This file attempts to cover all of the fundamental principles and techniques for playing Nexuiz in particular, though it will largely apply to any first person shooter.
The most important thing when playing is 'to feel good'. You need to be comfortable with how the game feels, and how it works, in order to play well. This means being able to concentrate on the game play itself, without being disturbed by in-game distractions or by various sorts of handicaps. This guide provides a systematic but very brief introduction to Nexuiz, with a view to increasing your effectiveness in-game, straight off the mark.
Especially when playing against others the first thing you need to ensure is that you can hear and see well. Although music can enhance the feeling of a game by complementing the action, it can also obscure the sounds of other events - such as players shooting at you or picking up items nearby. For this reason, many people turn off music while playing (set music in the settings/misc menu to off). You can also improve your ability to hear in-game events by simply using headphones instead of speakers. Headphones muffle external noises around you, and also make it easier to hear faint noises in the game. Because of this, you can hear others more easily, and thus react better.
Similarly, eye-candy can make the game very appealing to look at, but can also act to obscure in-game events - the flares and smoke caused by rockets, for example, can make spotting your target much more difficult in the heat of battle. Eye-candy also incurs performance hits on slower machines, which can make playing difficult. Bloom might be nice to look at, but it is often just distracting when playing. So again, many players disable some of the visual effects, so as to make the game easier to play in this regard (things to turn off include Bloom, HDR, Gloss, Coronas and all the Realtime stuff in the settings/effects menu). Although it may seem as if removing visual (and audio) effects will make the game less immersive by reducing the mood which the game designers were aiming for, in the long run it will make it much more rewarding and fun to play. Darkness and shadows can create creepiness and realism, but you simply don't notice these things in a fast-paced multi player battle. On the contrary, they make it harder to spot opponents or items and end up being frustrating. Better to play the game in campaign mode with full visual effects to see how pretty it can be, and then, once you're over the initial craving for eye-candy, start tuning the game to be more functional in multi player.
In this regard, one of the first things to adjust is the brightness and contrast (in the settings/video menu), so that shadows are not too impenetrable, and areas of alternating light and dark don't create difficulties in tracking opponents. It's also worthwhile to try increasing you field of view (fov) - the amount you can see to the left and right. By default, Nexuiz uses a fov of 90 degrees. Increasing this improves your peripheral vision, but also makes everything seem smaller and thus reduces your ability to aim. Decreasing it has the opposite effect. Most gamers find a nice balance somewhere around fov 100-120. You can find the fov control in the multiplayer/player setup menu.
Another thing which will greatly improve the game experience is to have comfortable movement controls, and to be able to get to the 'right gun' quickly. In terms of movement, there's no need to stick to the game defaults for controlling your character. Some people like to jump with space; some with mouse2. Some like inverted mouse, and some can't use it. Some use WASD for forward, left, back, right; some use ESDF or even 8456. Use whatever you feel good with.
In terms of weapon controls, try to get out of the habit of using the mouse's scroll-wheel to select which weapon to use. This is a very slow and unreliable way of changing weapons, and in a fast-paced deathmatch your ability to correctly and immediately pick the most appropriate gun for the job is critical. For example, if you hit someone pretty hard with the rocket launcher, and he has taken a lot of damage, you should switch to the shotgun or machine gun to finish him off, rather than worrying about whether you'll be able to hit him again with the slower and more inaccurate rockets. Using the mouse wheel to switch may well take too long, and you also have to keep an eye on the weapons as they scroll by (unless your mouse has very good scroll feedback, and you've memorized the order of weapons, and you know which weapons you currently have, and you can figure out on the fly how many scrolls you need to get to the shotgun!). On the other hand, if you have configured, say, the G key to switch to the shotgun, you can easily switch quickly and reliably, and finish him off in an instant. For this reason, it's extremely helpful to configure weapon-selection keys around the ones you use for moving. It's also obviously handy to use a similar layout in all the games you play. For example, you can have G as the key for 'all shotgun like weapons' in each game. All 'rocket like' weapons can go on R, and all 'sniper guns' on T, and so on - or whatever suits you! This way you do not need to think about which key you need for which gun - just what you want to do. You can change those key bindings in the settings/input menu.
