You may remember an interview we had a while ago with a group of Sauer veterans who were working on a fork of Sauerbraten, which would later be named “Inexor”. After over a year of development and planning, their first alpha has been released!
This first release, as stated by the developers, is based mainly on the development side of the game; only 3 maps are included so far and there is currently no master-server. Instead, it is more of a show-off of some of the new features in the game, including an improved build system (coding), ambient occlusion, and some console improvements, among other things.
Below are some links to the download, information, and the official website. So go ahead and try it out! And don’t forget, Inexor has a very player-driven developement; if you have some feedback or suggestions after checking out the game, they would love to hear them! The best way would be to join #inexor on irc.gamesurge.net IRC.
Enjoy!
Download Page | Direct Download
– Official Release Blog Post –
– Github –
– Wiki –
– Inexor.org –
glad to see that finally one planned feature was added:
* Gameplay Adjustments (e.g. Weapon Balance)
Would have been first on my list… It’s cool and all, but seriously, who needs more fancy graphics, which we all sacrifice anyway for better gameplay.
Only real cool addition untill now is hanni’s bezier curves! I hope he’ll keep working on the multi pov screen. A coaching mode would finally end the stupid ‘ghosting’ flames. I’d also like to see some improvements directed towards the gaming experience itself.
untill now, it seems more like: Stays Sauer, got better looks, but stays shit.
Agreed.
y u no fix mg spread
Weapon balancing/tweaking is planned for future releases
Nice. :) Just dont forget that for many sauer players the main reason to play inexor would be improved gameplay, which most of all includes better weapon balance.
Btw lightning and plasmagun like in quake would be rad.
might be too much work to code something like a lightning gun when tweaking the mg sufficiently might work. I remember acuerta compiled a “pro mod” which was a lot more fun than regular sauerbraten and the only thing he updated was some necessary changes to the weapon balance (lower mg spread, lower rocket splash, lower rifle dmg, shotgun spread pattern changed).
if you’d actually have bothered to read my post, you’d understand that it wasn’t what I was trying to suggest.
but I’ve been playing quake instead of sauer for months now anyway, since quake is actually playable, and i’m gonna be controversial here and say that there’s far less people in that game with a grossly over-inflated sense of self importance. :)
you’re both crazy.
quake is a toxic environment that hates new players and is entirely full of big egos same as sauer except worse.
but the game IS so much better, and sauer has been ‘left alone’ by many of its best players because of it. that is definitely not a good thing if you’re rooting for sauer.
sauer has a long way to go before you could call it ‘changed to quake,’ i wouldn’t panic at the notion of a little weapon balance. besides, i thought this was inexor?
with all due respect, I’ve never seen the same negativity I’ve seen in sauer in quake, except in ca games lol
100% agreed with the rest of your post though :)
I haven’t even opened sauer since january, and the last thing I played other than a public game was the dksc thing in november. I think it’s fair to say I’m “leaving sauer alone” well enough.
Inexor isn’t sauer, it’s a fork, so I’m taking an active interest in the project’s development, since that’s what the blog post was about.
Since you want me to explain what’s wrong with the current weapon balance:
– mg: spread is far, far too high and quite literally perfect aim will be “rewarded” the same as completely dogshit aim as a result. keeping mg spread the way it is completely lowers the skill cap and you’re essentially favouring random elements over the individuality of people’s skill being the limiting factor behind their results, as it is in most skill-based pursuits and other games. obviously, the damage would also need to be lowered from 15 (iirc?) to something like 7 in order to compensate for the lower spread. you could also change this idea into the concept of having “range” to a weapon, but it may be too reminiscent of quake’s lg for some people’s tastes (i’d be fine with it tho ftr).
– rl: splash is way too high. you can literally miss all your rockets (or at least when I was last playing, rockets were the one weapon I couldn’t hit shit with) and you’ll still be able to hit 60 damage with each rocket, or get ridiculous bounces on your enemy. if you aim a rocket at an enemy, I have no problem with it doing 120 dmg and even catapulting me into the air. but rockets really take zero skill to use in their current state and require no aim whatsoever unless you’re constantly hitting directs and midairs and shit.
