[Valherran]

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Yes, I was afraid of that, and unfortunately I didn't have time to test the class in mid-late game. Without getting into the reasons for doing it the way I did, how does this sound for a second-take on the tank class:

Same damage reduction bonuses as before.
Slow overall movement speed at all times (not just when firing weapons)
But not as slow as the current speed penalty when firing
And you can perform a continuous high-speed dash at any time by double-tapping forward and then holding the forward key, but the dash costs health (1% of max health every 2 seconds, minimum 1 health cost).

Ah, that makes sense. Well, when I did my testing, it was all mostly in the original levels. I went as a Tank in the WoA mode and still got the same results. As for the Tank class, slow movement overall would not be a good idea. That will limit the player from being able to get to hard to reach places/secrets on the map when they do not have a jet pack. Not too sure if the dash could really help with that issue either... What if instead the Tank's bonus was toggle-able? That will remove the issue of needed movement, and if the other things I said earlier did not block the movement then it will be perfectly balanced in my view.

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You also get increased XP, which means you level your weapons a lot faster. I was able to finish WoA mode with this class without too much trouble. I didn't have trouble with ammo reduction, because there is plenty of ammo in most maps, and I was able to use kicks and close range shots to compensate. However, I may change things around to make them more fun. Also, I realize the ammo might be an issue in other modes.

The first idea that comes to mind is giving the player bonuses when attacking a designated targeted enemy, regardless of the distance to the enemy. For example, you do double damage and get triple XP against that enemy, but not against any other enemies. Targeting an enemy would require putting them in your crosshair and pressing the use key, and you have to wait several seconds, or until the enemy dies (whichever happens first) before you are allowed to change targets.

In WoA it wasn't as bad with the ammo (except for that level with the storage crates and ramps), but in the original levels it was a real pain, maybe make it so it cuts down the ammo gained by 1/3 instead of 1/2? The idea with hitting the use key on a target would help greatly, I would like to test that out when you release another beta.

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Again, this is a case where I didn't have time to adequately test the class. I found it very easy going in WoA mode, but that was before I nerfed him to limit the max number of followers, and then I didn't test again after that.

I'm not sure what to do with this class, but I think there needs to be a guaranteed useful follower that can be summoned at any time (perhaps infinite dukebot that transfers a percentage of damage to the player, so when the bot gets hurt the player does too).

Thanks for all the feedback. I don't want to add additional classes until I have made the existing classes balanced and fun.

WoA was easy going until I got a really high score, then I got my ass kicked. lol
Same with the original levels, Got to Shrapnel City with a high score and was getting my ass kicked. XD
Maybe if the slain mobs gained x2-4 stats (similar to the Expander upgrades) but has a % chance to fight for you when killed. Say... The more powerful the mob, the higher chance it has to fight for you? Would limit the annoyance of navigating through 50 guys in a tight room, and have what you want to fight for you in large quantity. Would also like to test that if you put that into the next beta version.

That hologram idea would be better suited for that class idea I posted earlier. ;-)

[Radar]

Trooper Dan, on 17 March 2013 - 08:34 AM, said:

Do you have any suggestions for WoA maps?

You should include some DM classics, like Iod2 and Danzig66 (or even better, the Iod-Danzig amalgamation that's been floating around), or even falling type maps like Ledges or Bottles if you could somehow make sure the monsters don't fall (heck, there's an amalgamation of those maps floating around too).

[Headless_Horseman_Rebirth]

I'm just playing the latest version, but it seems to fail to load the final map of the "random maps" episode...

[king karl]

Norvak, on 21 July 2012 - 09:57 AM, said:

What about including the new monsters from total meltdown? PSX rips Like the pigcop variants and the shark drone

what about including the liztroop variants from carribean duke or nuclear winter?

[Headless_Horseman_Rebirth]

Re-downloaded & installed the last version : it still doesn't load the boss map of the "random map" episode.

[Danukem]

Headless_Horseman_Rebirth, on 05 May 2013 - 07:55 AM, said:

Re-downloaded & installed the last version : it still doesn't load the boss map of the "random map" episode.

At the moment I'm stumped. I believe it has something to do with the way the startlevel command is used when starting the boss map, but I can't see anything wrong with the code. I changed things around in the latest version and had to adjust some code, but I thought I had done it safely.

EDIT: I think I figured it out. Startlevel crashes if you try to warp to an episode that hasn't been defined. I deliberately did not define a couple of volumes, because I didn't want them all to show up in the episode selection menu (the volumes are being used to store level definitions). One of the undefined volumes is for the boss levels, the other is for the WoA mode levels. The reason WoA mode still works is that startlevel is not used to progress through the maps in that episode.

[Danukem]

The attached CONs fix the crash bug. I hope they don't cause any new problems.

Attached File(s)

•  attcons.zip (210.5K)
  Number of downloads: 501

[Headless_Horseman_Rebirth]

Thanks Dan, I'll playtest it and let you know.

[Headless_Horseman_Rebirth]

Well, I found out an old bug re-introduced at some point : in "Mincer City" I nuked an area full of Newbeasts and got the "Too many sprites spawned" error.

[Danukem]

Headless_Horseman_Rebirth, on 06 May 2013 - 08:21 AM, said:

Well, I found out an old bug re-introduced at some point : in "Mincer City" I nuked an area full of Newbeasts and got the "Too many sprites spawned" error.

I'm pretty sure that bug has been there all along. Mincer city has a very high sprite count to begin with, and when you set off a nuke on a bunch of enemies, lots more sprites get spawned (jibs, debris, etc.) which can push the game over the limit. I have some code that's supposed to help with that, but clearly it's not good enough.

[Radar]

Lol I've gotten that error on Mincer City using vanilla Duke.

[LeoD]

If you have a suitable savegame, prefer the shrinker over explosives to finish the map.

[Helixhorned]

Trooper Dan, on 06 May 2013 - 09:09 AM, said:

I'm pretty sure that bug has been there all along. Mincer city has a very high sprite count to begin with, and when you set off a nuke on a bunch of enemies, lots more sprites get spawned (jibs, debris, etc.) which can push the game over the limit. I have some code that's supposed to help with that, but clearly it's not good enough.

Actually, I've been thinking about a "priority", or rather, "uselessness" attribute for sprites for a while: when the game hits a sprite limit, it may delete sprites that the user has tagged "useless", like smoke, debris and so on. But first, some groundwork would need to be laid.

[Paul B]

Helixhorned, on 06 May 2013 - 01:07 PM, said:

Actually, I've been thinking about a "priority", or rather, "uselessness" attribute for sprites for a while: when the game hits a sprite limit, it may delete sprites that the user has tagged "useless", like smoke, debris and so on. But first, some groundwork would need to be laid.

Of course that would be after multi-player has been polished. lol

[Danukem]

Looking at my code, it does appear that I disabled a solution that I had attempted in the past. In EVENT_GAME, the following line appears for SMALLSMOKE and a lot of other useless sprites:

// ifvarg THISACTOR MAXSPRITES killit

The idea being that if the ID for that sprite is above a defined limit (say, 14000), then it should be deleted for safety because it is getting too close to the hard limit. But it wasn't a reliable solution. In some cases, thousands of sprites can get spawned at the same time. The useless ones can be deleted the next tic, but by then it is already too late. And if MAXSPRITES is set low enough that it is actually safe, then in a lot of scenarios sprites get deleted when they don't need to be. So instead I decided to rely on toning down some effects so that they spawned fewer sprites, but apparently that wasn't enough. There are other available CON solutions, however.

@Helixhorned: the implementation of idea would be very much appreciated!

Radar, on 06 May 2013 - 09:18 AM, said:

Lol I've gotten that error on Mincer City using vanilla Duke.

That makes me feel better, but it's surprising -- Mincer city contain 9589 sprites. That means 6795 sprites would have to be spawned to crash it, and the vanilla game is pretty conservative about spawning sprites. Just out of curiosity: do you remember what you what was happening when it crashed?

[Radar]

I believe I was just walking around the city shooting one or two monsters. I remember it always happening in front of the girl posters next to the Duke Burger, causing me to walk by it a certain way to make sure it wouldn't keep crashing.

[king karl]

I just finished the entire set of original levels with the zookeeper it was fun, a few things

*all the levels seem to be out of order in a few places, especialy the secret levels which is dissapointing, and hte level derelict is in the middle of episode 1 it seems.
* some of the monsters i get as allies are glitched, for example after i kill a slimer, another slimer spawns as expected.....but it still acts hostile. honestly id prefer to not have slimer allies anyways.....as id kill them anyways just because they creep the shit outa me.
*when one of my allied flying pig cars gets shot down it spawns a pigcop that is not an ally....asif an enemy was flying it the whole time it was fighting for me
* it is very easy to kill my own monsters especialy when they stand in the exact spot as the enemies (which is almost always because they walk toward eachother), perhaps give them reduced damage from my attacks? or atleast make it so i cant set them on fire/bleed/acid.

[Danukem]

king karl, on 10 May 2013 - 08:30 AM, said:

* some of the monsters i get as allies are glitched, for example after i kill a slimer, another slimer spawns as expected.....but it still acts hostile. honestly id prefer to not have slimer allies anyways.....as id kill them anyways just because they creep the shit outa me.

Slimers do not have any ally code and are not supposed to spawn other slimers. I have never seen that happen. You can make eggs into allies, but then they spawn allied mini-newbeasts or mini-octabrains, not slimers. That's because slimers are hardcoded.

king karl, on 10 May 2013 - 08:30 AM, said:

*when one of my allied flying pig cars gets shot down it spawns a pigcop that is not an ally....asif an enemy was flying it the whole time it was fighting for me

That's strange I thought I had fixed that bug.

king karl, on 10 May 2013 - 08:30 AM, said:

* it is very easy to kill my own monsters especialy when they stand in the exact spot as the enemies (which is almost always because they walk toward eachother), perhaps give them reduced damage from my attacks? or atleast make it so i cant set them on fire/bleed/acid.

They do often end up occupying the same space (which is a deficiency in the code) but not "almost always" -- they will shoot at each other from far away and can kill each other without getting close. In any case, what you are asking for would make a good zookeeeper upgrade. Perhaps the classes should have different skills they can invest in, and for the zookeeper one of them would be friendly fire reduction.

[Headless_Horseman_Rebirth]

Ok, everything works now and the "boss map" is loaded after you reach 600.000 points in the "random maps" episode.
P.S. : This mod is fantastic, thanx a lot Dan !

[Danukem]

Headless_Horseman_Rebirth, on 14 May 2013 - 06:12 AM, said:

Ok, everything works now and the "boss map" is loaded after you reach 600.000 points in the "random maps" episode.
P.S. : This mod is fantastic, thanx a lot Dan !

And thank you for testing it. Good to hear!

[Headless_Horseman_Rebirth]

I found a minor bug : when you're under super-steroids, your runs FASTER than freezesparks, and if you shoot straight in the direction you're running the projectiles simply hurts you before leaving the freezerthrower !

[Fox]

Hasn't it always been like that in Duke 3D?

[Danukem]

Yeah it has always been like that, and after a few upgrades the freezer fires a beam which you can't run into, so it's not really worth fixing. I believe there is a FREEZENOHURTOWNER flag that can be set in the user.con, though.

[Mikko]

Headless_Horseman_Rebirth, on 16 May 2013 - 08:43 AM, said:

I found a minor bug : when you're under super-steroids, your runs FASTER than freezesparks, and if you shoot straight in the direction you're running the projectiles simply hurts you before leaving the freezerthrower !

Duke can break the laws of physics!

In reality, if you're running at 10km/h and you fire a projectile that has a muzzle velocity of 10km/h, the projectile has a velocity of 20km/h relative to the ground and 10km/h relative to the shooter: you cannot "catch up" with the projectile.

[Fox]

Not like that's a problem for someon carrying 50 rockets in his pocket. But it would be something fun to be implemented, however the running speed shouldn't also affect the angle which rockets are fired at?

[Danukem]

Mikko_Sandt, on 16 May 2013 - 10:00 AM, said:

Duke can break the laws of physics!

In reality, if you're running at 10km/h and you fire a projectile that has a muzzle velocity of 10km/h, the projectile has a velocity of 20km/h relative to the ground and 10km/h relative to the shooter: you cannot "catch up" with the projectile.

Do modern games do it correctly? It's hard to tell because the player's running speed isn't so unrealistically fast in modern games.

[Mikko]

Trooper Dan, on 16 May 2013 - 11:32 AM, said:

Do modern games do it correctly? It's hard to tell because the player's running speed isn't so unrealistically fast in modern games.

If you've got a projectile that's slow enough (to observe) you could test it easily by firing from the exact same spot while 1) you're running and 2) while you're stationary. Then see how long it takes for the projectile to hit its target. If they both hit the target at the same time then the game has it wrong.

[Fox]

Trooper Dan, on 16 May 2013 - 11:32 AM, said:

Do modern games do it correctly? It's hard to tell because the player's running speed isn't so unrealistically fast in modern games.

The ones I play do, but you are only going to notice it with a Tank or something.

[Danukem]

While we are shooting the breeze about bad projectile physics, we shouldn't neglect the worst of the oddities: I am referring to the fact that projectiles move at a higher velocity when being aimed up or down. This is because they move at a fixed rate along xy coordinates. Movement on the z plane is scaled to match. For example, if you fire two rockets, one straight ahead and another at a 45 degree upward angle, they will cover xy distance at the same rate, even though one is also moving upward at a steep angle, so that the angled rocket is actually moving much faster.

[Headless_Horseman_Rebirth]

The "too many sprites spawned" bug is returning again in "Dogville 2012", which I believe will really fit better as "boss map" than a regular one, given the amount of enemies. Dan, you should really re-introduce the old semi-fix you did, it worked quite well for other high sprite count maps like "Demolition Plant".