Dear Splash Damage

(Mustang) #81

And the times are the same whilst crouched?
Maybe the strafe speed whilst crouched is too slow?

(DarkangelUK) #82

[QUOTE=Kendle;440593]
I’m sure DarkAngel can correct me if I’m wrong but I always thought ET and RTCW had a restriction on chaining together a sequence of jumps, you couldn’t gain greater and greater distance and speed?[/QUOTE]
Correct for flat surfaces, though if you went down a slope or hit objects that were consecutively lower in height then you could do Q3 style strafing for the duration of the slope.

[QUOTE=Kendle;440598]Yeah, it’s just that people say “we want strafe-jumping”, SD think “blimey, that’ll be a shed-load of work and doesn’t fit the game” when in fact what most of us want (with the exception of DarkAngel maybe) is just to jump, twist a bit, go a bit faster, maybe every other jump or something, rather than just press W and point.

That’s not particularly advanced IMO, and is something I think SD should consider, so I’m not disagreeing with anyone who wants better movement, I just think we need to define what it is we want, and keeping it simple like an air speed increase for example would be a good place to start maybe.[/QUOTE]
I think ‘advanced’ won’t have a definition here as it depends in whose hands it lands in. The way I see it, the majority of casual ET players saw that you could twist a bit, go a bit faster and do some funky key presses to get a bit further… some players took what was possible and honed it, practised and discovered possibilities that most didn’t know existed. SD could give you exactly what you mention and a few could work with that and take it to the next level, I doubt many casual ET players knew stuff like this were possible.

I’m not sure if SD are scared of alienating those that don’t want to have to learn such a system or are just scared of creating a system that they don’t fully understand and it ends up being broken by those that like to experiment and master. What I certainly hope is that they don’t garner facts from other games then taint that with their own skewed views “CoD is popular and doesn’t have strafing therefore players don’t want strafing”. If SD implemented a decent level of movement that really didn’t require much training to take advantage of, then those of us that want to take it further usually can, which means they cater for both side of ‘advanced’ fence… as long as SD don’t get scared and purposely set limits like they did in Brink. ET had a nice curve to suit all and I genuinely don’t believe it alienated players that didn’t want to learn to any great degree.

When I talk about acceleration I’m talking about forward momentum, Q3, ET and RtCW had UPS (units per second) counters in mods, a spedomoter as it were that showed you the current speed you were moving… you know it well from Tribes. Correct turn speed on the ground gave you ground acceleration that meant you had a faster boost when strafing or circle jumping and you gained speed per jump. Mouse angle in the air combined with holding forward+strafe gave you air acceleration which meant you gained forward momentum in the air as well… that worked for most Q3 engine games to varying degrees.

That’s just my reference to accel

(montheponies) #83

As mentioned ad nauseam, RTCW, ET and ETQW all had the benefit of mods to provide functions that were either absent or under developed in the original. I doubt very much with the F2P model that there will be any room for mods (or custom maps) in this game so it’s important that we are able to differentiate the game at a server level to suit the audience (be that pub orientated or competition), otherwise we’ll create one game that suits no-one.

Core to me would include

  • Movement, as discussed above, absolutely needs to be improved. Really don’t see a problem with including the RTCW mechanism, that coming from someone who could barely do the walljump on Ice.
  • Classes - Quite like the current class mix and potential for alternative loadouts.
  • Weapons - generally not as lethal as i’d expect. I’m mince at shooting so hate to sound like a whinger but I do find hitreg to be subjectively off - but that’s the same as RTCW, so probably just me being crap :wink:
  • Maps - unless custom content will be supported this becomes core. Currently would love to see a couple of simpler maps, as mentioned by others doc running maps would be some light relief from waddling along beside the EV. Think Frostbite revisited…

Everything else should be server side settable from iron sights on/off, friendly fire on/off/explosive, health regen on/off, ammo racks on/off to spawnwave on/off and whatever else would make the game appealing to the widest audience (including of course game type, DM, SW, Obj, CTF, KOTH etc).

(.FROST.) #84

I’ve never played anything from SD before Brink, and I’m not saying, that Brinks controls where more responsive in this particular regard, but I never had that very feeling of ice-skating and not being full in charge of where my char is actually going, like I have it in DB.

The only thing I can say for certain is, that I allways catch myself pressing “A” and “D” way to hard, as if it would increase the responsiveness; it’s some kind of reflex or something and I don’t know if you guys know what I mean, but I think that’s a sign, that the character control isn’t smooth and intuitive enough(at least for me).

Even though I know, that’s not an option, and I’m prolly talking for me alone here, but the less delay, the better; meaning “0” delay = best. That’s not meant as a real suggestion though, but I think you guys like to hear our personal preferences(most extreme opinions/wishes) and build your own conclusions from that. And here is mine; 100% player control over every kind movement, from reload animation, over plant and build animations, up to no delay across all axis. A bit of acceleration from run to sprint is ok though.

