Duality (or other future game) wants
Michael M. Eilers
In article <339971...@shore.net>, qua...@shore.net wrote:
> besides, it would screw with people making maps. ever played a map where
> you need to make a jump? need to run past a bunch of crushing platforms?
> lots of liquids? all of these are speed and weight related, make these
> factors adjustable and you can no longer make something chalenging.
this is definitely true--I'm tring to make a physics model with a faster
running speed because I'm playing lots of Quake, and I've jsut gotten used
to moving that fast. I've had to increase the vertical velocity and
several other things to avoid making the game too easy by being able to
"jump" every crevasse in sight. Just changing the player's speed makes
every map a pretty different place, compared to standard gameplay.
Now having characters that you could change the *appearance* of would be
cool, to be sure... Dark Vengeance is going to have some of this, along
with true "character" attributes that accumulate over time (not just
picked from a chart or selected from a base number of points.)
michael
-------
I'm test-driving MindSpring's server-side SPAM filter. Do your worst, evil fiends!
Michael M. Eilers * Fearful Symmetry Designs
Pfhorrest
I hope Duality or whatever else in the future (prefably Duaity) has some
sort of editable players, like Weekend Warrior's ability to put your face
on your guy taken a step further. I think that (in net games at least) the
entire player can be edited for each player. Have the appearance and voice
(scream, wail, etc) be stored in a special "player" file, along with
height, weight, strength, speed, endurance, etc (all of which must be
balanced between a certain # of 'points'. anyone play Spectre? like that).
Then this information would be sent at the begining of a net game to
everyone who has the option turned on. The gatherer could also turn it off
in his/her setup.
cool, eh?
-p4st
Forrest Cameranesi
pfho...@aol.com
http://users.aol.com/pfhorrest/
Project More Coordinator
(c) 1997 The Big Giant Head, Ultd
Quartz
> I hope Duality or whatever else in the future (prefably Duaity) has some
> sort of editable players, like Weekend Warrior's ability to put your face
> on your guy taken a step further. I think that (in net games at least) the
> entire player can be edited for each player. Have the appearance and voice
> (scream, wail, etc) be stored in a special "player" file, along with
> height, weight, strength, speed, endurance, etc (all of which must be
> balanced between a certain # of 'points'. anyone play Spectre? like that).
> Then this information would be sent at the begining of a net game to
> everyone who has the option turned on. The gatherer could also turn it off
> in his/her setup.
eh. spectre can get away with this by being so primitive. can you
imagine what would happen in a net game? you'd have people putting all
the points into 'speed' and droping everything else. they'd be
impossible to hit and look ridiculous when moving (i.e. mr doom man).
besides, it would screw with people making maps. ever played a map where
you need to make a jump? need to run past a bunch of crushing platforms?
lots of liquids? all of these are speed and weight related, make these
factors adjustable and you can no longer make something chalenging.
--
Quartz
"never argue with a fool, others may
not be able to tell the difference"
"a closed mouth gathers no foot"
http://www.shore.net/~quartz/main.html
http://www.pullmyfinger.com/quartz/Novelty.html
Finn Smith
The thing that I would like to see most in a game would be some sort of
realism connected with where and how monsters and players are attacked.
What I mean by this: If I take my shot gun, shove it up to someone's head
and pull the trigger, their head should be blown off and they should be
dead. They shouldn't just be pushed back a little and be able to take some
more punishment. Can you imagine how cool this would be if taken to its
full capability? Monsters that attack you with teeth or claws could simply
have their legs shot out from under them. Then you could kill them at your
leisure. Depending on how accurate you were, you could either take someone
out with one shot or twenty. It would add a whole new element of skill and
strategy to the game. How this would work for netplay I am not sure, but
for single player it would be great.
Finn
--
Finn Smith Check out my 3D Mac Games Page:
fi...@gwi.net http://www.gwi.net/~finn/games.html
Pfhorrest
<<besides, it would screw with people making maps. ever played a map where
you need to make a jump? need to run past a bunch of crushing platforms?
lots of liquids? all of these are speed and weight related, make these
factors adjustable and you can no longer make something chalenging.>>
well, like i said, all of these factors would have to be balanced. making
your player faster could make him smaller or weaker, for example. So you
would be more proficient in one area and less in another, and would have
to find your own perfect balance.
Svywranth
>> Monsters that attack you with teeth or claws could simply have their
legs shot out from under them.<<
I can imagine it... a new game. "Blow Greg's Leg Off!" HA! and it could
lead to VERY interesting Tag variants..... One Legged Races.... heh.... oh
man...
>;^)
soon enough.
-/ Svywranth \-
Master of the Hordes, The Masked Man in Silver,
the Dark Propfh't of Inpfhinite Doom and The
Little Keyboard Player That Could
-\ Svyw...@aol.com /-
Pfhorrest
oh, and another cool thing to have would be if they use a planet-like
model (like I suggested somewhere earlier) then have a random landscape
generator in there, so you have hills and mountains and whathaveyou
instead of just a perfectly round sphere.
If you did everything there is to do, and then you did it again, you'd get
pretty bored after a while.
Pfhorrest
<<Is this to be a planet that one's on or one that's viewed from a
distance?
If the former, then, unless it's *very* small (like one of Mars's
moons), it can be modeled as a flat surface without too much inaccuracy.
If the latter, then one may be able to get away with doing the
rendering in advance, as can be seen in the M2 landscape files.
However, if one wants something like an orbiting moon that changes
phase over time, one might also want to put in the changing position of
the local sun. The moon(s) would be 3D models that would be rendered
every so often as time goes by. And the same would be true of the
surrounding landscape, which could be done in Bryce fashion :-)
True, this rendering would be rather time-consuming, but one
would not have to re-render every frame, so one could get away with
putting the re-rendering into a background task that could take several
seconds to finish. If one wants an updated landscape every minute, then
that would be plenty of time for a high-quality rendering.>>
since evidently you missed my other post about the planet, i'll explain:
the planet i mean is the one you're on (if you're on one). the reason to
have a real spherical planet would be so you don't have Marathon's problem
of the ground always looking like it's below you...you could look out an
open window, chuck a grenade, and watch it explode on a hill outside. so
in this case having hills and curves and whatnot would be nice. so it
doesn't look like you're a flea on a bowling ball.
Loren Petrich
In article <19970609070...@ladder02.news.aol.com>,
Pfhorrest <pfho...@aol.com> wrote:
>since evidently you missed my other post about the planet, i'll explain:
>the planet i mean is the one you're on (if you're on one). the reason to
>have a real spherical planet would be so you don't have Marathon's problem
>of the ground always looking like it's below you...you could look out an
>open window, chuck a grenade, and watch it explode on a hill outside. so
>in this case having hills and curves and whatnot would be nice. so it
>doesn't look like you're a flea on a bowling ball.
I still don't see what you are worried about, because a
(relatively) small enough patch of a sphere will be very close to flat.
If you have in mind doing terrain, the Marathon engine already
does that, to an extent. I've experienced some maps with Marathon-style
terraced terrain -- and even trees (example: Marathon Earth). Tree trunks
you do like a pillar, but with a bark texture for walls; that can do a
good job of hiding the polygonal nature of the trunk. Tree leaves and
bushes you do with a mass-of-leaves wall texture; this does not hide the
polygonal nature so well, and the result sometimes has a rather topiary
appearance, like a bush trimmed to a blocky shape (example: Morgana's
Revenge).
Do you have in mind making the terrain look like it stretches out
to the horizon? If that's the case, then I agree that the Marathon engine
is rather deficient there.
--
Loren Petrich Happiness is a fast Macintosh
pet...@netcom.com And a fast train
My home page: http://www.webcom.com/petrich/home.html
Mirrored at: ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/pe/petrich/home.html
Loren Petrich
>the local sun.>>
>this would also be nice. an actual day length, and real time (not refering
>to rendering, refering to the time on your watch time). it can get dark
>out if you play to late. this could be done by (now that we know Duality
>has real-time lighting) having a light source that moves slowly across the
>'sky' in an arc, accurately following the curve of the 'planet' you're on.
That would support some interesting game scenarios, such as
completing some task before it gets too dark -- or too light.
>it would also be cool if you were in a space station (for example) to be
>able to look outside and see the local planets, slowly moving around their
>sun. the planets would just be spheres orbiting around a light source, and
>have them far enough that their relitive position doesn't change much.
Such planets would be rather difficult to see, except if the
station was orbiting one of them, or one of its moons; however, a space
station's primary might certainly be interesting to render. And its
rendering could be done in background-task fashion, since it would not
have to be updated with every frame.
Chrispy Nacho
In article <19970609070...@ladder02.news.aol.com>,
pfho...@aol.com (Pfhorrest) wrote:
> <<one might also want to put in the changing position of
> the local sun.>>
>
> it would also be cool if you were in a space station (for example) to be
> able to look outside and see the local planets, slowly moving around their
> sun. the planets would just be spheres orbiting around a light source, and
> have them far enough that their relitive position doesn't change much.
>
> -p4st
Yeah or if you're on a ship traveling FAST (like light?) then that would
be spiff-a-rific , like on Star Trek TNG when C'apn Picard looks out his
windows and you see the stars moving slowly (impulse) or quickly (warp) by
the window. Hey this is getting like that part in "Marathon Home Videos"
where they make the joke about the space texture being a real starfieldand
rotating in real time and such. Well maybe it's not a joke any more!
One thing I would like to see in a future game would be the ability to
talk to the other characters in the game. You'd just walk up to someone
(like a BOB) and press 'TAB' and out comes a "They're everywhere!" Or in a
more in volved game you could talk (or be talked at) by some character.
Like a private meeting with Blake from M2. I think it would give a nice
little bit of variety to a game. Also the game would not stop or even
switch to a close-up view of the conversationist, but just the audio from
the charater while you're still in the ingine.
-Cool Beans man,
-Chrispy Nacho
--
"Whoa! We totaly trashed the alien spaceship!"
-Sniz
Quartz
a day legnth would'n be too hard. I'm experimenting with making a whole
map out of lights that sloooooooowly fade in intensity. make the peroid
9999 or there abouts
Quartz
> switch between weapons, etc.
well, there are monsters that use 2 weapons, I can thing of juggies and
troopes off the top of my head.
Loren Petrich
In article <5ni008$as7$1...@nw003.infi.net>,
Shokolada <choc...@wamsat.com> wrote:
>Is Marathon: Earth a finished scenario, a demo, or just a
>set of shapes and/or textures I can download?
It's 3 levels so far. See for yourself a terraced landscape,
terraced water waves that one can walk on, and polygonal tree trunks.
Ken Kaji
In article <19970607014...@ladder02.news.aol.com>,
pfho...@aol.com (Pfhorrest) wrote:
>I think that (in net games at least) the
>entire player can be edited for each player. Have the appearance and voice
>(scream, wail, etc) be stored in a special "player" file,
That would be great. How would Duality, or whatever, handle replays,
though? Maybe the game could save all the sounds and things in the replay
file. Or there could be an option to just use the standard player
appearances in replays. Or maybe it could just save the individual player
prefs in seperate files. Or maybe...
