FAQ

Warsow's Official Wiki

Contents 1 General questions 1.1 What does Warsow mean? 1.2 What are Warsow’s plans and goals? 1.3 What’s Warsow’s team profile? 1.4 What’s Warsow’s trix system? 1.5 What’s Warsow’s weapon system? 1.6 What are Warsow’s game modes? 1.7 What’s Warsow’s trix ladder? 1.8 Why did you choose a Quake 2 GPL engine? 1.9 Why did you choose QFusion? 1.10 Why did you choose celshading? 1.11 Why limit wall jump to one per 1.5 seconds? 1.12 Why did you choose the single fire button system? 1.13 What’s stun? 1.14 How to Dash? 1.15 How to Dodge? 1.16 How to Wall Jump? 1.17 How to Ramp Slide? 1.18 How to Dash Double Jump? 1.19 How to change Movement type 1.20 How to use Strong Ammo? 1.21 How to download a server side demo 1.22 When will a version for Mac OS be available? 1.23 How to contact the team? 2 Troubleshooting 2.1 When I load a map, I can fly through walls. Is this normal? 2.2 I made a dedicated server but I can’t find it in the server browser. 2.3 I’m having a problem playing Warsow demos, it just goes back to the main menu. 2.4 I’ve seen this game is GPL’d. Where can I get the source? What about the media? 2.5 Can I load Quake 3 maps in Warsow? 2.6 How do I add bots in my single player experience? 2.7 I want to play against the bots, but people keeps entering my server! 2.8 I can’t load the game. I get the following error message: 2.9 I’m playing Warsow in linux, and my mouse feels very jerky, how can I fix this? 2.10 I’d like some help setting up my config. 2.11 Where can I keep track of requests made by the beta tester team? And also bugs-fix requests? 2.12 Is there any place I can find out how the weapons work? 2.13 I’d like some info on taking screenshots. 2.14 Are there any shortcuts in say_team that could be usefull for teamplay? 2.15 How do I switch to another window while running Warsow in fullscreen? 2.16 I have a dual core system/a system with more than one CPU and War§ow runs slowly. 2.17 Warsow runs quite slowly on my laptop. What can I do? 2.18 Where do I find my config/demos/screenshots/…? 2.19 How do I set custom resolution ?

General questions

What does Warsow mean?

• First of all, Warsow was a reference to Joy Division, a british post-punk band of late 70's / early 80's, which was previously named Warsaw (with an A, as the capital of Poland)
• Warsow quickly turned into a first acronym : Warriors of Alternate Reality - Slaughters Over the Web
• But SoLomoNK wasn't totally satisfied by it and, during years, looked for a new one, which would bring a real and strong message
• Finally, years after, a new acronym raised, matching perfectly with warsow's spirit : Warsow is Art of Respect and Sportmanship Over the Web

What are Warsow’s plans and goals?

• Promoting Open Source Software
• Promoting philosophy of “Do It Yourself”
• Providing a low tech, light, epured, platform dedicated to esport
• Having fun making and playing Warsow
• Having satisfaction to be played
• Finish the work

What’s Warsow’s team profile?

• 1/3 skills, 1/3 involvement, 1/3 good mind
• International crew
• As leader, SoLomoNK considers himself in a way like the hobbit in Lord Of The Ring ;)
• Blemish, our lead designer and lead mapper is our respected and beloved King Aragorn
• Our coders and artists are like valorous warriors of the fellowship, all fighting the chaos and giving their best to make the dream comes real

What’s Warsow’s trix system?

• Besides classical trix coming from quake scene, like Circle Jump, Strafe Jump, Double Jump, Bunny Hopping, etc., Warsow features its own Special Moves
• Special moves of Warsow are Wall jump, Dash, Dodge, Ramp slide, Double Dash Jump. All of them can be performed with a single key (spacebar by default)
• All this brings huge depth of interactivity in 3D environment, develops really skilled gameplay and brings endless learning curves

What’s Warsow’s weapon system?

• Each weapon uses 2 kinds of ammo
• Guns are by default loaded with weak ammo
• Ammoboxes around maps are providing strong ammo, which boost guns’ settings
• The goal is to increase the challenge by introducing new tactics. For example, at spawn, a new alternative is to rush to the closest weapon, whatever it is, then grab strong ammo in order to be equipped with a real lethal weapon. On the other side, the dominating gamer has to cycle too ammoboxes carefully

What are Warsow’s game modes?

Duel, DM, TDM, CA, DA, CTF, Race, Bomb, TDO, HeadHunt, CTF-Tactics and of course Instagib

What’s Warsow’s trix ladder?

• This is a Freestyle Trix rating system directly based on Free Climbing rules. It allows trix to be easily identified, listed and rated by difficulty level
• It’s a new kind of neverending contest, mixing IRL references like Yamakasi’s Clan and Bouldering

Why did you choose a Quake 2 GPL engine?

