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Helmet & Radar

Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2012 10:53 pm UTC
by norfenstein

I think one of Tremulous's biggest missed opportunities was how thoroughly the helmet destroys the applicability of stealth for aliens. It's especially unfortunate because the helmet would be highly valuable for it's defensive buff alone, so players miss out on what would be an interesting decision between surviving more hits and seeing enemies before they strike. So something obvious that Unvanquished could do is split the helmet into two items: one that provides crucial protection to the head (or just a big defense boost if locational damage were to change), and one that gives a radar but no extra defense.

I recommend that, but I think you could also take it a step further by turning the radar into an opportunity for promoting teamwork. Now, in a match with perfect teamwork (i.e. everyone on the human knows each other, works well together, and has voice chat) the above would be enough: humans would only ever need one radar-bearing player per squad, and that person would just shout out when he sees an alien hiding. My opinion is that the shouting part of that is not what's fun or interesting, it's that the humans grouped together and contributed in different ways (radar guy by spotting aliens, the others by protecting his squishy head). Therefore, in order to extend that teamwork fun into matches with less than perfect coordination, the game could just automate the shouting: give a radar to every human that's near a teammate with the radar item equipped. I like this sort of natural teamwork encouragement where just doing the right thing (in this case, buddying-up with a teammate) has an immediate and obvious benefit.


Re: Helmet & Radar

Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2012 7:51 pm UTC
by Gireen

We could completely remove the radar and make the sounds more important. that players must listen if a enemy is near.
Or for humans like the one form Alien movies, where you only know that there is movement in the next room, and maybe objects in the map could trigger these detector too.
For aliens there could be a smell visualization, about near humans and how many they are, but only in a roughly direction.


Re: Helmet & Radar

Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2012 11:44 pm UTC
by Khaoz

If we did the sound thing we'd need to add walking sounds to dretch + lisk (which would upset a few people).

I personally don't think there is anything wrong with the helmet and how it currently works, especially with the aliens flexibility in building. The amount of times I've managed to find the last egg purely because of the blip on my radar.

As for the teamwork idea I think this has been briefly discussed in the IRC, but in terms of creating a minimap where you can see all your team-mates and the maps layout.


Re: Helmet & Radar

Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2012 3:15 pm UTC
by Kabootles

Before i write a wiki page. Is this issue resolved?


Re: Helmet & Radar

Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2012 7:58 am UTC
by Ishq

For now, helmet and radar will be one item We can update the wiki page for this later should this change.


Re: Helmet & Radar

Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 11:51 pm UTC
by velociostrich
Khaoz wrote:

If we did the sound thing we'd need to add walking sounds to dretch + lisk (which would upset a few people).

If I recall correctly, in Modern Warfare 2, the Ninja perk was supposed to make your footsteps silent. Popular knowledge of the perk was that it did, in fact, completely silence one's footsteps, but (if I recall correctly), it simply reduced the sound to be nearly inaudible; if you cranked the volume enough, you could still faintly hear them. Perhaps an extremely faint sound would be passable.

On the subject of adding sounds to the dretch and lisk movement, I think to sell the concept that those classes do indeed have legs and don't just float above the surface, a walking sound could be played for the player only to the player only; i.e., so that in their perspective, they hear the sound produced by their own movement.