The1Qwerty

Part 8 of my Trem Skills programme helping to improve your Tremulous game skills.

Trem Skills #8 Deals with countering recoil that is associated with a Chaingun.

I find that alot of people can not effectively counter the recoil that is produced from using a Chaingun, unless of course they are in a battlesuit There is however a very good way of countering and limiting the amount of recoil a chaingun produces.

The method is quite simple but takes a bit of practice to perfect. How do you counter the recoil produced by a Chaingun? Simple you move the mouse in the opposite direction of the recoil, this technique can be used across a wide range of FPS games and is by no means limited to Tremulous.

The Chaingun recoil happens in a direction that forces your gun to move upwards, to counter this recoil effect all that is required is for you to move your mouse down at the appropriate amount this is where practice comes in.

Download the demo on controlling Chaingun recoil and see how much you can limit the effects of recoil.
Copy into your Tremulous base file then type the following code in the console.
/demo cgunrecoil.dm_69

See how when I am not pushing down on the mouse the Chaingun recoils all over the place, compared with when I am helping to correct the recoil.

Part 7 of my Tremulous Skills programme taking you from a Trem noob to a Trem pro.

Trem Skills #7 looks at playing Tremulous in wide screen.

Credit to Storma for this as I did not know how to set things up for wide screen.

You can setup Tremulous to run in wide screen in 3 simple steps:

1. Type this into your console r_mode -1 settings this to mode -1 lets you use custom widths and heights.
2. Set your desired width r_customwidth SET YOUR WIDTH HERE
3. Set your desired height r_customheight SET YOUR HEIGHT HERE

Hope that helps those of you who have nice LCD wide screen monitors.

Part 6 of my Tremulous Skills programme, taking you from a Trem noob to a Trem pro.

Trem Skills #6 deals with, the best weapon I think for use against aliens.

The best kind of weapon I think to use against aliens are ones that do not require to be reloaded. These weapons are the Lasgun and the Chaingun (you could possible include the Lucifer cannon as well).

Why are these the best weapons to use? You don’t have to reload them! Why is this good? Because every time you have to reload your weapon you are giving the alien opponent a free hit on you, as you are not able to attack them whilst reloading.

Reload times can be costly and having to reload a rifle every 30 bullets can often result in you being taken down by dretches, especially during the early stages of the game before you have a helmet.

Summing Up:

The Lasgun and Chaingun are the best weapons to use in Tremulous without them you can easily be killed during your reload time. Lasgun with a battery pack is a highly effective combination as it gives you an extra 100 rounds, it is also far more effective on the Dretch unit than the Chaingun is as the Chaingun is as not as accurate as the Lasgun shooting long distances.

Part of my Tremulous Skills programme taking you from a Trem noob to a Trem pro.

Trem Skills #5 Looks at the respective damage each human weapon deals out. Sorry that this post did not come out yesterday was busy playing with Wii Browser

Stage 1

• Blaster: 9hp
• Rifle: 5 hp per bullet
• Painsaw: ~200 hp per second
• Shotgun: 56 hp per shell
• Las Gun: 9 hp per bullet
• Mass Driver: 38 hp per bullet
• Chain Gun: ~75 hp per second

Stage 2

• Pulse Rifle: 9 hp per bullet
• Grenade: 290 hp
• Flame Thrower:~20 hp per bullet

Stage 3

• Lucifer Cannon: Fully charged shot deals 250 hp damage uncharged single shot 27 hp

A new release for the free FPS Sauerbraten (formally known as Cube 2) is out now.

For those of you who have not herd of Sauerbraten before here is a quick rundown of the games features.

Game Features

* Oldskool fast & intense gameplay (read: similar to Doom 2 / Quake 1).
* Many multiplayer gameplay modes, most in teamplay variants as well: deathmatch, instagib, efficiency, tactics, capture (domination/battlefield style), coop edit (!).
* Masterserver & ingame server browser.
* Lag-free gameplay experience.
* Two singleplayer modes: DMSP (fight a monster invasion on any DM map), classic SP (progression driven SP like other games)
* 7 weapons tuned for maximum satisfaction: double barrelled shogun, rocket launcher, machine gun, rifle, grenade launcher, pistol, fist.

Engine Features

* 6 directional heightfield in octree world structure allowing for instant easy in-game geometry editing (even in multiplayer, coop edit).
* Rendering engine optimized for high geometry throughput, supporting hardware occlusion culling.
* Lightmap based lighting with accurate shadows from everything including mapmodels, smooth lighting for faceted geometry, and fast compiles.
* Pixel and vertex shader support, each model and world texture can have its own shader assigned.
* Robust physics written specifically for this world structure.
* Loading of md2/md3 models for animated characters, weapons, items, world objects.
* Network library designed for high speed games, client/server network system.
* Small but complete configuration/scripting language.
* Simple stereo positional sound system.
* Particle engine, supporting text particles.
* 3d menu/gui system, for in-world representation of choices.

Seeing as it is open source sauerbraten is also free, so you can’t go wrong testing it out! You can download it via Sourceforge

Trem Skills #4 part of the Trem Skills programme helping to enhance your Tremulous skills, and help you to play Tremulous better.

Trem Skills #4 looks at the alien cross hair.

Isn’t it annoying how aliens do not get a cross hair! Well there is answer to that problem thanks to Chompers. Good job Chompers (I use to play with him till he gave up with Game Arena servers)

Default Alien Hud No Cross Hair.

Chompers hud is an alternative hud for both aliens and humans. The really important thing about it is that it gives all alien units a cross hair to help get the head bites in.

Chompers Hud Activated Gives Alien Cross Hair.