Speaking of replays, will Duality even feature replays? What will we do if
it doesn't? Be shocked?
>height, weight, strength, speed, endurance, etc (all of which must be
>balanced between a certain # of 'points'. anyone play Spectre? like that).
Interesting. But I agree with, uh, whoever-it-was who disagreed. I think
they said something about how you could make yourself look ridiculous
running, etc. And would it even fit with the game plot?
Are you able to choose your own physical characteristics? Why should you be
able to do the same in a game like Duality? IMHO, why not just practice
your skill at using the basic body the game gives you? After all, the more
you play, the better you get at playing, like exercising.
Thanks,
- Ken
--
:.."Gee, Bill Gates must be the third antichrist!"
:.."Is it in the Bible?"
:: - Chris, 1996
* 89X! *
Frost
In article <19970609041...@ladder02.news.aol.com> Pfhorrest,
pfho...@aol.com writes:
>another thing I'd like to see is non-player characters that act like
>players. i.e. they run out of ammo, need to pick up clips, reload, can
>switch between weapons, etc.
>
>I'd also like to actually SEE weapons being picked up and switched, not
>just suddenly be there.
>For example, a player runs over a weapon:
>1) the player would see his P.O.V glance downward for a second and
>his hands would grab the weapon off the ground and raise it into position.
>this would be a very quick, automatic action.
>2) the others (in a net game) would see the person lean down and his
>arms drop towards the ground, picking up the weapon and readying it.
>
>as for switching weapons, if the player-character has an MCU like in
>Marathon (Mass-Compression Unit. it's like a Pattern Buffer for objects)
>then he would lower his weapon into his MCU receptor and it would
>'teleport' out, just as another 'teleports' into his hands.
>
>for something without an MCU, you'd probably have to have the weapon put
>down each time, or just holstered somewhere. big things like Spankers
>can't be holstered, so they'd be put down. but smaller things (pistols,
>etc) could be holstered, and bigger guns like ARs could be slung over the
>shoulder. I'd really like to have a weight limit like Pathways, where you
>can only carry so much, and everything has to be put somewhere. of course,
>you'd have to be able to drop things then too. I miss some of these old
>RPG-style things from Pathways. They were cool.
Agreed completely. Being able to carry 700 missiles at a time is totally
unreal. :) However, I don't like the idea of an MCU... I'd rather have a
Jjaro manufactured Red Velvet 4D Bag. ;) I miss the RPG-style part of
pathways as well. I enjoyed being able to sort my stuff in various
containers, etc. It serves no purpose, but so what? It's fun, and cool.
Escpecially when you get to finish the game rich with gold ingots. ;)
+--------------------------+------------------------+
| Nikolas "Frost" Manak / Fro...@Flash.net |
+------------------------+--------------------------+
|Therm...@GeoCities.com|VidM...@Cyber-Wizard.com|
+--------------------+---+--------------------------+
|Editor-In-Chief |CEO and Founder |
|Marathon Magazine |JetStream Software Corporation|
+--------------------+------------------------------+
\ Genius is %1 inspiration, %99 perspiration /
\ - Thomas Edison /
*---------------------------------------------*
Svywranth
>>where (besides the great plains) on Earth do you know that you can
walk out side and everything is perfectly flat (save for grass & rocks and
whatnot)? Nowhere that I can think of, there's always hills somewhere in
view.<<
Well, in between Spokane and Seattle in Washington, it's pretty flat. I
mean, as flat as most land can get. It still has the slightly rolling
small little hills that are everytwhere. But it still is flat.
:^)
-Svywranth-
Master if the Hordes, Hell's Serendipity,
and Project Cooridinator of Magus Arcanum
-Svw...@aol.com-
JayT
> a day legnth would'n be too hard. I'm experimenting with making a whole
> map out of lights that sloooooooowly fade in intensity. make the peroid
> 9999 or there abouts
>
> --
> Quartz
>
> "never argue with a fool, others may
> not be able to tell the difference"
>
> "a closed mouth gathers no foot"
>
>
> http://www.shore.net/~quartz/main.html
> http://www.pullmyfinger.com/quartz/Novelty.html·
What would you do about the landscapes though?
JayT @ mr...@dircon.co.uk
*************************************
Quartz
JayT wrote:
>
> In article <339D60...@shore.net>, Quartz <qua...@shore.net> wrote:
>
> > a day legnth would'n be too hard. I'm experimenting with making a whole
> > map out of lights that sloooooooowly fade in intensity. make the peroid
> > 9999 or there abouts
> >
> > --
> > Quartz
> What would you do about the landscapes though?
make a generic one. in my experiments, I'm just using a flat grey as the
landscape (without actualy making it landscape) the no-detail grey is
disconcerting enough to fool the eye into thinking it's far away.
Face
Chrispy Nacho wrote:
>
> One thing I would like to see in a future game would be the ability
> to talk to the other characters in the game. You'd just walk up to
> someone (like a BOB) and press 'TAB' and out comes a "They're
> everywhere!" Or in a more in volved game you could talk (or be
> talked at) by some character. Like a private meeting with Blake
> from M2. I think it would give a nice little bit of variety to a
> game. Also the game would not stop or even switch to a close-up view
> of the conversationist, but just the audio from the charater while
> you're still in the ingine.
Or, if you want to save several gig, you could just put the dialogue in
as text. It couyld work kind oif like the SCUMM (Monkey island/Indiana
Jones FOA) story system. You could have a menu of dialogue options and
click on one to say it.
--
Face (Dan Rudolph) <rudolph...@mcleod.net>
The Dark Avenger of Netiquette
President, Watcher Comics <ftp://ftp.eyrie.org/pub/racc/watcher/>
http://206.168.216.158/Marathon/pmarchive/main.html
Chrispy Nacho
In article <19970610215...@ladder02.news.aol.com>,
svyw...@aol.com (Svywranth) wrote:
SNIP WEIRD 'BOUT SVY vs. FANTASY BOOK
> anyway.... As far as ON TOPIC goes.... well, talking to people in
> real-time would be pretty cool. It would make it more realistic and more
> like an RPG. ::perish the thought. :^)::
>
> Now, if there could be a game that came somewhere in between the realism
> and freedom of real-time movement of Marthon and the freedom of action
> (you can do anything, and I mean anything, in that) in AD&D, then, that
> would kick.
>
>
> -Svywranth-
I just finished playing the demo of Damage Inc. (one of those Marathon
clones) I liked it. The only reason was that there was praticaly a real
interaction between the guys on your side. yuo could command them to go in
a certain derection, seek -n- destroy, or follow you around, and other
things too. But what was really cool was that they talked to you, not
randomly but what they said REALLY applied to what was going on.
-Cool Beans Man,
-Chrispy Nacho
--
"Sometimes you just need to eat a mystery meat burrito at two in the morning, just like sometimes you simply need to travel to Philadelphia" -webm...@bungie.com on Taco Bell
Chrispy Nacho
In article <5nkgjf$qj9$1...@nw003.infi.net>, Shokolada <choc...@wamsat.com> wrote:
> In article <petrichE...@netcom.com> Loren Petrich,
> pet...@netcom.com writes:
>
> >In article <5ni008$as7$1...@nw003.infi.net>,
> >Shokolada <choc...@wamsat.com> wrote:
> >
> >>Is Marathon: Earth a finished scenario, a demo, or just a
> >>set of shapes and/or textures I can download?
> >
> > It's 3 levels so far. See for yourself a terraced landscape,
> >terraced water waves that one can walk on, and polygonal tree trunks.
>
> Thank you for the info! I'm retrieving that, and the
> Nomad S'pht patch, which looks pretty cool to me.
>
> As far as the 'more diginfied' BoBs... there is a patch
> called BaB's Revenge, which isn't bad at all... fully
> dressed ladies (tank tops and tight pants) carrying
> pistols and wearing the BoB cyborg eye. I've enjoyed it
> enough that I usually activate it for game which don't
> require a separate shapes file... it was fun to play
> Durandal and Infinity with it (in no small part because
> the creator didn't have a voice actress and used samples
> from "Robotech: Macross"!)
>
> Oh, yes... another nice touch... the assimilated BaBs have
> yellow lipstick. This makes playing "God Will Sort the
> Dead" much easier for those few of us who try not to shoot
> the unassimilated ones. :)
>
> Shokolada, the Thread-Killer
>
> choc...@wamsat.com
Hey But I thought That was the whole point of the level. I mean, it IS
named God Will Sort the Dead! Which implies that it shouldn't matter who
you kill, God will sort'em out, right?
-Cool Beans,
Shokolada
In article <christo-1306...@209.30.89.83> Chrispy
Nacho, chr...@flash.net writes:
>Hey But I thought That was the whole point of the level. I mean, it IS
>named God Will Sort the Dead! Which implies that it shouldn't matter who
>you kill, God will sort'em out, right?
>
>-Cool Beans,
>-Chrispy Nacho
True enough, but as a long-time role player, I have to
assume a UESC Marine wold be a little uncomfortable with
slaying the citizens he (supposedly) swore an oath to
defend. Therefore, when I'm truly immersed in the
experience, killing 'my' BoBs bothers me.
Other times, I just mow 'em down like everyone else. :)
Shokolada
Svywranth
>>You could have a menu of dialogue options and
click on one to say it.<<
I think that's too limited. I'd rather have something along the lines of
Pathway's conversation system. But those can be a bit confusing at
times...
-Svywranth-
Master of the Hordes, Hell's Serendipity,
The Masked Silver Streak with a Very Big Gun,
Svywranth
>>You consider the Cascade mountains 'pretty flat'...?<<
No, past that. After Moses Lake, I think. more like the Mideastern
washington.
Oh yeah, and Cyan's based here. :^)
Welcom to Spokane, it's very boring here.....
Kirill
In article <19970609060...@ladder02.news.aol.com>,
svyw...@aol.com (Svywranth) wrote:
[snip]
I.E. spending one point on speed would not make much of a
> difference at all, and only after getting up into spending about 10 would
> make a noticeable difference. (and even then....)
And eventually, you keep needing more and more to make that difference...
There is nothing cool about spending money, even if only hypothetical
"points", on drugs.
ObsidianSW
Hey guys, please put down EVERYTHING you want in a future 3D game. As a
developer of games I really need to hear what you want. What we have
cooking should satisfy a lot of people. It's really a chimera. All
different types of genres.
This thread is very important. Please write about the most detailed
feature you may want in a game. I'll try my absolute best to incorperate
all of your ideas. After all, our next title is dedicated to AGM regulars
and the BBE.
-Wiggy
Benjamin Wigler
CEO/Vice Presidient of Public Relations
Obsidian Software|Design Studios
*Check out the Rameses Webpage*
*http://users.aol.com/obsidianSW/rameses*
Svywranth
>>Please write about the most detailed
feature you may want in a game.<<
A non-linear story, in which several things may happen, with several
endings, mulitple paths through, etc..... so the game would be fun to play
through several times instead of just once.
--> Svywranth <--
The Masked Man in Silver with a Very Big Gun
---> Svwr...@aol.com <---
Kirill
In article <33A2A3...@shore.net>, qua...@shore.net wrote:
> []
>
>
> If you come across a SPNKR and hit tab, you pick it
> > up and drop the AR. Any SPNKR ammo you pick up will replace the AR ammo.
