for your YouTube video before you know it!

New features include (but are not limited to)

• an illustrated bunny hopping section with a step by step illustration of strafe turning,
• showing ramp jumps on the map Glowplant, and
• Crylink running added to crylink description!

You can access the entire Tutorial here. Enjoy!

Q.: Why don’t you want to bring Xonotic to Steam?

A.: This is not true. We’d very much like to bring Xonotic to Steam. However, there are some problems that we might need to solve before that. First of all, the game is not ready for that, as we’re still in beta stage, and the game has tons of bugs and half working features that we first would like to fix, and fully implement before introducing it to larger audiences.

Q.: Xonotic might be in beta stage, but it’s still in better shape than a lot of “stable” games on Steam. Also, Greenlight accepts beta staged software.

A.: First of all, just because other developers or publishers decide to release a buggy game it doesn’t mean we have to do so too. Also, it’s not about being beta or not. As I wrote before, we’d like to iron out the largest wrinkles before. A rushed release on such a high profile platform could have terrible consequences on our reputation.

Q.: Is it because of the 100 USD fee that Xonotic is not introduced on Steam Greenlight yet?

A.: No, it is not. Or rather, partially. 100 USD is not a big deal, we spend a lot more annually on servers for the developer infrastructure. It’s not even the question of who’ll pay for it (though that’d be an interesting question too). Also, as 100% of the money we need to pay for Valve goes to Child’s Play, we’d be more than happy to pay that price anyway.

Q.: Is it because Steam doesn’t support GPL games?

A.: No, it’s not. There are already GPL software (Blender, DosBOX) and partially free games (War§ow, Penumbra Overture, Aquaria, Gish) on Steam.

Q.: Is it because of SteamWorks implementation?

A.: Now we’re getting closer on the largest problem. Currently, there’s no “free” library that Valve officially supports too for SteamWorks API. Although, Valve doesn’t force a game to use Steamworks, but then we’ll loose the ability to integrate Xonotic into the Steam infrastructure, track statistics, let users earn achievements etc.

Q.: Wait a minute, what about Xonstat?

A.: That is another good point. There’s just no way currently we could do two way synchronisation between Xonstat and Steamworks – extracting data from Steamworks might be possible, but injection from Xonstat is impossible. In the end we might have to choose to use Steamworks and ditch Xonstat – obviously this is totally unacceptable, it’s out of the question.

Q.: So is Steamworks integration totally ruled out?

A.: Yes it is. Technically, we could still use an extra binary to transfer data between the Steamworks API and Xonotic, but that’s an ugly hack which is really hard to pull off, and right now we don’t have the manpower to do it (and most likely we’ll never have) . Not to mention, it’s a legally grey territory.

Q.: What about the trolls coming from Steam?

A.: It’s not very nice to refer the userbase of Steam as trolls. There are already lots of happy and well mannered Steam users in the community and in the developer team too, so the overall generalisation is nonsense. Sure, a higher userbase could introduce the game to higher number of ill mannered players, but don’t forget that it’ll also draw the attention of more nice people too who haven’t even heared about Xonotic yet.
Also, don’t forget: Xonotic is a free game. It’s free to use, play and enjoy for everybody, regardless of age, gender or origin.

Q.: You still didn’t tell when you’ll release Xonotic on Steam.

A.: And that is not a question either We can’t even give an estimated deadline. But I can assure you, you’ll notice when Xonotic goes to Steam.

I really hope we could answer all your questions about Steam and Xonotic. If you have any further questions or concerns, feel free to state them in the official Xonotic forum.

Welcome back to the (probably) final part of my Newbie Corner. This time, as announced in my last post, I will turn to tweaking the game appearance in order to optimize perception. The concept is easy and straight-forward: the better you can see and hear other players and their actions, the better you can react to them.