– rifle: probably the only weapon that “works” like it should in sauer atm, and it’s for this reason that the dmg is too high. In my personal opinion, I think it’d be hard to say whether or not balancing the other weapons properly would compensate for this, but I wouldn’t be against rifle dmg going down to 90 to prevent two hit riflekills like in acuerta’s promod.
– sg/gl: I don’t have any experience using these weapons, so not sure. sg seems fine. gl splash seems fine, maybe gl dmg should be reduced? idk.
what I’m saying isn’t designed to make it harder, just to increase the skill cap needed to get good results, that can then in turn allow those who are able to get good results to push themselves further. when I was last playing actively at least (probably around this time last year), there were a bunch of people (including myself) who were of a “good” skill level, but had trouble breaking through into the “very good” skill tier, where players like acuerta and notas for example would reside – and almost everybody who had broken through into the “very good” skill tier agreed with the points i’m trying to make. the reason why my skill stagnated a lot was because i was/am an mg whore, and my hitscan aim was very good, but I had difficulty aiming with other weapons, rockets especially. The fact that the one gun I could use at what I’d consider to be a high level had such an insanely low (and random) skill cap made me lose a lot of motivation to play the game over time.
When acuerta and I duelled on the promod, the kills we got were admittedly lower, but not ridiculously so. I got to about 85ish and he broke 100 on all the maps we played (in effic).
The reason why you think mg is sometimes overpowered is because of the lucky spread you’re getting. if it does 30 dmg, then we know 7 mg bullets deals 210 dmg and thus kills someone in effic or in ffa if they have GA, which is theoretically the quickest time to kill. The reason why theoretical stats are bullshit is because of the random elements like spread that have been added to the game that will influence any hard statistics, and as I’ve said before, are random – so therefore cannot really be assessed properly either, except through actually playing the game and understanding situations properly.
I can’t really understand how someone would think I want to change sauer to quake. That would make no sense and I would just play quake if that were the case. People need to make the distinction between taking elements that have been proven to work and provide enjoyment in other games, and actually becoming another game.
And I’m not even speaking about changing “sauer”, but inexor is in itself a modification of sauer and therefore I believe it’s appropriate to discuss the pros and cons of changing the weapon balance so we can work out something people find favourable.
I’m glad you’d at least be open to trying a new weapon balance. If acuerta hadn’t left the game too, maybe he could’ve publicly released his promod. :/
About the GL;
It has been degraded to some secondary rocket launcher which has a limitation of distance due falling down after being launched. However; on most duel maps which contain relatively close combat; direct hits are pretty easy.
This isn’t a GL should act. It should fire towards the ground or floor; bouncing away some tiles and after about 3 seconds (not 2,5 #).
So the speed which the grenades have when launched should be way less, the damage should be way up (even higher than rockets actually; so like 140; it’s a indirect-oriented weapon unlike all other weapons), the reloading time should be a bit higher and the time between launching and fusing should be 3 seconds instead of 2,5.
@ frosty
i cant reply anymore on our uber long comment train so i send it here
I’m not sure what you think the point of my post is, but I’m not trying to suggest that everyone who disagrees with me is a bad player or that you need to have top-level aim in order to play well. The last time I saw you play was when you’d just returned from a long break, and so there are no doubts in my mind that you’ve improved a lot since then – and your improvements don’t necessarily have to originate from having good aim. Putting the skill cap aside for one moment, I would also argue that it’s more fun for me to be able to aim at a player and have my shot hit, and this metric, if employed within inexor’s general gameplay may even turn people over from only insta-based modes into playing more effic/ffa. I know if there was one thing I liked about insta (and let’s face it, there was only the one thing) it was that I knew I wasn’t getting bullshitted when I aimed well. I’d like to have that across all modes.
I’d also argue that I had at least a decent understanding of how to play sauer and the way the metagame works, although this was far more true in team games since I only saw duels as a way of warming up and I never took the competitive aspects of duel that seriously. Furthermore, I’d say the “top level” players in question had probably mastered all aspects of the game. If you’ve really been undefeated in an effic duel for as long as you can remember, then I guess that quantifies you as a top level player too, unless the general skill level has lowered since I’ve left.
