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Xonotic

RIP sweet prince

Xonotic was a [1]free as in freedom fast multiplayer arena
[2]first-person-shooter [3]game similar to e.g. [4]Quake. It ran on
[5]GNU/[6]Linux, [7]Winshit, [8]BSD and other systems. It was one of the
best libre games, i.e. games completely free by both code and
data/content. It was available under [9]GPLv3. Its gameplay, graphics and
customizability were pretty great, it may well have been the best in the
AFPS genre, even compared to AAA [10]proprietary games -- this kind of
quality is very rare among libre/noncommercial games.

UPDATE: Xonotic as a game died in summer 2023 when the retarded developers
couldn't get an erection without CONSOOMING NEW CONTINT and started just
blindly pushing bugs and balance breaking changes without listening to
player complaints at all (and actually banning many for voicing criticism,
including [11]drummyfish), demonstrating [12]update culture at its worst.
The main server became a meme overnight, all [13]fun (such as friendly
push) was removed from the game to create a "safe space" for players,
possibly to get the game ready for Steam sales or make it more open to
noobs and advertisers. RIP. If you can [14]fork Xonotic and restore it to
its previous glory, please do so.

{ LOL the main server now banned me for voicing criticism of these updates
xD RIP, I guess that's it for me. It was a nice journey. ~drummyfish }

{ I used to play Xonotic for years, it was really an excellent game. I've
met many nice people there as the players are often programmers and people
looking for [15]FOSS. The gameplay was quite addictive and relaxing and
you could have a great chat during the game. Of course it's kind of
bloated but Xonotic was in a way a masterpiece. ~drummyfish }

The game builds on old ideas and mechanics but adds new weapons,
mechanics, ideas and modes -- apart from the traditional [16]deathmatch,
team deathmatch, capture the flag, complete the stage (defrag, racing
without shooting) and competitive mode (duel), there are a number of new
[17]fun modes such as clan arena (team round-based mode without
self-damage and items), freeze tag, key hunt, last man standing and even
Nexball -- [18]football in Xonotic!

Xonotic was forked from a game called [19]Nexuiz after a [20]trademark
controversy (basically in 2010 the guy who started the project and
abandoned it later, an ass called Lee Vermeulen, came back and secretly
sold the trademark to some shit company named Illfonic). Nexuiz itself was
created on top of liberated Quake 1 engine, so Xonotic still bears a lot
Quake's legacy, however it masterfully expands on its core principles and
makes the gameplay even better. For example rockets shot by rocket
launcher can be guided with mouse while holding down the left button which
adds a new skill element. New types of weapons were added to the classic
AFPS weapons (e.g. the infamous electro, a [21]meme spamming weapon used
by noobs for its forgiveness of lack of skill). Movement physics was also
modified to give better air control and faster movement as a result.

Fun fact: Xonotic even briefly appeared on a TV show:
https://yewtu.be/search/watch?v=a0TFejn95Sw.

The game's modified [22]Quake 1 (YES, 1) engine is called [23]Darkplaces.
It can be highly customized and modded. Just like in other Quake engine
games, there are many console commands (e.g. cvars) to alter almost
anything about the game. Advanced programming can be done using
[24]QuakeC. Maps can be created e.g. with [25]netradiant.

Though compared to any mainstream [26]modern games Xonotic is quite nicely
written (e.g. runs very fast, doesn't have billions of [27]dependencies
and despite not being 1.0 yet has fewer bugs than today's AAA games at
release), from a more strict point of view it's still very bloated and
it's known to contain some shitcode -- for example the engine has frame
dependent physics (TODO: cite a specific line in code), uses [28]floating
point to represent time, great part of the game is written in a joke
language called [29]QuakeC, its net code is worse than e.g. that of
OpenArena and some people complain about input lag and other bugs. It
could definitely be written MUCH better, but as already mentioned it's
still a million times better than any new game.

{ The game runs extremely smooth for me even on old PC, I have no input
lag. When my Internet connection gets bad I am sometimes unable to play
Xonotic but still able to play OpenArena, which says something about the
net code, but that happens very rarely. Also on pretty rare occasions I
notice bugs such as imperfect culling of players or even projectiles just
hanging mid air during whole game (which happens after heavy packet loss)
etc., but nothing that would really be so frequent as to bother me.
~drummyfish }

Xonotic is similar to other libre AFPS games such as [30]OpenArena and
[31]Red Eclipse. Of these Xonotic clearly looks the most professional, it
has the best "graphics" in the [32]modern sense but still offers the
option to turn all the fanciness off. OpenArena, based on Quake 3 engine,
is simpler, both technologically and in gameplay, and its movement is
slower and with different physics. While OpenArena just basically clones
Quake 3, Xonotic is more of an actually new and original game with new
ideas and style. Similar thing could be said about Red Eclipse, however
it's not as polished and shows some infection with [33]SJW poison.

