OverFlow, Friday 29th of December 2006 04:39:41 GMT - Mod DB contest nearly done
There are only 3 days left in the Mod DB contest, and if you haven't voted yet I highly suggest you do! Tremulous has a very good chance of winning the 'Best Standalone Game of the Year' and some nifty prizes. So, if you like Tremulous and would like to help us out, please vote!
To help promote ourselves, I've also put together a small video which you can find on:
SourceForge.net
DASPRiD's Mirror
ModDB.com (May have advertising)
Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and have a happy new year!
OverFlow, Tuesday 21st of November 2006 00:27:53 GMT - Mod DB contest
Player numbers for Tremulous have been quite high, considering the hit that immediately took place once high school started in the U.S. We're just about hitting 500 players peak on the weekends. We also hit 96 servers recently, a number we would have been astounded to see as the number of players at the time when we first released Tremulous 1.0.0. There have also been well over 300,000 downloads of tremulous from SourceForge alone, equating to over 30TB of data downloaded!
There's also news going on over at Mod DB:
Firstly, they have posted a review of Tremulous, giving it, in my opinion, quite good marks.
Secondly, they are running the annual "Mod of the Year" contest. The contest this year has a "Standalone Game of the Year" which I think Tremulous has a very good chance of winning. The contest is run in two phases. The first involves nomination which I believe is open to all people. The second phase takes the top 100 nominated mods and allows ModDB members to vote on them, picking their top three choices. I figure at this point the stand alone category will be pretty slim, and we should have it in the bag. So here's what I need you loyal fans of Tremulous (and anyone else who sees this) to do:
Go to the Tremulous ModDB Site and click on the big button that says: "Vote Now".
For more information on the topic or for your comments please see this forum post.
Vote in the Mod of the Year Awards
Lastly, DASPRiD put on a neat online radio show this weekend called TremRadio. You can download the live broadcast in this forum post. The actual talking bit starts about one hour in, and is broken up into segments with a hearty selection of metal music.
Timbo, Tuesday 25th of July 2006 21:42:22 GMT - Success, the future and the community
I think we've all been rather overwhelmed with the apparent success of Tremulous. Going standalone has certainly had a huge impact on the number of players. Since the release of 1.1.0 there has not been a single moment without several games being played somewhere in the world. More recently it has grown further such that we've had an average of around 250 players playing at any one time, up to a maximum of about 400. 1.1.0 has now been downloaded over 150 000 times and over 60 000 games have been played. A lot of this is down to some excellent publicity that we've had:
Newsforge
Consolevania Independents Day episode (warning: adult content)
One digg and another
All we need now is a good slashdotting. A number of Tremulous sites also seem to have sprung up:
http://tremulous.info/ - Probably the best Tremulous portal
http://www.tremulous.com.br/ - Brazilian site
http://tremulous-fr.geeknode.org/ - French site
http://de.tremulous.info/ - German site
http://www.capponcino.it/tremulous/ - Italian site
http://www.tremolous.pun.pl/ - Polish Site
http://tremulous.h16.ru/ - Russian site
http://www.tremulous.net.ru/ - Another Russian site
http://www.tremulous.websnadno.cz/ - Czech site
http://tremulousevolution.googlepages.com/ - Spanish site
http://tremulous.org/ - Fan site
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tremulous - Wikipedia entry
http://www.mobygames.com/game/tremulous - Mobygames entry
http://trem.arena-zone.com/ - Tremulous Clan League
http://www.tremwiki.com/ - A Tremulous Wiki
Apologies if I missed any. Feel free to mail me if I have. For the Linux people, Tremulous has also made it into Debian unstable, Ubuntu Edgy and I understand will soon be in Gentoo.
I've been getting a steady stream of email, forum private messages and IRC queries from people asking when the next version of Trem is going to be done. I'm not going to commit to anything purely because I have done in the past and invariably missed the prediction. So, some time after now and before a point in the future. As far as the content of the next version goes, it will focus mainly on fixing bugs, exploits and reducing the harm malicious players are able to perform. There may be one or two new features, but don't expect anything too radical, at least for the first update. In terms of overall balance, Tremulous appears to have regressed to a pre-1.0.2 make up. Given that very little changed in terms of gameplay from 1.0.2 to 1.1.0 and that certain servers are (statistically) more balanced than others, I think it's safe to draw the conclusion that player experience is still having a fairly large impact on our balance statistics. It's difficult to know exactly how to address this, as it's not clear whether it's better to bias the balance towards lesser or more experienced players. What is excellent however is that now we have more balance data than we know what to do with. It really makes our pre-1.1.0 data look rather spartan and pathetic. Also, given we now have a sizeable player base, testing and tuning the next version should prove significantly easier (I hope). Cheers.
p.s. While I'm here, I might as well take the opportunity to point out the link with the dollar signs on it in, up in the top right there. I think you know what that's for ;).