This probably won’t help with my “trying to disassociate from quake” image, but as an example: quake 3 had a mod called quake 3 cpma (challenge promode arena). It was released in 2000 and people are still playing it, and there are even tournaments, whereas the original quake 3 is dead. The reason for that is because quake 3 cpma took everything that was great about quake 3 and modified what was not so great so as to please the community on the whole. I’m not claiming the suggestions for weapon balance I’ve put forth will please everybody, but anyone who says the current weapon balance is “great” or “good” or “can’t be improved upon” or something similar literally is only saying as such because they don’t want to accept and embrace necessary change. I refuse to acknowledge in my head that anybody could actually find this weapon balance to be ideal (I do understand people who find it playable, but playable isn’t always ideal).
I honestly don’t remember most of the stats in the “promod”, although working out new values would be somewhat easy since I think all the suggestions I’d covered above (as well as some sg + gl changes I don’t remember) were included. I’m studying computer science atm so I’d be able to modify and compile for windows and linux, but I don’t have a mac build environment (neither would I want one, developing/compiling software for mac is ridiculous unless you’re using xcode).
Or maybe acuerta still has it on google drive somewhere. I’m not saying everyone needs to love it, but if more people tried it they might realise it isn’t really changing anything dramatically, I doubt some new players would even notice a difference :P
yeah, it’s fine. When I briefly comment on something such as this I often can’t really be bothered to go into an in-depth explanation and so I just summarise. Maybe it makes me look like I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, which is obviously then my own fault.
Nice quote btw. and AC isn’t that bad. :D
Quake(3) uses a better decal-system also which looks better (by meshes).
suicizer i seem to remember disagreeing with you about everything back in the day but you are spot on about the grenade launcher. i said it at the time and i’ll say it now these stupid firework nades are the ultimate cancer. Spam anywhere for free bullshit damage, unless you want to use them as actual grenades in which case they will probably bounce away. Although thanks to the huge splash radius they will probably still hit…
nice to hear that, really!
Nyamms and I were working on changing the sauer weapons and the way armors work to make FFA more appealing. Nothing was finalized, but the current version of the code I have has it such that:
GA gives 50 per pickup, maxes at 100.
YA gives 100 per pickup, maxes at 150.
MG does 20 damage, less spread.
Rocket does 120 with direct, but drops off to zero (same splash range though, but this really does nerf them).
Rifle does 90 damage.
Shotgun’s still fucked, I don’t even want to talk about it…
Pistol is restored to the good not-collect edition attributes.
Quake’s community is hostile and trash. Notas, every time you come on Sauer, you trash sauer because it’s not quake. I like having you play, but your attitude towards Sauer is shit.
swatllama gimme a break, if sauer was quake it would be redundant. that doesn’t make any of the things that are wrong with it better. sauer is fast brutal sloppy action, it can be fast brutal and sloppy without being so sloppy that it’s broken and random, and still be a completely different game from quake. quake has nothing like ectf or effic duel and never will.
imo the only way to ‘fix’ sauer ffa is to go back to ctf/trooper edition ffa, where you could control maps by raping off spawn with rifle and YA spawned every 20 sec so you could survive long enough to keep controlling it. again you might notice that this style of gameplay could not be further from quake – no armor stacking and slow deliberate strategizing, just extremely fast and brutal action. but not a confused and watered down efficiency like sauer ffa on small maps is now.
I really don’t think OMFG – Hello is a good choice for the sound track :D
I can’t blow shit up to this.
I agree :D I hate that song with a passion
I really think all of you should stop complaining about mg spread. It’s sad to see so many people crying over it… There is no way in hell, that i’ll even consider playing this game if it’s going to be like sauer with just “tweaks”. Call me crazy for liking the way sauer gameplay has been for as long as i can remember.
The way i see it is this sauerfork/inexor shit will just be for the complaining shitfags and bandwagoners.
Someone explain this weapon balance pls, do you mean like dmg? spread? or what?
yes when people mentioned mg spread they meant mg spread
You guys seem to be forgetting the main goal behind this game: to continue Sauer development and continue with more releases, as well as attempting to expand Sauer’s playerbase through broader advertisement and possibly future Steam compatibility
Basically so that Sauer doesn’t inevitably die
steam compatibility would be $$$$$
This is why i don’t play sauer much, i’d rather listen to complainers only 1 time in csgo than listen to you every single day. All this cry about sauer’s gameplay and inexor trying to blablabla.
