Ideas for netrek clients
- Add the ability to use festival -tts, which will read out messages via the soundcard to the user.
General Ideas
- Allow for multiple displays to be leveraged effectively. Modern computers have more than 1 monitor, so we could have the Tactical on one monitor, and the Galactic on the other.
Ideas From IRC Logs
Defcom suggests
- instead of pressing i on the board you put it directly on the mouse everytime the mouse will pass over a planet you will be able to see what kind of planet it is and how many army on it in a little screen up in the corner.
- Different planet type by graphics added to XP 2006 client, army count display on local is now a server feature packet (BB)
Quozl/KeyOS/Jerub suggest
- Download a customised client from the website, with the username/password already configured.
KeyOS suggests:
let people feel same would be to share user bases between servers of same type, so when I login to server A and make rank there the server B will also be aware of that. However such centralization would require much wider ranking system. I don't think anyone would like to have to play 3000 hours without advancing signle rank
- phadtahi said: not sure if the centralized db is worth working on, but it's something doable of course... we would need to evaluate if we want to depend on a highly dependable single server, or if we want to have some synchronization system (in which case, something like berkeley db might help perhaps) but in any case we have to deal with new possible security theads imposed by this model
- (quozl said) on the other hand, if we had a way to check in our web scripting that a proposed character name is free on every server, we could create it there and then and then configure their download.
(phadthai said) I thought of much simpler model. Let's take only servers that we administer and create some kind of protocol to exchange data. If the user logs in -> check if he's in local db. If not query every server you know with their user and crypted password and see if one of them contains record for user (if more than one then pick the longer hours record)
there's more from the conversation, refer to the change history of this page to see more -- StephenThorne
From the mailing list
Cliff Hudson suggests:
I have several ideas. As I said, I believe the game play for Netrek is excellent, and I think changing that directly is not appropriate. Some things which strike me as needing work, looking from an 'attract new players perspective', are: (NOTE: When speaking of the client, I am referring to the NetrekXP 2006 client, V1.0)
* 10 updates/sec. Because the client does not interpolate between server updates, gameplay appears 'choppy'. This is probably the area where I would most be inclined to change the server to accomodate a change in game presentation, moving to an event-based network protocol with sync rather than a updates/sec protocol.
- as of 2007-04, server is (up to) 50 fps capable, with continuum and warped having moved to 50 fps, and COW/XP 2006 clients supporting (up to) 50 fps (akb4/BB)
* Graphics. In general the bitmapped graphics look dated. Now I have the utmost respect for those who have come along and tried to give the game a more updated look with new bitmaps (Pascal comes to mind recently) but it's not just the bitmaps. Smothing out movements (vis-a-vis smooth ship rotations) and better effects (explosions with particle effects, maybe some lighting, trails off the torps or plasmas) are the top things which come to mind.
- XP 2006 has smooth ship rotations, spinning torps (particle effects on torps would just get in the way), no particle effects though on explosions
* Playfield. I've always felt the tactical should be much larger. Obviously the galactic is very important and its ability to convey information should not be diminished, but perhaps it could be made as an overlay, or hidden under some circumstances, etc to give the player more tactical screen real estate (even if no real additional information is displayed on the tactical.)
MacTrek has a very big tactical, which is zoomable. Unclear how much area it covers. (akb)
- XP 2006 has unlimited tactical/map scaling, and zoomable tactical (BB)
* Sound. Netrek has always been weak on this front. We all know that it sounds like what it is - developers grabbed some wavs from their favorite Star Trek-themed source and slapped a playSound() call in the right places in the code. What needs to happen is someone who is good at manipulating sound files needs to fix these up, balance their levels and integrate them into an overall sound scheme for the game. A bit of ambient noise (the hum of the ship) wouldn't hurt. To be fair, recent clients have done a better job with some of the sounds (shields sound good, for instance,) but others leave much to be desired (the login WAV on NetrekXP 2006 for instance seems jarring, the cloaking sound takes WAY too long compared to the cloak animation time, phaser blast sound is slightly delayed compared to the graphics.)
- These issues are fixed in the latest XP 2006 client version, and more Star Trek themes have been added (BB). Background music has been added as an option using .ogg sound files
* Configuration. RC files died in the 90s, at least as a primary method of users configuring applications. There needs to be a proper configuration UI, including a modern keymapping system. Obviously keys can be remapped using the help screen, but this fact is a bit opaque to new players and provides no instruction. The ability to move windows in the client is nice, but quite possibly misguided, especially since you can do it while in combat. There are probably a limited number of genuinely useful configurations, and it may be wise to make it so you can't create dumb ones (for instance, where the galactic is partially obscured by the tactical.) These will obviously seem like minor issues to devs and hardcore players, but I believe new players will expect more polish from a game which is ostensibly 20 years old in its present form.
* Window decoration. Now maybe this can be turned on and I simply haven't looked for the switch, but by default the game should be using the OS standard window decorations for the main window, so that it can be resized, closed, minimized, etc. Having a game window without a title bar (as appears on NetrekXP 2006) looks VERY strange.
- There IS a title bar (BB)
* Get past the idea that the Unix client is the primary client. The Unix/Linux ways are not appropriate for game players. Command-line tools and options should be the design of last resort. As a dev they are great and are useful for their efficiency, but as a player, they are cumbersome at best. Every connection and configuration option should be settable from within the client, probably requiring the ability to create 'profiles' for players/servers with special settings.
Overall, the client needs to be polished. It looks and feels rough because it was made by developers for hard core gamers, and for those two groups it large meets its presentation goals. But if I put this in front of a new person, the first thing they think is that it looks awfully old (and therefore must not be very interesting.) I think if people can just get past the first-impressions hurdle, they will be more inclined to stick around long enough to see how deep the gameplay goes.
art note
Quozl posted the following:
While looking at Blender resources for a local art teacher, I stumbled across a set of meshes that might be interesting for anybody wishing to create 3d game models for Netrek. [They are at] http://stblender.iindigo3d.com/meshes_startrek.html See the conditions of use at http://stblender.iindigo3d.com/meshes.html
3D
On 22-Feb-2007, Colin MacDonald posted a pointer to the following experimental screenshot on the -dev mailing list: 
(if that breaks, I've copied it into my darcs repo of www; in a day or two it should appear as www.netrek.org/img/ colin-macdonald-netrek3d.gif )