{ OpenArena is great too. ~drummyfish }

As of 2022 the game has a small but pretty active community of regular
players, centered mostly in [34]Europe, though there is some [35]US scene
too. There are regulars playing every day, pros, noobs, famous spammers,
campers and [36]trolls. Nice conversations can be had during games. There
are [37]memes and inside jokes. The community is pretty neat. Xonotic also
has a very dedicated [38]defrag ("racing with no shooting") community.
There have also been a few small tournament with real cash prizes in
Xonotic.

The [39]GOAT of Xonotic is probably Dodger, his skill was just too high
even above other pros. The worst player in Xonotic and probably also the
biggest idiot on the planet is a player named 111.

Great news is the development and main servers have so far not been
infected by the [40]SJW poison and (as of 2023) allow a great amount of
[41]free speech -- another rarity. Even the game itself contains speech
that SJWs would consider "offensive", there are e.g. voice lines calling
other players "pussies" and "retards". This is great.

Tips'N'Tricks

Here are some [42]pro tips to git gud, impress your frens and generally
have more [43]fun.

* Read the legendary beginner guide at https://xonotic.org/guide/.
* Point'n'click enemies to win.
* Do NOT fucking spam electro -- this will make you instantly hated, and
rightfully so. Not only is it lame, annoying, makes you easy to kill
(opponent can explode your electro balls), enforces more use of
electro (electro is countered with electro) and makes the game lag, it
can also hurt your teammates, even in no self/team damage modes (as
opponents may explode the electro you spray around). Use it
appropriately.
* Learn the weapons and make binds for each one: learn what every
weapons does (good mode for this might be clan arena in which you have
all the weapons from the start), bind each one around the movement
keys -- it's essential you can switch weapons quickly as the game is
designed to reward comboing (the most basic combo is
devastator/vortex/mortar). You HAVE TO combo to deal good damage. Also
note that almost every weapon has a secondary fire, for example
crylink's primary fire just shoots bouncing balls while the secondary
fire shoots a suction ball that can toss enemies out of the map or can
be used to accelerate yourself. With devastator (rocket launcher)
holding left mouse button allows guiding the rocket, right mouse
button explodes the rocket in air -- learn this! Then you can easily
kill enemies behind corners or flying in air.
* Learn the movement: movement is essential in Xonotic, firstly you
should learn extremely basic techniques like bunnyhopping, strafe
jumping and in-air controls, and secondly you should learn using
weapons for movement (blaster jumps, rocket jumps, crylinkg for
acceleration and climbing walls, ...). This is important not only for
quick relocation, taking shortcuts, dodging enemy fire and quickly
running away from enemies, it also saves you from countless deaths by
falling into pits.
* Console: console is extremely useful in Xonotic; not only can it
modify almost any aspect of the game, it also allows you to create fun
macros (some people even create what could be considered [44]cheats
only with the console commands). A very important command is search x
which will search for other commands and cvars, e.g. if you want to
mess with resolution, do search resolution etc. There is even a small
stack-based minilanguage in the console that's invoked with the rpn
command -- this allows for very advanced stuff. Sadly this isn't well
documented, but the thread at
https://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=2987 provides some
basics.
* Make cool binds, for example you should modify the standard team
messages to something more funny. One of the most basic binds is taunt
so that you can insult players (e.g. bind KP_SLASH "cmd voice taunt").
* Lower your mouse sensitivity, this is really crucial to git gud, it's
almost impossible to be good with high sens. Lower sensitivity
increases your accuracy greatly, which is just key, it's almost like
an instant [45]cheat; of course you'll need a bit bigger mouse pad.
Write down what sensitivity you have as centimeters per 360 turn
(measure this carefully with a ruler), this will help you achieve
exact same sensitivity when you buy a different mouse. Something like
22 cm per 360 turn is probably good. It is good to set your
sensitivity as early as possible so you don't have to later relearn
you muscle memory.
* Make basic graphics settings, for example increase FOV (field of view)
to at least 100, disable effects such as zoom animation (so that you
can zoom quickly) etc. If you want to play seriously you should also
turn off music so that you can hear enemies better. You can also
downgrade the graphics so as to make it basically look like Quake 1,