Ok well vanquish, your description of “making sauer better” is beyond stupid i couldn’t even imagine. You kind of make it seem like you have it all figured out and that you can win if you know this. Well meet me @ sauer.woop.us and find out. Frosty i agree when you say that these complainerfegs should go back to quake and leave sauer alone. Fatality i see what inexor is trying to do, but i believe it will be a bigger fail than tesseract.
In all seriousness though, all of sauer should be left alone, except maybe new maps/modes and that sort of things.
Your post is total garbage, not even remotely constructive.
A team of people have made the effort to improve sauer and effectively take over its dead development, let’s just shit on them because CHANGE SUCKS!!!!!!!!!11111111! #hadeslogic
Now addressing the actual crux of your post, if you can’t explain why my description of changing the weapon balance is stupid, don’t even bother posting because it makes you look like you’re just out to start a fight and not actually debate constructively, which is where all rational solutions originate from. I never claim to have anything “all figured out”, and most of my suggestions are based on Acuerta’s promod, which was received with overwhelming positivity amongst the people he got to test it out. I believe he had planned to pitch the changes to eihrul, but at the time eihrul was working on tesseract and so therefore had no interest in continuing sauer’s development. Considering that the last time I played you I beat you by over 30 kills in effic on turbine, I really doubt that if you gave me a few weeks to get back into somewhat decent shape (and more importantly, some motivation to do so) you would give me any trouble even with the current broken balance.
Furthermore, I can’t go to sauer.woop.us because I’m banned there, i’m told Drakas dislikes me because I publicised the fact that a woop member released an anticheat client for a tournament that scanned your system for external cheat programs (to quote britney, oops I did it again).
Calling me or others a ‘complainerfag’ isn’t constructive whatsoever and won’t add any more merit to your opinion. From your use of the word/phrase I can only deduce that I’m somehow making you angry, to which I’d suggest you go outside or do whatever you do to calm down because it’s a comment section on a blog post and you shouldn’t really get upset about it.
Nah i’m not angry at all. I believe that ‘complainerfeg’ will hopefully get you to acknowledge that you’re a complainer and will ultimately stop your bitching and play sauer the way it is. Then again you don’t play anyways so why do you care so much?
– Your way of fixing sauer is shit because it doesn’t need to be fixed.
– hell yea, lets shit on those devs
lol if you get back all of your motivation+skill you’d probably lose anyways. Just because you won over a year ago doesn’t mean you will win again, especially considering i changed a whole lot
#hadeslogic
I’m sure there is a good reason you’re banned from woop servers. God bless you Drakas
I just explained the reason, a w00p member developed an anticheat client for AssaultCube that scanned your system to see which processes were active at the time. I told various competitive players and they began to insult and hate on the w00p member in question (which wasnt my intention, obviously). Then Drakas banned me and anyone else who tried to discuss the matter with him, and many did (although I’ve since been unbanned on woop ts).
He also accidentally blacklisted me from w00p’s match servers because he thought I was a cheater from sweden. Yes, god bless drakas.
Acuerta, your promod was named multiple times here and it seems like it would have a good reputation. From what I got, your mod isn’t public at the moment, any chance that you could publish it, includinge the code under an Open Source license (best case would be the ZLIB license, since this is the license of Inexor/Sauerbraten)?
At the moment, we are doing a lot of ground work at Inexor. Changes, which directly improve the gameplay will follow at a later point. That’s why we also said multiple times before we released this alpha, that it is a technical preview. We are trying to release a new version every 8 weeks. With a bit of luck, one of the next two versions will already have a prototype of a new user interface, written entirely in HTML, CSS and Javascript.
There is no timeframe currently, when we will going to make changes to the gameplay, however, when we are going to make changes we will be more as happy to hear ideas and opinions from as much people as possible. Well, in fact, that’s something which counts in general, not only for gameplay changes. So whoever of you have ideas you can talk to us in IRC or wherever we are contactable. If one have a very specific idea, he can also open a GitHub issue.
@Nooby: http://i.imgur.com/1t6fQwi.png
These are the settings I used for this “promod” (not much of a mod, just some basic alterations).
What I basically tried was to “unnoob” every weapon, taking as much randomness out of the equation as seemed reasonable. The results are not to be taken as _the_ final solution for all issues. It’s merely something that I deemed would be a much better balanced version of sauer, while not really touching the core of the gameplay, only the finer aspects of it.
