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, 20784 views, last view: 05/18/2024 23:24

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.

Board Index

#1: Minigun is too strong

by voot_ on 09/06/2005 10:53

yeah that would be a great idea...but if you DONT change the zo strong minigun just the special armor would help..all others are useless because its too strong. So a game would be played like camping minigun and camping anti-mg-armor. So the main Problem is the minigun who is quite too strong. And as you said if its too strong.the mappers should balance the map..i found that even one mg is too much (im starting to place my items without any mg). Other probolem IMHO is that the rocketlauncher splashdamage is too big (i mean the area ??!!). It would be nice if you reduce the splashdamge a little not to make a weopen which is just good for spam. Also a less splashdamage for the player who shoot would be nice for usable rocketjumps imho ;) . But atm the gameplay isnt very good because the mg is too strong and imho the rocket launcher splash is to big. weopens like the rifle are rarely used..and the shotgun just if you dont have an mg or rl. Also the shotgun is a little bit too strong...

But if you would reduce the damage of the mg (it should be much weaker,like the mg on quake would be nice), and imho the splashdamage area from the rocketlauncher the whole gameplay would be changed imho.

And you talk about the tdm thing. But then later weapon respawntimes from weapons and armor and quad and healthboost would be better and more tactical (the whole timing thing, i tought about 20-30 seconds for wepons...and up to 1min20sec for quaddamage ..like that).

So if you reduce damage of mg and if other players think like me-the rl splash thing, the whole gameplay would be better, and the armor would have an completely new position in gameplay.

so far sry for that english..