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[VC]

Things continue to shape up.

Recently we got to work on (re-)adding Man with the Golden Gun scenario and it's up for testing presently.  As it stands, Golden Gun timing is correct, and the goofy reload bug of Beta 2 seems to be gone.  The only problems with it is a sound-effect clipping issue (thx valve lol) and a lighting issue.  The gun looks fine on Neo Facility Frontzone but isn't lit at all on Neo Runway.  At first I thought a PP7-S was being marked as the Golden Gun.

Marked, as in it will appear on the radar when it's on the ground which is really neat:


One of my rare breaks from canon has been implemented so that means I need to explain myself.
The player with the Golden Gun may pick up armor once during an inning.

In GE007, in the MWTGG scenario (NOT simply when Golden Gun loadout is selected.), the AuG holder cannot acquire armor.  This is a balancing maneuver to prevent someone from AC-10'ing all damn day. However, that also means if you get the AuG before Armor, you've thrown away 100% of life.

The old mechanic meant getting armor was more important than getting the golden gun, since you aren't going to hold it for long anyway if you don't get armor first.
The augmentation ensures that you can always get armor once and thus you are better off prioritizing the AuG over the Armor.


Other news:
* Timed mines should have shorter fuses so you can actually use the damned things.
* Shotguns may get a tweak; beta needs to do some testing.  I'm contemplating a damage buff similar to the one I gave to Sniper Rifle, though not as drastic.
* Rocket and GrenL; I'm ready to set up both.   I have informed KM how Rocket works (in short, the projectile accelerates so you cross a room in 0.4 seconds, temple's big room(s) in 0.6, all of Dam in 0.8, and reach Jupiter in about 1.0 if it weren't for special relativity. But I doubt KM wants to do that much math.)  Grenade Launcher is mostly logic code; all I need to do with it is ensure the initial velocity is good, which is mostly a trial-and-error thing.  We never set an official scale ratio so I'll just make it seem about right and not worry any further.  To do so would be like keeping eight decimal points in a three-significant-figure calculation.
* Cougar Magnum has been tweaked a bit. It's feeling pretty close to where it should be as far as the delay between when you touch the trigger and when the bullet is fired, while before it seemed really slow.  Thus, when we were testing last night and I accidently died and KM got the AuG, I picked up the CMag, he opened the door, I put a mag round through his nostril and I got my AuG back.  WHEEE!  Also, the fire event used to be so late that the gun already recoiled on the player view, causing the tracer to draw between the impact and the end of the gun up in the air; looked weird as hell.

[kraid]

and reach Jupiter in about 1.0

lol, i remember shooting RL in GE64 st8 upwards, and they came back to the ground after a while.
Not sure how they did that.
But what if a skybox will be hit by a grenade from the launcher, bounching it back or disapearing like the mines?

[VC]

I'm expecting it will disappear; but since it doesn't exist, who knows.  I'm hoping our mappers will take throwable and launchable projectiles into consideration when they create the fringes of their maps so that sort of thing won't happen much.

I just tested that and the rocket did not return, at least within ten seconds. You may be thinking GrenL unless you grabbed a bowl of popcorn and waited like it were Punxsutawney Phil.

[Bissrok]

One of my rare breaks from canon has been implemented so that means I need to explain myself.
The player with the Golden Gun may pick up armor once during an inning.

I like this idea a lot. I actually played GE64 multiplayer for the first time in years the other day, and everyone thought it was "extremely cheap" that I'd grab armor before the golden gun, when they thought the gun carrier wasn't supposed to get any.

How exactly does the new system work, though? Is it just that you can pick body armor up only once after getting the gun? Because then you could get body armor, grab the gun, lose the armor, and then pick up more. But, if you weren't allowed to get more armor if you had it on after picking up the gun, what would happen if you were at 10% armor when you grabbed it? You'd be at a disadvantage.