This would of course have to be playtested extensively.
There are some things to consider here:
– basically now that all weapons are veeery slightly nerfed, will that make flagrunning too easy? I tried to take that into account and raised the hitpush of rifle, mg, and shotgun. This might help to send the flagrunner into nirvana.
– with lowered mg spread: will it rule over all other weapons and be the weapon of choice in too many situations? (if so, maybe reducing the ammo again is going to work)
– will reduced rocket splash radius ( – 12.5% ) render the weapon useless to lesser skilled players?
I know you’re most likely going to ignore or dismiss this eventually anyway, but at least I can now say that I gave it a try.
The only reason why you could possibly think that the balance doesn’t need tweaking is either that you just don’t understand what makes a good game, or you don’t play competitively. You don’t necessarily have to agree with _my_ balance, but if you think the current balance is good then that says more about you than I ever could.
If you can actually read my response to frosty (or even the title of this blogpost), you’d see that I’m not trying to change sauer. I’m trying to change inexor, since I believe they’ve done great work on pushing the limits of the engine with a lot of new features and that gameplay is the only thing they would need to fix in order to have noticeably improved all of the major facets of the game. Therefore, I don’t even know why you’re mentioning the fact I’m not playing sauer as though it’s somehow relevant. If it’s to try and back up the claim you’d beat me in sauer, we could argue about it forever. I could say I’d beat you in AC, or in quake, or in counter strike, or dirty bomb, or some other game I’m playing atm that you don’t play. However you’ve _never_ beaten me before in any game so I don’t see a reason why you’d beat me now, so I don’t think there’s much else to say really :D (at least not from my end, I figure you’ll probably retort some generic bs though)
someone deleted my comments, cba to reply again
you have your opinions and I have mine, no need to call anyone a fegit. and in case you didn’t guess from the title of this blogpost, I was talking about inexor and not sauer ( :o ?!?!??!?! )
hades tbh i thought you were better than this. you complaining about complainers is more childish than the behavior of the ‘complainers’ you’re complaining about, and your tone towards vanquish is pretty much entirely uncalled for. vanquish is a professional esr commenter though so i’m sure he’s used to it.
if you don’t care that the game is constantly hemorrhaging players because of its horrid weapon balance and general shittiness that’s fine, but don’t shit on people for trying to improve a fork of the game when the whole point of a fork is to improve things.
Just because vanquish doesn’t play anymore but still enjoys commenting on things doesn’t mean his opinion is invalid, or that you get to call him out for ‘caring so much’ like that’s a bad thing anyway. People who used to play sauer and eventually gave up on it tend to be casually interested when there’s a chance to improve it and possibly give them a reason to play again.
You probably don’t hear complaints constantly in cs:go because cs is balanced enough to be played on the highest possible competitive level.
Exactly what I had had in mind before I decided to go “nah, I’ll just post some witty meme”.
Just one more thought. Isn’t it strange how the list of …
1) people who played sauer at the highest level
2) people who deemed sauer’s weapon balance bad
3) people who eventually abandoned sauer to play other games
… correlates? I could give a dozen examples.
Sauer’s boring now that all the good players left to play other games, if anyone wants to play FIFA 15 this summer hmu!
Adios Amigos!
PS: current MG spread is trash and if you say it isn’t, you’re lying.
You should be happy that the game isnt dead yet. Show some gratefulness for the effort people have invested into this. I finally found a little shard of piece after getting rid of everything that mattered to me.
Moreover i noticed that i have been a fool all the time. It is never too late to change.
Please think about it as there is no escape from fate. Happiness is a strange feeling. I am glad that I am now able to feel it. You guys are kind of responsible for this development and I came to thank you. It is Time to pay my debts now, goodbye.
Sincerely vzzec
spread is fine for me. I see no problem with the weapons. Every game loses players over time, i just assumed that most of you old guys left because you got a life (no offense) or found another game that is more fun. Didn’t think you left after 7 years because weapons were fucking unbalanced.
I think, that completely throwing away all sauer physics,
itemless mods and weapon balance is ok. The game must have lots
of different aspects to improve in to be interesting. It is the
main point of the game, so improving sauer’s devolopment and
leaving the game as it is makes no sence. Also network code have
to be improved, as it is very bad.