Some people consider Chompers hud as cheating others do not. I personally do not see anything wrong with it, and I am a big anti-hacker/cheater when it comes to gaming. Also if you play in Game Arena you can legally use Chompers Hud.

Download Chompers hud extract the files into the Tremulous/base/ui folder (make the ui folder since it will not normally exist) then run the following code in the console to set it up.

/cg_hudFiles "ui/hud.cfg"

/cg_hudFiles "ui/chompers.cfg"

Restart Tremulous and Chompers hud will be there ready to help improve your Tremulous skills.

If you wish to remove Chompers hud run the following code in the console.

/cg_hudFiles "ui/hud.txt"

That’s it for this Issue of Trem Skills, go install Chompers Hud and start practicing, it does take some time to get use to but once you have mastered it you will never look back.

Tomorrow I will be looking at the damage each (human) weapon in Tremulous does.

Part 3 of my Tremulous Skills programme, helping to improve your Tremulous skills and make you a better Tremulous player.

Trem Skills #3 covers the weapons which have bullets that travel slowly through the air and how to make the most of these powerful weapons.

Anticipate, anticipate, anticipate, I can’t say it enough. If you want to use the pulse rifle you can not afford to shoot directly at an opposing alien! It’s just not good enough. You have to shoot in front of it if you want to play better.
The pulse rifle, although having an extremely fast rate of fire travels slow through the air. Therefore if you shoot at an alien that is at a reasonable distance away by the time the bullet or the pulse rifle reaches the alien it has already moved onwards and is no longer there. To counter this problem you need to be shooting were you think the alien will be moving, this way you are almost guaranteed to hit the alien and take him out.

Aliens can make it alot harder for you to hit them by moving all over the place. I will discuss this in a future Trem Skills post.

Part of my Tremulous Skills programme, turning you from a Trem noob to a Trem Pro.

Trem Skills #2 Deals with basic ways to improve using your rifle against aliens such as the Dretch unit.

Alot of people who play Tremulous think that they can just shoot directly at a Dretch, however this is not the best way to go about it. A rifle does 5 damage per bullet and a dretch has 25 hp, therefore you need to hit a Dretch 5 times to ensure a kill. Sure you can shoot directly at the Dretch but I find that it is far more effective to shoot in front of the Dretch (this is particularly important with weapons that travel slower through the air, I will cover this tomorrow Trem Skills #3.)

Anticipating the movement of opponents is essential in Tremulous, thats if you want to be efficient in killing them. Always aim where you think the opponent will be next.

Everyday for next two weeks I will be bringing you ways to enhance you Tremulous skills, skills that I have learned/picked up from other ‘pro’ Trem players and worked out all on my own. Some of the articles may be influenced by the knowledge of other top Australian Tremulous players, in which case I will let you know and give credit where it is needed.

Trem Skills #1 will cover the art that is Dretching.

Dretching is just a term used when you are using the most basic of the alien units, the Dretch.

The Dretch are very weak life forms only having 25 hit points, but if used effectively, they can really set aliens up for a good game.

A common problem I see is that people are just running in and looking at the humans (opponents) legs. Dealing out only 24 damage on a non-armoured human. However if the Dretch looks upwards about 2/3 of the screen (approx head height) they can land in an attack dealing out 96 hp,(non-armoured human) that leaves the human with only 4 hp left another quick nip and hes down.

Download the demo of the Dretch foot attack to see how long it takes to kill the human.
To use the demo you must copy it into /tremulous/base/demos folder (if demos does not exist create it). Then to run the demo type the following code into the Tremulous console. (` will bring up the console.)

/demo dretchfoot.dm_69

The dretch foot attack demo will begin to play. See how ineffective it is.

Now download the demo of the Dretch Head attack to see how much faster it is to destroy the human.
Again copy into the base/demo folder, then run the following code.

/demo dretchhead.dm_69

I hope that from the two demos and you practicing the technique of looking up whilst dretching, you will see how effective the Dretch unit actually is.

Got any questions about Dretching be sure to leave a comment below.

For the next two weeks or so I will be bringing you a step by step tutorial on how to improve your Tremulous skills. I will update this post frequently so you can come here for the full run down of posts.

If you don’t know what Tremulous is about, and would like a rough overview of what Tremulous is then I suggest you read my Tremulous Review

I will use a variety of ways to help educate you on playing Trem, some of them will involve videos of actual in-game Tremulous footage to help give you a better idea of how to play better.
Other things will just be simple screen shots showing what I mean.

If I do show you game footage it will most likely be in the form recorded fresh from a Tremulous game. This is known as a demo, I will guide you through on how to play demo’s as the time comes.

Tremulous Skills Guide

• Trem Skills #1 The art of Dretching
• Trem Skills #2 Deals with basic ways to improve using your rifle against aliens such as the Dretch unit
• Trem Skills #3 covers the weapons which have bullets that travel slowly through the air and how to make the most of these powerful weapons
• Trem Skills #4 Covers getting yourself a cross hair for aliens, and how much this can enhance your alien game play
• Trem Skills #5 Looks at the respective damage each human weapon deals out
• Trem Skills #6 deals with, the best weapon I think for use against aliens
• Trem Skills #7 looks at playing Tremulous in wide screen
• Trem Skills #8 Deals with countering recoil that is associated with a Chaingun
• Trem Skills #9 Deals with how to set basic binds
• Trem Skills #10 Deals with setting binds for constructing alien structures
• Trem Skills #11 Deals with binding the construction of human buildings
• Trem Skills #12 Looks at binds for purchasing human weapons
• Trem Skills #13 Looks at the binds required for evolving as an alien
• Trem Skills #14 Deals with the basics of building of a base