Even though some settings are available via menu, we’ll change most settings via console, so before I go into details let’s have a quick look at how this awesome tool works. You can open the console by pressing <Shift> <ESC>. Now you have a command prompt where you can issue commands to query and change settings. If you already know how a command you are going to type is called, you can just type the first few letters and hit <TAB>. This will automatically complete the command. If the letters match several possible commands, it will auto-complete to the extent all potential completions match and show you all potential completions. For example, typing “cross” in console and hitting <TAB> will auto-complete to “crosshair” and show the commands like “crosshair”, “crosshair_alpha”,… If you try this you will notice the console will show you not only the possible command completions, but also more info to each possible completion: what is its current (local!) setting, what is its default setting (in square brackets) and a short description what the command does.

In most cases you won’t know the exact command to type, and this is where a special command will help you: “apropos”. If you, for example, want to know how to do change screen resolution, you can just type “apropos resolution” into console, and the console will spit out all commands with description that have the string “resolution” in their name or in their description.

If you’d like to know more about the Xonotic console, check out BlaXpirit’s forum thread about console tips and tricks.

Now that we know the basics about how to tweak the game, let’s get going!

First of all be warned that if you follow this tutorial and implement all changes I suggest here your game will look pug-ugly to say the best. I myself usually play with more or less regular settings because I like to experience the great work developers, modelers and mappers have done to create decent graphics. But if you intend to play competitively, it will be to your advantage to lower the complexity of what is displayed in order to be able to fully focus on the information that is relevant for your gameplay.
 

The first thing to do is to disable the damage blur. Getting hit is already bad enough, you won’t want to punish yourself with temporary blindness additionally. This is so crucial that I even disabled this “feature” in the left screenshot above in the “Visuals” caption, otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to see a thing there. If you haven’t done so already, disable this by doing

hud_damage_blur 0

While we’re at it, we can also reduce the damage flash when getting hit:

hud_damage 0.4

It obviously is crucial to see what is happening around you. To increase the area that you can see, adjust the field of view to your liking. While the default value is at 90, I personally play with a field of view of 120, and find this a quite usable setting. Remember though, that changing the field of view has an impact on your ability to aim, very similar to changing settings of your mouse sensitivity. The higher the field of view, the harder it can be to aim. I have a lousy aim anyway, so I can play with fov 120 alright. You can change the field of view in the menu or via console by:

fov 120 (adjust to your liking)

Most player models are really hard to spot, as they are optimized to look good and, to some extent, realistic. This means their textures are subject to the usual rendering procedures which calculate how much light from the surroundings will be reflected by the player models. Consequently, most models are hard to see in dark corners, and don’t have a strong contrast to the background in general. There is one model though that uses “fullbright” textures, which are always displayed at full brightness, and this is the “Mega Erebus”. Now there is a way to make every other player be displayed to you as “Mega Erebus” even if they selected a different model, and you can do that by selecting it for your own player and forcing your own model on everyone. This can be done via menu, but here’s the console command:

cl_forceplayermodels 1

Be warned though that the sounds other players make still remain the same, so don’t be shocked if a Mega Erebus is commenting to you in a Pinky Pie voice on servers that have ponies enabled. If you dislike other people using colors that may blend too well into the map, you can also select a particularly bright color for yourself and force it onto everyone as well:

cl_forceplayercolors 1

These settings obviously have the disadvantage that you become extremely visible to everyone else, too – but it would be rather unfair if you could make everyone extremely visible while staying a grey mouse, wouldn’t it?
 

I personally strongly dislike blood splatter and gibs flying around as a matter of taste, but disabling all the gory mess also has visual advantages beyond personal preference. The more unnecessary detail gets rendered, the harder it is to filter out the information that is actually relevant. Therefore, turning off gibs is a good way to get rid of a whole bunch of effects that only get in your way if you want to keep an overview in the heat of a fight:

cl_gentle_gibs 1 (note that you may need to restart Xonotic or reconnect for this change to take effect)

But not only gibs can obscure things, also particle effects of explosions, coronas and bloom can impact on visibility:

cl_particles_alpha 0.2 (feel free to experiment with values between 0 and 1)
cl_particles_sparks 0
cl_particles_blood 0
r_coronas 0
r_bloom 0

