Haro's Pitch for a Gun Server
 

Guns and graal. Now since the start of this all there has been pretty much one way of doing guns. Zone stepped in and made 4 more shootable directions, which i thought was a great idea. But i stil felt guns could be done better.

So i thought up a system one day that is radically different, but can still be extremely fun in its own way. It relies more on skill and smarts and less on equipment.

A basic idea is that this system is designed for a 360 degree shooting angle. Mouse controlled. So where you point your mouse is where your going to shoot. And you wont see your bullets in motion. I dont know about you, but most people cant dodge bullets. Almost instantaneously when you shoot, your bullets will be hitting your target.
You might be thinking thats too easy. Well it is certainly easier than whats going on in graal right now. It will change the way you play. You have to take cover, plan out your attacks, lay down cover fire for teammates.

This is where the reticule system comes into play:
(refer to the picture at the bottom. I used zone gfx for an example.)
Several factors influence where your bullet will actually land.

-The main influence is the disance your reticule is from your character. so the farther away your target is, the larger the circle will be.
- Rate of fire will affect your aim in battle. If your blasting off rounds with fully automatic, it will be a bit hard to aim at a exact point. For certain situations 3-shot burst or even single shot would be ideal.
- Movement by the shooter will affect reticule size. if he is running and shooting at the same time. it will be harder to aim.
- weapon type. some weapons are just more accurate than others. that doesnt mean they are any better. A high range rifle is no match for a fully auto smg or uzi around a tight alleyway.
- health. a wounded warrior cant concentrate as well as a healthy one. this wouldnt make the reticule any bigger, but it should affect its shrinking (aiming) time.
- and of course experience. a system could be made where a soldier can upgrade his marksmanship to improve his shooting skills, decreasing aiming time or reticule overall size.

Fog of war/ Line of Sight:

this system also shown in the picture at the bottom i feel should be in place for a gun system like this.
knowing where your enemies are is essential to victory. if your soldier is approaching a corner of a building, he shouldnt be able to see what is around the corner, unless he can hear bullets firing, reloading, or footsteps.
several important points to make:
- your team mate's line of sight should also be viewable by you. Because in a quick paced fight, you dont have time to stop and type out what you see. So just by spreading out and using smart tactics you can help your teammates out just by looking around.
- sight blocking objects could be anything! a line of parked cars, a stack of barrels, building corners and walls. possibly smoke bombs? this system can have alot of possibilities.


Soldier Experience & Ranking:
I think the best way to esablish ranking would be thru an ELO system. this basically rewards you more for killing a higher ranking soldier and less for killing a lower ranked soldier. Kills > Deaths ratio is a horrible way to display skill, as is experience system like zone's.

Rewards can be designed as badge system of sorts. players can spend their stars to increase their running speed, ammo count, accuracy, aiming, leadership skills, reload time, endurance, etc.
- a higher ranked kill earns you more stars
- lower rank kill earns you less stars
- assist earns you 1 star.
- team victory earns you set amount of stars.


The rest of the playerworld could be designed any way around this system. Like a map based game like zone, or an overworld constant war type system, or perhaps a combination of both. Futuristic or world war era, you can't really go wrong. personally id like to see this game designed anywhere from the world war 2 - desert storm era. with trenches, sandbags, war torn buildings.

in this pic you can see the reticule. this represents the area where a bullet fired from the player could land. the darkened area is the part of the room blocked from vision by the players location. he cant see around the corner of the wall.

I like where you're going with this. It could be fun, but you know people would complain about the line of sight.. x_x

Holy cheese you are a genious. Just ditch the line of sight thing and I'd support it.

Why? It'd be basically Zone or Era then. The whole line of sight aspect is what makes it dramtically different than the others.

line of sight makes close range weapons more valueable. whats the point of getting close to a shotgun guy when you know he is there and can easily own you.

That definitely wasn't an orriginal idea...It's been brought up /several/ times.

I however, hate it, and think it's trying to make a 2d client something that it isn't meant to be.

Sorta FPS-ish but with a 2D engine? That's what I thought.

I was going to bring something up like this one day, Haro. I was going to request that when we're done with Zenkou we could make a gun server like this with custom bodies using a,s,w,d movement. It'd be like a 2d AA or CS.

hachi, im pretty sure that when were done with zenkou im going to collapse and die.

Sure seems like it, huh?

