Re: CF: Suggestion and comments

[Patrick Kenny <pkenny@eecs.umich.edu>]

On Tue, 2 Apr 1996, Bill Farrar wrote:

> >POPULARITY/ACCESSIBILITY OF CROSSFIRE

I think the main reasons that crossfire does not seem that popular are:

1) The avaibility of servers to play on.
There just are that many with out major lag.

2) It's not really a client/server architecture. The server really slows
down when there are 10 or more people on.  And when some people put up 
lightning walls all around a Jessy or fire walls around a Wizzard, then
it gets so bad you have to log out, and this is with only 2 or 3 people on.

3) It takes awhile to play and learn, not really bad, but most people are
used to instant pleasure, x-pilot shoot-um up games.
Although look at Empire, it has quite a large following, and there is a very
steep learning curve on that.

4) Once you have explored all of the maps, then that's it. No more stuff
to do. If you had a dynamic dungeon creator like in hack or Moria or Angband
then you would have a reason to keep exploring the same dungeon. I have 
thought about adding this. Imagine a dynamic ever changing world. :)

5) Maybe there are servers running, but they are local. I know that when 
the lab here played, we had about 7 or 8 people playing for about 3-4 months, 
almost non-stop, but the server was local to cut down on lag and give more 
control.

6) Doom/Quake is where everyone is right now, not that many people are
running under X, Quake is trying to be like Crossfire, in about 5 years it
might. Quake is supposed to be server/client so you will see more 
dedicated servers appear.

There is a book out about net.game and I think it talks about crossfire, 
I know it talks about xpilot.

People will find it out, it just takes time. Becareful what you ask for.


! 	       Patrick Kenny (pkenny@eecs.umich.edu)  	 	  !
!          (University of Michigan  AI and Robotics Lab)     	  !
!      http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/kennyp/pkenny.html         !
!       Have you Hugged your Artificial Intelligence Today?	  !