Sliding crouch

(Valdez) #41

[QUOTE=MrEd;439950]Some good feedback here. Thanks folks.

To those who said no without further comment, are there any particular reasons why? Or covered already by concerns so far about lack of control, reduced CQC quality and Brinkophobia?[/QUOTE]

I just think we need more information on how sliding would be implemented. Can we do other actions while sliding? or once you slide you are locked into it? I think before giving you guys better feedback on this, we would need to know what you guys were exactly planning.

I definitely do think we need some type movement system (innovative) to spice this game up. Currently it is just too bland.

(Samurai.) #42

It’s pretty hard to provide strong counter arguments to this, when we have no idea what you have in mind for the sliding mechanic. People that are saying ‘yes’ all have their own ideas of how it should work so we are kind of restricted to making general assumptions rather than anything more specific.
Here are my questions and concerns if in theory a slide mechanic was to go ahead (which I am against).

So my general questions:

[ul]
[li]How will sliding be activated? Will it be annoying and occur when players don’t want to slide or will it be achieved by 1 key that does it all?[/li][li]How much control will we have over sliding? Will it be clumsy and useless? How will movement speed affect the distance you slide? How far can you slide? Will you be able to cancel sliding mid way through the slide, if so surely this will have an impact on the ability to hit the model?[/li][li]How will sliding add a skillful element to the game? – It sounds like a fairly simple and basic thing, I don’t see how it can provide a learning curve to “master”.[/li][li]How will the transition to the slide occur, will the fov/camera angle change dramatically (third person?) or will it be smooth and 1st person to allow aiming? Will it provide a benefit to the player sliding to avoid taking hits?[/li][li]Will working on a sliding mechanic take away time and resources from a different more important aspect of the game that could be worked on such as strafe jumping that would be more beneficial?[/li][li]Would sliding be a generic part of the movement system for all classes, or would different classes have different abilities during sliding (able to shoot/knockdown/slide fast/immune from damage)?[/li][li]Would the ability to slide be unlimited or would there be a cool down period to the number of times you could slide? And how would you display this without cluttering the HUD even more?[/li][li]How would sliding affect the spread and recoil of the weapons?[/li][/ul]

Possible/General criticisms

[ul]
[li]The current maps aren’t designed to allow sliding to be functional. [/li][li]Experiences from Brink suggest it is a terrible idea (you don’t want to draw direct links towards Brink mechanics as players will start thinking this is Brink 2 – negative image).[/li][li]Would more than likely affect hit registration on players. [/li][li]It would put less emphasis on aiming and more on erratic movement to avoid taking damage[/li][li]You could also say this would further increase the TTK with the current weapons, which is something that is already slightly too high and wouldn’t want to increase.[/li][li]You could say letting others influence your movement by knocking you over isn’t fun and reduces the level of skill within fire fights.[/li][li]The long term population of Dirtybomb will more than likely be the loyal playerbase from previous games such as ET:QW/W:ET/RTCW in which none of these games had a sliding mechanic or needed one. [/li][li]If you are able to slide, why can you not strafe jump or lean which are key aspects of the movement system in previous games and would be more relevant in Dirtybomb gameplay. [/li][li]If sliding was class based and varied in the benefit it could provide, it would require greater effort to balance the classes as even more variables introduced.[/li][/ul]

Ultimately it seems to me that adding sliding would require a lot of work only to create more problems than benefits to the players and wouldn’t really add that much of a ‘fun’ or ‘useful’ aspect to the game. I could see the comp community from ET:QW/W:ET/RTCW rejecting such a casual aspect to the game as many of us here have already done and when it is part of the core movement system this is quite a fundamental decision to make (basically a game changer in terms of attracting certain audiences imo). This is my point of view, feel free to contribute to it.

(nailzor) #43

[QUOTE=MrEd;439950]Some good feedback here. Thanks folks.

To those who said no without further comment, are there any particular reasons why? Or covered already by concerns so far about lack of control, reduced CQC quality and Brinkophobia?[/QUOTE]

For the “why?”: because it was pretty ‘meh’ in brink, would rather not go down that road again

(Protekt1) #44

Sounds like a case of brinkophobia. Maybe at least explain why you don’t like slide. I never played that game so I don’t know what they did wrong with it. I have played a couple games with fun + skillful movement mechanics like rolling, diving, and sliding. Just saying it was “meh” doesn’t really explain it.