That really sounds like a good, idea. The only thing I wouldn't like in there would be the fog of war because when you are trying to like invade another base, the other team could just shoot random bullets and pick you guys off.

Plus staring at a desert level seems like an eyesore if you play for longer than an hour. :redface:

I like this idea.
Alot. Go you.
Make it happen.

?

You're dead inside me.

I think I said something when I meant something diferent. Fog of War. It would be great without it, but then again, this whole mouse thing makes it loose the graal feeling.

It better be damned innovative. Few things are more bothersome inspection-wise to the PWA than an Era clone.

Era had the Apache Sniper Rifle which was a mouseclick gun, it rocked.
Mind you it still showed a bullet that moved in similar fashion to the other bullets on Era and could be dodged, but it allowed the bullet to be fired in 360 degrees.

I don't want to address the issue of realism in Graal because it has already been addressed 12396712934 times and just causes fights. Unholy Nation is stupidly unrealistic, but Era is/was a happy medium and I liked being able to dodge bullets; it added another element to fighting and made fights longer - your idea simply replaces the dodging aspect with a more tactic based approach.

I, personally, don't really like this idea and am dubious about it's application to the Graal engine.

That's just my opinion though ^_^ I'm sure you could combat some of my points but with only one post a day I'm not really up for debating them.

yeah your right, this would give alot more importance to where your fighting. tactics replaces dodging skills.

*hands you a tampon* You're making a mess.

loollolo

6) Leave these RPG elements with Zenkou please, not every game needs an experience system to provide the player with improvements. If your system is as dynamic as it sounds, the player would accumulate REAL experience with the weapons and the system, and just get better. This puts everyone on as equal a playing field as possible, without the need to suppliment false experience for real experience.

edit:
Yes my good man, those diagrams are lovely, but you are showing them on a 3d pallette. I am asking you to show how you intend on projecting this idea onto a 2d, graal surface.

wel think about it. yeah they can get better within their own skill as a player, but their character can also get better skillwise as well. im sure it wouldnt be very drastic at all anyway. at most 20 % improvements all around. upgrades and experience systems add depth to a game, something seriously lacking from current playerworlds.
it seems your thinking about this like a soldier vs. a terminator.

the line of sight system can probably be best explained as a first person shooter without the first person view. and a picture.

Diagrams! +1.


Will we be able to purchase eyes for the backs of our heads? :o

well i figured it might be annoying to be unable to see whats directly behind you, so you can call that audible sensing. AKA HEARING.

Probably would require some scripting to show black showpolys to hide things, but it should be possible. On Graal Kingdoms we do that for the labyrinth event, just need some additional check for npcs to hide things behind them.

i dont think your person should be able to upgrade his line of sight and hearing distence its more of a rpg type of things and rpgs and shooters dont seem to mix well

i.e. Sequence
It had all of this except line of sight; it was planned but was never made because of a lack of funds/scripters.

Everyone hated the mouse controlled guns too =(.

Just like real life :}

I had already scripted a basic outline of your aiming system, therefore I'll just post this to help you along. It's not GS2, but it's also not very complex so it's not like it'd be hard to convert over.

On a side note, the point of view system you mentioned would require some fairly advanced math. You may have a hard time getting that done.

id like to point out that im not developing this as a playerworld. i merely posted the info out to the community just for comments and for anyone else willing to try it

lol.

Shut up. Your +1 idiocy and your presence isn't welcome here.

Your idea reminds me of Counter-Strike 2D (http://www.cs2d.com)

http://okiesmokie.no-ip.org/images/cs2d.png

I like it, the line of sight is good, makes it almost like first person (no one take the 1st person idea, I'm working on it XD) , and would add much more stratagy. This would make a nice server. Maybe when I'm done the DR series I'll move on to that XD

wow that does look alot like what i described! haha cool. ill have to try this

dun be meanie maet we all knowz teddy bears doesnt fall from trees :frown:

I had Napo start on a sniper for me long ago on Aeon that had the whole 360 degree thing, but he never finished it >.> The bullet went way to slow as well =/

great idea!
i thought of something like that and programmed it a while ago,
you moved around and could aim with the mouse, your character turns based on where your mouse is, and whenever you clicked a bullet fired straight to that spot.
i made it where if you fired faster, the bullets accuracy was off a little bit.. not nearly as much as you have up there^^, but enough to miss a target.
had problems with repasting graphics though, but it was using visual basic.. learning c++ now.
haro? who else? you guys want to make a game?

xeno