> > If you switch to magnum, your drop the SPNKR
>
> !
>
> and can only pick up magnum
> > ammo. You can then also pick up another magnum which you must then drop if
> > you pick up another weapon. This would be more realistic (realistic, but
> > not neccessarily better). It may even be cool in net games on those
> > ammo-rich levels such as Morphine.
>
> I'd like to think that with this system, you'd not drop the spnkr.
> considering that you already have a magnum on you, can't you just sling
> the varible weapon over your shoulder?
It's a SPNKR-XP surface to surface missle launcher we're talking about,
not an electric guitar. Besides, it will complicate the mechanism. And you
can always come back to pick it up (unless someone else finds it first).
It's time to limit the player's absurdly large load bearing capacity (and
I speak for all first person perspective games).
Bryan E Holland-Minkley
Excerpts from netnews.alt.games.marathon: 14-Jun-97 Re: Duality (or
other futur.. by Svyw...@aol.com
> >>Please write about the most detailed
> feature you may want in a game.<<
>
> A non-linear story, in which several things may happen, with several
> endings, mulitple paths through, etc..... so the game would be fun to play
> through several times instead of just once.
This would be great. One way to make it really cool would be to
have a sort of AI thar determines what path you take, as compared to the
player deciding. Some of the choices could be the player's. However,
the AI could decide what tactic the opposition uses against the player.
For example, if the player is good at dispatching swarms of lesser
enemies, but is less good at attacking a handful of great enemies, then
the AI would send mostly greater enemies. And in the opposite
situation, the AI would swamp the player in minor players. These aren't
very good example, but I hope you get what I'm saying. These
calculations about what happens could take place in an off-time, like
during an equivalent of the Marathon chapter screens. It could be based
on such simple perameters as number of enemies killed, time taken on
level, areas seen, or such.
Of course, if you allow outside code, like Quake, then pretty mush
any change is possible, though including it in the code would be more
efficient.
-Bryan Holland-Minkley
be...@andrew.cmu.edu
Frost
In article <19970614132...@ladder02.news.aol.com> ObsidianSW,
obsid...@aol.com writes:
>Hey guys, please put down EVERYTHING you want in a future 3D game. As a
>developer of games I really need to hear what you want. What we have
>cooking should satisfy a lot of people. It's really a chimera. All
>different types of genres.
>
>This thread is very important. Please write about the most detailed
>feature you may want in a game. I'll try my absolute best to incorperate
>all of your ideas. After all, our next title is dedicated to AGM regulars
>and the BBE.
Sure thing. I'm so full of ideas I can never list them all at one time.
;) I'll number the list so you don't get lost.
1. A True 3D Engine
2. Pathways style interface, where you can interact with each and every
item in the game
3. Weight limits
4. A sort of 4D bag like PID (Note: This is a must for me because I pick
up everything;)
5. Modern AND futuristic weapons. i.e. A Colt .45, M9 Beretta, M-16A2,
M-79 GL, MP-5N SMG, M-81A1, MA-75C, etc.
6. Damage Inc. style conversation, and commanding of men. And a slight
few alterations to this: You don't have a specific set of men, you can
like just run across some BOBs or whatever, and tell them to start
following you.
7. Ask me for gun sounds/pictures for M-16A2, M-82A1, and Colt .45 :)
8. Allow editing via ResEdit like Bungie did with M1, not locked up with
no resources like M2 and MÉ.
9. Jumping & ducking, and really low ducking so you can crawl on your
stomach
10. Jetpacks
11. Remote controlled mines
12. Destroyable walls, doors, and scenery
13. If you REALLY want to spice your game up, put in vehicles like in
Zone Raiders or preferably HAVOC, so you can like be running down a road,
shoot a guy inside a car, then drive the car. Or maybe even motorcyles...
:)
14. More when I think of them.
Face
How about cameras and mirrors? You could spy on people in another part
of the level.
The ability to have multiple kinds of players. This would be sort of
like character classes in an RPG, but not exactly. Some kinds would be
shorter, some would start with different things, some would run faster..
etc.
Ray-based lighting. This would allow for shadows, not to mention make
lighting easier to set up realistically.
Colored lights. Just for atmosphere.
Both male and female charcters for mutiplayer. This should probably go
with character classes.
ObsidianSW
well you're going to be in for a REAL treat. I'll tell you what I'm doing
so far. Everyone else, please tell me what you'd like:
1) ReDam (real-damage) system. If your player takes a magnum to a guy's
head he's dead in one shot and missing most of his head. If the player
takes a hit in the arm or stomach, he grabs his wound but keeps going. A
leg wound and he starts limping leaving a blood trail.
2) Full interactivity. Put a chair up to the door, and your enemy can't
get to you. That is until he breaks through the door. And when he does
that, grab the chair and smash it on his head.
3) 3rd person/1st person gaming POVs.
4) A True 3D engine that kills Unreals (hopefully. We've got 3 guys on
that now).
5) Commanding of troops.
6) Scary as hell. Since you don't have much ammo at all for most of the
game and go up against 2 or 3 enemies at a time you have to really use
strategy. The result will be something as scary as Resident Evil.
7) An interactive communication system carried out in "cut-scenes" or in
real time like Monkey Island, Full Throttle etc.. There will be about 5
relatively long rendered movies that also help the story progress.
8) A very cool and creepy story.
9) Some really wicked baddies.
10) A neo-gothic feel remeniscent of Alien3 and Blade Runner. Very creepy.
11) Hover car chases, hovercycle combat.
12) Very cool weapons. Remote explosives included. :-)
13) Weight limits.
14) Stealing clothes that make you look like guards so you can infiltrate
the death camp you are in. Also contruction signs so that you can block
certain areas from guards who don't want to go to a construction zone. :-)
What do ya'll think?
assimilated bob
blue valkyrie needs food, badly.
red warrior is about to die.
green elf is about to die.
blue valkyrie needs food, badly.
gauntlet anyone?
j
Devon
In article <kirill-1406...@news.lava.net>, kir...@lava.net
(Kirill) wrote:
> It's a SPNKR-XP surface to surface missle launcher we're talking about,
> not an electric guitar. Besides, it will complicate the mechanism. And you
> can always come back to pick it up (unless someone else finds it first).
> It's time to limit the player's absurdly large load bearing capacity (and
> I speak for all first person perspective games).
> http://www.lava.net/~kirill/
hey! what happened to the
"Screw the "it's not realistic to have music blasting out of nowhere as
you explore a ship/planet" deal."
attitude?
devo n
Loren Petrich
In article <33A382...@mcleod.net>, Face <rudolph...@mcleod.net> wrote:
>How about cameras and mirrors? You could spy on people in another part
>of the level.
>The ability to have multiple kinds of players. This would be sort of
>like character classes in an RPG, but not exactly. Some kinds would be
>shorter, some would start with different things, some would run faster..
>etc.
So one could choose between (say) a slow and tough character and
a fast and vulnerable one.
>Ray-based lighting. This would allow for shadows, not to mention make
>lighting easier to set up realistically.
Nice in theory, but in practice, it would require a heck of a lot
of computing. For Quake, one can precalculate lighting maps that contain
just such info, but it takes something like an hour on an Alpha
workstation.
One might ask if that takes so long, how does Marathon manage to
be so fast. The trick is that the Marathon engine does the eye-to-surface
ray tracing *implicitly*. Each horizontal line of the floors and ceilings
and each vertical line of the walls is drawn with pure nearest-neighbor
mapping. My guess is that it's done by keeping a pointer to the current
pixel in the texture-map image and adding some appropriate amount to it
when one moves to the next pixel in the displayed image.
This shortcut for doing texture mapping will work if the surfaces
are all horizontal or vertical; if not, then one has to do more
complicated calculations. In particular, one has to do a bilinear
transformation, which requires some multiplies and divides:
Coordinates in texture space: (xt, yt)
Coordinates in view space: (xv, yv)
xt = (c11*xv + c12*yv + c13)/(c31*xv + c32*yv + c33)
yt = (c21*xv + c22*yv + c23)/(c31*xv + c32*yv + c33)
where c11,c12,c13,c21,c22,c23,c31,c32,c33 are all functions of the
geometry of the surface. One can do this calcualtion with 6 adds, 8
multiplies, and one reciprocal (a divide can be done by taking a
reciprocal and then multiplying).
>Colored lights. Just for atmosphere.
And it would also offer interesting gaming ideas, such as:
Hiding an object by making it difficult to see against its
background if only some colored light is on, but easy to see if some
different-colored light is on.
One might even have fluorescent objects, that glow whenever one
turns on an ultraviolet light (in Marathon, one can set some object
colors to be glowing; they will not be reduced in brightness if the
object gets darkened -- being able to control that feature was one of the
first features added in an Anvil patch).
Loren Petrich
In article <5nvhfg$dhu$1...@excalibur.flash.net>,
Frost <VidM...@Cyber-Wizard.com> wrote:
>8. Allow editing via ResEdit like Bungie did with M1, not locked up with
>no resources like M2 and MÉ.
The trouble here is that ResEdit is MacOS-specific. But one can
do much the same thing with archivers such as Zip.
Loren Petrich
Altering or extending characters' behavior by loading extensions
with appropriate code; a good language for that would be Java. This is
something like what Bungie is doing with "Myth".
Loren Petrich
In article <finn-15069...@brnpc35.gwi.net>,
Finn Smith <fi...@gwi.net> wrote:
>In article <19970615120...@ladder02.news.aol.com>,
>obsid...@aol.com (ObsidianSW) wrote:
>> 2) Full interactivity. Put a chair up to the door, and your enemy can't
>> get to you. That is until he breaks through the door. And when he does
>> that, grab the chair and smash it on his head.
>This sounds cool. But what if the wall is made of wood and they've got a
>rocket launcher? You should be able to blast your way through walls, blast
>supports out from under people, etc.
That can easily be done by creating appropriate destroyable
objects. Thus, when building a map, one can create knockout walls which
can be destroyed as desired.
Shokolada
In article <19970615120...@ladder02.news.aol.com>
ObsidianSW, obsid...@aol.com writes:
>well you're going to be in for a REAL treat. I'll tell you what I'm doing
>so far. Everyone else, please tell me what you'd like:
>
>1) ReDam (real-damage) system. If your player takes a magnum to a guy's
>head he's dead in one shot and missing most of his head. If the player
>takes a hit in the arm or stomach, he grabs his wound but keeps going. A
>leg wound and he starts limping leaving a blood trail.
Okay, some comments. First of all, this sounds like it's
going to require very accurate marksmanship. In Marathon,
once an enemy was visible in the distance, one basically
had to worry about hitting that enemy's cylinder. In this
game, it sounds like you're either going to be using most
of a clip for a kill, or having to run up to your enemy
and jam your weapon into his skull before you pull the
trigger.
True, there is a certain amount of realism in that, but
what will it do to gameplay? How will it affect ammo
supplies? And, a final note - this will increase the
advantages of fast Macs over slow ones - marksmanship is
much easier on a fast Mac - people with 601 Power Macs
will be wiped up by the 604s in net games.
