Added Beam Control

ESF Related
,
1

Just a quick suggestion thats probably been said before but I couldnt find with a quick search.

[ul]
[li]After one fires a beam, the player can press RMB to detonate the beamhead, and LMB to let go of the attack.[/li][/ul]

[ul]
[li]The beam leaves the players control and continues on its last trajectory until it hits something. The player cannot detonate the beamhead at this point.[/li][/ul]

[ul]
[li]The beam would simply resemble a swatted beam.[/li][/ul]

[ul]
[li]Useful in situations where detonation would be too risky, or to ‘free ones hands’. Also gives players the option to launch a straight-firing ki wave.[/li][/ul]

[ul]
[li]Perhaps a damage reduction since, taking the physics of a cartoon universe into consideration, there is no longer a flow of ki being pumped into the attack (hence why a beam is even present).[/li][/ul]

[ul]
[li]There are far more scenarios in the anime where a ki wave is let go/carried on than where it is detonated.[/li][/ul]

[ul]
[li]Debating whether this release manouver should be added during a powerstruggle. On one hand I think you should be forced to battle out a PS and see the victor, but on the other hand you should have the choice of technique and gamble. You could use it to delay your opponent, or to simply escape from the PS and try your luck at dodging the attack, or even a way to cancel out of a bugged out PS altogether. I would say press both LMB+RMB during a PS to let go of your beam.[/li][/ul]

2

Maybe I missed something..
Isn’t it already like that in the open-beta?

3

Pretty much all the things you’ve mentioned are already in the openbeta!

4

Not really. First im against having beams detonateable in the first place.

Thats just a cheap trick to score some damage. I say instead of the detonate ability they should simply be let go.

Secondly. If a beam hits the skybox it should not detonate but just disapear. (sadly that probably cant be done to easily)

Thirdly releasing your beam in a striggle Beam VS beam is a cheap way to get out of there when you notice you cant win. No deal. You take the gamble with the PS of being beaten you should cary the punishment if you cant win.

Fourthly In a struggle Beam VS Ball its allready possible to let go of the attack by pressing the right mouse button.

And finally. As the force pitters should know from an update a few weeks ago. The mouse button 1 is allready used for another beam feature that will make using beams a bit easier and will allow us to even further decrease the blast radius on the *****es XD

5

Where is a proper log of changes then?

Thirdly releasing your beam in a struggle Beam VS beam is a cheap way to get out of there when you notice you cant win. No deal. You take the gamble with the PS of being beaten you should cary the punishment if you cant win.

See thats what I thought at first, but you will be at a disadvantage to avoid the incoming attack through lack of ki.
You can always have a small timeout between the beam being let go and the beamcontrol animation ending, so that there is a delay from letting go to normal controls.
The winning beam can increase in speed due to no resistance.
Conditions that make it harder to avoid and more punishing if you fail to dodge.
And if you were going to win the PS, you can delay the opponent and set up a consecutive attack, or worry about other enemies.
Also PSing bugs out a lot and players are forced to hang there. A command to let go of it means they can go about their business.
Just an idea to increase strategy and pace, Id rather gamble with junken than 2-up.


Fourthly In a struggle Beam VS Ball its allready possible to let go of the attack by pressing the right mouse button.
Cool I didnt know that, i really like that.

6

I like the ideas. Pretty good points brought up.

If I may, I also have a suggestion under the exact same title: better control.

I am suggesting that when a beam is fired that there be a key pressed so the camera view goes from behind the player to the head of the beam. Once in that view there should be keys like ‘W’ and ‘S’ that can speed the beam up to the its maximum speed and slow it down respectively. This way you can see where your beam is in the world and have way better control. Of course this jeopardizes your player to attacks you won’t be aware of but that’s the price you pay for “focusing” your attention into controling the beam. - Think of Perfect Dark’s Rocket Launcher

7

But the beams right now work like those guided rockets in HL and HL2

They go exactly to where you aim. And the new beam lockon system even enhances that.

8

UT Redeemer clone? No thanks.

9

One simple teleport and whatever lockon there was is gone.

UT Redeemer clone? No thanks.

I don’t play Unreal but I read a bit about this weapon:

The most powerful weapon in the game, it results in some cataclysmic massacres of various nodes and players, every time it’s used. I’m strongly opposed to using the Redeemer in any gametype, other than Invasion. It simply makes the game void and empty.

Then again, it is immensely gratifying to shoot down a Node in Onslaught and get an instant MEGA KILL, but still, I’ve never believed in this weapon’s value. Too user-friendly.

What’s the major problem with this weapon?

The reasoning behind this idea is because hitting people with beams is a problem in ESF; especially from great distances. It’ s hard to maintain a 3d spacial sense when u don’t know if the beam is behind or infront of the player and how close it is. Maybe this vulnerable ability with have people using beams more and adding to the gameplay. There was talk about reducing the explosion radius wasn’t there?

