Thoughts about weapon balance

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scirmast
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Thoughts about weapon balance

Post by scirmast »

This hit me yesterday while Bloodbathing..

Blood has a fairly good weapon balance. All weapons can be used (though spray cans seldom), and all got their use in the right situation. But everything affects everything, and so the weapons are now balanced for the build engine. How thoroughly will these balances caryy out to TF?

For example, if you are crouched, you get much less damage than normally. And Tesla primary is next to useless in middle-long ranges, since the autoaim screws it up. In TF, however, things can be all different, as you can predict opponents movements and totally ream with Tesla, or you can aim down to crouched player and he'll take just as much health as when standing. Things like this can have a great impact on how the game is played. At first glance it may not seem so, but you never know. Also this is probably the main reason there was so much criticue like "it's not the original Blood!!".

One might now ask: does this matter? If the idea is to recreate Blood, then it does definitely matter. Not to forget that to many people here Blood means Transfusion. Changes to play classic Blood over the internet are small because Kali is not free and commit sucks (does commit 1.4 life up to its name, no-one seems to have proof). There are alternatives to the commercial Kali, but the useability is unknown and some are considered illegal.

What are your thoughts on this?

And Slink, I am waiting for a spell check too ;)
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Willis

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Post by Willis »

Not to forget that to many people here Blood means Transfusion
While I hope one day I can say that, in all honesty, all team members are well aware Transfusion is still far from Blood. I thought I should get that out of the way first....
How thoroughly will these balances caryy out to TF?
The balances, from my preception, will remain the same with one exception: no auto-aim in trade for proper mouse aiming. While having proper mouse aiming will somewhat change some of the balance build had without such a feature, I don't think anybody here will be able to agree on what balances should be adjusted, and what should be left. It is clear that mouse aiming is here to stay, and therefore, I don't think an auto-aim system is a relevant argument. Everything else will be emulated to the best of our ability.
In TF, however, things can be all different, as you can predict opponents movements and totally ream with Tesla, or you can aim down to crouched player and he'll take just as much health as when standing.
What have you been playing? There has been no public release of Transfusion that supports crouching in any way :shock:
Not to worry, crouching is coming now that we have switched map formats. And any consistancy issue that is clearly documented and reported that we miss will be taken into consideration.
(does commit 1.4 life up to its name, no-one seems to have proof)
While commit 1.4 does add TCP support, I have found it to be quite sketchy in that is has conflicts with IPX, and the fact that it doesn't seem to truely impliment IP seems to, for the most part, keep it limited to LAN multiplayer, as opposed to internet multiplayer.
What are your thoughts on this?
I'll summarize my feelings to this:
Recreating Blood in whole is impossible without its source code. We will have to make compromises, but we always discuss them, and we should always conform to the best interest of the Blood community above all else.

PS, aren't you on the wrong Blood forum :twisted:
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Post by scirmast »

Willis wrote:
Not to forget that to many people here Blood means Transfusion
While I hope one day I can say that, in all honesty, all team members are well aware Transfusion is still far from Blood. I thought I should get that out of the way first....
I know this, what I meant that TF is played more since it works in XP with no hassle. Everyone knows its not yet Blood, but still people seem to play it online more than they play Blood 1 in any mode (I am not sure though).
How thoroughly will these balances caryy out to TF?
The balances, from my preception, will remain the same with one exception: no auto-aim in trade for proper mouse aiming. While having proper mouse aiming will somewhat change some of the balance build had without such a feature, I don't think anybody here will be able to agree on what balances should be adjusted, and what should be left. It is clear that mouse aiming is here to stay, and therefore, I don't think an auto-aim system is a relevant argument. Everything else will be emulated to the best of our ability.
Exactly. Nobody wants the autoaim to return, not even me, but nevertheless it is a feature that changes the gameplay in Blood1, especially the weapon balance.
In TF, however, things can be all different, as you can predict opponents movements and totally ream with Tesla, or you can aim down to crouched player and he'll take just as much health as when standing.
What have you been playing? There has been no public release of Transfusion that supports crouching in any way :shock:
Not to worry, crouching is coming now that we have switched map formats. And any consistancy issue that is clearly documented and reported that we miss will be taken into consideration.
OK, I havent played TF with crouching. I made an assumption that the gameplay will change on that part.
(does commit 1.4 life up to its name, no-one seems to have proof)
While commit 1.4 does add TCP support, I have found it to be quite sketchy in that is has conflicts with IPX, and the fact that it doesn't seem to truely impliment IP seems to, for the most part, keep it limited to LAN multiplayer, as opposed to internet multiplayer.
I may be wrong but the network code was also improved in the 1.4 version. So you could use it with Kali or some other and get better results.

