Ê The coding continuesÊ - Ê eXoR[Troopers] Ê - Ê25th Jul 2003 00:03
It looks as if the .plans are really getting popular among our chat regulars – aren’t they Yoshiro? Anyway, I can’t write you a plan as funny as that from Sambo. That was top of the notch. No, I’m saving my real literate skills (if any) for an interview with a local dutch gamesmag that’s coming up soon. Instead, I’ll just give you the lowdown of what I have been doing these past 2 days.
There recently was a discussion on our forum about the fire mode switching on the E11. Some players prefer the auto fire, and want that to be made the one that’s active by default. Others are in love with the burst mode. To please all, Ghost Enigma came up with the wonderful idea of saving the last selected fire mode to disk, so that one is restored when you pick up an E11 or spawn with one. This suggestion had been implemented and works like a charm. Kudos to Ghost.
Another thing that has been brought up in the forums is the effectiveness of the A280. Even though headshots are lethal, and it has this great target finder built into it (which took me a while to do), it wasn’t good enough. So I started changing it around a bit. The rifle still shoots its damaging green moving load in primary fire when not zoomed, but as soon as you zoom in, the rifle becomes a real snipers tool. When zoomed, the A280 fires an instant hit beam – the effects on it are yet to be changed – that does a good deal of damage. We don’t want to make it too easy though. Therefore, the zoomed instant fire has a lower rate of fire than the bolt fire. The zoom itself has also had a little revamp. Regardless of how pleased I was with all the nifty bob and prediction systems built into the zoom, most of you didn’t like it. So I removed both crosshairs. The center of the zoom HUD is now the spot where you will hit. To make sniping a challenge and not some point and click arcade game, the weapon bob is now applied directly to your view rotation. That means that when your weapon is bobbing all over, and you go into zoom mode, your view will bob all over. When you stand still and get some rest, the movement stabilizes. The further you are zoomed in, the more your rotation will be hindered by the weapon bob. I’m really curious to see how this works out in public games. I’m hoping that it allows for a gradual learning curve with the gun, so that veterans who master countering the weapon bob will be rewarded with hitting shots. Also, since Troopers wouldn’t be troopers without decent bot support, I’ve been teaching the bots how to properly snipe. When normally running around and blasting at close range, the bots will use the bolt fire. But when targets come up at long range, bots will stand still, crouch, and lay down instant hit sniper fire. Don’t say I didn’t warn you! There are also some changes to the target readout in the lower left of the zoom HUD planned, but since those aren’t finalized yet, I’ll keep those for some other time.
We also changed the jump height recently. ShroomDuck was kind enough to find a value that he saw fit, and after some discussion with Ghost we decided to go with something lower than that, but nonetheless a decent increase compared to what’s currently in game. This might be bundled with a jump interval limit (similar to what is currently done with dodges) later, to prevent bunny hopping. But we have yet to decide on that.
I’ve also fixed a bug with the character specific weapons, that caused you to spawn with Imperial weapon meshes while being a Rebel if the server put you in the map very fast without having time to send the necessary team information. By Viper’s request, support for the bonuspack music manager has been added tonight. I’m also going through some major Target ID tweaks, which should have a decent effect on game play. Hopefully, it’ll change them to be less like a wallhack and more of a team coordinating help system. I’ll write down the details of those changes later.
That sums up most of what I have been doing for the past two days. I’m going to hit the sack and crash now, as Sambo is known to put it subtly. Good night, and have a good one.
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