RUNNING WITH RIFLES
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Beta 0.4 feedback
http://www.runningwithrifles.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=187		 Page 1 of 1
Author:  Jason9mm [ Thu Sep 15, 2011 1:23 pm ]
Post subject:  Beta 0.4 feedback
I think a general feedback / comments thread is in order per each release, so we get to see how people generally like each release.

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Here's my two cents:

The gameplay changes in 0.4 seem to work very well, at least the ones that I noticed during the first 30 mins of playing.

The excessive travelling issue with respawns seems to be gone, I rarely spend more than a few seconds getting back into the fight (although the very first spawn at the start of the map was in the exact opposite corner of where the first attack was, doh)

I didn't get killed by a single bullet from the farthest corner of the map once.

I didn't get to try the online mode yet, a game/server browser would be excellent (and sadly, it's not coming anytime soon I think?)

The most nagging issues in the basic gameplay are, to me, that I still find it difficult to see the terrain shape exactly and the combat degenerates to a two way grenade rain fairly quickly as the combatant count creeps up. I think the grenade range is just too long (and the blast radius might be slightly wide too. maybe tune it so that grenade blast might not kill every time at the edges of the blast?)
Author:  pasik [ Fri Sep 16, 2011 5:32 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Beta 0.4 feedback
The grenade bounce hasn't been fixed yet, that's probably the main reason it's a bit annoying. I realized myself at some point that when using a M240 you tend to attract quite a lot of grenades from the AI, had kinda forgotten that, so you need to get up and moving almost instantly when you see a grenade thrown towards you, otherwise you won't survive the blast. It was pretty fun after that though, it saved my life quite often.

Fixing the bounce will likely make it easier, which is a good thing.

I can try diminishing the blast radius a bit, but I wouldn't change it much though, the grenade should stay as this effective tool in putting people on the move, to force them to come out from the cover or flee. Ideally, I'd have a different impact on the outer regions, so that the soldier would just fall down for a second to recover and get up. It would be otherwise pretty easy to implement even, but it needs multiple new animations to handle the falling down in a couple of directions and getting up from those, which tends to be time consuming to achieve.

I have some new ideas about bringing out the terrain shape. I'm mostly developing and testing the game on my 42" HDTV, and it appears that it actually shows the colors as less than true 24-bit colors, there's a clearly visible difference when compared to a laptop. However, the outcome is that I can see the shape of the terrain better on the TV, as I can see clear boundaries of different color shades on the terrain as it's not as smooth as it is on a laptop. It's a wild idea, but I might implement a shader for the terrain that uses less colors than what is actually available, and bring it out as an experimental option to start with.

Another option would be to just draw the edges of the terrain polygons with some lighter / darker color. By imagining how it would look like, I'm already hating it, but I probably should try it anyway.
Author:  Jason9mm [ Fri Sep 16, 2011 7:05 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Beta 0.4 feedback
pasik wrote:
Ideally, I'd have a different impact on the outer regions, so that the soldier would just fall down for a second to recover and get up. It would be otherwise pretty easy to implement even, but it needs multiple new animations to handle the falling down in a couple of directions and getting up from those, which tends to be time consuming to achieve.


That sounds like a great idea to me. It it may end up so that the guy knocked down by grenade will end up dead anyway, due to being shot while getting back to his feet, as all kinds of snares/stuns tend to be very effective in whatever games. Still, I think that'd be just an excellent detail, as it would bring about quite a lot of new stuff to see and do; knockdown, barely surviving a previously binary event (die or survive), new kind of challenge for the receiving player (capitalize on your fortune = get away and stay alive), new kind of challenge to the "sender" as well (be ready to finish any stragglers after throwing a grenade) and so on. And it could just as easily end up so that the knocked down guy really gets to walk away 75% of the time or more, which would of course make the feature even better.

You probably have a technical limitation with this, but one solution to cutting down on animation work would be to transfer the character model to the physics/ragdoll system for the knockdown phase. You'd still probably need some kind of recovery animation, though it might not look that terrible if you could use the prone animation (maybe with some animation blending, if available, in between, or maybe even just snapping the model to the prone position).

I used to wonder why this sort of "let the ragdoll handle impact animations" technique isn't used often, so I felt almost vindicated when it was used in the original Splinter Cell: Conviction even for fistfight impacts. Sadly, Ubisoft never released that version of the game and ended up delaying the release for a few years and redoing pretty much everything in the game :D
Author:  pasik [ Fri Sep 16, 2011 7:32 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Beta 0.4 feedback
Even if there is a simple ragdoll physics system already in the game, it's not quite straightforward to get back to keyframe animation from the ragdoll in a good looking way once the model has started the ragdoll motion.

The problem is that the physics applied ragdoll can end up in any arbitrary pose when falling down, and there can only be a finite collection of predefined get up animations that all start from some distinct pose. There are really elegant solutions to this, e.g. using procedural animations like in Overgrowth (see http://www.wolfire.com for some amazing animations if not familiar with it already), but to create a system like that requires a huge effort.

The not-so-elegant solution is to make predefined recovery animations starting from several poses, and try to detect which start-pose is closest to the ragdoll end-pose, and blend between those quickly and go on with the animation from there, or perhaps adjust the ragdoll while it's falling to end up close to one of the get up animation start-poses. It could look like crap at times, but I guess mostly the oddities could be pretty unnoticeable thanks to the distant camera in RWR.

I'll think about this. Maybe I can find a spot to experiment with it.
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