With the increase in polygon number, maps have increased the number of objects like chairs, boxes, fences, tubes, girders, … and the walls and the ceilings are more and more sophisticated. The only surfaces that are still flat are on the floor. The maps are more beautiful and are nice if you want to hide. But wallwalking becomes difficult.

Sometimes when I think how hard it is for me to wallwalk in some places on some maps, I can easily imagine how painful and frustrating it must be for new players to begin with aliens…

Wallwalking was one of my favorite feature of this game. I could often play as dretch and basilisk, giving my evos to other players until the final rush, just because to me it was a lot of fun. But in the more recent maps, wallwalking becomes too random: just go in any direction by pressing keys randomly and use your radar to try to bite before you are killed. There is nothing else you can do. The view is constantly moving and is much more often looking at the walls rather than the direction you are going or what you want to look at.

I have no idea what should be done in regards to this problem. I think a good start is to discuss it and to be aware of it. So I have been thinking about a few ideas.

For mappers, a few things that help:

• few angles. Curved surfaces and curved corners or corners that are not at 90 deg are difficult to manage at high speed, especially with small surfaces.
• use different polygons for graphics and for walking when needed. For example a very sophisticated wall can use a flat walkable surface on it.
• don't add borders everywhere: borders to the sides of the walls, of the doors, of the tables, of the stairs, etc. Or make them only graphic: when you walk on them, they are flat.
• when there are too many edges and corners close to each other, running straight may result in chaotic directions. A few can be good to quickly turn around and go back to the attacker with another angle of attack, but too many and you are lost.
• please don't put girders and beams (especially those with holes in them) on the ceilings and the walls. It slows you down, gets you lost and often make you fall. It's even worse when you end up going around them in circles… Still, girders and beams can be useful to hide yourself or to make shortcuts, so put them in places where you can easily sidestep them.
• when a room has platforms and pillars, be careful with the connections between the pillars, the walls and the platforms. Make them large enough, easy enough to spot them while you are running (whether you want to take them or avoid them)
• fences and rails. I think I hate 95% of them all… Especially if they are thin and there is no way around them. In some place they can be useful for protection or hiding. Humans can crouch behind, shoot over, etc. But most of the time they are just decorative and painful while a bit of reflection could make them decorative and useful or avoidable.

Also maybe the current wallwalking mechanics could be enhanced to make the camera movements more predictable and/or make them better comply to the will of the player. Some ideas:

• walwalking pitching (the fact that the view accommodates to changes in terrain orientation) could be made better with more smoothing on rough terrains.
• wallwalking pitching could be reserved for greater changes in terrain orientation, so your vision stays more stable on lightly uneven surfaces.
• wallwalking pitching should never end up making you look at a wall if you weren't already doing it.
• the wallwalking key could become a "drop from wall" key: it only stops you from wallwalking when you press it.
• a new key could prevent wallwalking pitching when pressed. So you can continue looking at a target while you change surface.
• maybe a sign somewhere on the HUD indicating the direction of the ground and the average direction you are (or were) following can help you quickly recover your sense of orientation.
• the path you are going to walk if you keep going in the current direction could be drawn on the surface. As dretches are very fast, 1 second of precomputed path may be enough.

I think dretches should always be wallwalking. Not only because it is too easy to kill them on the floor, but also because aliens can't avoid each others and many tyrants and others have been killed because of their teammates while they where trying to retreat. So if we could have a game were wallwalking is good enough that it could be used at all time, then we would have made a nice (though maybe utopian) step, that would make all players only want to join aliens :)

It's hard to disagree with this. Some areas are almost impossible to navigate effectively while wall walking. Other corners and roofs catch your marauder and goon.

Pro mapping tip: Use player clip

kthxbai

ziliss wrote:

• walwalking pitching (the fact that the view accommodates to changes in terrain orientation) could be made better with more smoothing on rough terrains.

So you propose having more smoothing with a greater angle difference between the surfaces you are changing between?
That could work, but I wonder how confusing having a non-uniform smoothing would be.

ziliss wrote:

• wallwalking pitching could be reserved for greater changes in terrain orientation, so your vision stays more stable on lightly uneven surfaces.

This would help too, but care must be taken.

A simple solution would fail completely if you go from floor to cieling while taking very small steps in between ( a very smooth tunnel for instance )

ziliss wrote:

• wallwalking pitching should never end up making you look at a wall if you weren't already doing it.

I'm not sure what you mean by this one.

Wallwalk pitching basically realigns your current view with the model.
If a dretch is looking down while on the ceiling, its view will be looking up when he disables wallwalk because of this.

ziliss wrote:

• the wallwalking key could become a "drop from wall" key: it only stops you from wallwalking when you press it.

Don't we already do this?
This is just wallwalk toggle, which is the default setting.
If you don't have this, then look in the options menu for it.
This option was in tremulous too.

ziliss wrote:

• a new key could prevent wallwalking pitching when pressed. So you can continue looking at a target while you change surface.

