Cube Engine Games

Cube & Cube 2 FORUM

singleplayer respawning

by Aardappel_ on 04/21/2006 01:03, 41 messages, last message: 06/07/2006 07:49, 6288 views, last view: 05/18/2024 20:40

As I am looking at whats still missing in the sauerbraten FPS, particularly on the SP side, one obvious thing is that loadgame/savegame is broken (though its easy to restore).

So I wanted to try out this recent SP map "vr", but had no savegame functionality, so had to make sure to not die at all.

I noticed how much more exciting playing the map without it was, as running into monsters around corners made me jump, and every little ambush made me feel "omg I am going to die!".

Of course, it is well known that having to start from scratch would be too frustrating for SP. So that got me thinking about alternative methods that would take out the frustration, but would keep some of the added excitement that having things at stake gives.

My idea is the following: add special SP spawning to SP. The way it would work is:

- respawn points are placed thruout an SP map, particularly in quieter areas before major battles.
- if you touch a respawn point (marked by some model), that becomes your current respawn point.
- if you die, you respawn at the current respawn point.

To give appropriate fear of death, yet make continuing after death possible, and easier every time it happens:

- all monsters and items stay where they were before you died. This means that if you are having a very difficult time, it becomes a little bit easier every time as monsters get killed.
- you will lose all your armour, and get all your ammo capped to a low amount (probably 5 each).
- to compensate, your health gets replenished fully, and you will get a large amount of pistol ammo
- your permanent powerups (currently the +10 health boost) will stay across respawns, as in DM (making them more useful!)

I think this would be a lot more interesting than load/save. It would feel less than just having to repeat a section, since it would be different every time. I think its a good balance between being punished for dying without the frustration, and increasing the excitement of battles.

Comments welcome. The rules as to what you lose and what you get when dying can be tweaked, of course.

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#2: Re: oh and...

by Pxtl on 04/21/2006 03:34, refers to #1

Sounds good. I've always said that "quicksave" is worse than checkpoints, because quicksave is like crack... first you use it just once in a while, then after big fights, and pretty soon you're hitting F9 before you round each corner. Games with a good checkpoint system seem much better.

To compare to my personal favourite game, Abuse: each quicksave in Abuse was effectively a health restore. All the state info was saved _except_ your health, which returned to 100 when you respawned. It had the annoying effect that players would often suicide into the next room just to get health back, as taking damage is less painful than wasting ammo... particularly since Abuse weapons had effectively no max ammo count so every shot missed was a shot wasted.

"5 of each" would be a bad idea since often mappers design specifically for a subset of weapons. For example, say a map has a large number of monsters on far-off corners that are in eyesight, but only gives the player shotguns with which to attack. Giving the player 5 sniper rounds suddenly woudl throw that out of whack.

Perhaps the best approach would be to have the player loadout be configured at the respawn point. That is, each individual respawn point is programmed with an invisible list of health, ammo, and armour values that are given to the player when they respawn there.

Alternately, there's the Descent approach - you respawn with nothing, although the corpse from your previous failure is covered in the spew of your old weapons, so you have to rush back to loot your own corpse before continuing the mission.