10

And i allready told you. The beam lockon solves that problem

11

Alright. Well I’d like to c how gameplay has changed now.

12

Maybe I missed something..
Isn’t it already like that in the open-beta?
Pretty much all the things you’ve mentioned are already in the openbeta!
Actually they’re not. The only thing there which does exist is detonation, which obviously wasnt the point i was getting across. I was emphasizing the point of releasing the beam. I didnt think I was that unclear. In the current OB, I cannot do this.

Im against having beams detonateable in the first place.
Thats just a cheap trick to score some damage. I say instead of the detonate ability they should simply be let go.
I have absolutely nothing against this. I say get rid of detonation and allow LMB and RMB slots to have alternative abilities, such as releasing the beam etc

If a beam hits the skybox it should not detonate but just disappear. (sadly that probably cant be done to easily)
I agree with this, but Im intrigued to know why it has become so difficult. Im thinking that its next to impossible to isolate and determine that ‘event’. Does the engine not differentiate between the skybox and environmental geometry? I find it odd that it wouldnt.

If the beamhead hits the skybox, perform the same operation as normal ‘explosion’, except remove the scripts telling it to perform the visual effect and damage radius.

Im guessing that the outer limits of a map are also treated as env geometry?

Ive been wondering, which im sure has been mentioned before, but when a player contacts a beamhead during a PS, it should detonate. The potential damage is that of the combined attacks. It would be funny if a player contacted the beam itself during PS, they were sucked along the beam into the beamheads, but thats just peripheral fun.

I mention this here because of strategies/scenarios ill explain further :

I’ll start by reciting a common technique of 1.2.

When one fires a beam, and an enemy fires a beam back, its not uncommon to detonate the beam before it makes contact to avoid the PS and move yourself into a different position, while the other player is slowed down by a fraction (having anticipated a PS).

Swap detonation for beam release.

When i fire a beam, and the enemy fires a beam back, i will release my beam before they make contact, thus allowing myself time to move into a new position. This technique has a higher degree of subtlety about it than detonation. The enemy is likely to release their beam if they notice what you did, otherwise they would endure the PS, only to find you lying in wait.

Now, lets say you both release your beams. The PS is now Ball VS Ball, and should have a constant trajectory and the potential damage of the 2 attacks (Ill refer to this as the cluster). Now the objective is basically to lauch the opponent into that cluster while it still exists.
The initiator of this ordeal, now lying in wait for my opponent to release their beam, moves in to melee or throw (whatever’s your poison) and send the enemy into the cluster. This can lead to some interesting duels as experienced players fight over using the cluster as their weapon.

Also, another example of utilising beamheads, which RPers would probably love, is when players are engaged in a PS. For the sake of theatrics, lets say Gohan is in a PS, and its becoming evident to those around him that he aint gonna win this PS. Before he becomes victim to the PS, his teammate Piccolo dives into the fray and into the beamheads, gets hit with the brunt of the combined damage of the attacks and sacrifces his life to save that of his teammate, Gohan only receiving a snifter of the the splash damage (depending on his distance from the beamheads of course).

Now im not too sure how comradery fares these days online, but it can prove useful in a war where the martyr has little HP/PL anyway, and would serve little assistance if they were alive anyway, and where the player being saved has plenty of HP/PL and would serve the team more if they survived the PS.

Also an enemy could exploit this, sacrificing themselves to ensure their team won the PS, by diving into the beamheads when they were closest to Gohan so he received the brunt of the splash damage.

13

I tried to do beam releasing in OB couple days ago and couldn’t do it either. Not present.

If the skybox can be detected, I would like to c a fade out (scale down to 0 - then remove) to give the illusion that the beam has reached a distance too far to see. This would be better than just disappearing but I don’t know if it will render well outside the skybox other than for maps that use that space like esf_name_end.

14

Believe it or not this is actually one of my favorite techniques when playing against bots (they’re far more predictable).
When the ball is formed (say big bang vs buster) I try and simple melee my opponent into the ball or even better, throw them into it.
Its fun as hell and like you said.. can lead to very interesting scenarios.

15

agreed!! FINALLY beams will be more balanced. Just have to work on the damage fairness :wink: (too strong!)

can something like that work?

16

Simple. The same reason why you can walljump off the skybox. That thing is nothing more than a normall brush (like the ground) with a special texture that gets replaced by a picture in a certain directory.

The onlything different on the skybox and the ground is the texture. So it would be preety hard to isolate the skybox.

Now its possible to make the skybox an entety and detect collision with that. But every single mapper would have to adapt to it in order for it to work.

17

If beams operated as waves rather than as projectiles, it’d “go through” the skybox the way it’d be dispersed by the ground.

18

And consistency is something we struggle with around here.