Finally, adjust your mouse sensitivity. Sensitivity controls how much (or fast) your view turns when moving the mouse. You can make it high sensitivity, which means you need to move the mouse only a short distance to turn fast or far; or you can make it low sensitivity, so that you turn slowly and have to move the mouse further. A high sensitivity reduces the need to lift and reposition the mouse, and it will help you when doing lots of turns. A low sensitivity will help you to aim more easily, and also make your aim more steady if you are nervous and have slightly shaky hands. For the most part, the level of sensitivity you choose depends on how you aim. This is a very personal thing and you will have to see what you like - again, select the setting which is most comfortable for you. However, a good rule of thumb when you're learning to play is to configure your sensitivity a little lower than you're comfortable with, and try to get used to it. After a few hours you will probably find that you have acclimatized, and are aiming better than before. Keep reducing the sensitivity below your comfort zone until you are happy with your aim, or until it definitely becomes too low for you. You'd be surprised the difference this makes. Also consider that you can either use your wrist or your arm to aim - and you'll probably do one or the other more naturally. Using the wrist is more exact, and thus high sensitivity is found more often among wrist aimers; using the arm involves more mouse movements, and so low sensitivity is common to arm aimers. As a rule of thumb your sensitivity should be set so that you can comfortably perform a 180 degree turn with one sweep of your mouse. The sensitivity setting can be found in the settings/input menu.
Depending on the game mode played you either fight for yourself against all others (sometimes there is just one other player to play against) or its your team vs the other team(s). Pay attention to the welcoming screen it will tell you what gamemode is being played. You can find an explaination of those at the end of this guide. If its a team match you might have to choose a team or you could be automatically assigned to a team when you join the match. If you have to choose yourself its best to just use the Auto button! It will assign you to the smallest team or if the teams have the same size to the one that has less points. Only use the specific team buttons if you REALLY want to join that team. You can press F5 to bring up the team selection dialog or instead of pressing F5 and clicking on the Auto button you can also press F6, thats a shortcut for the Auto button. If you are unsure about which team you are in look at your gun or at the scoreboard, which by default will be shown when you press TAB. The weapon color and the color behind your name is your team color. Try to only hit the OTHER team(s) :).
Once you're comfortable with your controls and your mouse, you should already find it easier to hit your opponents. And, if you've bound keys to each of the weapons, you can accurately pick which one to use. But to know which weapon to select, and to get the most out of it, you must understand the advantages and the use of each.
When you use direct-hit (hitscan) weapons like the shotgun, machine gun, or nex, you 'just' have to directly aim with the crosshair and hit fire. Obviously this can be much harder than it sounds, particularly when both you and your opponent are moving. Therefore, you should use geometry to your advantage, to reduce the relative movement between you as much as possible, so that you have as much time as possible to aim. When someone is moving from one side of your view to the other it is harder to aim at him than when is moving towards or away from you. In the latter case he will hardly change his position relative to yours, and this gives you more time to aim at him. In the former, his position is changing a lot, and so you have to react to how he moves very quickly and accurately to ensure a good shot. The same principle applies when your opponent uses a jump pad. He will prescribe a trajectory in the air, and at its highest point he will stop for a moment. It is easier to aim at him at this point than when he is accelerating off the jump-pad.
In addition to using geometry to your advantage, when you're moving relative to your opponent it is sometimes easier to not aim with the mouse, but rather to leave it steady at the right height, and use the strafe buttons to move your cross hair onto him. If you have the advantage of his not seeing you, or being unable to shoot at you, or even if you simply have a health and armor advantage over him, you can even just aim at some point and wait for him to walk into your cross hair. However, always bear in mind that people will generally move unpredictably so as to lessen their chances of being hit - so unless you're sure of where he's going, don't sacrifice your own movement advantage for a hit that might never come.