• Since the beginning, we knew that the open source scene was a better way for a hobbyist project like ours, than modding on any copyrighted engine
• In 2002, Quake2 engine just became GPL. As we were already looking for some cartoonish design, far from realistic hype, we hadn’t big gfx needs, so it was the best choice for us

Why did you choose QFusion?

QFusion brings many cool improvements to the Q2 engine, and has always been supported by a strong community. This let us save a lot of time, specially with gfx.

Why did you choose celshading?

• We never wanted to follow nowadays realistic hype with ultra powered GFX
• The idea too was to reduce violence content, letting the game being clearer for gamers, and more eyes-friendly for spectators
• Jet Set Radio (Jet Grind Radio in US) opened a very interesting way, but we were inspired by and explored comics and SF. Why celshading would fit only to manga, after all?

Why limit wall jump to one per 1.5 seconds?

• In a land where everybody has super powers, there would be no super heroes
• The key to good gameplay is a good balance of rewarding and frustration
• It became definitely obvious with the trix ladder 0.1 that the 2 wall jumps limit was allowing too many ways and shortcuts, it was killing the challenge

Why did you choose the single fire button system?

• As we already added a new key to the controls for special moves, we refused to add another one
• Powerful double jumps require mouse-clicking, so gamers could hardly assign a second fire mode to right-click
• The single fire button system also increases the Arcade touch of Warsow

What’s stun?

• There is stun effect after you get hit.
• While stunned, a player can not walljump.

How to Dash?

• Dash allows quick accelerations on the ground
• Simply press Special Key when on the ground

How to Dodge?

• Dodge allows quick and powerful sidesteps on the ground
• Press Special Key + Any Strafe key when landing after a jump

How to Wall Jump?

• You can use walls while jumping for a powerful rebounds
• Press Special Key when touching a wall during a jump

How to Ramp Slide?

• Ramp slide lets you make a continuous Dash on ramps
• Press Special Key when running along any ramp

How to Dash Double Jump?

• Dash Double Jump allows a powerfull rebound on lower edges than for usual Double Jumps
• Press Special Key then quickly press Jump when touching a small edge

How to change Movement type

• New movement is a default movement
• To change it, use cg_oldmovement command: 1 for old, 0 for new

How to use Strong Ammo?

• If you got a weapon and it has strong ammo, you’ll fire strong ammo first
• Check the numbers above the weapon icons in the HUD to see how much strong ammo you have
• When you have fired all strong ammo, the gun will instantly switch back to weak ammo

How to download a server side demo

• Connect a server
• Type in console "demolist" for list of avalible demos and find the demo you want to download
• Type in console "demoget" with your demo number ( Example: demoget 123 )
• You will see a progressbar on your monitor. You can also type in console "downloadstatus" for download status.

When will a version for Mac OS be available?

A first running Mac OS version, which is to be considered as a very early alpha, has been developed by virus, who published it on the forums

How to contact the team?

• IRC: #warsow@quakenet.org
• Mail: info*AT*warsow*DOT*net.

Troubleshooting

When I load a map, I can fly through walls. Is this normal?

Yes it is. You’re stuck in spectator mode, meaning that you can’t shoot or anything. Press F3 to join the game (if it’s not 1v1 and people are playing already). Alternatively you can press ESC and join using the menu.

I made a dedicated server but I can’t find it in the server browser.

Be sure to open up the right ports in your firewall. After that, start your server executable and wait for it to send a heartbeat to the master server. This usually takes a couple of minutes, if you don’t want to wait that long type “heartbeat” in the console. People should now see your server in the server browser.

PORT_SERVER 44400 (UDP)

PORT_MASTER 27950 (UDP)

I’m having a problem playing Warsow demos, it just goes back to the main menu.

Warsow demos have to be played with the right Warsow versions. Demos before Warsow 0.1 had the extension .dqf and it’s hard to divide them into groups because of that, but most should be playable with Warsow 0.072a. Since Warsow 0.1, demos have the extension .wd<protocol version> and .wmd<protocol version> for multiview-demos which makes sure that you cannot start demos with the wrong protocol in your Warsow version. Below is a list of Warsow versions and their protocols/extensions.

Warsow 0.1 - 0.12: .wd7 Warsow 0.2 - 0.21: .wd8 Warsow 0.3 - 0.32: .wd9 Warsow 0.4 - 0.42: .wd10 Warsow 0.5 - ... .wd11

I’ve seen this game is GPL’d. Where can I get the source? What about the media?

Just download the SDK. The media is copyrighted, and will remain artist’s property unless we abandon this project. In that case, we will ask the artist for their permission to make the media GPL.

Can I load Quake 3 maps in Warsow?

