Ideas for the future of Soldat

[bania656]

It looks much better than the current bitmap and gives more opportunities.

[Bistoufly]

What about vector style (nice for scaling)?

It is the logical way to go. So that everyone gets the same vision of field whichever resolution they use. It's also future-proof.

[Dusty]

Whatever it is Soldat should have a coherent style throughout the game. Currently the game is jus an incoherent mess graphic-wise.

[DutchFlame]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/27920/?snr=1_7_15__13

that is how soldat should look like.

But we don't have the power to do so I think.
The last few weeks there have been zero to none activities as to how to make this game a better game.

Soldat is not really going anywhere atm besides having an bug-free update every now and- then.
What I was and still am trying to say here is that we need a group of people who have the abilities to recruit people and to make this game better graphic wise and user-friendly wise. This certain group of people have to be active and voted by the current devs/community.

[paintZoom]

i would go for a stylish Non-PhotoRealistic look for soldat i think it will fit better with the game
realistic = boring as hell
actually i think soldat can look good because it support png wich is an awesome format
and i've tried making maps and stuff and looks ok but i had problems with the resolution so things looks a little blurry
and i think thats the why soldat looks like crap... is way to low res

also this:

Whatever it is Soldat should have a coherent style throughout the game. Currently the game is jus an incoherent mess graphic-wise.

thats another big reason for why soldat looks like crap.
a game-look should be consistent

so to make this game look at least decent the devs should put the resolution higher and revamp al the graphics with a solid and consistent style.. i think
(sorry if i had bad english

[Bistoufly]

i would go for a stylish Non-PhotoRealistic look for soldat i think it will fit better with the game
realistic = boring as hell

so to make this game look at least decent the devs should put the resolution higher and revamp al the graphics with a solid and consistent style.. i think

I agree with this. And I think that's the plan. Remaking graphics vector style will enable high res on hd monitors.


It's also IMO essential that this is done in a way that enables high performances ( high fps ) on old hardware.


Vector graphics should be thought and made with low resolution users in mind. Making it look nice even for low resolutions such as 640x480 or 800x600. And ofc all the way up to 1440p users and beyond. As ultra HD will be the new standard for the enthusiast gamers in a few years.


Another standard that is coming gradually is high frame rate monitors. 120Hz monitors are being more and more adopted by gamers.


Given that, it might be interesting to consider upgrading animations to 120hz.
And changing soldat 1/60s ticks to 1/120s.


Other things to consider are graphic special effects: Lightning, Shadows, HDR, BLOOM, ...
If used wisely and subtlety, special effects have the potential of raising the overall graphic quality of a game.


Sound effects are important as well. Current Vanilla sound effects are pretty poor.
They could be replaced with higher quality ones.
Furthermore, the geometry of the maps could be used to modulate the sound effects in real time, using reverberation and delay for example.


Just my 2cents.

[paintZoom]

PP effects really improve the graphics a lot but you need to choose carefully because overloading the game with postprocesing effects will destroy game performance and put the look back in the crappy level
also add some nice gfx's to the game would be pretty sweet, what comes to my mind is some stylish looking dusts and particles but taking care of not overloading anything too (think of some Newgrounds flash games that looks awesome)

also the sound part in a game is almost important as the visual
so in this matter soldat has a giant room of improvement to explore
a nice example of this is the old Doom 3 wich is the sound that makes the game experience pretty cool (for the age)

[DarkCrusade]

Update all the maps. There are great looking maps and there are maps that simply look like shit. That's something the community can do. The developers should show more interest, though.

[darDar]

to embellish the maps will be a good start.
There are already some maps which are pretty well looking.
This remake of ctf_Laos for example - Why didn´t it replace the old version btw. ? It was in the Beta some years ago.

The thing which is going wrong is that there are mainly being bugs fixed which is good of course but actually the game doesn´t change a lot with that. With the new release we will have a quite stable version in my opinion and it is about time to go ahead and add some other stuff to soldat.
1. Make a new GUI. If a new player comes and start Soldat the current GUI doesn´t really invite him into further playing this game.
Here are some examples how a proper GUI may look like.
I´ve attached some images how a proper GUI may look like. (made by Loner)
2. Change the gfx to something nicer. The current gfx´s hasn´t ever been changed. I would suggest to make the game look like this. By simply having the option to change the graphics to "classic" everyone should be statisfied with it.
3. It´s never too late to make advertisements happen. This might happen via YouTube or sth. else. Since MM´s new game has a great playerbase and will be released on STEAM soon he has the chance to make an adverstise Soldat there.
4. Update the official website - It is just totally outdated and messy.
5. EnEsCe made the Soldat Portal back in time before he jumped off. The code wasn´t given to the new devs. The Soldat Portal thing was the greatest and best thing which could have happend to SOLDAT in the past years. Having an account system is just great because people love to see their stats/rankings/achievements/...
Also it prevents hacking. There are some people doing something similiar as far as I know called "". So you should include their idea into the new version or even let them be a part of the dev team.
6. Parallax Scrolling? as background for the maps
7. Soldat Chat-Mod Integrate this please.

