So I spent some time today digging through the OS source today and made some smoke grenades:
The idea here is to have a way to defend against spawnkilling. 0.76 tried that with the damage falloff, but I dislike that since it’s a bit unpredictable.
This is currently local only, so other players only see a regular nade.
Giving every player one of these is a great way to have another griefing issue, so the Smoke would have to be some kind of reward. Giving it to players for kills or intel captures doesn’t make sense, since it’s primarily meant to be a defensive tool. One idea on discord was to make it shotgun-only, but I’m not sure that’s a good idea considering that the shotgun is pretty useless in the types of situations where a smoke grenade is useful. Generally, I’m not a fan of very complicated conditions like “killed 3 enemies within 23 blocks of the intel” since they make AoS a lot less simple.
Yes, enabling this on your server will break compatibility with Voxlap. Once I add this to piqueserver, I will have to make it reject clients that don’t support it.
Otherwise, it’s pretty pointless, since you can simply play with a client that does not show smoke.
Are those the actual numbers? I thought OS was more popular.
Either way, this might be a controversial opinion, but I think not killing the Voxlap client is a fatal idea. The playerbase has been shrinking since 1.x and without new content and new energy, it is doomed to continue. The game has been the same for half a decade, but I believe we are truly at the turning point: if nothing happens, I think this is the last year of AoS.
Of course, I believe no numbers were published regarding the OS/Voxlap usage among the playerbase, so I just assumed that a half uses Voxlap (I’m obviously wrong). I’m not really sure about killing Voxlap to make room for a new client with updates and new features, such as removing glitches (most of them, at least), but I think that I would still like Voxlap to be a viable option, since the selling point of the game is the fact that it can run on a prehistoric toaster (and I believe OS can’t do that) and easier modding. Then again, it is just a silly opinion of mine.
The website has been completely redesigned, looking absolutely gorgeous to new players
Stack plans on updating the Build and Shoot launcher with plenty of new useful features
source
There are open-source projects that are being worked on; OpenSpades, which was recently updated, piqueserver, Iceball, the new BnS website being put on GitHub, and VXW by lecom (currently not much info but he’s working on it afaik)
Discord servers! Last year, Mile made a Discord server for the game, called /AoS/, which looking back on it was a HUGE success before it was deleted. Then, earlier this year, aloha.pk made a Discord server which is absolutely amazing. With tons of veterans and new players all in one place, it makes event planning much easier.
You say that there isn’t any new content for the game. My friend, this post is all about a custom script that you have made! Since OpenSpades is open-source, so much is possible to bring to the game!*
Events are always possible. Last year I ran an event for the map Assault, which had a huge turnout, and was an immense success.
*my personal opinion on the “ditch voxlap for openspades” debate is do what is best in the long run (aka see ya, voxlap) and make a better, open-source, low-spec client
I personally believe that the only time the game will die is when nobody cares anymore; when there are no more developers who care to make scripts and/or develop off of the clients anymore, nobody to host servers, nobody to maintain the website. Fortunately, I think that there will always be some people who will stick around until the very end. The very fact that there are still all of us here and on the Discord server even after five years since the original games development dying is impressive. Although the communities of the game have drastically declined in size (most to a point of vanishing), we are still here, and we are the ones who are keeping the game as fun as it is.
The game and its community has a very bright future. I will most likely be here until the end. Being a part of this community is my passion, and no matter how busy life gets, I will never forget this beautiful game and its community.