>2) Full interactivity
>
>3) 3rd person/1st person gaming POVs
>
>4) A True 3D engine
>
>5) Commanding of troops
Sounds quite excellent and exciting...
>6) Scary as hell. Since you don't have much ammo at all for most of the
>game and go up against 2 or 3 enemies at a time you have to really use
>strategy. The result will be something as scary as Resident Evil.
Is not being given enough ammo to complete a level on
Kindergarten scary? No. Is it irritating? Yes. If you
wish to play ammo-shortage games, please playtest the
levels carefully... especially since the ReDam system is
going to leave many players with empty clips as it is.
>7) An interactive communication system
>
>8) A very cool and creepy story.
>
>9) Some really wicked baddies.
>
>10) A neo-gothic feel
>
>11) Hover car chases, hovercycle combat.
>
>12) Very cool weapons. Remote explosives included. :-)
>
>13) Weight limits.
>
>14) Stealing clothes
The whole thing sounds very interesting to me - keep us
posted!
>*http://users.aol.com/obsidianSW/rameses*
May I suggest adding a couple space characters and
changing your address format to: *
http://users.aol.com/obsidianSW/rameses *? Some
newsreaders are adding the trailing asterisk to your
address, and this badly confuses some folks...
Shokolada
Face
Loren Petrich wrote:
>
> In article <33A382...@mcleod.net>, Face <rudolph...@mcleod.net> wrote:
> >The ability to have multiple kinds of players. This would be sort
> >of like character classes in an RPG, but not exactly. Some kinds
> >would be shorter, some would start with different things, some
> >would run faster.. etc.
>
> So one could choose between (say) a slow and tough character
> and a fast and vulnerable one.
Right, but there would be other variables too. Soem may be able to fly,
for instance.
>
> >Ray-based lighting. This would allow for shadows, not to mention
> >make lighting easier to set up realistically.
>
> Nice in theory, but in practice, it would require a heck of
> a lot of computing. For Quake, one can precalculate lighting maps
> that contain just such info, but it takes something like an hour on
> an Alpha workstation.
Computers may be able to handle it by the time it comes out, but of
course this would cut off most of their market.
Quartz
Svywranth wrote:
>
> >>Please write about the most detailed
> feature you may want in a game.<<
>
> endings, mulitple paths through, etc..... so the game would be fun to play
> through several times instead of just once.
>
well, hoth has this, sorta. only 2 endings but it's a start. (I'm trying
not to sound like a EVIL press release)
Quartz
> It's a SPNKR-XP surface to surface missle launcher we're talking about,
> not an electric guitar. Besides, it will complicate the mechanism. And you
> can always come back to pick it up (unless someone else finds it first).
> It's time to limit the player's absurdly large load bearing capacity (and
> I speak for all first person perspective games).
a spnkr isn't _that_ big. "absurdly large load bearing capacity"? but if
you're already carrying the spnkr and the magnum, why should you have to
drop one to use the other?
Bryan E Holland-Minkley
Excerpts from netnews.alt.games.marathon: 14-Jun-97 Re: Duality (or
> > I'd like to think that with this system, you'd not drop the spnkr.
> > considering that you already have a magnum on you, can't you just sling
> > the varible weapon over your shoulder?
>
> not an electric guitar. Besides, it will complicate the mechanism. And you
> can always come back to pick it up (unless someone else finds it first).
> It's time to limit the player's absurdly large load bearing capacity (and
> I speak for all first person perspective games).
Have YOU ever tried to run with an electric guitar slung over your
shoulder? The damn thing always slips around to some inconvenient angle
and tries to smash into stuff, and don't get me started on trying to run
through a doorway with that thing on my back! And, frankly, a missile
launcher would probably take an impact with a table better then a
delicate musical instrument, IMHO. To add my 2 cents, more realistic
weapon pickup would be interesting, but there other things I'd like to
see first.
-Bryan Holland-Minkley
be...@andrew.cmu.edu
Kirill
> > It's a SPNKR-XP surface to surface missle launcher we're talking about,
> > not an electric guitar. Besides, it will complicate the mechanism. And you
> > can always come back to pick it up (unless someone else finds it first).
> > It's time to limit the player's absurdly large load bearing capacity (and
> > I speak for all first person perspective games).
>
> a spnkr isn't _that_ big. "absurdly large load bearing capacity"? but if
> you're already carrying the spnkr and the magnum, why should you have to
> drop one to use the other?
Owwwww... Damn you and your logic. B-)
You're right, in part, but as I've stated elsewhere, it's not just mass,
it's also bulkiness. The SPNKR is a rather heavy and bulky piece of
hardware, and it would be difficult to run or walk, hold it in one hand
(or have it on your back where you also have some oxygen canisters) and
use a magnum.
Michael M. Eilers
In article <ond=ERW00iW...@andrew.cmu.edu>, Bryan E Holland-Minkley
<be...@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
> Excerpts from netnews.alt.games.marathon: 14-Jun-97 Re: Duality (or
> other futur.. by Kir...@lava.net
> > >
> > > I'd like to think that with this system, you'd not drop the spnkr.
> > > considering that you already have a magnum on you, can't you just sling
> > > the varible weapon over your shoulder?
> >
> > It's a SPNKR-XP surface to surface missle launcher we're talking about,
> > not an electric guitar. Besides, it will complicate the mechanism. And you
> > can always come back to pick it up (unless someone else finds it first).
> > It's time to limit the player's absurdly large load bearing capacity (and
> > I speak for all first person perspective games).
I'm not 100% sure I agree here... Absurd load-bearing is a tradition of
1st-person games back to wizardry 1 on the Apple II! ;-) I don't think we
can discard this venerable practice so lightly. That being said, I would
much rather have the energy and programming skill used to "correct" this
"defect" turned instead toward plot and interactivity with the
environment. Think Ultima 7 (changing season, movable furniture, beds to
sleep in, people to talk to) with the Unreal engine. It is part of the
adventure tradition to be able to carry the Eye of Horus and 40 arrows
and a crossbow and 3 swords while in full armor.
> Have YOU ever tried to run with an electric guitar slung over your
> shoulder?
Yes.
The damn thing always slips around to some inconvenient angle
> and tries to smash into stuff,
Yes! (usually delicate parts of my anatomy)
and don't get me started on trying to run
> through a doorway with that thing on my back!
YES! *%$# that hurt! Well, it was between two amps, but I'd rather not
discuss it. My brother has a camcorder film of it he plays every time I
come over.
And, frankly, a missile
> launcher would probably take an impact with a table better then a
> delicate musical instrument, IMHO.
Unless it exploded. Youch.
Like I said, I also think that a realistic weapons load is pretty far down
on my list of priorities--interactivity and a decent AI seem far more
important for playability that holds my interest.
michael
-------
I'm test-driving MindSpring's server-side SPAM filter. Do your worst, evil fiends!
Michael M. Eilers * Fearful Symmetry Designs
recent spammers: i...@experts-exchange.com i...@experts-exchange.com i...@experts-exchange.com i...@experts-exchange.com i...@experts-exchange.com
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Cliff Evans
ObsidianSW wrote:
>
> well you're going to be in for a REAL treat. I'll tell you what I'm doing
> so far. Everyone else, please tell me what you'd like:
>
> 1) ReDam (real-damage) system. If your player takes a magnum to a guy's
> head he's dead in one shot and missing most of his head. If the player
> takes a hit in the arm or stomach, he grabs his wound but keeps going. A
> leg wound and he starts limping leaving a blood trail.
>
> get to you. That is until he breaks through the door. And when he does
> that, grab the chair and smash it on his head.
>
>
> 4) A True 3D engine that kills Unreals (hopefully. We've got 3 guys on
> that now).
>
> 5) Commanding of troops.
>
> game and go up against 2 or 3 enemies at a time you have to really use
> strategy. The result will be something as scary as Resident Evil.
>
> real time like Monkey Island, Full Throttle etc.. There will be about 5
> relatively long rendered movies that also help the story progress.
>
>
> 9) Some really wicked baddies.
>
>
>
> 12) Very cool weapons. Remote explosives included. :-)
>
> 13) Weight limits.
>
> the death camp you are in. Also contruction signs so that you can block
> certain areas from guards who don't want to go to a construction zone. :-)
>
> What do ya'll think?
<G> Me like. But will it be creepy? >8-)
--
Cliff Evans
<boz...@earthlink.net>
---------------------------------------------------
"Fightin's outta style...fun's where the fear is."
-The Firesign Theater
---------------------------------------------------
Cliff Evans
<G> "Don't shoot the food!"
It always sounded like it was scolding me.
"Blue Valkyrie shot the food!"
Svywranth
>>What do ya'll think?<<
Uh... well, it sounds like it'll take a lot of work.
Therrra 13
>(or have it on your back where you also have some oxygen canisters)
Despite Bugie's redering of the marine I would think to place the
oxygen canisters underneath the helmet a la the alien sector masks on B5.
And on the subject of oxygen, how does he get to the external oxygen tanks
without some thing over his mouth?
Quartz
> You're right, in part, but as I've stated elsewhere, it's not just mass,
> it's also bulkiness. The SPNKR is a rather heavy and bulky piece of
> hardware, and it would be difficult to run or walk, hold it in one hand
> use a magnum.
I wasn't suggesting you can use both weapons at the same time, and if
you can't run/walk with the spnkr on your shoulder, it wouldn't make it
any easier slung on your back.
I don't really like this system anyway. a game is supposed to be fun.
real life poses probelms that make running around a building with
multiple heavy weapons all loaded anything but fun. games create an
escape from life, and mock it (to some extent). why bother with a truly
realistic engine when you can probably run around in a mall with an
ak-47 for about the same price? that's more realistic than anything a
game could come up with.... you can see people get thrown in an infinite
number of poses.... you can get arrested... go to jail....get raped....
no game could ever mimic the *fun* of situations like these.
ObsidianSW
>When does it ship? <GRIN>
Good question. I'd say in 3rd Q 98. Maybe 4th.
W Pasquill
Aye,
Suddenly how many weapons we can carry is an important issue,eh?
Well heres my two uplink chips and a Pfhor staff.
On the SPNKR This thing could be hooked to some sort of weapon
harness, so it just swins up into position and the marine grabs the
handles to steady it. This guys is a "far-future" space marine, not some
guy who lives in brooklyn. I'd presume they'd design a carrier. Then again
maybe not. Remember the version in M1 it was ALOT smaller then the current
2 barrel monster so they didn't but maybe Durandal did. Now if your
talking about the Doom marine I 'have no clue how he carries all that
stuff, and don't even ask me about Duke Nukem.
Now as for carrying 2 pistols and a SPNKR The pistols are
obviously holstered. But switching inbetween them would probably require
some working (from SPNKR to magnums that is the other way would be easy)
especially if you were running. Now as fr dropping the spanker that makes
no sense if you have ammo, if you have no missiles I could see dropping it
tho.
