AQtion Roadmap

[darksaint]

In an effort to keep the community aware of what's in store for AQtion, the AQ2World team will periodically update this list of items we would like to do, plan to do, and ultimately implement, given the resources available.

This will be broken into levels of effort (LOE) and timeframe. Things that we want to do long-term and take immense efforts may be pushed back further depending on prioritization. These tasks are also further split between the game itself (AQtion) and the community efforts around it (AQ2World).

Completed or being Tested

• Steam Launch - Jun '22
• Turnkey / Easy server deployments - Jun '22
• Play Now feature - Jun '22
• Weapons and Items video showcase - Jun '22
• Basic Steam Integration - Aug '22
• Discord Integration - Sep '22
• Stereo wav support - Sep '22
• New male model replacement - Sep '22
• Optional randomized weapon selections (server setting) - Sep '22
• Discord-Run Ladders - Oct '22
• Steam Achievements - Nov '22
• Player Stats - Nov '22
• Steam Cloud Synchronization (saving configs and other files to the cloud)

Short Term (<6mo.) or Low LOE

• Self-hosted Pubobot
• Unobtrusive asset authentication mechanism (Asset checks for fairness)
• Item Kit Mode
• Bad name filtering/force renaming

Medium Term (>6mo. to <1yr) or Mid LOE

• New game mode - Highlander Mode
• New game mode - Gun Game
• Migrate game mode - Espionage
• Migrate game mode - JMOD
• Selectable weapon firing sound effects
• Completely rewritten and tested bot code for much more intelligent bot games

Long Term (>1yr) or High LOE

• Entirely revamped and modernized UI overlay system to replace the menu and scoreboards
• An assets shop for all AQtion assets, make-your-own-pkz from available assets, and a place to upload your own new assets (skins, textures, maps, etc)
• New game mode - Battle/Action Royale

[Hirchart]

It's a shame to see that the highest listed change on short-term, the hosting of pubobot -which could prove highly beneficial for the community because pickups are the main driver of activity, and because it could contribute in terms of fair and balanced matchmaking-, is still not realized.

Moreover, this list does not mention developments such as "antilag", "interp", "true hitboxes" or "xerp". Why are the latter being prioritized over other developments, whilst being absent from the roadmap?

That said, is there any indication that there is a significant portion of players who are not happy with the core mechanics of this game? Or is the community otherwise asking for these changes (isn't the adage "for and by the community")? Did anyone put these unlisted changes up for discussion? Have people been given the opportunity to give their opinion or consent? Maybe I missed something.

Is the development and fate of the game now in hands of a select group of special initiates, who make plans and decisions out of sight of the actual stakeholders, i.e. the playing community?

[darksaint]

Hi Hirchart,

Thanks for taking the time to express your concerns about the direction of the game and its development. I'd like to answer some of your questions and I hope the explanations are clear.

Self-hosting pubobot has been something on our list for quite some time. There are some hurdles we have to overcome, notably and in no particular order:

• We lose the ability to administer the pickup details from the Web UI if we self-host, as the Web UI portion is not a part of the Pubobot self-hosted system. We would need to specifically request it from Leshaka, and we may not get his approval to do so, and then we would need to host and support that service as well.
• We would like a database dump to retain all of our past match data, this again would be a Leshaka ask and may not be easy (or possible) depending on how the schema is defined. If it ends up that the data is not transferable, we would have to decide if self-hosting is still worth the effort of losing historical data.
• Paying for hosting it 24/7 and supporting it when it goes down falls upon the shoulders of the team, moving from a free service to self supporting incurs time and money costs we have to consider.

Development that has occurred such as antilag and xerp are not on this list

• Given the size of the dev team and time dedicated to code, we don't employ a scrum/agile approach for feature work; ideas are presented, code examples are provided, testing is performed and ultimately decided on if we include it in a release. For every change we introduce, we follow the ideals that everything is toggle-able and that the original game play is preserved if the server / client so wishes. An example here is that true hitboxes was an experiment that won't likely see normal play anytime soon.
• The above list is not regularly curated, this is something I should be doing more often when I have the time.
• Additionally, the above list was a high-level 'goals' list, with each one addressed at any given time per developer resource availability. The more dev resources we acquire, the faster we can churn out these features.

Any indications about unhappy players with the mechanics of the game / stakeholder involvement

• I believe that anyone who still plays this game to this day does it because they enjoy aspects of the game, the speed, the weapon play, the maps, and so forth. Anyone who does not play found something that didn't agree with them, and there's thousands of other games for them to play, so they moved on. The primary objectives of the project are to continue the legacy of the game, to grow the game for returning players and fresh faces, and to continue to improve the experience through development and assets to achieve the two previous objectives.
• People are free to provide feedback as you have here in order to have their voices heard. If someone makes a suggestion or has an idea, we give it consideration and perform our due diligence to determine if it's out of scope, how heavy the lift would be to implement it, and how it would affect the game. If we don't have suggestions from the community, then we take it upon ourselves to think of improvements, as we are also part of the community. In general, as far as feature work is concerned, we don't get a lot of suggestions, but more high-level goals to reach for, such as "get more people playing".
• Given that if we are using the volume of posts in this thread since late August '22 as our barometer for community involvement (or the forum in general), it seems like people are generally happy with the game, or don't have suggestions to offer? I would love to review more community-offered suggestions to improve.

It is an interesting challenge to balance the original game with enhanced clients and servers, 1997 and 2023 technology colliding, and making the game as available and approachable as possible, while keeping the long-time veterans engaged and happy with the changes, and getting fresh blood in the scene. There's so much high quality competition in gaming today, let alone retro first person shooters.