As for people, who likes everything in sauer, they can play
sauer. Non will miss them. And again, without firm and unique
gameplay this project will never gain any audience. It has to be
attractive for new players, not for sauer-loving-everything
players.
Game design, game feel, that will determine people’s reaction,
not some cool frameworks, that nobody cares about.
P.S. Even blind cloning quake is ok. No ideas of your own – copy
smth, it works at least.
QUAKE IS NOT SAUER. GO PLAY QUAKE, YOU FUCKING CANCER.
Go play default sauerbraten, a dead game. What is your problem?
You’re a joke
There are initially 7 weapons:
num name damage reload dam/sec technically similar to
0 fist 50 0.25s 200 quake3 gauntlet
1 shotgun 20x10 1.4s 143 doom2 SSG (wide angle, but less than in doom2)
2 chaingun 30 0.1s 300 quake LG (mild spread at distance)
3 rocket launcher 120 0.8s 150 quake RL (splash damage)
4 rifle 100 1.5s 66 quake2 RG
5 grenade launcher 90 0.6s 150 any quake GL, except faster but less damaging
6 pistol 35 0.5s 70 quake SG, but more precise
Does anyone need help with counting a number of “quake” word occurrences in it?
Glad you mentioned this.
What most “fanatics” fail to realize is that the weapon physics of sauer are nothing but a failed interpretation/imitation of their quake 3 counterpart.
Not exactly true, as Cube Engine 1 rather had the physics like Quake 1 had (“crabbing”).
Sauerbraten has very strict physics. You can’t fall faster than a certain amount of units (while it’s unlimited on Quake 3), you can’t accelerate more than a double jump and any trickjump let you (while you can accelerate unlimited in theory on Quake 3, even with just strafejumping).
So they are certainly different from each other.
talking about weapon physics.
Even the weapon physics are not exactly true;
– Explosions go through anything in Sauerbraten (while on Quake 3 they don’t).
– Shots of the rifle can only hit 1 player at the time (while a shot of the railgun can hit thousands of players by just 1 shot; as long as they are lined up).
– The grenades within Quake 2 and 3 work like they should; fire like a mortar but then still a count down-time before fusing (Sauerbraten’s grenades are being fired with that much force that they can fuse while still being in air).
– The LG has a distance cap (while the MG of Sauerbraten had not).
The spawning weapon of Quake 2 has infinite ammo while you only have 40 rounds on Sauerbraten (with an annoying spread in the shots). Let’s not start about Quake 3’s MG…
And what is your problem? It is a new game, from another developers team, you can still enjoy playing sauer with other sauer players (or more likely with yourself alone). Nobody is speaking of taking that from you.
To be honest I do play Quake (Live) weekly, while I nowadays only edit in Sauerbraten (Quake’s radiants are bitches and Cube Engine’s editors are way easier to use if you ask me). However, I do play some games on Sauerbraten now or then. But rather from nostalgia, then being exited from it’s “outstanding” gameplay.
But enough about Quake; let’s rather focus on this project.
I think it’s good certain people want to keep Sauerbraten alive by such mod. It has happened before during Cube Engine and the start of Sauerbraten. At some point; there needs to be a reboot through revolutionary ideas like changes within the gameplay or within rendering. The game and engine needs to grow with it’s community after all.
I would be pleased to contribute towards this project if they need some help of a semi-artist.
Sooner or later the current team have to radically change the gameplay. Or drop the project at all, because it is not very motivating to do something nobody cares about. Tesseract tried to be the game for sauer players, focused only on the most popular insta modes (99% of current sauer players). And has completely failed as a game, despite having a fancy graphics (development is stalled for many months).
Also a feedback from unbeatable-sauer-experts, that have never seen any other FPS games for some very strange reasons, can’t be constructive at all.
I don’t know how where such violating and aggressive talk comes from, but that shouldn’t be said to anyone on Sauerworld, but especially from someone which is representing a clan (are all members like that?)
Is that how the community should act against each other nowadays?
I definitely think not.
People tend to forget the topic of this news thread;
There is an alpha-version released of Inexor.
Now go get that mod and play your ass off before commenting.
“Also I don’t have time for fps and feedback because I am too busy fucking your whore mother!”
nice to see constructive discussion can still take place in this community
I think the “unbeatable sauer expert” comment was because you said you couldn’t remember the last time you’d been beaten.