either for a cool retro look or to play the game on a [46]potato.
* Don't fall for the F11 [47]troll -- when you ask how to do something
and people respond with "press F11", don't do it, you'll humiliate
yourself. { Faggot devs disabled it now I think. RIP fun. ~drummyfish
}
* Enable cheats with F11.
* Spin to win: you can make a cool spinning macro that makes you look
like you have a seizure: e.g. bind b "toggle vid_stick_mouse; rpn
/m_pitch 1 ${vid_stick_mouse} - 0.022 * =;".
* Once you have a comfy config, you can remove the write rights to it
(chmod -w ~/.xonotic/data/config.cfg). This way the game won't be able
to modify the config and all settings and experiments you make in the
game will only be temporary, until the game restart, so you can't fuck
up your settings.
* Do NOT camp, it's retarded and wastes other people's time, especially
e.g. in clan arena where dead people have to wait for the end of
round. Better lose quickly than win or draw by camping.
* Explosions (and bullets) go through thin walls by default, so you can
e.g. kill someone hiding in the room above you by shooting the
ceiling. Very cool.
* Don't stand at teleport exits, so as to not get telefragged.
* A quick way to tell how good someone is is the damage deal to damage
taken ratio -- once you deal more damage than take, you seize to be a
complete noob. When you deal twice as much damage as you take, you are
probably reaching a pro level. Of course, this also depends on
opponents, mode you play etc., take this just as a quick estimate.
* If you're not doing well, complain about [48]lag.
* You can turn off the chat in case there is some retarded conversation
going on (just go to setting and HUD editor). New versions also
support client side ignore of specific players.
* In addition to chat you can also turn off opponent names if you just
want to play without any distraction. Try e.g. hud_panel_chat 0;
hud_panel_centerprint 0; hud_shownames 0;
hud_panel_scoreboard_maxheight 0.01; hud_panel_notify 0;
hud_panel_scoreboard_namesize 1; hud_panel_score 0; con_chatsound 0;
hud_panel_infomessages 0;
* Slap opponents to humiliate them: the shotgun secondary fire is a
melee slap, which is the best way to kill someone, partly because it's
pretty hard to do (there's a delay before the bash). Another
humiliating way to eliminate opponents is to kill them with Hagar
secondary or push them off the map with blaster, crylink or even Mario
kill (very rare -- you jump on someone's head while he's jumping over
a pit which makes him fall down). Don't forget to taunt and
[49]teabag.
* If you see someone running fast while crouching in air, he's probably
a [50]pro.
* For more frags listen to sounds enemies make -- if a player is low on
health, he makes a distinct sound when hurt. You should listen to
these sounds and just quickly hit these players e.g. with machine gun
to get an easy kill.
* For more frags watch for falling players -- on space maps watch our
for players falling off the map and just quickly hit them with machine
gun (secondary fire) before they die, the game will give frag to
whoever hit him last.
* v_psycho 1, r_trippy 1 etc.
* Slow down enemies with crylink secondary: crylink secondary fire
shoots a projectile that "sucks in" anyone in near proximity to the
hit -- besides exploiting this for accelerating yourself you can also
use it to slow down enemies that try to run away from a fight or who
just try to move quickly to avoid being hit. This is extremely
annoying to the affected player, so do it as often as you can.
* cl_handicap can be used to make yourself weaker by specified
multiplier (take more and deal less damage), either to balance the
game or provide a challenge.
* v_flipped 1 flips the rendering so that you see the mirror version of
the map, it basically gives you a new map for free and provides a nice
challenge.
* in_pitch_min and in_pitch_max can remove the limit of looking up and
down (set to e.g. -1000 and 1000) -- this way you can turn completely
upside down which can be seen by spectators and make them think you're
a cheater.
* Typing /me in chat makes the chat message be output in a different
format; instead of username: message it writes *message and replaces
the /me string with your username -- this can create cool and fancy
messages.
* Piss people off with troll votes: study the vcall console command (see
vhelp), it allows for calling votes on specific things like switching
maps, kicking players etc. Some votes allow a parameter string so that
you can make a funny message with it, e.g. vcall bots play better than
player X. Due to weird code numbers can be specified with almost
arbitrary number of leading zeros, so you can just call a vote to set
fraglimit to 1 with 100 leading zeros to spam people's screen and
confuse them. Where enabled, vcall grunt will try to turn on grunt
sound that many players hate. If you want to leave, a fancy way to do
