#1 2014-07-23 07:33:20

Buggy
Member

As I see it: The most important issue with Tesseract right now

Right now, the development of Tesseract is focused almost entirely on the underlying engine. This Isn't necessarily a bad thing, the Tesseract engine is still young, and while amazing it Isn't flawless and there are almost always things that can be improved or added. But, this can't keep up forever, eventually the engine will be in a acceptably featureful and stable state, and then what?

This brings me to my next point. Something I've seen a lot while browsing the forums is a number of conversations along the lines of: "We can't add X, it would break maps and anger users." This is a issue. Change is important for a community to grow, otherwise things just become stale. If things continue like this, we'll end up like Saurbraten: Fun and interesting, but frozen unchangingly in one state for years, drawing interest only from those who really like the game the way it is.

And thus, In my eyes, Tesseract desperately needs one thing right now: A flexible easy-to-use way for both developers, and users, to add content without breaking anything else, or requiring users to go through lengthy or difficult processes to use said content. A scripting language comes to mind.

An excellent example of this is Garry's Mod. In Garry's Mod you have everything from role-play games to fast-paced shooters to space-sandbox, and you can play one after another without even restarting the client if you want. You don't even have to do anything to install them, you just connect to the server and wait a minute or two.

The source engine Garry's Mod uses is nearly a decade out of date, is closed source, and costs 20$, yet look at the massive community it's gathered. But look at Tesseract. It's free, open source, visually pleasing, relatively simple, and is capable of mind-blowing real-time map editing. Even that one feature alone, real-time seamless modification of map geometry, is a incredible feature that dozens of professionally made, big budget engines could only hope for. Tesseract holds a HUGE amount of potential, it does things other modern engines barely dream of!

What needs to be done, is to unlock that potential.

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#2 2014-07-23 07:39:48

Calinou
Moderator

Re: As I see it: The most important issue with Tesseract right now

In before:

eihrul wrote:

No.

The lead developer generally doesn't want to code such a thing and seems to be fine with the monolithic base of the game.

However, there's OctaForge, a fork of Tesseract, which is worth looking into. It's still in heavy development and multiplayer doesn't work currently.

Tesseract uses its own scripting language, CubeScript, whereas OctaForge uses CubeScript and Lua.

Last edited by Calinou (2014-07-23 07:45:24)

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#3 2014-07-23 13:37:27

Marcin
Member

Re: As I see it: The most important issue with Tesseract right now

@up that is not really a comprehensive response, because you throw in no reasonable arguments. I think op's way of thought has a solid base and makes some good points. Tesseract needs some way to rapidly create new 'gamemodes', or overally all sorts of content. If you look now, there are barely any servers available, it is almost impossible to playTesseract casually, thus the game is failing to utilize all the work that has been put into the game by devs.

Last edited by Marcin (2014-07-23 13:37:47)

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#4 2014-07-23 18:06:08

Calinou
Moderator

Re: As I see it: The most important issue with Tesseract right now

Marcin wrote:

If you look now, there are barely any servers available, it is almost impossible to playTesseract casually, thus the game is failing to utilize all the work that has been put into the game by devs.

There are barely any players available. No real easy fix is available for this.

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#5 2014-07-23 23:19:43

Buggy
Member

Re: As I see it: The most important issue with Tesseract right now

Calinou wrote:

There are barely any players available. No real easy fix is available for this.

True, there aren't many, but to use Garry's Mod as a example again, it didn't start out as a big fancy game with lots of players either. The first version was just a simple HL2 mod that added a rope gun, and as content was slowly added it gathered attention, until it became what it is today.

Players don't come first. We can't expect players to show up before content is added. But, with a little luck, as the game grows, so will the community.

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#6 2014-07-24 00:21:54

ImNotQ009
Moderator

Re: As I see it: The most important issue with Tesseract right now

Guys. If you reply to someone's message, please make sure you reply to the whole message, because that kind of defeats the point :P As Calinou has stated in his first reply there's OctaForge, which is Tesseract with powerful Lua API allowing to code games. It's still under development but it IS there.

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#7 2014-07-24 00:30:14

Marcin
Member

Re: As I see it: The most important issue with Tesseract right now

@ImNotQ009
The thing is that the aforementioned solutions are required to be applied to Tesseract. It is not our intention to wait for a seperate project to meet our expectations, because we can clearly see the great benefits of Tesseract to have such flexibility and to be easily moddable. We see the potential in This game, not in OctaForge. Tesseract already has a ( small, but still has ) player base and community backing. OctaForge looks like it has never been heard of by anyone and lacks basic features ( coop map editing, gameplay ) which are already implemented here. One can easily see that our developers work faster and have a clear idea in mind, which, in my opinion, is not the case in OctaForge.

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#8 2014-07-24 17:52:25

Julius
Member

Re: As I see it: The most important issue with Tesseract right now

I hope OctaForge take the opportunity of their broken netcode and uses the newly open-sourced RakNet instead: https://github.com/OculusVR/RakNet

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#9 2014-07-25 08:54:31

Calinou
Moderator

Re: As I see it: The most important issue with Tesseract right now

Julius wrote:

I hope OctaForge take the opportunity of their broken netcode and uses the newly open-sourced RakNet instead: https://github.com/OculusVR/RakNet

Well, enet is already used, what's the point in changing for a library that doesn't follow the Cube 2 philosophy at all?

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#10 2014-07-29 20:20:25

FaTony
Member

Re: As I see it: The most important issue with Tesseract right now

Does enet support IPv6?

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#11 2014-07-30 09:32:01

Calinou
Moderator

Re: As I see it: The most important issue with Tesseract right now

FaTony wrote:

Does enet support IPv6?

I don't think any Cube-based game ever supported IPv6, I'm not sure if this is due to enet or the game itself.

enet's website doesn't seem to have any information on IPv6 support.

Last edited by Calinou (2014-07-30 09:33:11)

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