Now carrying the KKV and the AR-75 would be quite difficult tho a
simple sholder harness could carry them (running is another story) maybe
they fit into slots on the "weapon harness" the same goes for the shotguns
and ammo (tho carrying all that ammo is ridiculous, especially since most
of it is in clips [by the way why does the KKV have clips and a circular
"tommy-gun" like look, shouldn't the ammo be in chains or circles] also
what the hell happends to all those empty clips?)I'de presume that the
flame thrower would be connected directly to the "weapons harness" and
the bottles of fuel are attached to some nossle in the back. I think the
fusion pistol could be holstered or put into a slot on the harness (just
for description I'm thinking of this harness as like the backpack thing
from Ghostbusters
Now without this magical "weapons harness" which is not present in
the shapes, I' say its relatively impossible.
W.Pasquill
on a side note someone mentioned the gun from the 5th Element and one of
those in a game would kick ass! Tho I remind you don't push the little red
button!
ObsidianSW
<<on a side note someone mentioned the gun from the 5th Element and one of
those in a game would kick ass! >>
he he he... it would rock, wouldn't it?
Ben
assimilated bob
AMMO
always thought that ammo that could be
detonated would be a nifty trick.
example 1: a room riddled with grenade
supplies. shoot the grenades [boom];
perhaps only vulnerable to flame
thrower.
example 2: net game opponnent carrying
lots of ammo in ammo 'box' shoot
vulnerable spot on box [boom]; only
vulnerable from a 44 shot.
example 3: net game; shoot opponent's rocket
launcher at correct angle [boom] or
damaged weapons; hit at correct angle
next time he/she fires that weapon [boom]
example 4: that personal weapon pattern buffer
thingy able to be broken, so shoot a player
at certain spot with 44 all their weapons
and ammo not in use [gone] or fusion pistol
knocks it out of wack for, say a minute.
imagine if this was a feature that would have
been added to infinity. wow, what a huge change.
NEW WEAPONS
ok - how about exploding terminals?
booby trapped rechargers? that would be too cool.
perhaps implemented like duke nukem's pipe bombs.
make them tag operated (terminals and rechargers)
or have "polygon triggers weapon" switchability on
the fly as you 'fire' your pipe bomb -thus motion sensor.
fridedman likes to snipe you from that same spot
over and over, you put a pipe bomb there... hmm.
(of course, pipe bombs would have to be impervious
to most other weapons save,... maybe the shotgun
or a grenade)
others?
j
freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
Yossarian
In article <19970616224...@ladder02.news.aol.com>,
obsid...@aol.com (ObsidianSW) wrote:
> <<on a side note someone mentioned the gun from the 5th Element and one of
> those in a game would kick ass! >>
>
> he he he... it would rock, wouldn't it?
I don't know. That feature where the gun aims for you reminded me
a little too much of DOOM.
--Yossarian
Yossarian
In article <33A4AA...@earthlink.net>, boz...@earthlink.net wrote:
> How about, as a partial compromise, a variation on the Swiss army gun
> approach of ZPC, also as seen in the multiweapon in "The Fifth
> Element"?
You know, your mentioning this reminded me of something. Remember a few
months back when that film was coming out, there was a huge thread on
this group about whether characters pictured in the trailer were holding
fusion pistols?
Well, in a "sneak preview" of the upcoming film "Speed 2" on E! (I know,
I know...), I swear I saw a fusion pistol in the main badguy's hand. It
looked like it had that same shape, it was sort of light grey in color,
and there appeared to be a spot of light at the end of it. In the scene
they were showing a clip of, the Badguy and the Goodguy (Sandra B's
boyfriend-character) appeared to be in a big pipe or something. Boyfriend
had a pistol and Badguy had this familiar-looking gun. Boyfriend said
something like, "Put down the weapon..." Did anybody else see that, or
am I just nuts?
I don't plan to spend money to see "Speed 2", so somebody else will have
to go and bring back the news... :-)
--Yossarian
Quartz
assimilated bob wrote:
>
> AMMO
>
> always thought that ammo that could be
> detonated would be a nifty trick.
well, this is possible if you use a tick or something that references
the items collection. you wouldn't be able to pick up the explodable
'ammo' though.
> booby trapped rechargers?
make a term that has no logon, info or logoff, just a teleport. make it
look like a save term. :)
> others?
switch activated bombs? have a crate on the celing that is dropped by
that little 'what's this do' switch in a closet in a back room....
mi...@imap.wellsfargo.com
> Is not being given enough ammo to complete a level on
> Kindergarten scary? No. Is it irritating? Yes.
I agree. There are two different schools of thought regarding ammo. Some
people like the challenge of ammo shortages. Many others-- myself included
--like to shoot a lot. Less ammo is highly corelated with less fun in my book.
>If you
>wish to play ammo-shortage games, please playtest the
>levels carefully... especially since the ReDam system is
>going to leave many players with empty clips as it is.
Good point. Running out of a particular kind of ammo and having to switch
weapons makes the game more interesting. Having to kill lots of devlins with
your fists is not.
mi...@imap.wellsfargo.com
My fifteen cents on this thread:
(Stuff I'd like to see in future games.)
1) Speed speed speed. Higher frame rate == more engrosing play experience.
2) Find a way to avoid extreme pixelization when the player is very close to
something. One way to do this is to interpolate between several
representations of the same object (or wall, monster, or whatever). Another
is to represent objects in some kind of resolution-independent way. Yeah, I
know that conflicts with #1.
3) Put a lot of effort into network play. Killing your friends is always more
fun than killing automata. The software should be tolerant of slow
connections or dropped packets. Modem play would be great. Internet play
would be amazing.
4) Hire a good sound designer. Tell the programmers to pay attention to him.
Sound can do a lot to create whatever atmosphere you want and draw the players in.
5) Make the game scary as fuck. Animals and small children should cower in
fear at the mere mention of your game.
6) Be sure to playtest on old hardware.
7) Do what you can to make monster behavior fairly sophisticated. Lots of
games are a lot less fun once you figure out the quirks in monster behavior
and learn to exploit them.
8) Make the monster movement as smooth as you can. One of the big drawbacks
of Marathon (as much as I love it) is that the monsters have very few poses.
9) [Here's a strange one, but it's easy to code.] For network play, each
player's copy of the game should tell the other players what s/he looks like.
That will allow people to hack their copy to make their avatar look however
they would like. Hell, you could even provide hooks to let people import
graphics in some common format. I predict that people would go nuts over that feature.
10) Speed speed speed. Find some uber-geek who can perform PowerPC pipeline
optimizations in his sleep. Get him hopped up on cheap crank and tell him his
bonus is contingent on some frame rate that you know is totally impossible.
The faster your engine is, the more room you will have to add cool features.
11) Publish the spec for your maps, shapes, etc. to the net. (This implies a
degree of modularity.) If your game is cool, somebody will write a free
editor for it and the net will explode with maps. Maybe the freeware one will
even be better than the one you were using in-house.....
12) Find a way to make the environments flexible enough to support fancy level
objectives. Tags and platforms are neat, but after a while the puzzles all
get to look the same. Personally, I'm more into carnage than puzzle-solving,
but a few puzzles are nice. This is computaionally cheap and can add a lot of
richness to the game.
13) Ignore the sub-thread about encumberance and dropping weapons. (I can
feel the flames already....) Screw weight limits and item limits. Unreality
is exactly what is appealing about games. "Gee, I'd like a game where you
have to live with the consequences of violence and you rack up huge legal
bills and need to spend years in therapy because you hurt another human
being." Forget that; unreality is what it is all about. Having a lot of
weapons to switch between is fun. Fun == sales.
14) Be wary of canned video. It can make people ooh and aah in the store, but
it gets pretty annoying after repeated play.
15) Speed speed speed.
Chrispy Nacho
In article <33A58D...@shore.net>, qua...@shore.net wrote:
[snip stuff about the ALL important question: Where do weapons go?]
> I don't really like this system anyway. a game is supposed to be fun.
> real life poses probelms that make running around a building with
> multiple heavy weapons all loaded anything but fun. games create an
> escape from life, and mock it (to some extent). why bother with a truly
> realistic engine when you can probably run around in a mall with an
> ak-47 for about the same price? that's more realistic than anything a
> game could come up with.... you can see people get thrown in an infinite
> number of poses.... you can get arrested... go to jail....get raped....
> no game could ever mimic the *fun* of situations like these.
>
> --
> Quartz
>
> "never argue with a fool, others may
> not be able to tell the difference"
>
> "a closed mouth gathers no foot"
>
>
> http://www.shore.net/~quartz/main.html
> http://www.pullmyfinger.com/quartz/Novelty.html
Quartz is right, this thread is silly, who cares where your guns go? Maybe
they could be made of paper and you are a master at Origami and create new
weapons out of the same peice(s) of paper each time. And ammo is paper
too, but stored in you mouth, you know... spit wads. Or what if you put
everything into a guitar case (a la Desperado), That way, everything is
slung over your shoulder via the case's shoulder strap. The case could
also double as a chaingun and SPNKR. Hmmm... maybe some one could create a
"Desperado Shapes" patch that would be cool to just run around pointing a
black guitar case at Pfhor and BOOM! Pfhor innards are SPNKRed around the
room!
-Cool Beans Man,
-Chrispy Nacho
--
"Sometimes you just need to eat a mystery meat burrito at two in the morning, just like sometimes you simply need to travel to Philadelphia" -webm...@bungie.com on Taco Bell
Loren Petrich
In article <33A62122...@imap.wellsfargo.com>,
>(Stuff I'd like to see in future games.)
>1) Speed speed speed. Higher frame rate == more engrosing play experience.
This will conflict with just about everything else, because the
less time available per frame, the less one can create in it.
>2) Find a way to avoid extreme pixelization when the player is very close to
>something. ...
There is another way to accomplish this -- simply interpolate to
get color values between the pixel centers.
Using different versions of objects for use at different
distances is one commonly-used trick -- the more-detailed versions are
used for closer up.
As to resolution-independent 2D graphics, what one will need is
some graphics library that can do vector graphics, and that can do
perspective transformations and arbitrary-polygon clipping regions.
QuickDraw GX, for example, would fit the bill most nicely, though there is
the serious question of whether GX or similar graphics libraries can be
fast enough for real-time 3D gaming.
>3) Put a lot of effort into network play. ... The software should be
tolerant of slow >connections or dropped packets.
One way to get around that in the case of the Marathon engine
would be to have one of the boxes periodically update the others with a
description of the complete state, so that the others will not get out of
sync. Also, a good way for testing for getting out of sync would be to
compose some sort of hash code from all the state variables' values, and
comparing to see if those from different boxes at the same time are the same.
>6) Be sure to playtest on old hardware.
One might end up finding the lowest limit of usability; a Quadra
barely makes it for Marathon, for example.
>7) Do what you can to make monster behavior fairly sophisticated. Lots of
>games are a lot less fun once you figure out the quirks in monster behavior
>and learn to exploit them.
There are all sorts of cute ideas one could implement, such as
one that has to go to an ammo dump every now and then to reload.
>8) Make the monster movement as smooth as you can. One of the big drawbacks
>of Marathon (as much as I love it) is that the monsters have very few poses.
That's one good argument for full-scale 3D; one can have 3D
models that continuously vary from one pose to another, thus making
smooth-looking walking and other actions.
And the same can be done with 2D graphics.
