Mars People wrote:
THIRD-PERSON
The third-person view mode can be used to make the game more cinematic. The mouse could be used to set where the character is pointing. W could be used to move forward (away from the camera), S could be used to go backward (towards the camera), A and D could be used to strafe. To compensate for the extended range of the sniper rifle, entities farther than the weapon's range would not be rendered.
BURST RIFLE
A burst rifle should be added to the game to make an even bigger selection of weapons. If a burst weapon just isn't available, at least give modders the ability to give weapons a burst ability.
DAMAGE FALLOFF
Damage falloff could be implemented to some guns, like the shotgun. It's had a high kill probability at close range, but it is unlikely to be lethal at longer ranges. Falloff can be calculated so that the probability falloff is constant, until a specified range.
SQUAD COMMAND: PICK UP WEAPON
Ability to order someone from your squad to pick up a weapon. Allows you to make the squad more versatile. Instead of a team filled with assault rifle-ers, you could order someone to pick up a sniper, a machine gun, etc.
DEAD BODIES DON'T APPEAR BEHIND BUILDINGS (and some other things)
Dead bodies shouldn't be outlined behind buildings and structures, because they're really just confusion. In addition to this, dead bodies shouldn't have any outline around them because it's hard to confirm whether or not something is dead or alive.
MODDING: SEMI-AUTOMATIC
Ability to set the weapon to semi-automatic. Currently, holding down the fire button will make the gun shoot as soon as the game permits it to.
WEAPON MODELS/SCRIPTS ARE SERVER-SIDE
Weapons should be server-side so that adding mods to the game (new weapons, etc.) wouldn't disable online playability. In addition, server owners can add some sort of theme to their game. They could have, for example, WWII weapons in their server ONLY or altered player skins.
ENABLING THE PICKUP OF THE ROCKET LAUNCHER IN NO-VEHICLE MODE
The rocket launcher still has some anti-personnel capabilities, why disable it in no-vehicle mode?
Thanks for a well-thought-out post Mars People! ComJak answered the questions very well anticipating what I would be answering, thanks for that ComJak, but I wanted to elaborate on some things.
3rd person mode, as people usually see 3rd person mode i.e. similar to GTA3->, wouldn't work for the reason ComJak said. Part of the development ideology is that as we keep the camera far away, we can use shortcuts on some of the choices regarding graphical appearance, and that's important to us as a 2-man development team. Actually, sometimes it feels ComJak is the third of us, I certainly wouldn't want to diminish ComJak's influence over the game and his excellent weapon models.
I do think there's some space to experiment with cameras in 3rd person space by retaining the far away camera but allowing rotation. I've seen a thing like this done in a few games, but generally I've not been very pleased how they do it -- it makes it feel it's not easy to pull off in a satisfying way. If you guys can think of games that do far-away camera + 3rd person rotating camera well, I'd be happy to see videos about it.
Burst rifles will very likely end up in the game as either firing modes or new weapons.
I'm not sure I'm reading the damage falloff remark right. It's a fact that damage falloff is supported by the game. Sniper is effective at far higher ranges than other weapons, shotgun and mp5 not so compared to other weapons. At least that's the idea. We've had to experiment with the parameters lately, as shotgun and mp5 were being way too ineffective in .. was it 0.75 or 0.76 and before?
The squad weapon choice is an interesting topic. For the most part, your squad will get itself killed in the next battle or so, so micromanaging individual soldiers in your squad to order them to pick a certain weapon item on ground sounds way too much work. To me, it would seem you'd like to be able to set preferences on weapons your squad should be holding, I don't know, maybe using some kind of percentage-based distribution, and if they have a setup that conflicts with your preferences, they'd try to fix it by picking up weapons on ground when possible. Any further ideas about that?
I've previously thought about this subject mostly regarding stealth, so that your squad would automatically try to prefer the suppressed MP5 if you would be holding one. That would make your squad able to shoot without causing an alert, in certain situations.
I haven't found dead bodies shown behind occlusion a problem, but it could be because I mostly tend to play with fairly low corpse cleanup setting. I take it it's possible to end up having the behinds-of-buildings crowded with dead people if you keep the setting high, which would make it an issue. I have a gut feeling I once had it set to that dead soldiers wouldn't render their "ghost", the part that shows behind obstacles, but it didn't feel satisfying to fight behind obstacles then as when you got someone killed there, they just disappeared from sight. Maybe just reducing the intensity of their color would be a good middle-road solution?
Mods are currently in a state that you yourself need to be aware that the server is having mods, and have the same mods installed if you want to play on the server properly, so it's a matter of convenience. As a beta product, and especially not being a platform but a game, I think RWR is entitled to not have all the convenience features implemented regarding mods. I have semi-seriously given a few thoughts about this matter some time ago, but mostly I seem to be stumbling on the data sharing problem. What if, as one of the weapon modders expressed himself recently, the server has 200mb worth of weapon mods? Surely distributing that to every connecting client will cause a dent in the server performance / bandwidth, not to mention on the client who's trying to connect.
Only sharing weapon specs would allow the client to play properly, but he still wouldn't see the right things. My thinking then goes that the client should be denied of connecting to such a server, and provided details on where to download and install the mod to be able to connect on the server. At this state, the only conformity check handled is the version and the map folder. This will become stricter later.
I don't understand the last point about disabling M72 LAW if vehicles are disabled, there shouldn't be such a connection at least. Note that you can only collect LAWs if you have rank 1+ if my memory serves right.