Anyway, I like the sound of all of it -the radar, the GG rules, the timed mines (the idea of them being useful is intriguing), the shotgun, and the magnum changes all sound wonderful. As for the rockets and grenade launcher, I know everyone here my lynch me for saying it, but I could wait longer for Beta 3 if it would include them.

[Mike [fourtecks]]

I remember the rocket launcher straight up thing. I think it may have reached the world boundaries, looped to the bottom of the level, then exploded when hitting the ground from below. Takes longer than 10 seconds if I remember correctly.

[kraid]

A lot longer then 10 seconds, maybe a minute, i will check this.
Tecks explaination sounds realistic to me.

[VC]

How exactly does the new system work, though? Is it just that you can pick body armor up only once after getting the gun?

I don't know exactly how it works.  I know exactly how I specified it, but I also know KM didn't implement it in the same fashion.  I would not be suprised if there is a way to exploit it in the current WIP.  KM likes to make more work for himself by doing things in a way similar to, but less perfect, than my way, only to have to do it correctly later on.  He did that with the scoring and now he's doing it with the armor thing.

Verified: As it is coded, KM poofed it and is allowing an armor pickup if you had none when you get the AuG, whether or not you had any before.  Which means you want to avoid the AuG unless you have full armor or none at all, which is even goofier than before.

Good thing he's doing it with a script that polls 10 times per second and doesn't do it right, instead of just using a single BOOL flag that is reset on spawn and set on armor pickup that works flawlessly.

</sarcasm>

[killermonkey]

I would prefer you to refrain from making blog posts on wip material.

[CCsaint10]

so does this mean that you guys are going to implement grenade launchers and rocket launchers before releasing beta 3? I sure hope so. They will add a great deal of depth to the game if you do. I can wait longer similar to what was said above. It will be a much better game with those.

also, thanks for the blog VC, I always look forward to new blogs.

[VC]

It means if one or both is/are going to be in B3, reasonably canonical projectile motion speeds are prepared so they will function appropriately. They won't have stats pulled out of a hat as the weapons of previous releases have endured.

I enjoy writing them.

[major]

I'm happy cause VC's posts are making more and more sense.

[VC]

Shotgun testing looked pretty damn poor.

For one, it's much easier for the RCP90 to pop your head and do 90% in a flash than it was on N64.  For two, because of Source and other issues, if you get close enough to put all the pellets into your enemy, his model and hitboxes are warping and you lose some reg -- especially in the 200~400ms ping combat we've been testing on. For three, my GE monitoring software doesn't know about shotgun's five pellets, so what I was capturing was either the last pellet or the worst pellet or god knows what else.  Anyway, I have a feeling that its figures were the worst shotguns could be, not what they usually were.  I visually compared GE007 Shotguns against GE007 Klobb, then the current GES figures, and tweaked accordingly.  I probably over-tightened the rocksalt shotgun but if it somehow becomes a slaughter I'll back it off again.  Damage is also up a bit.

Now, to see if I can get the kids to test them out for me...  that's the difficult part of all this.

[CCsaint10]

seems like shotguns are a pain in the a** to get working and functioning properly...you guys have seem to be working on it for months and then Just when someone things its right..it turns out completely wrong. That must be hard to do. You guys have so much patience. Hope you can get it figured out.

[VC]

Valve made shotguns weird because they like doing hackish things rather than thinking things through; which is why its very fortunate for them they update their crap since they leave themselves so many problems to fix. And for us to fix.

Now that damage is fixed, Shotguns need(ed) to be dialed-in.  Again, Rocksalt Shotgun was never in multiplayer, so it's a completely unknown quantity.  Auto Shotgun was slotted as a higher-grade weapon than RCP90.  Why that was may be because it was intended to be better in most skirmishes, or it may be because it has a higher weapon ID number.  In either case, Power Weapons is about busting skulls and if you have CMag doing 50% and 100% and RCP90 doing lots of 45% and 90%, AShot had better be paying the bills, too.  And thanks to previous GES releases, we know what an overpowered shotgun feels like for reference.