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Topic: UQM 'Frenzy' Fork: Melee ideas (Read 19720 times)
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HentaiZonga
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I figured I would seperate out the UQM fork discussion into seperate forums, to keep discussions about bugs from cluttering up discussions about ideas, and to keep melee-change discussions from cluttering up story idea discussions.
This thread is for discussing ideas about the new Melee system, which I am currently dubbing 'Frenzy'.
Here's a run-down on the current development status; comments are welcome:
1. Combat Area - the combat area is significantly (400%) larger than in the standard SC2 game. Additionally, the base resolution for the game has been increased from 320x240 to 640x480. I'm currently working on fixing bugs as a result of this; right now, all non-melee functions operate somewhat strangely because they assume a 320x240 resolution.
2. Ship speed - ships top-end speeds are significantly increased; overall, all ships have roughly the same top-end speed now. I had wanted true inertial acceleration, but beyond a certain speed, projectile collisions start behaving strangely, so I capped it out as high as I could.
To restore play balance, I'm adopting a concept from Death_999: acceleration will 'top out' after a certain amount of time, which will be proportional to the ship's original top-end speed. The formula will be simple: every 'N' seconds (N being proportional to the ship's original top-end speed) of continued thrust, the ship's current acceleration rate will drop by one increment, until it reaches 0. Every 'N' seconds of non-acceleration, the ship's acceleration rate raises by one increment, until it reaches its original value. So extremely fast ships, like the Pkunk, can thrust nearly indefinitely, while extremely slow ships, like the Vux, must wait for their engines to 'cool down' before re-thrusting.
It may make more sense to have these values be independant of the original maximum speed values, and have them reflect the 'character' of the ships - for example, have the Pkunk run out of thrust very quickly, making a nimble, agile fighter with no real 'staying power', while the Vux and the Chmrr plod inexhorably onwards.
Non-inertial ships, such as the Arilou and the Slylandro, have simply have their speeds increased to 2.5x their original
3. Weapon ranges - all weapon ranges have been significantly increased; I'm going on a factor of 2.5 to 3, roughly. Additionally, tracking weapons now accelerate smoothly in a manner identical to ships; they accelerate much more quickly when pointed at their target than when turning. Laser weapons now scale down based on range; the Chmrr, for example, do as much as 6 damage per hit at point-blank range, but only 1 damage per hit at the edge of range. This is SIGNIFICANTLY more damage than they originally did, so I've added a 'randomization factor' to try to balance it out, until I get critical damage effects working.
4. Weapon damage - Weapon damage is going to be completely reworked, to reflect the new damage system. Currently, damage is unchanged, with the following exceptions:
A) Human - I'm working on making the human missile have a proximity detonator and a large blast radius, to reflect the fact that it's really a nuke, and to try to mitigate the fact that at these speeds, the tracking system can't hit for shit. Ideally, it'll be a scaled-down version of the Shofixti self-destruct system - which means it will be suicidal to fire the missile at close range.
B) Chmrr - The laser damage effects have resulted in the Chmrr dealing massive amounts of damage with their primary weapon; I'm attempting to mitigate this by having the damage rate pulse, and by randomizing them. 'Pulsing' means the laser damage depends on the intensity of the beam - note that when you fire the Chmrr's laser, it's dim, then it gets bright, then it gets dim again. The brighter it is, the more damage it's doing. 'Randomizing' means that once the damage is computed, the actual damage is randomly reduced, on average down to 25% of the maximum.
C) Vux - The Vux laser now does up to 4x its normal damage at point-blank range, which scales back to its original damage at the last 50% of its range.
5. Gravity - the planet gravity well has been increased out to 500% its original range, since there's so much more space now. I'm working on scaling up the planet itself to be about 5x to 10x its original size, and having an area of atmosphere around the planet which scales back top-end speed.
6. Collisions - collisions with asteroids and other ships should do a point or two of damage at high speeds. Right now I'm checking this, but there's a crash bug that occurs if I actually try to set it. I'll look into this.
7. Damage model -
Ideally, different types of weapons should do damage differently, and different ships should take damage differently. Here's my current plan for the damage model:
A) All damage will first come off of Armor. A ship will have between 1 and 100 points of armor (for example, the Chmrr and Ur-Quan will have values in the high 80's; the Arilou and Supox will have values in the low 10's). Each point of armor represents a 1% chance that a given point of damage won't get through. Armor degrades by 1 point each time it fails to block a point of damage.
B) Any damage that penetrates armor will immediately hit a critical system. Each ship will have a given weight matrix for each system, which determines which system gets damaged by a given attack from a given direction (front, left, right, back).
