Hey everyone,

It's been a while since I've suggested a few ideas and put them up for discussion so some of these may have been mentioned before but it's hard to remember.

1. Fences and Vehicles - I feel like APCs and Trucks should be able to destroy/topple small wire fences. Especially the truck because it looks like a beast of a truck.

2. APC damage - It's hard to use the APC to kill. I understand that's part of its balance but maybe an tiny explosive round will do the trick. Something that has a real small blast radius that only has a chance to kill rather than a 100% kill rate. This blast kill chance could increase as the distance to the center of impact decreases. I'm talking a blast radius about the 1/4 the size of the grenades if even. The turret rotation and uneven terrain already add to the difficulties of using an APC and against someone with a good throwing arm or a LAW, it feels a little underpowered. An explosive round would allow the APC to take on groups of enemies that are clustered easier.

-Another idea for the APC would be 2 firing modes, one chain gun mode, and one explosive mode. The chain gun mode would be an actual bullet but at gets fired at a higher rate. The explosive mode would be slower but have the blast radius as described above (again, with only a certain % chance to kill). This would in my opinion help define the APC as a mobile turret more rather than a super fast hail mary bullet flinger

3. New terrain type, Swamp - We have water which makes you unable to shoot and move at a slower pace, and we have land which you book ass across. A kind of swamp/marsh type terrain that simply slows down the character would add a whole new dimension to map making. It would make areas that are hard to reach and easy to defend as targets move slower and are easier to shoot. Swamps would make maneuvers more important as perhaps charging a base head on through a swamp would be a poor choice.

4. Passenger Indicator - On the jeep, it was easy to tell how many people were on the jeep. On the APC and truck however, it's impossible. An icon like the squad member icon would easily do the job so that you can quickly tell how many people (and maybe in pvp, WHO is) are in your truck.

That's all for now,

ComJak

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This is planned for the final release. I doubt this will happen a lot before 1.0



We fortunately didn't test much the APC before release but ya, I discussed already the small blast radius with Pasik. Explosions have for now all the same blast radius (HG/LAW). It'd need a hack in the code to make different blast radii possible. I am pretty sure this will be done soon. Also the APC will be able to destroy crates with his cannon. The turret rotation on uneven terrain is a bug and will be fixed in the next version.
I had a few diamond kill streaks with the APC so far. You just need to keep the distance (driver needs to drive back if enemy is too close) and be sure not to get flanked. As soon as you are within a certain radius of the enemy with a LAW he will automatically switch to the LAW, so you have to keep that distance to avoid it. With humans on the other team it might be another story




Sounds good, and would match the next map idea pretty well, a vietnam themed map with a bunch of vegetation.
We also thought about a frozen lake (for map4) where vehicles and soldiers would go crazy on it



We roughly discussed that also. Something definitely needs to be done in that matter. Maybe a key that highlights the slots with the team color that are already taken.

Haha, i was thinking of vietnam when i thought up the idea of swamp land. hmmm great minds think alike

ComJak

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1. ^
2. I haven't played the current release yet, but I assume the cannon is either using an AP or HE round. An HE round would be pretty overpowered and kill everything, but an AP round would be more interesting while still retaining some 'area of effect' for infantry and its anti-armor capability, naturally. An AP round on contact with something could send out bits of shrapnel that quickly lose velocity/killing power, while still making sense. A coaxial machinegun would maybe make it too powerful?

On some vehicles there are hatches passengers can button out and fire, so it would gain some similarities to the jeep if passenger safety isn't a concern. On other vehicles (BMP3) there are tons of machineguns in the hull to shoot from, which would kinda make them mobile fortresses in this game XD

3. How about instead of this make it so that there's multiple water depths. If the water goes above the chest you start to swim, below the chest you move slowly but are able to shoot, below the waist you can move slightly quicker, and below the knee you can move almost jogging speed with a lot of noise. There's probably a way to easily calculate this, or even just make it so that the percentage of your body submerged effects your movement speed. This way you won't have to actually create swamps separately, just put down water and maybe make it kinda gross looking =p

You could also copy Tribes 2 in a sense and make it so different maps have different water viscosity and such, so you can have some maps where the water is some weird thick sludge stuff and some maps where it's practically thick air. If you were really satanic you would make it so certain weapons would be unusable for a while after being submerged in water.

4. A small icon over the vehicle would do, even if it's just little square pips. Or you could take the idea I just suggested in the other thread and have it so when you move the crosshair towards the center of the screen it displays the names of the players in the vehicle somewhere and what position they are in.

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Ozymandias, King of kings, God of Caves, Wizard.

I just thought of something that I feel like has been brought up before, but i didn't see it in the forums.

Player kill icons - most PVP games will show what weapon someone killed someone else with. It's just a little indicator that says like Player1 kills Player2 with a little sniper icon next to it or something. Would add a nice feel to the game I think.

ComJak

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I miss the days of actual death messages.

Player2 has suffered deceleration trauma
Player2 catches Player1's bomb between both teeth
Player1 pops Player2's head like a cheap balloon
Player2 explodes in a fit of ennui, que violin
Player1 sends Player2 into orbit
Player2 leaves a dent in Player1's bumper

etc.

But if you wanted to go with the more modern approach, most guns already have an icon displayed in the bottom left, it's just a matter of rotating and scaling it a bit and putting it between the two player names.

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Ozymandias, King of kings, God of Caves, Wizard.

Haha, I like that.

I think particularly humiliating death messages should play when a player gets run over by a vehicle: "player1 sends player2 into orbit" and stuff like that haha.

Given JackMayol's fun with the irc bot, he should definitely enjoy making kill messages.

ComJak

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I discussed this with pasik several months ago but good that you talk about it as he was like "ya, maybe sometime..."

Yup, I have no intention to keep the kill notifications as just plain white text forever

Comic sans with rainbow color?

Everybody loves comic sans (apparently), and everybody loves rainbows (apparently).

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Ozymandias, King of kings, God of Caves, Wizard.