You weren't actually comparing Zeq2 with Esf, right? :/
Although Zeq2 has some potential it still has a long way to go, as you said.
First and foremost surely you are refering to ZEQ2-lite and not ZEQ2. They are two completely separate projects with two completely different development teams / design goals.
No, I was making no direct comparison between the projects. Although by the tonality of your response, it's almost as if you personally put ESF on some pedestal of greatness that other DBZ games are all trying to reach -- which by the way is ridiculously preposterous and bias.
While I'm sure ESF has spurred on some other creations like DBZHood or DBSource, ZEQ2 was originally an abasement from an entirely different and much older community-set that originally found ties/influences as more of a BFP/DBQ successor.
Obviously this mindset has changed, but it's incredibly lacking and foolhardy to not consider ESF and ZEQ2 with similar seniority given that both have been around almost the same amount of time (few years apart) and given that several of ESF's 'new' artists that have helped improve it's next generation graphics were former ZEQ2 developers.
Of course not, but playing has never been the goal.
The big, BIG reason why Grega, myself, and other developers from both projects have continually asserted that ZEQ2-lite and ESF shouldn't form a base of comparison is in the project's greatly differing core goals. While ESF is attempting to create a solid, traditional DBZ fighting experience, ZEQ2-lite is actually more about creating a general-purpose development platform for custom characters/mods. Any amount of poking into the grfx, phys, psys, tier, and other plethora of incredibly powerful configurations that were custom-created for ZEQ2-lite easily reveals the capability for any kind of anime spinoff or even complete 3D Mugen type environments to be created and maintained.
It may seem like that, but i can assure you that all 3 of our melee systems are based off of the ESF 1.0 simple melee system design. And thats quite different from what i saw in ZEQ2. Our throw and combo melee subsystems are nothing more than a simple melee hit with an extended animation time. What i saw in ZEQ2 was a lot closer to what they did in DBS. Though your way of doing it wins hands down compared to that.
Though it could be just the forced lock on that gave me that feeling.
And sorry if i came over a bit to rude with my previous comment. Its just that i dislike the idea that you have to be locked on to do any melee at all
Again, I wasn't asserting that there was direct influence from ZEQ2-lite to ESF's latest rendition -- merely that similarities of design DO actually exist. I've never actually played ESF (beyond the 1.0 alpha) or DBS to make any kind of factual comparisons thus my observations were mostly based on analyzation of video footage.
If requiring lockon to use melee is your greatest discomfort, a simple boolean can remedy that notion. The main reasoning for the hard-lock system and a non "free-use" melee stems both from series accuracy and usability. All in all, we felt that players just running around throwing punches randomly in the air (in a non-gesturing manner) was unnatural and unbefitting. Sure, characters in the series missed melee attacks a large portion of the time, but I can't recall any instances where Goku threw out a kick/punch in front of him with intention to strike with absolutely no one around. Granted this is easily solved from a simple radial trace check to perform the animations/maneuver, the principal remains that some degree of practicality should be sustained.
While I agree 100% that a soft-lock or no-lock system encourages more skill in aiming/movement coordination, our decision considers that characters will be moving at almost uncontrollably high speeds in a 360 degree sense to match series counterparts correctly. Given the desire to remove flailing wildly at open air, design choice to keep speeds proportionally/accurately scaled, and needs for the player to maintain aesthetically reasonable control, a hard lock system was implemented.
Besides all that, this is what server side cvars are for. The game itself can be radically turned on head by removing player's options to fly, boost, alter, melee, lockon, capping speeds, isolating allowed power level ranges, healing, etc. There are dozens of options to drastically alter how the experience handles with dozens more easily implemented upon request or by contributors.