What are your thoughts on this?
I'll summarize my feelings to this:
Recreating Blood in whole is impossible without its source code. We will have to make compromises, but we always discuss them, and we should always conform to the best interest of the Blood community above all else.

PS, aren't you on the wrong Blood forum :twisted:
Hehe, well this was about TF :)
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Willis

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Post by Willis »

Nobody wants the autoaim to return, not even me, but nevertheless it is a feature that changes the gameplay in Blood1, especially the weapon balance.
Well, we definatly need to get our weapons damage and fire effects to match Blood before we'll know for sure... the weapons still in dire need of adjustments... more of a matter of figuring out the true original values.
I may be wrong but the network code was also improved in the 1.4 version. So you could use it with Kali or some other and get better results.
I'm not sure if network code itself was ever an issue, as opposed to addressability beyond lan (IE, connect to an IP address), or the fact that all players had to connect before any match could begin (IE, # of players had to be static before you could even begin playing, no joining on-the-fly). The lack of addressability (and therefore the need for 3rd party apps such as Kali) make it quite undesirable to even try to play over the internet, aside from how hard the game is to run on a modern computer anyway.
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Post by scirmast »

Willis wrote: I'm not sure if network code itself was ever an issue, as opposed to addressability beyond lan (IE, connect to an IP address), or the fact that all players had to connect before any match could begin (IE, # of players had to be static before you could even begin playing, no joining on-the-fly). The lack of addressability (and therefore the need for 3rd party apps such as Kali) make it quite undesirable to even try to play over the internet, aside from how hard the game is to run on a modern computer anyway.
Yeah, the addressability is an issue. But Kali also allowed people to chat, and people saw what games were running. So it also had small benefits (yeah could do that with irc too). But the real problem was the network code. Most games work well with 50 ping, but Blood needs a LAN to not lag. Its somewhat playable on 100 ping (luckily both players have the semae lag), but in the long run not something you appreciate. A friend once reported he played Shadow Warrior (that uses commit 1.4) over the internet and didn't find any problems, though I am not sure what he regards as "no problems". It's also unknown if commit has all the network code in (IE. would the Shadow Warrior game be the reason it worked).

And to make it clear, I am anticipating TF very much, not criticising it. Everyone is doing good job and I appreciate every bit of it.
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Post by da_weezle »

@ Weapon-tweaking:
This is being worked on. A few months ago we changed the damage-system and now we can fully tweak every specific damage for every weapon (on every difficulty), so this is a matter of testing and tweaking.

@ LAN / Internet play:
I haven't actually tried it yet, but a friend of mine came up with this a few days back:
http://www.hamachi.cc/
Might be something to check out if you wanna play Blood over the internet. Also, has anyone ever tried setting up a VPN for this purpose?

Cheers!
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Slink

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Re: Thoughts about weapon balance

Post by Slink »

scirmast wrote:. (does commit 1.4 life up to its name
You meant to say "LIVE up to". :) I wouldn't have said anything if you hadn't asked. ;) I didn't even notice it until Willis quoted you... :D Pretty damn good!

Auto aim?
In Blood, you could turn off autoaim using the parameter, "-noaim". In TF, it be possible to toggle autoaim as well, if we code it. :)

Speaking of code,
I am interested in working on the code for TF if it is possible. I know C++, but I am not well-versed in the art. I would love to see the damage-balancing system. :twisted: Now, after school, if only I could do some **cking maps...

-Slink
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da_weezle
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Post by da_weezle »

If you wanna code, please do! We're always short on coders, so that would be very welcome. Basically you'd have to create a sourceforge.net account and ask Willis or Kazashi to add you to the project as a developer. Then you'd have write-access to the CVS.
You can also access the CVS anonymously (which gives you access to the code), but you can't commit.
Have a look:
http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=22136

[edit]
Balancing the weapons-system shouldn't be to complicated (code-wise). Just a matter of tweaking healths and damages. Last time I checked we were changing the monster-code, don't know what the precise status of that bit is.
[/edit]
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Post by scirmast »

da_weezle wrote:[edit]
Balancing the weapons-system shouldn't be to complicated (code-wise). Just a matter of tweaking healths and damages. Last time I checked we were changing the monster-code, don't know what the precise status of that bit is.
[/edit]
I was trying to say that it isnt so straight forward since the engine changes will affect directly to the weapon usage. But we went this over with Willis.
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