Jex, Tuesday 30th of May 2006 16:55:28 GMT - Community websites
Megabite has put up a helpful Tremulous website. As well as providing the latest community news, the site provides a centralised location for new maps. Add this one to your bookmarks!
Megabite's Tremulous Infobase
It should also be mentioned that Planet Tremulous is in the works. Hopefully the site will be available soon.
Planet Tremulous
Timbo, Friday 31st of March 2006 20:00:01 GMT - Standalone version released
The stand alone version of Tremulous is released!
I highly recommend you at least skim over Norfenstein's quick start guide before playing. Further information is available in the manual.
Update:
Mirrors:
http://0day.icculus.org/mirrors/tremulous/
ftp://ftp.wireplay.co.uk/pub/quake3arena/mods/tremulous/
http://www.planetgloom.com/trem/
If you have the Q3 version of Tremulous installed, please uninstall it before installing the stand alone version.
Timbo, Thursday 30th of March 2006 22:14:37 GMT - Tremulous release tomorrow!
Tremulous will be released tomorrow (Friday) at 2000GMT. If you want to know the second it's released, what server to play on, or just want to talk about Tremulous, join the IRC channel: #tremulous irc.quakenet.org. See you there!
Timbo, Monday 27th of March 2006 21:25:22 GMT - Release date and promo video
So, by now you all will have noticed the typo I made in the last post; when I said "weeks" I of course meant "months"! Nevermind that though, as we now have a release date: Friday 31st March! As if that wasn't enough, we've also put together a short promo video demonstrating Tremulous' gameplay. It's available in both high (40Mb) and low (11Mb) quality versions.
Timbo, Sunday 29th of January 2006 00:30:14 GMT - Balance data and stand-alone predictions
Hello! Any game featuring two non-identical teams is going to suffer from balance problems at one point or another. Tremulous is no exception. Starting with 1.0.2 however, Tremulous' balance issues are more or less resolved, at least to an acceptable tolerance. The balance statistics for each release are shown in the graphs below.
Given that there are in the region of 500 individual variables that affect balance in one way or another, I think getting it this close is pretty good. In actual fact, at this point in the time, the balance is good enough that the map is a much more dominant factor in game balance than the the afore-mentioned variables -- as it should be.
Now for the news. Work on the standalone version has progressed to the point where we have only very little media left to replace. In terms of programming, Tremulous is in a finished state bar a short testing phase. Tremulous will inherit all of ioq3's features as detailed in its README. A couple of features have also been added to Tremulous with the standalone version. Firstly, a scriptable trail system. This is used for the pulse rifle and tesla generator as seen below. Basically this allows the trail effects to be defined externally to the code, so no code recompile or programmer is necessary to change the effects. The other two shots show the new tutorial mode. This indicates which controls are available to the player in a context sensitive manner. Hopefully this will help slacken the learning curve a little bit and cut down on newbie questions during the game.
Assuming there are no last minute disasters and testing goes to plan (keep an eye on the forums if you want to participate), you should expect standalone Tremulous 1.1.0 to be released within the next few weeks.
Timbo, Wednesday 2nd of November 2005 02:35:33 GMT - Oops
So apparently Sourceforge upgraded their MySQL server to version 4. Apparently they sent mails out saying they were going to turn the MySQL version 3 server off on November the 1st. Apparently I'm a muppet and I didn't read them. Apparently I should be writing a support request asking for a database backup.
There will now be a short intermission.
In the meantime, you can still get the files from our project page. The forum is dead for the moment.
Update: Phew!, all better now.
Timbo, Sunday 9th of October 2005 17:41:27 GMT - 1.0.2 release
OK, I lied. There is another release before the stand alone version: 1.0.2. The focus is much the same as for 1.0.1, i.e. balance tweaks and bug fixes. The primary reason for making another release is that we've reached a point with the 1.0.1 data where it is clear what the changes accomplished, and gathering further data is essentially useless.
Work continues on the stand alone version. I have been spending a lot of time contributing to icculus.org Q3 with a view to using it as base. The vast majority of known Q3 bugs have been squashed, and certainly all the serious ones. I can heartily recommend it as a good client to use for playing Tremulous, assuming you're comfortable compiling it yourself. Note it's possible to compile a Windows client with MinGW, so you don't need expensive tools like Visual Studio to get your feet wet.