Using projectiles weapons such as the mortar, rocket launcher, and electro, can be both easier and harder than using hitscan weapons. You must still consider the same geometric factors, but you also have to keep in mind that your projectile will take some time to travel the distance between you and your opponent. In that time they will continue moving! So it's absolutely no use to aim directly at them. It will take some experience with each weapon, and with getting used to how people move, but you should eventually develop a good instinct for where your opponent will be at the time when your projectile will land (and where the projectile itself will land), and thus be able to 'lead' him when you aim. If your target moves to the right, aim further to the right and press fire. Also consider that almost all projectiles will explode when they hit something hard, and that explosion will also cause damage to players nearby (splash damage). You can use splash damage to your advantage, so that rather than trying to predict the exact spot at which to aim your projectile (which is very difficult), you can aim at the general area of floor or wall where you expect your opponent to be and let the splash damage do its work. Along these lines, you'll find that it's much easier to aim at his feet and use the splash damage from the explosion on the floor than it is to hit him directly.
Also bear in mind that people try to evade projectiles; and it is even comparatively easy to do this at distance. If you fire to their left they will see it coming, and change direction to the right. You can use this to your advantage by boxing them in with explosions - just fire another one to their right. If you correctly place both projectiles, they will be unable to evade the splash damage from one of them. Either they will avoid the first and be hit by the second, or they will backtrack to avoid the second and be hit by the first. Or, even better, they'll not see the first one at all and be hit directly.
A special feature in Nexuiz is that walls do not block explosions, so you can't hide behind them. Similarly, if you know that someone is on the floor above you, shoot at the ceiling, and with a little luck the explosion might hurt him. This can be changed by a server admin, but the default allows for more fun; and it's also nice to see how good people are at guessing where their opponents are.
To put up a good fight you need to survive an attack, so make sure you pick up health and armor lying around the map. This will also ensure that your opponents are deprived of these, so it will be easier for you to frag them. To do this effectively you will have to learn where those items are, and try to get them before someone else does. Armor and health items reappear 30 seconds after they were taken. You can use this to your advantage by timing your pickups - look at the scoreboard to see the current map time, and then use this to predict when items will respawn. This way, you can develop patterns on the map so that you're always around when an item respawns. However, be careful - patterns make you predictable, and your opponent can also use the timer! If you keep grabbing the armor or health, he will use this against you by lying an ambush.
The health and armor system in Nexuiz is different to other games in that it tends toward an equilibrium of 100 health and 100 armor. You can collect as much health and armor as you like, but it will degenerate toward these values. The more health and armor you have, the faster it will degenerate - but when you pick them up the degeneration stops momentarily. Because of this, you can't just load up on health and armor and head off into battle - you need to constantly replenish to remain strong. On the converse, though, when your health is below 100 it will slowly regenerate (armor will not). The lower it is, the faster it will replenish. This regeneration stops for a few seconds if you are hurt, so just running away after a fight is not usually enough to restore you to useful levels again - you have to wait a while to regain your full health, and so picking up health after a fight is still important.
In regard to the previous point of working a map to control items, and also shooting at where your opponent will be, it's important to try to predict where on the map your opponents are even when you can't directly see them. Firstly, try to listen for them; secondly, learn the maps so you know the most useful routes and the most popular areas to which people tend to gravitate. It gives you a marked advantage to be able to say, "I saw or heard someone pick up an armor, so they must be at such-and-such location, and from there he can only go to this place or that place." Just shooting something to the likely places your opponent will be - a rocket or a grenade for example - can often result in either a surprise kill, or in surprise damage which you can then follow up. Don't underestimate how likely a well-aimed educated guess is to hit someone. Maybe he'll walk into it - rockets can be hard to see coming, and grenades lying on the floor or spammed into a small space can be really hard to avoid. Once you've hurt him you'll hear the tink of your damage, and you will also know for sure were he is and can finish him off. You can pretty much 'lock down' a map by picking up items, and making sure others have a hard time getting around which will also mess with their concentration.
Among the items you can pick up are the weapons. Some of them are very unique to Nexuiz, and to get the most out of them you need to be familiar with every aspect of how they work - including the rate of fire, the damage per hit, the spread and speed of the payload, and so on.