[jrgp]

The code wasn´t given to the new devs.

Yes, it was. The PHP/web side of it was hosted on the official servers run by FLAB and it's likely still sitting there, unused. One of the first things the new devs did was remove all traces of Soldat Portal from the Delphi source, as the majority of everyone came to the conclusion that it was a waste that very little people liked and used.

[darDar]

The code wasn´t given to the new devs.

Yes, it was. The PHP/web side of it was hosted on the official servers run by FLAB and it's likely still sitting there, unused. One of the first things the new devs did was remove all traces of Soldat Portal from the Delphi source, as the majority of everyone came to the conclusion that it was a waste that very little people liked and used.

We are talking about the same thing right ? Everyone told me that the source has never been given away. Also, how can there be any majority who didn´t like SoldatPortal if it has never been fully released? There is no reason to not like it but ignorance.

[jrgp]

The code wasn´t given to the new devs.

Yes, it was. The PHP/web side of it was hosted on the official servers run by FLAB and it's likely still sitting there, unused. One of the first things the new devs did was remove all traces of Soldat Portal from the Delphi source, as the majority of everyone came to the conclusion that it was a waste that very little people liked and used.

We are talking about the same thing right ? Everyone told me that the source has never been given away. Also, how can there be any majority who didn´t like SoldatPortal if it has never been fully released? There is no reason to not like it but ignorance.

SoldatPortal involves/involved two parts: the code in the Delphi-written game client itself; and several PHP  scripts running on the same server that hosted these forums and the other official Soldat sites. The parts in Delphi were removed, and as such the PHP parts were no longer used/accessed. Neither the client side game code nor the PHP scripts were ever given away. If you look at the changelogs the devs have published you'll see entries where they removed the client side parts of soldat portal.

[Shoozza]

As far as i can remember the version we got was some beta with portal code and an even older one from the server.
I didn't know if we had the backend code or not - but assumed we didn't.

I removed the portal code because it used Internet Explorer controls for the GUI (limits portability) and I didn't think Soldat was ready for portal.
I think at that time a lot of people were against accounts.
Also if added someday Portal should be optional so people don't have to take yet another step after they figured out how to get it to work in the first place...


--
hmm Soldat in Vector Style would be nice.

[Petterkowski]

The idea is taken from cs. ingame teamspeak.

I think noone has mentioned it earlier but i might be wrong

I do not know if this is possible from a technical point of view but definitely , it would be a cool thing. That kind of communication is better. Sometimes you don't pay attention to what people are texting in game and you may overlook the valuable information , like ' where's the efc ' . Whereas if someone said it through the ingame ts, you would have heard that. If someone does not like to talk , he doesn't even have to. It's push to talk. But it's better to hear the information than look for it in a heap of dialogues. I find this better than the radio thing. Definitely it's faster and it's a facilitation , especially for the newcommers. Also you are learning faster if you are receiving some tips from better players. People can talk with eachother , not just about the current action but generally about everything that is related to Soldat. All this can be made by ingame ts. You start to talk just by pressing one button , for example 'f'. When you don't want to hear all these conversations there should be a disable button too.

[darDar]

The idea is taken from cs. ingame teamspeak.

I think noone has mentioned it earlier but i might be wrong

I do not know if this is possible from a technical point of view but definitely , it would be a cool thing. That kind of communication is better. Sometimes you don't pay attention to what people are texting in game and you may overlook the valuable information , like ' where's the efc ' . Whereas if someone said it through the ingame ts, you would have heard that. If someone does not like to talk , he doesn't even have to. It's push to talk. But it's better to hear the information than look for it in a heap of dialogues. I find this better than the radio thing. Definitely it's faster and it's a facilitation , especially for the newcommers. Also you are learning faster if you are receiving some tips from better players. People can talk with eachother , not just about the current action but generally about everything that is related to Soldat. All this can be made by ingame ts. You start to talk just by pressing one button , for example 'f'. When you don't want to hear all these conversations there should be a disable button too.

This is just Just a waste of time. The radio / taunt thing works pretty good and there are a lot of tools around to make voicechat.
TeamSpeak integration has been added to Soldat a few releases ago.
Better change the chat behaviour and make it just like Shoozza´s Chat-Mod.

@jrgp: What about the website? soldat.pl
It wouldn´t take long to update this and delete some content.
-update the screenshot/media page
-update the links
-delete the gather page
-delete the chat page
-update the league page