Now the game still looks somewhat ok-ish. Time to change this! Let’s get rid of all those details in textures that generate contrasts where it isn’t needed:

gl_picmip_world 10
gl_texturecompression 1 (if you like, or need faster loading)

What, still looks the same? Well, then do

vid_restart

and enjoy
 

Some people even like to replace the beautiful pickup models by twodimensional, bright sprites. I personally don’t see a visibility benefit, but the bright symbols could be considered as easier to spot. To enable “simple items”, do:

cl_simple_items 1

You will have to reconnect to the server (or, if you test it in a local game, type “restart” in console). Note that this change only works on servers that allow this setting to be used.
 

The next thing is to set an always visible crosshair. Though I personally like the per-weapon crosshairs, they unfortunately are not very bright. With them, I often had the problem of identifying where that crosshair actually is in the middle of a battle. Even though I probably ended up landing quite some hits this way due to my particularly fuzzy aim which seldomly places the crosshair on the target, I decided to make the crosshair really visible, now that I deliberately chose to use the darn thing. You can very comfortably configure the crosshair via the menu or just copy my settings:

crosshair 27 (this is really all about personal preference)
crosshair_alpha 1
crosshair_effect_scalefade 0
crosshair_effect_time 0
crosshair_enabled 2
crosshair_dot 1
crosshair_dot_color 0.24 1 0.13 (this too is all about personal preference)
crosshair_per_weapon 0
crosshair_color_per_weapon 1 (if you like to know the weapon per crosshair color)
crosshair_ring 0 (this removes the nex ring, keep it if you like to see it)
crosshair_ring_reload 1 (mg reload ring might be useful)
crosshair_ring_reload_size 1 (adjust to your liking, default is too big imho)
crosshair_size 0.28 (adjust to your liking)

If you have already set up weapon binds following my previous tutorials and are really confident about them, you might even choose to remove the rendered first person weapon model so it doesn’t block your view:

r_drawviewmodel 0

Now you’ll only know what weapon you hold by remembering the bind you pressed last and by the color of the crosshair. But if you managed to get the weapon binds into your cerebellum, this is manageable – decide for yourself if you’re ready for this.#
 

When using the zoom to improve sight in a fast paced game like Xonotic, you won’t want the view to be impaired by some mask around the crosshair that generates the impression you look through some binoculars or something:

cl_reticle 0

Also, who wants to waste time for the transition between zoom and non-zoom?

cl_zoomspeed -1

Bobbing effects are generally only for conveying a “realistic feel” but don’t serve a purpose that’s important for the gameplay. Quite to the contrary, they make your view less steady. So you might want to switch off all sorts of bobbings:

cl_bobfall 0
cl_bobmodel 0
cl_bobup 0

If you like to keep an eye on the action (and on who takes which items) when you get fragged, you can disable automatically showing the scoreboard when dead with:

cl_deathscoreboard 0

Apart from all the visual stuff, you can of course also improve perception by adjusting the audio settings. While there is quite some remarkably good music in Xonotic, in-game music can distract you and predominate pickup or movement sounds that you might want to hear. The same goes for ambient sounds. Whereas these greatly add to the atmosphere of the game, they can prevent you from predicting where an opponent will come from, what the player’s approximate health status is and what is being picked up. So if you can do without the atmosphere, you might want to turn those off via the menu.
 

That’s it for now again, thanks for reading and stay tuned, as the next project I’ll be working on is to rework the existing parts of the Newbie Corner into a comprehensive Newbie Manual in order to keep the information up to date.

Don’t Stand on the Respawn

You can watch the video online here or you can download the high quality version here.

Featured in the video are the following players:

• Lady*D
• Nimbuz
• bunny
• eThaD
• entou_

I don’t know about you, but I think this is absolutely mesmerizing! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Thank you Lady*D for creating such top-notch stuff.

Join the discussion of the movie here.