(sunshinefats) #45

Those are some well thought out points; let me just say that first. In terms of your questions, I think that covers what most of us wonder. After all, how it’s implemented makes all the difference. So no arguments there.
As for the possible/general criticisms, however, I would like to offer a couple of counter points…

  • I believe the current maps would allow for a simple slide mechanic as is, and could really make good use of it with only minor modifications. Of course that’s just my opinion so we may never agree on that, but people here have offered some nice solutions that would work nicely without destroying what we like about the game so far.
  • I believe my personal experiences with brink as well, as those of several other players I know, was a great idea. It just perhaps wasn’t implemented as well as it could have been.
  • I don’t see it putting any more emphasis on erratic movement than is already present. You already have people strafing and running around like mad while you’re trying to empty 80 rounds into them to kill them(a slight exageration I realize but you get my point hehe). In my eyes the slide mechanic might make them easier to hit while they’re in it. Sure they’re a lower,smaller target doing it probably, but assume they can’t just arbitrarily change direction of jump out of it in the middle and suddenly they just got easier to keep your crosshair on, which should make people think twice about using it.
    -I agree that letting it knock people over is probably not the way to go though. I’m thinking of it terms of movement only.
    -I also agree that lean, at the very very least, and strafe jumps if possible should also be imlpemented. But I would like the slide as well. To me, that’s the total package that gives the game some flavor and gives the player a really true feeling of freedom of movement.
    -I think the ET, ETQW, RTCW crowd will be the early adopters, but if the game appeals to more people than that for the long term that can only be a positive thing. Expanding your market with a great game leads only to a REALLY great game. And at the end of the day I think we all want SD to be successful with this game.
    So, I don’t disagree totally with all your points, but do partially disagree on somepoints. I still believe that sliding would add an exciting element to the game that could not only be enjoyable (if implemented properly) but could also help the game appeal to a wider audience who expect such renovations in these games. I don’t want the game to be Brink, but I don’t want ETQW either…I’d like to see the best of both.
    STANDARD DISCLAIMER
    I just took my prescribed sleep medication before I wrote this so while it may seem well thought out and rational to me, it may seem like nonsense in some areas too(hopefully not) so if something doesn’t make sense just skip over that part lol :slight_smile:
(Kendle) #46

I can only re-iterate what I said on the previous page, Urban Terror is a quake-engine based game (it actually uses ioQuake3, the free Q3 based engine built from Q3 source), it has sliding, and it’s hugely competitive, so please don’t write it off as something only for “casuals”.

However the devil is in the detail.

Brink failed because sprint and SMART were the same button (press and hold for SMART, press and release for sprint). This was a stupid idea, but the game was made for consoles with limited buttons, so I guess that was the reasoning behind it. If that had not been the case, if they’d simply allowed us to bind SMART to a different key (i.e. been able to choose not to use it), the movement system in Brink could’ve worked.

If DB implemented sliding (or movement of any kind) the way Brink did I’d oppose it with every fibre of my being, well at least until I stopped playing DB, which would be pretty much straight away.

For sprint to work, IMHO, it would have to conform to these rules.

  1. You can only start sliding by sprinting and then pressing crouch. Only this combination causes it to happen, so if you’re not sprinting when you crouch, you just crouch, so we don’t have players sliding about all over the place accidentally.

  2. If you let go of crouch whilst sliding you stop sliding and start running upright again.

  3. The transitions between running and sliding, and sliding and running, have to be seemless, with the hitbox following the player model exactly.

  4. No knocking people over (or damaging them) when you slide in to them.

A knock-on effect of implementing this could and should be that “pressing some button” doesn’t cancel sprint, because at the moment everything does, which can be quite annoying.

But if you’re going to implement sliding then why not other parkour elements? I appreciate the danger is it’ll be seen as Brink2 (which would not be good), but if done right I don’t see why it can’t add a lot of flavour to the game. “Done right” meaning no SMART system, just combinations of sprint / crouch / jump / and movement keys to achieve a particular move, and make it so they’re a bit tricky to pull off and some skill is required to do them.

(Humate) #47

To those who said no without further comment, are there any particular reasons why? Or covered already by concerns so far about lack of control, reduced CQC quality and Brinkophobia?

Other than immersion, I dont think it really adds anything to the game.
Youve mentioned Brink-o-phobia; thats a valid point from an overall / collective perspective.