>9) [Here's a strange one, but it's easy to code.] For network play, each
>player's copy of the game should tell the other players what s/he looks like.
>That will allow people to hack their copy to make their avatar look however
>they would like. Hell, you could even provide hooks to let people import
>graphics in some common format. I predict that people would go nuts over that feature.
I understand that one can do a little of that in Weekend Warrior.
ObsidianSW
Oh my god! Gauntlet! That was the most amazing game. Is there a Mac Vers?
Red Warrior is it!
BulkBruin
re: carrying weapons.
maybe just a realistic *rationale* for being able to carry and deploy a
small armory... i'm thinking of the armored power suits in heinlein's
"starship troopers", which basically had everything built in. if you
wanted to use a weapon, your body language told the suit what you wanted
and it loaded and unholstered it and put it in your hands--when you were
done with it, the suit put it away. the learning curve for using the suit
was probably equivalent to learning the controls of an f-18, but we can
assume that took place *before* the game starts.
speaking of "starship troopers", would love to see somebody implement my
favorite weapon from the book: the 30-second bomb. you arm it, toss it
into a *very* crowded room, and it starts to LOUDLY announce: "i am a
30-second bomb, i am a 30-second bomb. 29. 28. 27..."
Finn Smith
In article <petrichE...@netcom.com>, pet...@netcom.com (Loren
Petrich) wrote:
> >This sounds cool. But what if the wall is made of wood and they've got a
> >rocket launcher? You should be able to blast your way through walls, blast
> >supports out from under people, etc.
>
> That can easily be done by creating appropriate destroyable
> objects. Thus, when building a map, one can create knockout walls which
> can be destroyed as desired.
Yes, Dark Forces did this. What I would really like to see is *all* walls
and structures being able to be affected in some degree by the player. If
it's steel, shooting it wouldn't do anything. If it's plaster, it would be
blown away. You could destroy stuff even if it wasn't necessary or didn't
lead anywhere.
Finn
--
Finn Smith Check out my 3D Mac Games Page:
fi...@gwi.net http://www.gwi.net/~finn/games.html
Pfhorrest
<<>9) [Here's a strange one, but it's easy to code.] For network play,
each
>player's copy of the game should tell the other players what s/he looks
like.
>That will allow people to hack their copy to make their avatar look
however
>they would like. Hell, you could even provide hooks to let people import
>graphics in some common format. I predict that people would go nuts over
that feature.
I understand that one can do a little of that in Weekend
Warrior.>>
and if people don't remember, I already suggested this and people flamed
me. oh wait, that was the other part of my post that got flamed. well, i
still get credit for it! <g>
-p4st
Forrest Cameranesi
pfho...@aol.com
http://users.aol.com/pfhorrest/
Project More Coordinator
(c) 1997 The Big Giant Head, Ultd
Chris Geisel
> [snip stuff about the ALL important question: Where do weapons go?]
psst...
besides their skill with FTL spacetravel and platform technology, by far
the biggest Jjarro industry was collapsible accesories. you don't want to
be encumbered when you're a god-like multidimensional creature on the go.
--chris "chris" geisel
--
Chris Geisel
Designer
Double Aught, Inc.
www.doubleaught.com
Quartz
> 2) Find a way to avoid extreme pixelization when the player is very close to
> representations of the same object (or wall, monster, or whatever). Another
> is to represent objects in some kind of resolution-independent way. Yeah, I
> know that conflicts with #1.
the guy who runs ID software was talkinh about this quite a while ago in
wired. he said something about using a fractal routine to make infinitly
detailed wall textures.
Quartz
Maybe
> they could be made of paper and you are a master at Origami and create new
> weapons out of the same peice(s) of paper each time.
aparently, the person who taught you this trick also makes vacbob suits
in his/her spare time... :)
Bahamut
In article <19970617071...@ladder02.news.aol.com>,
svyw...@aol.com (Svywranth) wrote:
> Here's how I always viewed the weapons carrying pattern....
>
> -Pistols: Holsters at hips
> -Li'L Zeusbuddy: Another holster a little lower than the pistols, on the
> thigh
> -Shotguns: Holsters on shins
> -TOZT: On the back; "gun" part held in holster on thigh, opposite
> Zeusbuddy
> -MA-75b: On the back, over the shoulder, next to the backpack part of the
> TOZT
> -Flechette: Opposite the MA-75b
> -Spanker: Accross the shoulders, above the rifles and TOZT
>
> Optionally, there could be holsters for pistol-type things on one's upper
> arms.
>
> Of course, this leaves no room for ammo. But then again, with this setup,
> you can't very well move. But then again, it's most likely the most
> logical arrangement. Or close to it.
> --> Svywranth <--
And _this_ why they created shields for our cyborg. Seems the Marine should
have an explosion radius. And net games wern't deadly enough before?
-Bahamut
@fred.net
"Guns don't kill Pfhor, the Devlin do"
<< Macintosh Technology at War! >>
Bahamut
In article <19970617155...@ladder02.news.aol.com>,
bulk...@aol.com (BulkBruin) wrote:
> speaking of "starship troopers", would love to see somebody implement my
> favorite weapon from the book: the 30-second bomb. you arm it, toss it
> into a *very* crowded room, and it starts to LOUDLY announce: "i am a
> 30-second bomb, i am a 30-second bomb. 29. 28. 27..."
In the Pfhor language, too.
(Read the book- it rules.)
Bahamut
>
> One might end up finding the lowest limit of usability; a Quadra
> barely makes it for Marathon, for example.
>
Hey! My Quadra 605 @ 25 MHz runs just fine.
Merrick Burkhardt
In article <finn-17069...@brnpc84.gwi.net>,
Finn Smith <fi...@gwi.net> wrote:
>In article <petrichE...@netcom.com>, pet...@netcom.com (Loren
>Petrich) wrote:
>
>> >rocket launcher? You should be able to blast your way through walls, blast
>> >supports out from under people, etc.
>>
>> That can easily be done by creating appropriate destroyable
>> objects. Thus, when building a map, one can create knockout walls which
>> can be destroyed as desired.
>
>Yes, Dark Forces did this. What I would really like to see is *all* walls
>and structures being able to be affected in some degree by the player. If
>it's steel, shooting it wouldn't do anything. If it's plaster, it would be
>blown away. You could destroy stuff even if it wasn't necessary or didn't
>lead anywhere.
I was playing with a map of my office and realized that with the assault
rifle all i need do is fire and rotate. The only thing in our building
that would stop a rifle bullet is a floor or outside wall---that or I
guess if you hit a pipe within a wall.
The point is that modern buildings don't provide much actual cover, they
only block line of sight.
-Merric
--
Merrick Burkhardt Ants Inc. - engaging natural history-
email: mer...@rt66.com "Lifting things 10 times our weight
phone: (505) 255-0653 (home) for almost 4 years now..."
phone: (505) 842-8409 (Ants) http://www.ants-inc.com/
ObsidianSW
<<Having to kill lots of devlins with
your fists is not.
>>
Well your fists are your primary weapon for the first couple of levels.
But don't worry, because they are the most fun weapons in the game. You
can:
headbutt, jab, upercut, smash heads against the wall, knee in the stomach,
and with the use of the action key, break necks.
ObsidianSW
<<I agree. There are two different schools of thought regarding ammo.
Some
people like the challenge of ammo shortages. Many others-- myself
included
--like to shoot a lot. Less ammo is highly corelated with less fun in my
book.>>
I agree with this. However, how much fun would you have going around with
a million rounds of KKV clips shooting up all of the 10 badguys on the
board. Do you remember that I mentioned that it would be scary not because
you don't have any ammo, but because there are few enemies. That way, you
have to really reason out slaughtering them. However, there will be levels
that are all out slaughter. There is a very good balance.
Loren Petrich
In article <bahamut-ya0234800...@news.fred.net>,
Bahamut <bah...@fred.net> wrote:
>And _this_ why they created shields for our cyborg. Seems the Marine should
>have an explosion radius. And net games wern't deadly enough before?
I looked in Anvil, and one can manage that by altering the
Physics Model for the Marine -- in "Combat Settings", change some
"Shrapnel" parameters. And one can set a whole lot of other things, of
course. Try wandering around in Anvil.
Adin Hunter Baber
> <<on a side note someone mentioned the gun from the 5th Element and one of
> those in a game would kick ass! >>
>
> he he he... it would rock, wouldn't it?
>
Take out the auto aim, that would be too obscene for a game.
"Look there's some aliens, ho hum,.... oh they're dead already"
Doesn't sound very fun to me.
--
Adin Hunter Baber
my email address is in flux now
you *should* be able to contact me at cucmw1.pen.eiu.edu
'The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know'
--Socrates
Adin Hunter Baber
> Here's how I always viewed the weapons carrying pattern....
>
> -Pistols: Holsters at hips
> -Li'L Zeusbuddy: Another holster a little lower than the pistols, on the
> thigh
> -Shotguns: Holsters on shins
> -TOZT: On the back; "gun" part held in holster on thigh, opposite
> Zeusbuddy
> -MA-75b: On the back, over the shoulder, next to the backpack part of the
> TOZT
> -Flechette: Opposite the MA-75b
> -Spanker: Accross the shoulders, above the rifles and TOZT
>
> Optionally, there could be holsters for pistol-type things on one's upper
> arms.
>
> Of course, this leaves no room for ammo. But then again, with this setup,
> you can't very well move. But then again, it's most likely the most
> logical arrangement. Or close to it.
>
> "Ah, jeez.... how the hell am i gonna hold this uplink chip...."
Oh, that's easy, put it in the holster where you stow the weapon you're
currently using. ;p
Marine: "Low on ammo, need to change weapons!" crunch... "oops..."
Durandal: "Good job, now you have to get another chip. But since you were
so stupid aboutr breaking this one, I'm going to teleport its replacement
to a place where there are 10 mother of all hunters guarding it"
>
> But I just like to go with Pfhorrest's ("Go away, Svy, I'm busy") idea of
> the MCU (Matter Compression Unit) that teleports your stuff through a plot
> hole [into a Zip disk: Because it's your stuff] into a parrallel
> dimension.
>
>
> --> Svywranth <--
> The Masked Man in Silver with a Very Big Gun
> ---> Svwr...@aol.com <---
Adin Hunter Baber
> <<on a side note someone mentioned the gun from the 5th Element and one of
> those in a game would kick ass! >>
>
> he he he... it would rock, wouldn't it?
>
But the smart-bullet feature would be obscene, definitely leave that out.
Adin Hunter Baber
In article <finn-15069...@brnpc35.gwi.net>, fi...@gwi.net (Finn
Smith) wrote:
[snip]
>
> This sounds cool. But what if the wall is made of wood and they've got a
> rocket launcher? You should be able to blast your way through walls, blast
> supports out from under people, etc.
>
How about an arming range for rockets and grenades? I know if you fire a
LAW, the rocket has to go ~14 meters before the warhead is armed. If you
hit someone/thing closer than 14 meters, it *should* just hit him and not
explode. I, however, wouldn't want to test this particular safety
feature. After all, it's a mechancle device, which means it's prone to
failure...
