Souhaits pour Q3A

Voici la wishlist et mon 'bug report' que j'ai envoyé à id Software lors de la mise en circulation de la version de test Q3Test 1.5, en espérant un tout petit peu contribuer à un monde meilleur. Mais sans grand espoir hein :)

Au menu : rien sur les armes, l'architecture des maps, les effets visuels, sujets qui ont été largements abordés partout, mais mes désirs sur les commandes et variables de la console, et une réflexion sur les claviers AZERTY. En toute humilité hein, et à titre de souvenir ;)

 

Dear id Software,
Dear programmers over there,

 

I am a Quake2 fan from France, and I've gathered some suggestions about the development of what the whole world is waiting for.

You must have already heard a lot about the 3D engine and the weapons, so I won't cover these topics (unless you ask me to do so :), but will mostly deal with :

console, commands and cvars, and something you may have not read about yet, specific issues linked to the other keyboard standard, the AZERTY keyboard.

 

* I think there should be something like the "g_select_empty" in Quake2, which is reaaally usefull to write some weapon aliases.

* please allow jumping 0 ms after landing : this enables what we call strafe-running (ie to strafe and run while bouncing) and allow players to reach high speeds (useful then to make very long jumps). Pleaaaze.

* There should be also a command to toggle the in-game commentaries ("Excellent", "You lost the lead"..) (which is, by the way, a really cool idea) : they may be useless, or annoying, in team play.

* the Q3 HUD when cg_gun is 0 lacks something : in Quake2, "hand 2" takes off the gun but the difference with "cl_gun 0" is that the weapon used is indicated by a small icon. This helps a lot, being in the bottom center of the screen (easy to see) and indicating more than the ammo (than can be used by two different weapons: seeing "shells" doesn't tell you if you have the Shotgun or Super Shotgun)

* I think there should be a bunch bunch of cvars to customize the LOD and all visual effects. I thing of something like r_flaresize to modify the size of explosions, too big in my opinion. The more variables to customize everything, the happier hardcore config script maniacs :)

* the colored railgun slugs is a great idea, which may be fun for clan matches. Why not extend it to some other weapons (like the plasma gun for example ?)

* One word about the railgun : if you choose to keep its delayed firing, I think a sound more like the Q2 BFG's (you hear something warming up then *b00m* it shoots) would be more accurate : in Q3Test, you feel lagged since when you press the fire button with the railgun, nothing happens for a few milliseconds, just as if you were missing some network packets.

* I would like to see some commands like bind, shiftbind, controlbind as there is in Heretic or some game. It makes alias writing more beautiful :)

* I would *love* to see a more complex set of instructions, with something like "if a=b then ...", but, errr, I understand this may get off topic :)

* Some cheaters in Q2 used a modified male model with big spikes, making it easy to locate since the spikes, coming far out from the bounding box, would go through walls either. Why not integrate in the .dll or the .exe some code check to prevent from modifying the default model ? Oh, yeah, "player's choice to do what they want", baaaah, never mind...

 

As for the AZERTY keyboard :

In France and some other european countries I think, we use AZERTY keyboards instead of QWERTY keyboards, as you probably know.

Quake and Quake2 were qwerty games, even on an AZERTY system like a Windows french version, and Q3 seems to adapt itself to the client system.

Well.

It may be sound weird, since I type all day long on an AZERTY keyboard, but I think Q3 should force the QWERTY keyboard too, for compatibility reasons.

For example your "~" key to bring the console is a "²" here, and then it writes "²" in the console each time you bring it down (preventing you from completing a partial word with Tab).

Moreover, a config script using the "[" key for example can't be used on AZERTY keybds, since the letter "[" is ctrl-alt 5.

As for the rest (weapons balance, switch times, rendering effects..) well I am sure you know what we think.

 

Thanks for reading it all, and please excuse any weird sentence I may have written.

Best regards,

Ozh
ozh@writeme.com