it is to call a vote to kick yourself.
* The game outputs chat into terminal, you can filter these messages out
and redirect them to [51]espeak for a fun experience :)
* Electro spammers are easy to kill: when someone is raping electro and
just spraying everything, simply shoot at him with electro primary
fire -- this explodes the balls he's spamming and hits him AND his
teammates with huge damage. Don't forget to teabag and taunt him once
he's dead.
* Standing in front of a nub with Hagar is dangerous.
* Switch left and right hand for a challenge.
* Play drunk and/or high for a challenge.
* Change your name to some unicode monstrosity like
^6.̸̡͋̽̍̎͗̊͛̋̂̃̌͗͘^5.̸̨̧̯̙̞̟͙̖̞͈̬͙̞̖͎͉̽̿̇̔̂̎͗͌͆́̕͝͠͝͝ͅ^1.̷͕́͛̈́. {
[52]RIP if your reader can't [53]Unicode well :) ~drummyfish }
* [54]Doom challenge: disable looking up and down with console.
* If you're slow, [55]strafe harder.
* Move to [56]Europe to actually enjoy the game with good ping.
* { My config is at
https://codeberg.org/drummyfish/my_text_data/src/branch/master/configs/xonotic_config.cfg.
~drummyfish }
* Buy premium account for extra skins and [57]lootboxes. Just kidding :)
* Don't [58]ragequit, you'll give your opponent the ultimate
satisfaction. Making someone ragequit is better than just [59]raping
him.
* Bully players that admit to be playing on [60]Window$.
* There are [61]minigames in the game menu, can serve to kill time while
waiting to respawn in some modes.
* If you want to win in a team game and your team is losing, just
quickly switch to the winning team before the end. Gotta keep them
xonstats high.
* Sound is important, firstly you can hear where enemies are (especially
when you turn off music) and secondly you can also spot low HP players
by sound (they make a specific hurt sound when low HP).
* Just spec good players and do what they do.
* All americans in the game are cheaters without exception, just like in
[62]real life. You spot americans by ping and high score despite
playing like pre beginners when you spectate them, and by crying like
babies when you criticize [63]capitalism and tech consumerism.
* some tactics/strategy/habits:
* Chasing low health players is usually a bad idea and a mistake
made by nubs: such player, if he's not a complete newbie, can
just spam electro/nades behind himself and easily kill you.
* Unpredictable movement and positioning is key to avoiding damage:
nubs think that when they move fast they won't get hit -- this is
only partially true, it is about just as important to move
unpredictably and avoid spots that get regularly spammed by
enemies. When you move from point A to B on a map and the enemy
sees you doing so, you should take a randomly long short pause in
doing so, or maybe even switch direction completely, otherwise he
can quite accurately predict when and where you'll appear at the
destination and kill you with prefire. It's a great advantage if
your opponent doesn't know where you are. One sneaky tactical
move is "the return" when you pretend you run away from
somewhere, then wait 3 seconds and return back (the opponent
expects you to run anywhere but to where you ran away from).
* When in fight, don't be an easy target and don't stand near a
wall (this makes you be easily hit with splash damage). Don't
stand in a corner. Try to always have a quick escape path.
* Stay together with your teammates (if you want to win). Fighting
alone against multiple enemies is usually just a quick death
without dealing much damage, even if you're very good and they're
mediocre. Especially if you're a nub playing clan arena, stay
with your team or else you'll die in 3 seconds and will have to
wait until the end of the round.
* Higher ground is usually good.
* When microcamping (camping for a short time with vortex
somewhere), the only direction you can be hit from should be the
one you're looking in. Nubs sometimes camp in a spot that can be
seen from multiple directions -- that's just asking to be
fragged.
* Use machine gun (MG) secondary to finish off low HP enemies: MG
is [64]hitscan, i.e. it hits instantly on a distance and its
easier to hit with than vortex (which fires just one strong shot)
-- the secondary fire has no bullet spread unlike the primary
fire, so it's ideal to just deal quick small hit that's enough to
finish someone. But watch out, some people bitch about using MG
this way being too nub, going for slap will entertain the
audience better.
* Take items, many new players just walk by mega health without
taking it, that's pretty stupid.
* It's sometimes good in a fight to be directly above or under the
opponent as it's harder for him to aim precisely looking
completely up or down, and with many weapons it's generally
harder to just hit someone in air, especially for noobs. Noobs
mostly don't even see you if you're above their heads (they have
FOV set to low), it's basically free damage.