Adin Hunter Baber
In article <postmaster-17...@lum.herringn.com>,
postmaster@[127.0.0.1] (aaron) wrote:
> In article <yossarian-ya024080...@news.mindspring.com>,
> yoss...@mindspring.com (Yossarian) wrote:
>
> > In article <19970616224...@ladder02.news.aol.com>,
> > obsid...@aol.com (ObsidianSW) wrote:
> >
> > > <<on a side note someone mentioned the gun from the 5th Element and one of
> > > those in a game would kick ass! >>
> > >
> > > he he he... it would rock, wouldn't it?
> >
> > I don't know. That feature where the gun aims for you reminded me
> > a little too much of DOOM.
>
> No, no... it sent the bullets where the last shot went. You still had
> to hit with that first shot. =)
>
So...if you missed.... all of your other shots would miss too... and then
you would have to empty your clip of 3000 rounds before aquiring a new
target??
Marine: "I hate working for R&D"
Commander: "Not enjoying working for R&D means your a commie mutant traitor!"
;p
> Very cool movie.
>
> --
> aaron[at]herringn.com
Ken Kaji
In article <kirill-1706...@news.lava.net>, kir...@lava.net
(Kirill) wrote:
>
>> > I don't know. That feature where the gun aims for you reminded me
>> > a little too much of DOOM.
>>
>> No, no... it sent the bullets where the last shot went. You still had
>> to hit with that first shot. =)
>
>
>As Yossarian suggested, it would unbalance the game, and that's just not fun.
I agree! What a waste of aiming skill. Can you imagine, say in a Marathon
net game, someone getting a lucky shot on you and then just holding down
the fire keys? Argh.
- Ken
--
:.."Gee, Bill Gates must be the third antichrist!"
:.."Is it in the Bible?"
:: - Chris, 1996
* 89X! *
Adin Hunter Baber
Here's a few suggestions:
1)variable thete error on assualt rifles. Starts out with a low theta
error. Each round you fire increases the theta error by one. Set a
maximum theta error. In Marathon, this would have been ten. Doing the
theta error this way allows a player to fire a short burst and still
retain decent accuracy.
BTW, I would like to note that most militaries train their soldiers to
only fire at most 3 to 6 rounds per burst, otherwise the kick makes aiming
impossible. In fact, I do believe that this is the reason the U.S.
Military went over to rifles that don't have full auto as a standard issue
weapon.
2)Arming ranges on rockets and grenades. I know real (eek..he used the
"r" word) ones have to travel a certain distance before the warhead
becomes armed. Thus, if you hit something inside the arming range, the
shell doesn't explode, and your target takes a nice impact in his chest
(or wherever).
Anyone have any suggestions about how much damage the target would take.
3) Monsters that *don't* shoot their friends. While there are many times
this has helped me, rarely are the times I thought is was cool.
4)About real damage. I have to be against this. I agree with the view
that it would allow you to die too easily. I never found it fun when
playing a game when I died from a cheap shot (or won for that matter).
Of course, there's the trick of shooting the enemy's feet as he opens the
door and then closing the door again.
OTOH, I found myself going toe to toe with the Mother of all Hunters a few
too many times. I noticed that my shotguns were aimed right at his
*crotch*. How would read damage handle that?? ;p
ObsidianSW
<<OTOH, I found myself going toe to toe with the Mother of all Hunters a
few
too many times. I noticed that my shotguns were aimed right at his
*crotch*. How would read damage handle that?? ;p>>
LOL... he he he... I think we might put that in there... ;)
Come to think of it you're right about the ReDam thing. It'd be a real
bitch to keep from getting hit.
Bryan E Holland-Minkley
Excerpts from netnews.alt.games.marathon: 17-Jun-97 Re: Duality (or
other futur.. by Bulk...@aol.com
> re: carrying weapons.
> maybe just a realistic *rationale* for being able to carry and deploy a
> small armory... i'm thinking of the armored power suits in heinlein's
> "starship troopers", which basically had everything built in. if you
> wanted to use a weapon, your body language told the suit what you wanted
> and it loaded and unholstered it and put it in your hands--when you were
> done with it, the suit put it away. the learning curve for using the suit
> was probably equivalent to learning the controls of an f-18, but we can
> assume that took place *before* the game starts.
This works, without having to use the 4th-dimensional bag, however,
this explanation doesn't work well in net games, where you would expect
to see the suit "do its thing". Having to show the suit switching
weapons would be very labor-intensive when using sprites, and complex
when using 3D-modeled characters.
> speaking of "starship troopers", would love to see somebody implement my
> favorite weapon from the book: the 30-second bomb. you arm it, toss it
> into a *very* crowded room, and it starts to LOUDLY announce: "i am a
> 30-second bomb, i am a 30-second bomb. 29. 28. 27..."
Cool idea. I would like to see "Pipe Bomb"-esque weapon, Duke Nukem
style. The cloest you can get in Marathon is land mines, which a friend
of mine figured out how to do.
-Bryan Holland-Minkley
be...@andrew.cmu.edu
Loren Petrich
In article <kirill-1706...@news.lava.net>,
Kirill <kir...@lava.net> wrote:
>In article <bahamut-ya0234800...@news.fred.net>,
>bah...@fred.net (Bahamut) wrote:
>
>> In article <petrichE...@netcom.com>, pet...@netcom.com (Loren
>> Petrich) wrote:
>> > One might end up finding the lowest limit of usability; a Quadra
>> > barely makes it for Marathon, for example.
>> Hey! My Quadra 605 @ 25 MHz runs just fine.
>Whoa whoa whoa, buddy. It's not _your_ Quadra he's talking about, it's the
>other Quadras.
That's based on my experience with my Quadra 650 before I got my
PowerPro PPC upgrade card. When I had only that 68040 chip, I had to run
in half size with pixel doubling just to get an acceptable frame rate.
Now, with a 100-MHz 601, I run in 3/4 size without pixel doubling, and
get the same frame rate. I have my eyes on getting a new -- and much
faster -- Mac, but I don't know when I'll be able to get one. In any
case, I'm sure I'll be able to go at the maximum frame rate then.
Kirill
In article <19970614132...@ladder02.news.aol.com>,
obsid...@aol.com (ObsidianSW) wrote:
> Hey guys, please put down EVERYTHING you want in a future 3D game. As a
> developer of games I really need to hear what you want. What we have
> cooking should satisfy a lot of people. It's really a chimera. All
> different types of genres.
All right, here are some features I think would be interesting:
Monster AI (very important)
Monsters should have a strategy of their own and should respond
to a change in my strategy. Monster behavior should not be
generalized across a caste, instead, it should be by group. One
group, for example, may guard a goal while another may follow
the player with the intention of hunting him or her down.
As I said earlier, such a complex AI need only exist at the
development level, complex behaviors can then be broken down
into simpler behavioral atoms that can be manipulated quickly in
real time.
Building such an AI mechanism alone would make for an
interesting project.
Balanced storyline (important)
The story should be complex enough to be interesting for the
interested player, but should not require the player to know the
story as do many RPGs, making it impossible to progress if the
player forgets some critical part.
Balanced and interesting weapons (important)
Boring weapons can make a game, especially in the network
variant, uninteresting. Weapons like shotgun and double-barrel
shotgun or nail gun and super nail gun are not very creative.
All they've done is add "super" or "double" to the name and
increased the firing rate. Duke on the other hand, has some very
creative weapons.
The weapons should also be balanced. No one weapon should be
clearly better than another (as in super nail gun is always
better than nail gun).
Simple controls and interface (important)
The controls and game interface should be understandable within
five minutes and should be as simple as possible. After all the
movement and weapon control keys, I can only spare a few more
keys, those should be used wisely.
Internet play (desirable)
Not an easy one, but quite desirable, as the best players
usually don't tend to live in one state, city, and area.
Cross-platform play (desirable)
Not an easy one either, unless you choose to write for yellow
box.
Nonlinear storyline (optional)
Creating a good nonlinear storyline is hard and would take a
_lot_ of time. I am guessing a year, and that's certainly more
time than most people would want to spend on story alone, which
is why I would recommend against it. A good linear storyline is
better than a crappy nonlinear one, IMHO.
A nonlinear storyline would also require a fairly complex real
time system of building the next level from a base specification
and additional variables reflecting your previous actions. The
alternative is to have each level constructed in advance
accounting for every possible turn of events, but this would
require a tremendous amount of resources.
Object manipulation and breakable objects (not important)
This would be interesting and fun, but would involve a lot of
work that could be spent elsewhere. This feature also tends to
create more RPG-style puzzles, such as having to place a certain
object in a certain room in order to finish the level, which
IMHO, is not so desirable for the action genre.
Bryan E Holland-Minkley
Excerpts from netnews.alt.games.marathon: 17-Jun-97 Re: Duality (or
> > >rocket launcher? You should be able to blast your way through walls, blast
> > >supports out from under people, etc.
> >
> > objects. Thus, when building a map, one can create knockout walls which
> > can be destroyed as desired.
>
> Yes, Dark Forces did this. What I would really like to see is *all* walls
> and structures being able to be affected in some degree by the player. If
> it's steel, shooting it wouldn't do anything. If it's plaster, it would be
> blown away. You could destroy stuff even if it wasn't necessary or didn't
> lead anywhere.
>
The problem with this would be that the map maker would have to take
into account any non-steel, or some other explosion-proof material, wall
being blown away. If you want to have the player wandering around
inside an apartment building, you'll have to set up every apartment in
the building. After all, how many apartments do you know of which have
missile-proof walls? I'd bet that a SPNKR would punch right through any
of my walls, not that I've tried.
Of course, it would be possible to get around this, by having the
engine know that if there isn't anything behind a destroyable wall (a
wall not made up of explosino-proof material) then it should have the
explosion, instead of revealing a room, just make a pile of rubble.
This way the map-maker could make their apartment building without
having to fill it, but it would still be more realistic. This would, in
fact, be a cool way to make secret rooms. Like if you destroy the wall
across fom the elevator, then you find a secret room.
-Bryan Holland-Minkley
be...@andrew.cmu.edu
Bryan E Holland-Minkley
Excerpts from netnews.alt.games.marathon: 18-Jun-97 Re: Duality (or
other futur.. by Adin Hunter Ba...@bgu.ed
> Here's a few suggestions:
>
> 1)variable thete error on assualt rifles. Starts out with a low theta
> error. Each round you fire increases the theta error by one. Set a
> maximum theta error. In Marathon, this would have been ten. Doing the
> theta error this way allows a player to fire a short burst and still
> retain decent accuracy.
Good idea. Of course, I always thought the error was from a feature
of the fun, not the player not having full control over the gun. After
all, he is a cyborg.
> BTW, I would like to note that most militaries train their soldiers to
> only fire at most 3 to 6 rounds per burst, otherwise the kick makes aiming
> impossible. In fact, I do believe that this is the reason the U.S.
> Military went over to rifles that don't have full auto as a standard issue
> weapon.
Again, I think the cyborg is a wee bit stronger than your usual
military officer. After all, he can take a ten story fall without a
problem, and doesn't blink in the face of carrying hundreds of pounds of
equipment while running.
