Re: [Help-liquidwar6] Some Liquid War 6 news

[Kasper Hviid]

2011/8/12 Christian Mauduit <address@hidden>:
> HI,
>
>> Each rules.xml could
>> also have a value to define the number of bots and their color-teams
>> in standard single-player.
> I thought of that again and again and you're just damn right. To some extent,
> it's like in any shooter or any game with opponents, you don't enter a menu to
> set up the monsters in a cave of a dungeon before entering it, right? Game
> designer thought of that for you.
>
> I think I'll add that, maybe not in rules.xml but another file just to avoid
> bloating rules, something like "bots.xml" maybe.

An .xml file to define how the level will behave in single player
campaign might be a good idea. It could also overrule the values in
rules.xml, most importantly the team settings.
You mentioned earlier a single file called episode.xml ... I can't say
which values should go there, and which should go in the levels
bots.xml

Should an user who is playing singleplayer be able to play different
colors, or should he play red only? If he can play any color, we would
need to design 10 different single player missions for each map. (so,
we should have bots-red.xml, bots-blue.xml ... )

Should single player be "one life (last wins)" or "Respawn (deathmatch)"?

> Ha, yet another point, latest snaphost (which should hopefully be built as a
> source package tonight) has experimental support for the bezerk (super-strong
> attack), invincible (cannot be attacked) and turbo (move & act super fast)
> special actions. Will require to build from source as I don't have time to
> package, but well, just FYI.

This sounds really fun! Too bad I'm having trouble getting the
snapshots up and running. Don't worry, LW6 still has plenty of corners
for me to explore.


-- TEAMS --

I think the adjustment should be extreme enough to be visible to the
naked eye. So we should avoid adjustment that are too discrete to make
the game truly asymmetrical.

We should proberly be careful about setting "fast" too high. My guess
is that high speed will cost a lot more to calculate.

The first 4 colors should be able to fight each other without anyone
feeling handicapped, so we should test all 12 color combinations.
Despite this, some colors might be handicapped when played at certain
levels. If that's the case, the levels rules.xml could have some
slightly changed team settings, to make things fair.

Possible ways to adjust teams:
 - One strong point, weak in the other areas
 - One strong point, one weak point
 - One weak point, strong in other areas

Low priority idea: a cheat code to enable God mode! (aggressive:1000,
fast:1000, mobile:0, vulnerable:10)



 -- MOBILE --

I have tried changing the value of mobile, using otherwise symmetrical teams:

The score with mobile at 0 for all teams was:
Red: +234 frags
Green: -447 frags
Blue: +213 frags

The score with red: -1 green: 0 blue: 1
Red: -269 frags
Green: 97 frags
Blue: 172 frags

The score with red: -2 green: 0 blue: 2
Red: -1349 frags
Green: +1186 frags
Blue: +163 frags

The score with red: -3 green: 0 blue: 3
Red:    -1826 frags
Green: +1932 frags
Blue:    -106 frags

(For serious statistic I should probably had used more teams and a
longer playtime than 3 minutes)

It looks like mobile is good for making teams less effective.



 -- ERRORS --

I noticed a few errors: The game freezes at times - I think it is the
team settings for some reason. Sprites becomes white in windowed play.
Animation-speed in config.xml has no effect



 -- FUN --

I have created a 3 quick levels:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=B4B0BGI8

"DOG" is an empty level where I have played around with the team profile values:
red      This is the normal one
green   (discrete adjustment:) slow and weak attack, but strong defence
blue     (discrete adjustment:) a bit slow, but strong attack
yellow  (discrete adjustment:) slightly faster, but weak defence
cyan    slow, but strong attack and defence (I like this one)
magenta strong attack ... weak defence
orange   Fast ... but weak defence
light blue  Handicapped
purple   weak attack and slow, but strong defence
pink    Victim

"PXL" is using some simple pixelart. It uses
<bool key="pixelize" value="true"/>
<bool key="resample" value="false"/>
(Its a bit wierd - map.png and texture.png don't seem to align
perfectly, even though they are the same size.)

"RECTANGLED" uses 24 interconnected rooms, painted quickly.

 - Kasper