For example, the human ship would look something like this:
Front:
Crew - 30%
Weapon - 30%
Turn - 10%
Special - 15%
LSS - 5%
Left:
Crew - 10%
Turn - 25%
Thrust - 10%
Special - 5%
Back:
Crew - 15%
Thrust - 30%
Battery - 20%
Turn - 10%
Special - 25%
'Crew' means that a crewmember dies. 'Thrust' means the ship's acceleration drops by 1. 'Turn' means the ship's maximum turn rate drops by 1. 'Battery' means the ship's recharge rate drops by 1. 'Special' means the ship's special weapon stops working. 'Weapon' means the ship's primary weapon stops working. Each 'LSS' hit means that one crewmember starts dying per second.
C) So long as there is at least one crewmember alive, the ship is still considered 'alive'. If there are more than 1 crewmen aboard, each additional crewman has a 1% chance of repairing a single point of critical system damage per turn. (obviously, crew can't repair crew damage). So the more crew you have, the faster critical damage repairs.
A special note about this is the Mycon - since they are purely organic, and can regenerate crew, I will probably have two points of critical damage repair themselves automatically each time their crew regeneration power is activated, and double their crew's repair ability.
Comments? Ideas? Anything else?
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Haplo
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actually, that sounds pretty cool
is there any plan for a module system for sc2 someday (mods like if fps games ie quake)
or just a separate build
either way
sounds interesting
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Precursors=Yeti
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Yeah we don't want to go to realistic.
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Actually, the planet in SC3 was tiny and had a ridiculously sharp gravity well. This increases the size of the planet and smooths out its gravity well -- making it act NICER not MEANER.
Also,
"It may make more sense to have [overheating] be independant of the original maximum speed values, and have them reflect the 'character' of the ships - for example, have the Pkunk run out of thrust very quickly, making a nimble, agile fighter with no real 'staying power', while the Vux and the Chmrr plod inexhorably onwards."
This is what I originally intended. Remember, I suggested (in different words) that since we were losing an old crucial ship balance independent variable -- top speed -- we needed to add a new crucial ship balance independent variable.
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HentaiZonga
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I love YaBB 1G - SP1!
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*nods*
Well, I haven't implemented thruster overheating yet, or armor or criticals, but here's the latest version:
http://www.wherethesundontshine.net/uqm_frenzy2.zip
Note that it also installs a new directory under contents, called 'human2', as well as a 'frenzy.ndx' and 'human2.shp' - these are for new graphics (specifically, a gigantic nuclear explosion for when your missiles detonate).
Have fun, and please provide any useful feedback you can think of.
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Sage
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When I ran uqm2.exe the first time around, I was unable to use controller input. Considering I'm using Striker's CVS build and uqm2 was (presumably) built off of the 0.2 source, this isn't surprising. However with this newest mod it seems you've updated the source to the latest, because I did not have to worry about changing to my old keys.cfg.
If you're having problems, I suggest you update all of UQM to Striker's build and see if you're able to run this fork afterwards.
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« Last Edit: August 22, 2003, 03:51:11 pm by sageallen »
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Anyway, back to MELEE ideas...
I think that with the new longer ranges the tactic of slipping between fire arcs will be a bit more prominent. This is an especially big change for the Yehat... before, if you turned, the arcs would cross about 1/3 of the way up the stream of fire, leaving very little room between them at full range. Now, however, full range extends much further, so there is plenty of room between them at full range. You can fit a dreadnaught in there, broadside...
I am not sure what solution can be applied -- perhaps with the double-length ranges it is fair to double the number of allowed angles (or at least increase it by some amount)... unless the AI counts on the particular number of angles...
Alternately, more weapons could be subject to the Zoq-Fot spray effect, but less so.
Lastly, do not feed the troll.
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« Last Edit: August 22, 2003, 07:51:25 pm by Death_999 »
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Chrispy
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i dont htink u should mess with the crew instead of armor. that would completely mess up a bunch of ships
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HentaiZonga
Zebranky food
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I love YaBB 1G - SP1!
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Anyway, back to MELEE ideas...
I think that with the new longer ranges the tactic of slipping between fire arcs will be a bit more prominent. This is an especially big change for the Yehat... before, if you turned, the arcs would cross about 1/3 of the way up the stream of fire, leaving very little room between them at full range. Now, however, full range extends much further, so there is plenty of room between them at full range. You can fit a dreadnaught in there, broadside...
Yep. I'm working on increasing the number of rotational increments from 16 to 64 to compensate. I anticipate being finished with this by the weekend.
I am not sure what solution can be applied -- perhaps with the double-length ranges it is fair to double the number of allowed angles (or at least increase it by some amount)... unless the AI counts on the particular number of angles...
Luckily, the AI doesn't care; it just uses whatever the FULL_CIRCLE constant tells it to. The trick is keeping the frames synched to the angles - if there's 16 frames, but 64 angles, I need to remember to divide by 4 whenever I'm talking about rotation frames, but NOT when talking about animation frames. Annoying, but certainly doable.
Alternately, more weapons could be subject to the Zoq-Fot spray effect, but less so.
I've considered that, but I'd really rather not do that, especially for the laser-based weapons.
Lastly, do not feed the troll.
Well-noted. Is there any way to put certain people on 'ignore'?
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Deep Jiffa Owns j00!