(kilL_888) #48

[QUOTE=Kendle;440001]
But if you’re going to implement sliding then why not other parkour elements? I appreciate the danger is it’ll be seen as Brink2 (which would not be good), but if done right I don’t see why it can’t add a lot of flavour to the game. “Done right” meaning no SMART system, just combinations of sprint / crouch / jump / and movement keys to achieve a particular move, and make it so they’re a bit tricky to pull off and some skill is required to do them.[/QUOTE]

i don’t understand that brinkophobie issue. i think the majority of people agrees that one of the good things in brink was the parkour. i personally didn’t even mind the smart key. it worked, most of the time at least.

the parkour was a evolution for the first person shooter genre. it added more depth to the movement. admittedly, sliding into people and knocking them down was too powerful. and it was pretty easy to start the slide animation, you just had to sprint for a second or so. you could also spam it, not so good.

but generally speaking, i think sliding, mantling and maybe even walljumps would add to the gameplay. mantling is in both cod and battlefield. in crysis there is sliding+mantling. so, i wouldn’t consider these features parkour or even special nowadays. it’s already implemented and people are used to the mechanics. i would even go as far to say that a shooter without basic features like mantling over smaller obstacles feels dated and too “oldschool”.

movement mechanics in shooters havn’t really changed since 1996. i think that’s awful. i think if you implement it right, it can be only beneficial.

(Verticae) #49

In this part of the video, an Urban Terror player jumps, frags, then slides. Yes, that moving across the ground at a constant speed? That’s the UT slide. Go ahead and tell me that that sliding mechanic would somehow work in DB. Don’t get me wrong - it works in UT, but that game’s movement mechanics are absolutely nothing like DB’s - not even if they’d implement strafe jumping (which, by far, would be a more desirable feature).

(Kendle) #50

I agree, and with everything else you said, apart from the SMART key, that was the killer for me. If only they’d allowed us to bind sprint and SMART to different keys all would’ve been good. It was the fact you couldn’t precisely control your movement that got to me. After years of playing Urban Terror, with proper strafe-jumping / wall-jumping / climbing and power-sliding, I didn’t need a button to do it for me.

(HellToupee) #51

[QUOTE=kilL_888;439877]
mantling over things should be in every shooter imho. what does it mean anyways? it adds a animation, making it look and feel smoother when you try to get over obstacles. the simple jump that used to be in pretty much every shooter since quake 1 just feels dated. but… the big cod and battlefield actually use this mechanic and just from the looks of it in battlefield 3, it must feel pretty awsome to mantle over an obstacle, instead of just hitting jump and getting over it.[/QUOTE]

Its horrible, you get locked into an animation half the time it does not even work and when it does alot of the time to others it makes you do some weird warp, while bfbc2 was many times more fluid and controllable because you just jumped and never turned control over to glitchy animations.

(Mustang) #52

[QUOTE=Kendle;440001]1. You can only start sliding by sprinting and then pressing crouch. Only this combination causes it to happen, so if you’re not sprinting when you crouch, you just crouch, so we don’t have players sliding about all over the place accidentally.

  1. If you let go of crouch whilst sliding you stop sliding and start running upright again.

  2. The transitions between running and sliding, and sliding and running, have to be seemless, with the hitbox following the player model exactly.

  3. No knocking people over (or damaging them) when you slide in to them.[/QUOTE]

  4. Releasing sprint whilst sliding immediately stops the slide and the player remains crouching.

(Kendle) #53

^^ yep, so perhaps line 2 should be :-

  1. If you let go of crouch whilst sliding you stop sliding and start sprinting again, if you let go of sprint whilst sliding you stop sliding and remain crouched. So both buttons are needed to start sliding, releasing one of them reverts you back to the action the other would normally perform.
(Raviolay) #54

I was thinking as well, if you double tap crouch while in a slide and then hold you come to a dead stop in a crouched position. Also if you hold the jump key while in a slide, and when come out of the slide by releasing crouch you jump straight after. So you could slide to a window, and then jumpcrouch through it.

(maxxxxlol) #55

As someone who has played Urban Terror since 03, I don’t think it really fits in with how this game plays atm. Slow, guns to inaccurate. etc. I do love how it works in Q4 and UrT though.

(MrEd) #56

Samurai pretty much summed up the list of design questions that need to be answered.

[QUOTE=Samurai.;439969]Here are my questions and concerns if in theory a slide mechanic was to go ahead (which I am against).

