The1Qwerty

Part 10 of my Tremulous skills programme helping you play Tremulous better.

Trem Skills #10 Deals with setting binds for constructing alien structures.

There is a much easier and far more efficient way of building alien structures than having to go through the menu all the time. The way to increase building speed is like playing RTS games and using hot keys to micro your construction, and thus increase speed.

Hope that helps you! Tomorrow I will look at binds for constructing human structures.

Part 9 of my Tremulous Skills programme helping to improve your Tremulous skills.

Trem Skills #9 Deals with how to set basic binds.

Do you wish you did not have to type common messages into Tremulous all the time? For instance “Base Under Attack” or many of the other commonly used messages.

Instead of having to type this over and over again you could create a simple bind to do this for you.
/bind 1 say Base Under Attack
That little piece of code will cause the message Base Under Attack to be sent when you press down the number 1 key.

The message “Base Under Attack” will be sent to everone even your opponents, so to correct for this all you have to do is replace ’say’ with ‘teamsay’
like this:
/bind 1 say_team Base Under Attack

That is by no means the limit of what can be bound in Tremulous, you can bind everything you can do in game.

For those of you who enjoy building I have something in store for you tomorrow, how to set binds for alien structures.

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.

Whilst looking through Digg I stumbled across Wiki4MMO.com which is a wiki dedicated to free MMO games. Within the wiki be sure to check out their extensive collation of Free MMO games.

If your into MMO’s and want a new free game to check out, you cant pass up Wiki4MMO.

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.

Looking back on the week I think I have produced a fairly good amount of new content, I will highlight the main points underneath this.

• The fairly obvious posts are the ones that are part of my Trem Skills series helping to enhance your Tremulous skills. I won’t list them all though.
• Another post that you may find interesting is my Review of the final version of the Wii Opera Web Browser/Channel

The top commentator is… Madhur who has taken out the top commentators spot for a consecutive week. Great job Madhur, I hope that you will continue to contribute on The1Qwerty and enjoy these links.

Madhur just went over a complete theme overhaul, and I gotta say it’s very nice. Madhur’s blog is using the Digg Theme by WP designer, Madhur has tweaked it a fair bit and it shows, looking very impressive nice job Madhur.
Madhur blogs about gaming, technology and general blogging things, from the posts he has written recently I take that he is a GTA fan.
Madhur also stumbled across MyCyberTwin I’ll let you read Madhur’s write up of it.

Sutto has posted up an article on REDDER some kind of graming idea he has come up with.

Jake has a very interesting article on how to download youtube videos by simply adding a kiss.

Finally Aniela has articles on… (No offense to you Aniela but I don’t know what to say).

Thats it for this weeks blogosphere week in review. Thanks to everyone who commented, and remember to get a link in the blogosphere week in review all you have to do is comment and get into the top commentators list. Which is not very hard.

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

With the release of the final version of the Opera browser yesterday, I have to say that I am rather impressed (writing this on it now though I wont do the whole post to hard to type lol)

Sure I never really used the beta of it, so it is all new to me, however, I think that the final version of the Wii browser is fantastic it’s great to be able to browse the internet pointing with the Wii remote whilst laying down or just sitting back. Once you have zoomed in to a comfortable zoom level the text is very clear and easy to read.

Start Menu

The main start page has a very nice clean interface as you can see from the pictures, if you are stuck with the controls that are used with the Opera browser simply click the Wii remote diagram and all the controls will be revealed to you.

It is pretty limited in what things you can change within the Opera Browser, for instance you cannot turn pictures on or off, you can adjust the zoom settings from automatic to manual. I find that automatic is the best mode to be in for general browsing however there only appears to be two levels of zoom when in it, so if you want to be able to have more control over your zoom options I suggest you use the manual mode.

Settings

More settings although not enough

You can set if you want, the view bar to hide automatically, never or on the control of a button. Button mode would probably be the best in my opinion.

Set which search engine you would like to use. The search function is really neat! You just click the button enter your search terms and it loads up the search results page (Google or Yahoo).
Delete cookies, no explanation needed.
Finally you can mess with your proxy settings.

Interface

Basically the main things you need are covered but more advanced features are lacking. Still it’s only for browsing on the Wii so you don’t really need to have all the things a fully functioned web browser has.

The favourites menu is very nice, make sure you add The1Qwerty in there

Netvibes even works (well kind of you can’t read the posts properly, but the headlines are fine).

Netvibes on Wii browser

I did find that a few things are lacking from the Internet channel such as:

• More advanced features
• Tabbed browsing
• A RSS reader would of been really nice

The1Qwerty on the Wii browser

Overall the final product is very impressive, visually appealing and all that is really required in a web browser for the Nintendo Wii. Plus it is free to download for a limited amount of time, (grab it whilst you can) so you cannot really complain about it.