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MD5: eda7e8acadbefaf4b2efcfb70bbe98e2
Package size: 993M

Other resources:
Lower quality download via HTTP (627M, md5: a16167f0a56303ff00fdfbc79d6e8487)
Map editor download via HTTP (166M, md5: 1ee3939f3bd84281d2609cf34397eb01)

You can also download and play Xonotic on Desura:

While you’re downloading the game, check out some of the highlights of this release…

Xonotic 0.7 features updates to the classic game modes that define the game, including a complete rewrite of Capture The Flag. New gameplay elements such as flag-passing and stalemates have been introduced along with new visual effects and game notification messages. Other game modes such as Clan Arena, Arena, Last Man Standing, Onslaught, Assault, Freezetag, Nexball, and Domination have also received updates for bugs, minor features, and relocations to the mutator system.

Our last release ushered in a new wave of possibilities with client-side rendering of players which allowed us to implement full animation blending to playermodel rendering, among other unique features. Because of this we can now play two separate animations on a player at the same time. This means we can show a specific walking direction on the legs and play an attacking animation on the torso simultaneously. This implementation also lets us bend the playermodel skeleton based on the direction they are looking, which provides a seamless appearence of where other players are aiming.

This release also includes many new competitive-oriented features. The long-anticipated arrival of simple items provides 2D rendering of sprites for item pickups instead of models, allowing items to be identifiable from a much further distance. Super spectating is also available, which allows for a wider array of options for video recordings and broadcasters with options such as follow powerup and follow killer. New and improved spawn rules better fit competitive gameplay in duels or team matches alike.

Once again we have rolled out a fair portion of mapping updates to the game, including 4 new maps: Abyss: A large indoor CTF map by kuniuthefrogg designed for public and competitive gameplay. Fuse: A stunning new duel map by cityy which captures the aspects of Xonotic movement and game design perfectly. SilentSiege: A medium size duel map made by Justin with stormkeep-like gameplay. Oilrig: A revived map from the older origins of our project, providing great visuals and deathmatch gameplay that will really shine through with the older members of our community. Additionally we have paid a lot of attention to the existing maps again, and updated them with new features and gameplay improvements along the way.

The in-game message system has been completely re-written for this release. It provides an entirely new set of abilities for centerprints, console messages, and hud notifications. The system gives players the flexibility to customize and control all of the game messages as well as the ability to add full translation support. The notification system also integrates with many of the other game mode updates.

We have migrated to an all new QuakeC compiler, gmqcc. The work of graphitemaster and Blub\0, gmqcc generates faster, more optimized program files when compared to its predecessor. It gives game code developers new features and tools that will be of tremendous value to the game in the future.
 
 
 
 
 

View extensive changelog…

Xonotic 0.7 is the product of strong collaboration between our developers and the rest of our vibrant, diverse community. We’re excited to look at this release as nothing other than a giant step forward for the project. If you like what you see, please share it with your friends! For your support and feedback, we thank you. See you out there on the servers – happy fragging!

P.S. We’ve finally decided upon a new release schedule, so expect to see more frequent, consistent release patterns from us in the future!

Welcome back to the 5th episode of my Newbie Corner! Now that we’ve been examining movement and weapons, the air for new newbie stuff is starting to get thinner and thinner, but there’s still enough material left to be covered by one or two newbie corners, so let’s get started! In this part I’ll be providing some general gameplay hints that hopefully will make your life as a newbie out there on the servers easier – and longer

First of all, Xonotic encourages the usage of weapon combos. How so? Well, if you shoot, you will have to wait a short while (the refire time) until that weapon is able to shoot again, unless you’re holding a constant or rapid fire weapon (currently only hagar and mg). The refire time is rather short so it doesn’t feel like limiting you much if you’re not aware of the concept of weapon combos. But if you switch your weapon immediately after you shoot, you can land a second shot with the second weapon faster than you would be able to with a second shot of the first weapon, as the refire time is longer than the weapon switch delay. This way you are able to deal more damage per second by combining different weapons. Additionally, combining weapons also enables you to combine the specific benefits of two weapons, like slowing down a fast target with crylink in order to be able to easier finish it off with an instahit gun such as nex.