So my general questions:

[ul]
[li]How will sliding be activated? Will it be annoying and occur when players don’t want to slide or will it be achieved by 1 key that does it all?[/li][li]How much control will we have over sliding? Will it be clumsy and useless? How will movement speed affect the distance you slide? How far can you slide? Will you be able to cancel sliding mid way through the slide, if so surely this will have an impact on the ability to hit the model?[/li][li]How will sliding add a skillful element to the game? – It sounds like a fairly simple and basic thing, I don’t see how it can provide a learning curve to “master”.[/li][li]How will the transition to the slide occur, will the fov/camera angle change dramatically (third person?) or will it be smooth and 1st person to allow aiming? Will it provide a benefit to the player sliding to avoid taking hits?[/li][li]Will working on a sliding mechanic take away time and resources from a different more important aspect of the game that could be worked on such as strafe jumping that would be more beneficial?[/li][li]Would sliding be a generic part of the movement system for all classes, or would different classes have different abilities during sliding (able to shoot/knockdown/slide fast/immune from damage)?[/li][li]Would the ability to slide be unlimited or would there be a cool down period to the number of times you could slide? And how would you display this without cluttering the HUD even more?[/li][li]How would sliding affect the spread and recoil of the weapons?[/li][/ul]

Possible/General criticisms

[ul]
[li]The current maps aren’t designed to allow sliding to be functional. [/li][li]Experiences from Brink suggest it is a terrible idea (you don’t want to draw direct links towards Brink mechanics as players will start thinking this is Brink 2 – negative image).[/li][li]Would more than likely affect hit registration on players. [/li][li]It would put less emphasis on aiming and more on erratic movement to avoid taking damage[/li][li]You could also say this would further increase the TTK with the current weapons, which is something that is already slightly too high and wouldn’t want to increase.[/li][li]You could say letting others influence your movement by knocking you over isn’t fun and reduces the level of skill within fire fights.[/li][li]The long term population of Dirtybomb will more than likely be the loyal playerbase from previous games such as ET:QW/W:ET/RTCW in which none of these games had a sliding mechanic or needed one. [/li][li]If you are able to slide, why can you not strafe jump or lean which are key aspects of the movement system in previous games and would be more relevant in Dirtybomb gameplay. [/li][li]If sliding was class based and varied in the benefit it could provide, it would require greater effort to balance the classes as even more variables introduced.[/li][/ul]
[/QUOTE]

So as there’s been some great work done here already by you guys, let’s use this thread to evolve a set of rules that the design & prototype would have to fulfil in order to be successful. Let’s keep the discussion here to sliding for now and we can talk about other advanced movement later.

Re #3. As the hit boxes follow the player’s body exactly already I’ve removed the bit about them following the animation. As a result though the rest of rule #3 becomes even more important in (all) DB animation design.

(Kendle) #57

That wouldn’t be necessary. To maintain the slide you need to be pressing crouch + sprint at the same time. Simply releasing sprint would stop the slide in a crouched position.

Again no. If you want to jump straight after a slide you just release crouch and then press jump. Timing the key presses would be part of the skill needed to do it properly.

(Raviolay) #58

“You can only start sliding by sprinting and then pressing crouch”
&
“Releasing sprint whilst sliding immediately stops the slide and the player remains crouching”

So are we supposed to hold two keys, after letting go of one and pressing another?

How about.

While in a slide if you let of the crouch key you stop and stand up. Double ( edit* or press immediately after letting go) tap the crouch key in a slide to stop in a crouched position & press and hold sprint while in a slide to transition to a sprint from a slide.

(Kendle) #59

Raviolay, for me it’s very important that you don’t have double tap anything or “press this while doing that then later something else happens”. Besides, think about what you’re saying, how do you double tap a key without first releasing it?

The way I see it happening is you first press sprint, to sprint, then whilst still holding sprint press crouch to effectively “sprint in a crouched position”, i.e. slide. This is simple and intuitive IMO.

Releasing sprint keeps you crouched, releasing crouch keeps you sprinting. Because ordinarily you don’t move when crouched releasing sprint would cause you to stop in a crouched position. Again, simple, intuitive and makes sense in the context of the standard actions the keys would normally perform etc.

(Raviolay) #60

Kendle there is a least one guy hear (not me) who is missing a finger, and besides does there have to be a single way this can be used? There is more than one way of skinning a tapir:D