Almost all weapons in Nexuiz have two firing modes, so make sure you know both. You normally (depending on game-mode) start equipped with two weapons: the laser and the shotgun, so we'll start with these. You can bind these weapons to a key at the settings/input menu or in the console using the command bind key "impulse n", where n is the number of the weapon, below.
Now that you know all the guns you also have to understand that in Nexuiz each projectile can be set off by explostions. So its possible to blow up the rocket an opponent is shooting at you. So a good strategy against someone with a rocketlauncher is to spam him with the hagar. Chances are high you make his own rocket explode and hurt him!
You will need to be able to get around the map quickly and efficiently if you are to hunt down your opponents, and collect items well. As already mentioned, the laser is useful for jumping and gaining speed - but you can use all explosive weapons for a similar effect. Other weapons, however, will cause more damage to your health, and not all offer the same strong push as the laser. The rocket launcher will push you twice as far, but you will also take lots more damage. The mortar has the same push as the laser, but its explosion is bigger so the timing and the right angle are less of an issue. For this reason, the mortar is better for a beginner to learn these sorts of jumps.
You should also know that you gain a bit extra speed moving forward simply by jumping. When you walk, there is friction from the floor which keeps you at a constant speed. If you jump as you walk, the amount you touch the floor is considerably less, and so the friction does not slow you down as much. The longer you jump, the faster you go. The most simple way to do this is to run forward, jump, and then while you are in the air release and repress the jump button. Your character will jump again the moment you land, without you having to worry about timing hitting the jump key. Unlike other games, Nexuiz does not need you to do this with strange key combinations or even with circular movements of the mouse - trying to do these will generally make you slower. The only time that strafe-jumping (holding one of the strafe-keys while jumping) is useful is for the very first jump you make. This can increase your jump speed a little - although not by much.
Another useful thing to know about movement is that if you run and jump, you can release the forward key and instead press the left or right key, and turn your mouse in the same direction. Doing so will turn or 'bend' your jump in this direction. This is a useful trick to get around corners, to become less predictable, and also to avoid having to stop jumping to change direction.
Both the speed jumping and the turning require a certain amount of practice, but they are easy to learn - especially compared to the trick jumping found in games like Quake 3 CPMA or Enemy Territory. However, there is another trick in Nexuiz that does not need any practice at all: the ramp jump. Just walk up a ramp or slope, and jump. That jump will get you higher and further than if you had jumped on flat ground. You can reach some interesting spots by doing this, and ramp jumps can be effectively combined with speed jumping to achieve some remarkable acrobatics which can be very useful for taking shortcuts and thus dominating a map effectively. It takes some time to learn the good spots were these four tricks can be used to the maximum effectiveness - again, experiment yourself, watch others, and ask around in-game or on the Nexuiz forums (http://www.alientrap.org/forum).
Games generally have a great many settings which can be changed or tweaked to give you the best advantage. A lot of these aren't included in the game menus, which are limited by space and intended to give only a quick and compact view of the most important options. For all the other variables, you have the in-game console. This is like a command line inside the game. You can enter commands to connect to a server, vote for options on the server, or to change variables like your name or various graphic effects. You can access the console by pressing shift-escape, and you can close it again by pressing escape. Lots of info is available on the official Nexuiz forum regarding the effective use of the console, but probably the most important in multiplayer is using it for voting, which will be briefly covered here:
When you are on a server, open the console and type vhelp. This will display a short help regarding voting, and also tell you what can be voted on on the server. By default, things you can vote for include the timelimit and the map played. By entering vcall timelimit -1 you call a vote to set the timelimit to -1, which means to end the current map and play the next one. Or, as another example, vcall chmap aggressor will start a vote to switch to the map 'Aggressor'. This vote is printed to every player on the server, who can then accept or reject it. To accept a vote, press F1 (or type in vyes at the console); to reject it, press F2 (or enter vno at the console). If more then 50% of the players currently on the server accept a vote, the vote is passed and whichever setting has been polled will change. And in this example the current map will end and the next map will begin. It does not hurt to tell people to press F1/F2, as some still do not know about it.
Nexuiz supports several different game modes and some smaller changes called mutators. Both are displayed when you connect to a server.
There are some more of these mutators, but those are the most important ones.
A list of useful links:
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