This leads to the problem that it’s terrible difficult for any orthopedic healthy and sane person to do weapon combos efficiently and reliably with the default keyboard layout or (omg!) the mouse wheel. Fortunately, Xonotic allows you to re-configure the entire keyboard bindings very easily (settings window → input tab). I consider direct weapon binds per weapon the easiest way to access any weapon immediately, and would strongly recommend to place the relevant binds around your movement keys or on extra mouse buttons your desktop rodent may have. You will have to find a solution that feels comfortable for you, which might require some experimenting. I for example moved my movement keys from wasd to esdf in order to have more keys available around my movement keys for weapon binds. But that’s just an example, you’ll have to find out what works best for you.

Don’t worry, impacts on your playing skills that result from redesigning your keyboard layout will, once you found a comfortable setup, be temporary only and the change WILL pay off in the longrun. Being able to pick the right weapon for the job instantly by means of a finger reflex is a great advantage in a FPS that is as fast paced as Xonotic.

Another thing you should be aware of is that splash damage travels through walls. Knowledge of this fact can come in very handy at various situations. Especially if you know or suspect someone to be on a higher level above you and the ceiling is thin, you can just try a lucky mortar or rocket shot at the ceiling. The hit indicator sound (that little beep) will tell you if your guess was right. If you’re very confident about the location of your opponent, you can even unleash an electro combo (see Part 4: electro) at the ceiling, which works surprisingly well and does a great amount of splash damage, but takes a bit more time to do.

Using splash damage that travels through walls is a very useful and secure technique, as the opponent will obviously not able to fire back at the same time.

This is something which is almost too obvious to be included here, but I’ve seen so many new players running right past health and armor pickups without taking them. In Xonotic, your starting health of 100 can be brought below zero very quickly. It takes any experienced player two shots to accomplish this, which typically are a two weapon combo so this goes REALLY fast. If ONE player can finish you off that fast, imagine how long your life lasts in a typical EIGHT player deathmatch. This is why it is absolutely crucial to pick up any health and armor you might find on your way, unless of course this puts you in a dangerous position that outweighs the advantages of a health/armor boost. A mega armor or mega health gives you additional 100 health or armor points respectively, which obviously equals the amount of damage you can take with your starting health – you could consider a mega armor or mega health an extra life. Megas respawn within 30 seconds of being taken.

However, note that if you are above 100 health/armor, both health and armor will start to rot down to 100 a short while after you picked up your last health or armor respectively. The higher above 100 you are, the faster the rot goes. On the other hand if you are below 100 health, your health will start to regenerate a short while after you took damage for the last time. Again, the lower your health is, the faster it regenerates. This means if you get out of a battle with really low health and there is no health pickup anywhere near, it can be a good idea to retreat to a place out of action until you managed to regenerate a bit. Armor obviously does not regenerate.

The fewer players you have in a match, the more important it gets to listen to the sounds they make. Each armor or health pickup size has its own distinctive pickup sound. Pickup sounds are louder and therefore easier to notice even at some distance than footsteps. If you know where which pickups are on the map you’re playing, you’ll be very often able to know where other players are before seeing them just by listening to the pickup sounds they make.

Also note that the sound a player makes when getting hit varies depending on how low that player’s health is. When you hit a player and you hear the characteristic “very low health groan” (most newbies know that sound primarily from their own player model… ), you’ll know that you’ll only need to deal a few damage points to finish that player off, so you can go for fast high spread (mg, shotgun) or fast splash damage weapons (crylink). Listening is a very important part of duel gameplay.

These are the general gameplay hints I was able to think of. I hope they’ll help you live longer on public servers! Have fun and good luck, see you on the servers and stay tuned for the next issue, which will cover configuration tweaks for assisting you to concentrate on the important parts of the gameplay.