Yes! isn’t it cool : p But not all items will be supported and without most baseq3 textures the maps will look really ugly. You can also load Nexiuz, OpenArena and Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory maps in Warsow.

How do I add bots in my single player experience?

Open up the console and type “callvote numbots #” where # is a number of bots you wish to add. 1 will add 1 bot, 2 will add 2, etc.

I want to play against the bots, but people keeps entering my server!

Launch the map from the “start server” menu and set public OFF. The same can be done by setting sv_public “0” at the console before loading any map.

I can’t load the game. I get the following error message:

ERROR: R_Upload32_3D: texture (***r_dlighttexture***) is too large (resizing isnot supported) width:32 height:32

Disable gl_ext_texture3D in your config and it will be solved. However, it is very likely that the game will be exceedingly slow when it does start. Therefore:

• In Windows, ensure that your graphics drivers are installed and up to date.
• In Linux, in addition to making sure your graphics drivers are installed, there is a possability that X might be using the Mesa OpenGL library to display graphics through software instead of using your graphics hardware. To figure out which you're using, open a terminal and type in glxinfo. Near the top of the output, there should be some information about "direct rendering", if it is disabled then it is very likely that X is using Mesa for rendering OpenGL, and not your graphics hardware. Another clue is if the "vendor" is listed as SGI instead of your graphics card manufacturer. Unfortuniatly, replacing Mesa with your graphics card manufacturers hardware libraries varies from distro to distro, and is out of the scope of this FAQ, so fixing this is an exercise left to the reader.

I’m playing Warsow in linux, and my mouse feels very jerky, how can I fix this?

Warsow's native mouse handling is not fully supported in Linux. However, there is a workaround through the use of DGA. To use it, ensure that your X server supports DGA and set in_dgamouse to 1. Please note that you must either restart Warsow or toggle mouse input (in_mouse 0; in_mouse 1) before this change will take effect.

Changing the USB mousepoll

If you are used to playing on Windows with a higher USB mousepoll rate, you can set the usbhid to use a different rate. For example, in /etc/modprobe.conf (or modules.conf, depending on distrobution), just add options usbhid mousepoll=1 to the end for 1000hz.

• 1 = 1000Hz
• 2 = 500Hz
• 4 = 250Hz
• 8 = 125Hz
• 10 = 100Hz (Default)

# echo "options usbhid mousepoll=1" >> /etc/modprobe.conf

Some mice may not support high polling, but after rebooting or reloading the usbhid module, you can check what it is set to by checking the /sys/module/usbhid/parameters/mousepoll. It will say what number you are using (if any).

$ cat /sys/module/usbhid/parameters/mousepoll

More information about USB mousepoll can be found here.

I’d like some help setting up my config.

We have a small guide up (not finished) for some basic variables in your configuration file. http://www.warsow.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7888

Where can I keep track of requests made by the beta tester team? And also bugs-fix requests?

This is updated on a regular basis, so keep an eye on it.

Is there any place I can find out how the weapons work?

Items

I’d like some info on taking screenshots.

Here are the vars you need to know about

r_screenshot_jpeg “1|0”

1: Screenshots will be written as JPEGs

0: Screenshots will be written as tgas

r_screenshot_jpeg_quality “85”

defines the quality of the JPG images.

To take a screenshot after you’ve set these variables to your likings: press F12 (if you haven’t changed it in your config yet)

Are there any shortcuts in say_team that could be usefull for teamplay?

Yep, we have some nice chat tokens which only work in say_team. german-tutorial

How do I switch to another window while running Warsow in fullscreen?

Windows

Simply press alt+tab.

Linux

You’ll have to press alt+enter to go to window mode and then toggle the console to lose focus of the Warsow window. If you are brave, change your "warsow" shell script to use xinit instead. This guide should help. Changing the last line of the warsow script to:

xinit "$BINARY_DIR/$executable" +set fs_basepath "$DATA_DIR" +set fs_usehomedir "$USEHOMEDIR" "${@}" -- :1 &

I have a dual core system/a system with more than one CPU and War§ow runs slowly.

It is known that War§ow may run slowly if your operating system tries to divide work to be done for the game onto the different cores/processors. This can be solved by strictly assigning War§ow to one core/cpu with the help of

sys_affinity 1

Warsow runs quite slowly on my laptop. What can I do?

Make sure that your laptop is not set to maximum power saving or connect it to a power supply.

Where do I find my config/demos/screenshots/…?

As of version 0.4, those files are saved in per-user directories by default. You will find the requested files in the following places:

Windows

%APPDATA%\Warsow (if you used the installer there's a shortcut to it in the start menu->programs->Warsow)

Linux

~/.warsow/

How do I set custom resolution ?

You can setup custom resolution for Warsow by opening the console:

r_mode -1
vid_customheight h
vid_customwidth w
vid_restart

where h is the height and w the width of the screen.