[aur-general] Replacing nexuiz with xonotic

[Samual Lenks]

On Oct 21, 2011 11:30 AM, "Sven-Hendrik Haase"<sh at lutzhaase.com  <http://mailman.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/aur-general>>  wrote:
>/  As it stands, it looks like xonotic devs would be a lot happier if I replaced nexuiz and eventually players would be too. AUR sounds like a fine place for nexuiz.
/>/
/>/  -- Sven-Hendrik
/
Coming from an external (user) perspective, I think some confusion may
have been derived from the use if the term "replace" in this thread.
If my understanding is correct you are suggesting that xonotic would
"replace" nexuiz in the sense that xonotic moves to community and
nexuiz drops to the aur. Not that xonotic gets marked as
replaces=("nexuiz") such that nexuiz users are moved to xonotic on
their next upgrade.

>/ From an end-user perspective I see very little loss, and a potential
/considerable gain from this move. Given that the nexuiz package has
not been update in nearly 2 years (the data package even longer), and
upstream is effectively dead, the user will not likely have to build
it more than once. Neither are existing users likely to miss an update
because it moved. Xonotic on the other hand has been updated within
the last month and and is likely to continue to be update, so
significant time and effort could be saved for the users with not
having to build each update.

More frequent updates with xonotic will mean more bandwidth usage
however, so if this is the bigger concern then perhaps it is best to
leave things as they are, or even drop nexuiz to aur anyway to free up
the space with little loss.

Just my humble 2¢

-- Sean Bogie




------------------------------


Hey, this is Samual (one of the contributing developers of Nexuiz, and now one of the founders/core team members of Xonotic) -

I see three points here i'd like to talk about...

Firstly, Xonotic is on the rise and we're constantly bringing older Nexuiz players over (plus we're getting many new players), and eventually Nexuiz will die as the community doesn't even have a forum or such to rely on anymore. There has not been any new good maps for Nexuiz in over 2 years, plus the development for Nexuiz is totally dead.. Also, we're already planning another release (and will continue to do so often, probably in 3-6 month periods) so yes we do have more to come.... Clearly, with respect to which project is more important/promising to keep for the future, Xonotic wins. Secondly, considering gameplay... The gameplay actually is very much so similar to Nexuiz, with the same basic concepts/fast gameplay behind it -- we just have major improvements to the balance (weapons/player settings) and physics (movement/strafing) over Nexuiz (though again still similar) -- Most public players probably won't even notice a difference between the games other than that Xonotic looks better, which means the majority would have absolutely zero problems with switching. Thirdly, regarding bandwidth and disk usage... This is one of the main reasons I suggested removing Nexuiz as well in the first place. Xonotic currently takes about 950mb for a single install, however there are ways to make it smaller (e.g. more compressed sounds/music or more compressed textures) if needed.. Still, 950mb is not really that bad. Either way Sean, removing Nexuiz *AND* not having Xonotic just to save space is simply terrible :P Okay, lets just remove ALL the games.. THAT'LL SAVE SPACE FOR EVERYONE!

In the end it comes down to this I think: Xonotic is the better, actually maintained and newer version of Nexuiz. Xonotic has a future (support, developers, new releases), Nexuiz does not. Nexuiz has a dwindling playerbase, Xonotic has an ever-increasing playerbase.

Really though, whether or not Nexuiz should go is something which maybe should be decided later (like in a few months after our next release) -- However, Xonotic certainly should get in.


Thanks, regards,
	-- Samual Lenks.