> 2)Arming ranges on rockets and grenades. I know real (eek..he used the
> "r" word) ones have to travel a certain distance before the warhead
> becomes armed. Thus, if you hit something inside the arming range, the
> shell doesn't explode, and your target takes a nice impact in his chest
> (or wherever).
Interesting idea, but this would eliminate suicides! Before this
feature, I'd like to see laser sights. Just imagine seeing a red spot
sweep across a wall towards you, and you don't realize that you're being
targeted until you got chopped into dog food.
> Anyone have any suggestions about how much damage the target would take.
Perhaps the same as a running punch, or a little more.
> 3) Monsters that *don't* shoot their friends. While there are many times
> this has helped me, rarely are the times I thought is was cool.
I believe this can be done in Marathon. Have you ever seen two
Juggernauts attack each other? If two aliens are set as friends, then
they won't ever attack each other, I believe.
> 4)About real damage. I have to be against this. I agree with the view
> that it would allow you to die too easily. I never found it fun when
> playing a game when I died from a cheap shot (or won for that matter).
> Of course, there's the trick of shooting the enemy's feet as he opens the
> door and then closing the door again.
One man's lucky shot is another's brilliant shot.
> OTOH, I found myself going toe to toe with the Mother of all Hunters a few
> too many times. I noticed that my shotguns were aimed right at his
> *crotch*. How would read damage handle that?? ;p
Unless he's REALLY well padded he would roll on the floor shrieking,
making him a fairly easy target. At least, that's what I would do.
-Bryan Holland-Minkley
be...@andrew.cmu.edu
Kirill
In article <Belcher-1506971033520001@news>, Bel...@ucsu.colorado.edu
(Devon) wrote:
> In article <kirill-1406...@news.lava.net>, kir...@lava.net
> (Kirill) wrote:
>
> > It's a SPNKR-XP surface to surface missle launcher we're talking about,
> > not an electric guitar. Besides, it will complicate the mechanism. And you
> > can always come back to pick it up (unless someone else finds it first).
> > It's time to limit the player's absurdly large load bearing capacity (and
> > I speak for all first person perspective games).
>
> > http://www.lava.net/~kirill/
>
> hey! what happened to the
> "Screw the "it's not realistic to have music blasting out of nowhere as
> you explore a ship/planet" deal."
> attitude?
Good point. I was only defending a hypothetical realistic weapons handling
mechanism, I never said it would be fun or the best thing for the game. It
_might_ be fun for network play, but only as an option, something like a
"Realistic carying capacity" checkbox next to "Aliens" and "Penalize
suicides".
Quartz
> Object manipulation and breakable objects (not important)
> This would be interesting and fun, but would involve a lot of
> work that could be spent elsewhere. This feature also tends to
> create more RPG-style puzzles, such as having to place a certain
> object in a certain room in order to finish the level, which
> IMHO, is not so desirable for the action genre.
or a spin off of this. give scenery objects the ability to manipulate
tags (or some equivalent). a lot of times I've wished I could break a
lamp and watch the lights go off.
Svywranth
>>>I agree. There are two different schools of thought regarding ammo.<<<
I hate having little amounts of ammo... I like my carnage *messy and
loud.* (not the little pistol bang bang, dodge, bang).
Of course, I don't mind using fists, except when fighting Troopers and (of
course) Juggernauts. Those are the ones I avoid fighting with fists.
(Generally, if it annihilates you on death or fires invisible shots that
are damn near impossible to dodge, it's not fun to fist fight to death.)
On the topic of fists.... has anybody made a patch that makes the punch as
fast as M1's? The one in M2/Minfinity is rather slow.
Devon
In article <cuahb-18069...@eiuts111.eiu.edu>, cu...@bgu.edu (Adin
Hunter Baber) wrote:
> BTW, I would like to note that most militaries train their soldiers to
> only fire at most 3 to 6 rounds per burst, otherwise the kick makes aiming
> impossible. In fact, I do believe that this is the reason the U.S.
> Military went over to rifles that don't have full auto as a standard issue
> weapon.
Any full-auto burst destroys aim. the only way the US army can get away
with it is by using extremely light rounds ("Poodle-shooters"). Even then,
you van count on the 2nd and 3rd shots being waaaayyyy off.
> 2)Arming ranges on rockets and grenades. I know real (eek..he used the
> "r" word) ones have to travel a certain distance before the warhead
> becomes armed. Thus, if you hit something inside the arming range, the
> shell doesn't explode, and your target takes a nice impact in his chest
> (or wherever).
>
> Anyone have any suggestions about how much damage the target would take.
yes, next to none (big bruise) for most ordinance. The rocket hasn't built
up enugh speed at that point.
> 3) Monsters that *don't* shoot their friends. While there are many times
> this has helped me, rarely are the times I thought is was cool.
Uncheck "Is Berserk" in the easy edit (I think) field for the monster in
Anvil. this makes troppers a whole 'nothr ballgame.
Loren Petrich
In article <kirill-1806...@news.lava.net>,
Kirill <kir...@lava.net> wrote:
>Balanced and interesting weapons (important)
Bungie has been very careful about that; consider the deficiencies
of two would-be superweapons: the rocket launcher and the Flechette. The
former has a slow reload, while the latter runs through ammo very fast.
>Internet play (desirable)
> Not an easy one, but quite desirable, as the best players
> usually don't tend to live in one state, city, and area.
The problem here is avoiding getting out of sync as a result of
delayed or lost packet.
>Cross-platform play (desirable)
> Not an easy one either, unless you choose to write for yellow
> box.
Actually, that should not be very difficult if all versions use
the same network-communication protocol (same message format, etc.).
A problem with Marathon is that the MacOS version was designed
around AppleTalk, while the Win95 one was designed around TCP/IP and IPX
-- so MacOS M2 and Win95 M2 cannot communicate!
Let's hope that Bungie, Double Aught, etc. avoid that sort of
gaffe in the future.
Adin Hunter Baber
In article <Mne_BPm00...@andrew.cmu.edu>, Bryan E Holland-Minkley
<be...@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
>
> > 2)Arming ranges on rockets and grenades. I know real (eek..he used the
> > "r" word) ones have to travel a certain distance before the warhead
> > becomes armed. Thus, if you hit something inside the arming range, the
> > shell doesn't explode, and your target takes a nice impact in his chest
> > (or wherever).
>
> Interesting idea, but this would eliminate suicides! Before this
> feature, I'd like to see laser sights. Just imagine seeing a red spot
> sweep across a wall towards you, and you don't realize that you're being
> targeted until you got chopped into dog food.
For M1, I made a model that gave the rocket launcher that had a laser
sight. The secondary trigger would fire full auto plasma shots (zero
damage) that went along the EXACT path the rocket would travel. An
interesting side effect was that all the monster (except hulks and juggs)
would freeze when hit by the laser sight, thus allowing you a clean shot
with the rocket.
While it eliminates suicides, I would be more frustrated at wasting a
rocket round that wasn't going to explode and thus do a lot of damage.
Also, someone mentioned somewhere that 1024 units is around 7 meters.
This being the case, the arming range is farther out than the blast radius
of the rocket, which means you would still have a stale hit even though
you would have been safe w/out this safety feature. It could be an
option, just in case you have those annoying players who *like* to
suicide with the rocket launcher.
>
> > Anyone have any suggestions about how much damage the target would take.
>
> Perhaps the same as a running punch, or a little more.
Probably a lot more. A Dragon rocket flies a 100m per second, and its
considered slow by today's standards.
>
> > 3) Monsters that *don't* shoot their friends. While there are many times
> > this has helped me, rarely are the times I thought is was cool.
>
> I believe this can be done in Marathon. Have you ever seen two
> Juggernauts attack each other? If two aliens are set as friends, then
> they won't ever attack each other, I believe.
What I meant was the alien would aim at you, then go "oops, my friend is
in the way" and not shoot at all. If the guy was a berzerker, than I
would have no problem.
Adin Hunter Baber
I have another idea to add to the list:
Monsters use the same data struct as the player. This means enemies would
not have infinte ammo supplies, and you could grab any piece of equipment
they were carrying. Since the player could get more ammo this way, you
wouldn't have to leave ammo lying around conveniently.
This could also add another tactical decision to the game: do you rush
forward to kill the guy quickly so that you may get his weapon and ammo,
or do you make him waste his shots so that you have nothing to fear.
Or better yet, an example: You see two enemies. One armed with a rocket
launcher, the other with a plasma pistol. Your current weapons are :1
magnum, full clip, 4 more clips, AR75b, full bullet clip, 3 grenades, 1
more bullet clip, no grenade clips. You also know there's a Mother of all
Hunters roaming somewhere on this level. Decisions decisions...
Kirill
In article <cuahb-19069...@eiuts46.eiu.edu>, cu...@bgu.edu (Adin
Hunter Baber) wrote:
> I have another idea to add to the list:
>
> Monsters use the same data struct as the player. This means enemies would
> not have infinte ammo supplies, and you could grab any piece of equipment
> they were carrying. Since the player could get more ammo this way, you
> wouldn't have to leave ammo lying around conveniently.
>
> This could also add another tactical decision to the game: do you rush
> forward to kill the guy quickly so that you may get his weapon and ammo,
> or do you make him waste his shots so that you have nothing to fear.
This will complicate things. There N pfhor and only one marine. I can just
see it now, one trooper to another on 'If I had a rocket launcher...':
"Say, why don't we get that there rocket launcher ourselves...?"
Quartz
> On the topic of fists.... has anybody made a patch that makes the punch as
> fast as M1's? The one in M2/Minfinity is rather slow.
the punch is the same speed, it's just the graphic that's slower. shots
come out of your weapon the instant you hit the fire key, regardless of
how fast the graphic plays
Bahamut
> In article <bahamut-ya0234800...@news.fred.net>,
> Bahamut <bah...@fred.net> wrote:
> >In article <petrichE...@netcom.com>, pet...@netcom.com (Loren
> >Petrich) wrote:
> >> >6) Be sure to playtest on old hardware.
> >> One might end up finding the lowest limit of usability; a Quadra
> >> barely makes it for Marathon, for example.
>
> >Hey! My Quadra 605 @ 25 MHz runs just fine.
>
> At what resolution and speed?
> --
> Loren Petrich Happiness is a fast Macintosh
An LC, say- that barely makes it.
-Bahamut
@fred.net
"Guns don't kill Pfhor, the Devlin do"
<< Macintosh Technology at War! >>
Bahamut
> In article <bahamut-ya0234800...@news.fred.net>,
> bah...@fred.net (Bahamut) wrote:
>
> > In article <petrichE...@netcom.com>, pet...@netcom.com (Loren
> > Petrich) wrote:
> > > >6) Be sure to playtest on old hardware.
> > >
> > > One might end up finding the lowest limit of usability; a Quadra
> > > barely makes it for Marathon, for example.
> > >
> > > Loren Petrich
> >
> > Hey! My Quadra 605 @ 25 MHz runs just fine.
>
> Whoa whoa whoa, buddy. It's not _your_ Quadra he's talking about, it's the
> other Quadras.
>
> --
> http://www.lava.net/~kirill/
Ha ha ha. Do you realize that the 605 is the slowest quadra? Do you think,
say, a Quadra 840 AV would be slower?