Beam Struggle Mechanic Suggestion

[GoldenBlade]

Hi!

I always loved beam struggles even if they aren't a big part of core gameplay in ESF, but as we all know they looked awkward and turned into a mess if not aimed almost perfectly, and the problem just becomes bigger when you had more than two players to it.

Dunno if the team already has a solution for making beams take a path as direct as possible once in a struggle, this is a must in order to avoid the strange lights shows Beam Struggles turn into to.

Forcing the paths to straighten in all situations may still be visually awkward and entering a beam struggle whichever the angle of attack doesn't make any sense.

My idea is to restrict the angle of contact between two opposing beam heads in order to start a Beam Struggle and make controlled curved beams unable to enter a struggle.

All interactions outside of that angle or area, including the controlled curved beams would have one of these results:
-A KI ball flying off in the resulting direction, like beams on 1.2.3 but uncontrollable;
-In case of a large power difference the strongest beam keeps going unaffected;
-Or in alternative to 1 the result could just be a big explosion and problem solved.

Multiple beam struggles would make the additional beams follow the 1st connected path no matter what or just fail to join due to power diff like in 1.2.3.

Tell me what you guys think

 

[Grega]

Beam heads are devided in to 6 sectors. Depending on what sectorrs the struggle happens in there are different results. Sectors are simply up, down, left, right, back and front.

A beam can only hit something with its front sector since its moving forward, so a headon collision is front sector to front sector. In this case the struggle straightens out in a rubber band effect between the 2 players. Such a struggle will 90% end up in the explosion of the struggle at one of the 2 characters. The remaining 10% is when the struggle is not moving, and that will simply detonate after 10 seconds or so.

The other areas simply calculate vectors to determine the new heading. So hitting it in the back with a faster beam will make it go only straight, but itll get a boost due to both beams adding their energy to the same direction.

Aditionally you can choose to leave a struggle with a ball type attack. Meaning you are no longer forced to sit there and watch as your beam slowly pushes the ball away. But this is only when struggling against ball type attacks. You cant quit out of a beam vs beam struggle.

The whole idea of a stronger beam simply erasing a weaker one is already in 1.2.3, and i believe it was even included in 1.1 and 1.0

 

[Nedgi]

I agree that there should be an angle limit for beam struggles or at least for the "straightening" of beams given that there are situations(although very unlikely to happen) where if the straightening were to happen the beams would go through the character.
Either that or just dont make the struggle happen at all when the characters arent facing each other or you could also force the characters to "face" the beam struggle if they arent already but i dont think that would look very good.

 

[GoldenBlade]

Great to know there are different results upon beam collision now!!

A beam can only hit something with its front sector since its moving forward, so a headon collision is front sector to front sector. In this case the struggle straightens out in a rubber band effect between the 2 players. Such a struggle will 90% end up in the explosion of the struggle at one of the 2 characters. The remaining 10% is when the struggle is not moving, and that will simply detonate after 10 seconds or so.

The other areas simply calculate vectors to determine the new heading. So hitting it in the back with a faster beam will make it go only straight, but itll get a boost due to both beams adding their energy to the same direction.

Aditionally you can choose to leave a struggle with a ball type attack. Meaning you are no longer forced to sit there and watch as your beam slowly pushes the ball away. But this is only when struggling against ball type attacks. You cant quit out of a beam vs beam struggle.

Can't you make ball vs ball detonate just like on beams when the struggle is not moving? Or is that already in?

What is the current state of multiple beam struggles? From what you said it is just a matter of coding the additional collisions on different areas of the meeting heads to follow the previously established path in one way or the other. Is this how it will work?

 

[Grega]

The detonation is a general struggle mechanic. Doesnt matter if its beam or ball. But it needs to be standing still in order to activate the timer.

As for the current status of the beams. They are ingame and the explosions work, but the collisions themselves not so much. They will explode on collision with the ground, bgut last i tried,i could not make them colide with entities. Meaning players or other attacks. So cant really start a struggle ATM. But the systems are similar to those of the open betas, since the struggle mechanics were mostly implemented at that stage and was only more fine-tuned later.