Adding a key for this seems like unneeded complexity.
Why don't we just make it the default?

I mean, when you wallwalk, your view direction will never change.
It seems like this would make wallwalk a ton less confusing and much more practical.
The only downside is the loss of "realism" because your view won't resemble actually walking on a wall. ( It would remain upright as if walking on the ground )

The greatest benefit is it will enable the easy use of wallwalk for combat.
You can easily keep your view on the enemy human at all times because you won't have to fight the auto-pitch system.
Doing this also means the complexity of the map's geometry won't matter.

ziliss wrote:

• maybe a sign somewhere on the HUD indicating the direction of the ground and the average direction you are (or were) following can help you quickly recover
  your sense of orientation.

This seems ok, but I wonder how much it will actually help.
You would still have to query the HUD to get your position.

ziliss wrote:

• the path you are going to walk if you keep going in the current direction could be drawn on the surface. As dretches are very fast, 1 second of precomputed path may be enough.

I don't see how this would help.
The main problem with wallwalk and complex map geometry is the transitions between surfaces manipulate your view and change what you are looking at because it trys to keep your view aligned with your model.
This gets VERY disorientating and makes it difficult to keep your view on an enemy because you have to fight the view changes while also compensating for the enemy's movement.

Donate doesn't exist in unvanquished (yet) so you don't need to worry about donating evos to ur team.
The wallclimbing stuff is more of the mapper's problem than the engine problem.

Well I have actually no idea whether the ideas I wrote are good or not. One thing is sure: the mapper's involvement is necessary. Maybe it could be useful to have some kind of guidelines in order to get more coherence and more quality. (As Thomas DEBESSE said here: http://linuxfr.org/nodes/95888/comments/1397244)

If we want better smoothing, we should have a smarter algorithm. The current algorithm seems to only realign the pitch to the model. It does that more or less quickly depending on the user preference. Thus it cannot make the difference between a rough terrain, where pitching should be instantaneous to allow a stable view, and a real change in terrain orientation like when you go on a different wall, where pitching should be smoothed otherwise the player would get lost.

For example if you could remember the different orientations of the model during the last half second or so, you could analyze the tendencies for example with a moving average (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_average). This should already make it much better, and the lag introduced by the moving average may not be noticeable. But if you want, you can compute the future positions for the new half second and analyze it too so you could adjust instantly.

Now there may be better ways to do it. If you know a physicist, you should ask him ;)

Also I am sorry, I realized that I confused disabling pitching and stable view in my first post, which is mostly wrong (the facts that english is not my natural language and that I wrote the post late at night didn't help ;) ).

About the "drop from wall" key, the idea is that if wallwalking can be made to work really well, we could make walwalking the default and change the wallwalking button to a not toggelable key which would stop wallwalking while pressed. It was half a joke, because even if I think it would be great, I believe there are players who wouldn't like it…

About the key that stops wallwalking pitching while pressed: it is an idea I had that maybe if I could manually control when to deactivate pitching, I could get better results, since as I know the terrain, I also know when it would be better not to have it. But it's hard to tell how much that could help without trying it.

About the sign indicating your orientation on the HUD: you are probably right, it wouldn't be very useful in real combat if you need to specifically look at it to see the orientation. But maybe it could be some other kind of system, like a color code or indicators appearing on the sides of the screen which you can see without looking at them.

Thanks Fuma for your comments which have been very helpful (at least to me).

Also I don't know your development process, but as the game is still alpha, if you could include a few console options to try different wallwalking strategies, and different parameters, we could test new ideas quite easily in real situations and in real fights.

I think moving averages are a good idea, but can cause problems similar to how you can 'walk up stairs from underneath' (visually, bbox stays rigid i.e. the position of the camera is shifted to smooth too much) if it is steep enough. If i run into a corner, there's a chance with this mathematics smoothing system that i will run through the wall then pop back up (visually, the bbox stays rigid)

The 'drop from wall' - i think our current wallwalk is fine as is. To drop from the wall all you have to do is toggle off or let go the wallwalk key depending on what settings you use.

Also, I heared that wallwalk exists in NS2, but your camera doesn't tilt which i don't really like as it doesn't seem realistic in this game.

Make some wall decoration, pipes etc. without collision so the wallwalking aliens can just go through them. This will also add some nice spots for the smaller aliens to hide and wait for the prey :)

I didn't read the entire thing but I feel that you are talking about the wall transition smoothing?

It bothers the heck out of me. It is a adjustable, although all the settings are very jittery and the instant is... well to instant. The one in stock Trem I think was geat

WhiteTech wrote:

all the settings are very jittery and the instant is...

Server's problem I think. Its also related to why the fans in nano and the telenode rings are acting warpy.
Then again, somehow it appeared in one of my LAN server demos :/