Cube Engine Games

Cube & Cube 2 FORUM

sauer gameplay changes

by Aardappel_ on 09/06/2005 10:16, 44 messages, last message: 09/16/2005 13:07, 20735 views, last view: 05/04/2024 15:57

I've spend the weekend doing heavy refactoring of the sauer game code, and things are starting to settle down a little bit (though still rough).

This will get me closer the the next stages in the grand scheme of things, i.e. polishing off the FPS game, which I really want to get to a good polish level before I fork the game code and start doing RPG stuff.

So besides some graphical enhancements, I mainly want to talk about gameplay here.

And before you ask, yes the current physics are not final. I want to get it back to be more Cube like, if I can persuade eihrul.

One thing that bothered me recently is the whole armours deal. It has been copied verbatim since Doom in every shooter, and all it really does is add to your health. There's the tiny tactical issue that people always quote that you can be low on health and high on armour, but really in fast DM that doesn't happen that much, and it is hardly a challeging gameplay feature.

So I would like to do something more original with the armours. I am explaining it here, so that we can get all the complaining done and over with before I even start implementing it, or maybe people have good ideas. I fully expect people to not like it because it is so easy to put value on something you know.

So in an FPS you have health. Health is increased by armours, and decreased by weapons... its armour vs weapons!

So why not make armour vs weapons a bit more interesting than just 1:1 ?

What I propose is that each armour is a special "protection class", which determines how much damage from each weapon it soaks up. For example The yellow armour could offer "bullet protection", soaking up a lot of rifle/mg damage, but hardly any RL damage. The green armour could be "blast protection", which does the reverse, etc. With 4 types of armour (or mega), every weapon could have its own protection. This means that if you see your opponent pick up a certain armour, you know you can gain an advantage by attacking him with the weapon it is weak for. This makes armours vs weapons more tactical than it is now.

Whatever armour protects against the MG might be most popular. You can still only carry one armour at a time, so you might not pick up a certain armour because you want to go for the anti-MG armour, but get killed in between. Tradeoffs.

A change would be that absorbtion would go to 100%, i.e. no health gets touched before the armour is gone. You can pick up a new armour once your old armour is 50% gone.

Another planned change is a more serious teamplay mod, something a bit more interesting than plain TDM, but more dynamic than CTF. I am very likely going with a "domination" style mod, of which there have been tons of varieties... most recently UT onslaught, and of course BF2.

It would simply have:

- strategically placed spawn/captured points, initially 1 red and 1 blue at far ends of the map, and the rest uncaptured
- capture by standing near it N seconds
- captured points adding to teamscore every N seconds
- when dead, after delay, spawn at chosen point, or close to team, or whatever.
- the above armour system, in combination with simple classes that would equip you with more or less of certain ammo.

Vehicles? haha, maybe one day :)

If I'd be contemplating new weapons, the first on the list would be a grenade launcher.

I'm looking for good ideas to make the weapons feel "meatier", i.e. more satisfying when used. I'll be looking at better particle effects, better kickback, better sound?, better animation? and better blood.

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#25: Re: hmmm

by Aardappel_ on 09/08/2005 03:07, refers to #22

you can already control how much ammo a player starts with and what weapons he can use... simply by placing ammo boxes.

I guess I should have mentioned that my original post was mostly talking about MP... I agree that in SP scriptability is required :)