(ImageOmega) #85

Are you referring to moving left and right when you talk about full left strafe into full right strafe? I think the current iteration is your best yet. When strafing left, then reversing to strafe right, the slow down, stop, then acceleration to the other direction has been removed to a very responsive point.

I think what acQu was referring to was when you’re jumping forward consecutively that you hit a “wall” and aren’t able to move forward any more. Basically, making sure a player can’t jump continuously or accelerate any more.

(acQu) #86

Nope, did mean it as Anti said, that is simple spoken: press ‘a’ to strafe left, then press the opposite strafe key after you gained full momentum till you gain full momentum again. Just by pressing nothing else than a, d, a, d, a, d … (i speak of standard config here where a is left and d is right, to exclude that potential misunderstanding as well xD).

Sometimes i feel we all just talk, but everyone understands it differently xD In a way that is also the price when you try to be eloquent, to make it really sound like you are talking about something totally complex, whereas if you would just speak it out simple you would demystify everything and exclude yourself from talk forever xD

(Anti) #87

[QUOTE=acQu;440624]
Sometimes i feel we all just talk, but everyone understands it differently xD [/QUOTE]

You’re right :slight_smile:

This is why examples are always good for us. Right now a lot of people will chat to me about acceleration and responsiveness issues but when we dig deeper or check against other games we start to find that folks are either talking about different things to each other, or they view the titles they played in the past through time distortion goggles :smiley:

(Protekt1) #88

+1

The best communicated ideas are concise and simple to understand.

Also, using terms like strafe jumping etc. which is very ambiguous causes more issues. Strafe jumping could either mean strafing then jumping or jumping then strafing.

(acQu) #89

Yeah, i am sure when most of us are refering to strafe-jumping, then it is refering to the strafe-jumping mechanisms from the previous SD games and even beyond (Quake, RTCW). Pretty sure that can be understood as that. All of these games have a pretty common core in this regard.

Anti: my humble and very specific suggest would be to try out even less acceleration, maybe 200 or even 150, since DB mostly feels slower in movement speed compared to, let’s say Quake this time. So since we have slower movement speed, the “effectiviness of moving” (if you can call it like that) becomes less, when accelartion is not decreased as well (in my quick theory at least :confused:). But i really need to try it out once more to surely tell (as said, i have issues with the launcher, can’t play currently). Maybe the slowdowns cut even more to this perception, that DB is actually slower, but it feels so the very least to me. The other related parameter would be movement speed imo.

(Verticae) #90

I loved ET:QW’s movement system. Not too hard to track because it was nearly impossible to accurately return fire while strafejumping, and pretty capped in how fast you could go. However, between teh strafes and rampjumps, you could get some pretty sweet movement going on. In example, while a casual player might figure out one or two ways to jump the wall in Volcano, I’ve seen 6v6 matches where every attacker jumped across the wall at a different point.

(Kendle) #91

This thread was about more than strafe-jumping, so rather than labour that point my suggestion would be to get the SD coder responsible for the movement mechanics to have a one-to-one chat with DarkAngel to iron out the basic principles. I suspect most of us don’t really want full on Quake style trick-jumping, we just want a more responsive system and the option to, with a bit of practise, mash a few keys to extend what we can do.

(.FROST.) #92

Since DB is in alpha and the dev team can do whatever they want to test stuff, without having to worry about bad responses from customers that payed for a fully working release title, I’d suggest something like “casual fridays”. In regard of it’s purpose I’d call them “extreme Fridays” (or whatever day of the week, SD would see fit). Days on wich they’d test extreme stuff like no(or very little) delay at all*; just to see how people react to that. And then increase the delay little by little, till the majority starts complaining again.

*(except for sprint maybe; 'cause it would be kinda weird if you’d gain speed in no time)

A bit like in “Mythbusters” where they’d start with the myth and when it doesn’t work, they’d start getting more and more extreme in their approach; just to see if the allready kinda busted myth would, at least, work under ridculously perfect and enhanced/improved circumstances.

I think it would be very interesting to see the responses to very severe changes in gameplay mechanics.

Maybe the following comparison is a bit off, but…:
You all know the “frog in the boiling water pot” thing. Increasing the temperature little by little and the frog would stay in the water until he boils to death, because he can’t notice when the water temperature starts being unhealthy high for him.

Starting with boiled water on the other hand makes the little guy react immediately and he would instantly jump out of the pot(well, if the water doesn’t kill him instantly). Then you’d put him in a pot with slightly cooler water and you’d repeat that until you find the exact temperature that suits the little fella well. What I want to say: I think working from extreme to normal is in many cases the best solution. A penciler would also start with a very extreme sketch and work his way to normal then.

PS: I’ve never done the frog thing IRL; just saying :wink: