by Mkall » Sat Feb 02, 2008 6:29 pm
- Weapon: Twin Sonic Cannons
Welcome to Mkall's Journal. Here I'll just blabber on about where I am in the coding process, various ideas I've had (feasible or not) and other things. I'll try to keep you informed as to what I'm currently working on, although I may not tell you everything I'm working on. Please do not take everything I say here as a certainty that it'll appear in the game. Many ideas I state here are still very much in their formative stage, and will most likely be changes or dropped completely.
I've had the code for 24 hours now and I'm still sifting through it. It's not really a mess, just complicated, very complicated; and yet kind of simple at the same time. I'm still setting up my development environment, which in itself is proving to be a bit of a learning curve since I've never done it before.
I haven't modified anything yet as I'm unsure yet as to the full extent of integration, however some things look like they may be easy to change/modify; number of characters for example.
Now that I see the code and know for sure how things interact, I can now properly evaluate all the cool ideas that have popped up on this board. The main issue that has plagued HMW for some time has been weapons and their imbalance. There has been suggestions of just setting the reload times of all the weapons to the same thing, however that doesn't sit well with me as it will leave us with clone weapons. Tammuz has given me the idea to ditch reload times all together and go with percentages instead. Every round a percentile is chosen, and if it falls within the weapons chance to fire entry, the weapon is fired. I think I may have found a way to get that idea to work. Experimentation will commence as soon as I finish setting up the environment. Oh yeah, it seems that it should be easy to include INT as a pre-req stat for some weapons. It might be more challenging though to include healing-style weapons as it would mean figuring out how to dynamically change the targeting part of the code. You don't want to heal your enemies after all.
The idea of victory points has always intrigued me too. For those of you that do not know, Victory Points (VPs), under Glyph's planning, were given to a character if they stasis locked a target, or brought a target below 50% health. These would then go to earning character and player badges. I have a few other ideas too, such as giving them out if you survive a successful territory defence mission, or help win a mission that secures a territory for your faction in the warmap. Maybe you'll gain VPs just for being brave enough to fight severely outnumbered in missions. The more difficult your opponent, the more VPs you gain. And I'm sure I'll come up with more ideas. However I don't intend to place them in until the warmap is implemented.
For now, I'm not going to be working on the challenge arena. I'm placing the warmap as a higher priority. Which brings me to my vision on missions vs arena in v2. We, the programmers, have always believed that the missions/warmap should have more focus than the arena/pit. To that end, when the warmap rolls out, I'm currently thinking about nixing the xp bonus in arena/pit matches. That isn't to say that those places won't be without their merits. Currently I'm thinking about replacing the XP bonus with something completely different: tokens (better name might follow). As you earn tokens, you can exchange them for prizes not normally available through regular means. How'd you like an alt class with a tactic that only Quints have? Or maybe an above-average weapon? Or maybe you'd like a pet Kremzeek? If you want to upgrade your character, go into missions. If you want shiny objects, enter the pit. Be warned though; only the winner of a match will get tokens.
Until next time, see ya.
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