[Dick]

Yes they are useful for flying, and clearing canyons ... but that ability is met with scorn by most of the community. In BZ3 we are in serious ponder to remove that. Any idea for BZ3 MUST meet these two questions, in this order.

Does this benefit the Commander?
Does this maintain balance in the game?
Does this benefit the thug?
Does this maintain balace in the game?

If the answer is NO to any of the above, it will likely be a no answer in general.

Allowing an altitude advantage does not benefit the commander at all and removes balance completely. It can benefit the thug personally, but as a whole most will not like the idea and will definately effect balance in the game.

If I build a tank to fight you in your ship, I can expect you to outsmart and outskill that tank in a fair fight ... not fly above it beyond its point of attack and exploit it, as that would render the tank i built useless, and in general not worth playing the game if my units have no use. Furthermore I'm so sick of the BS in BZ I want all verticle cliff faces unclimbable, have the fight on ground level so no wanker hovers up to the top of a mountain and mortars a base. A commander cannot react to that unless they get out of command, get in a tank, fly up, and fight at which time they have to hope they don't get mortared on their way to a tank, its just bloody boring and unnecessary.

I'm all for the removal of verticle thrusters in favour for a horizontal afterburner. It would solve so much bullshit, and make the game much better for the commander knowing the thugs are bound by the same physics as their units and have to resort on their own skill adnd tank upgrades as aposed to just exploiting the game.

Last point, 'bigger ships recharges quicker' ? You mean the opposite right? The scout unit is the one that needs the afterburners, the red field, the site cam, the counter measures its a scout, its ment to be recon and quick ... big ass tanks aren't ment to be agile, their features are big ass guns that use ammo, therefore their size is in relation to big guns and ammo capacity, scouts are all about speed, recon, agility and moderate weapons.

[BZRanger]

Excellent debate.

[Dick]

Removing hovering is taking from the thug and giving to the commander. The status quo is restored.

Removing turrets ... well me entire briliant concept is about removing gun tower spamming ... if deployable turrets still existed people would just spam them instead ... having no deployable turrets will make people buy units instead.

So applying your three principles;

1. Yes it is really big and screws up gameplay to have hovering
2. You will never produce a game that has '60 seconds' of fun, a shoot-em-up game is repetitive by nature, if you have a game that can create a solid 30 seconds of fun because you spend a good 30 seconds dodging, shooting, using an afterburner, etc before you starting doing it all again then it will considered an awesome game. If all you do is shoot, shoot, strafe, shoot then it will be considered '3 seconds' of fun. Halo and MW2 are shoot-em-ups that are considered '30 seconds of fun' as its not completely repetitive shooting, players decide to do something else, grenade, melee, vehicle, airstrike etc.
3. Have no idea what your talking about.

I don't care if you put the manual in the game or pain it on my ceiling, myself and 90% of the rest of the worlds population will not read it, therefore make your time more useful .

Ok, here is another reason to remove hovering.

BZ2 terrain is horrible, its got magical trees that you can fly through and its idea of a mountain is just a really big pile of sand, there is no faces and therefore you just fly up it as if it was the ground. This is unrealistic anyway, the nose of the craft will dig right into it the face of this massive sand pile.

If BZ3 has terrains like that picture (and i'm hoping) and instead of those silly sand piles that are considered mountains, it has real cliffs and mountains then a hovercraft is not going to be able to climb it unless it has a path build into it. If it has a path built into it then AI units can use it aswell.

If hovering remains, then there should be an altitude limit that prevents any ship from getting to a certain height, an invisible wall that prevents a ship getting to high, preventing tanks from climbing mountains to mortar bases from an unfair vantage and preventing this bug. Better yet, just remove it completely and save teh needless coding.

My entire concepts are not only brilliant (yes i said so myself) but are intentionally thought of with a practical programming sense in mind. Half the units, half the weapons, none of the bullshit. I hate this 'fluffy' 'unfunctional' pattern of thought that I occasionally read on here (not this thread) that just sounds like fantasy baseball without any methods of 'how' or better yet 'why', but merely 'I think its cool'.

[BZRanger]

ok fine

[arcanise]

ok this post is going to cover 2 points, the need for some hovering and the terrain/environment.
ok hovering, i say we remove the sustained hover, and make your jump thrusters only last say 5 seconds, this will allow for cushioned lands and aid in running away in very unstable terrain with cliffs and such, and also prevent cliff climbing.

now on the environment, imagine flying your ship through a field of tall grass and looking to your side at your allies tank and watching as the grass reacts to the front of the tank, and the thrusters charring the grass as you pass over it, if this field becomes a battle zone then expect it to no longer have grass but instead be crater filled and smoldering. as for climbing cliffs this would be impossible because the engine will detect your ships nose intercepting the cliff face, creating a indent in the dirt and lifting the rear of your ship since all your thrusters are at the rear of your ship. imagine going down a dirt path made by tracked vehicles in a forest then doing a quick turn around by shoving the nose of your ship in the dirt and using that as a pivot point.

all in all it doesn't have to look extremely realistic, but i would like if it all reacted realistically with weapons and vehicles and well more like real fucking life, lets face it it would make an interesting twist if a player decided he wanted to shoot at a cliff side long enough to put his recycler in a tunnel. or imagine flattening an entire map from WMD's and other large weapons, need a fighting hole? cool shoot the ground with an at-stabber...ta-da! a hole. now this will require a lot of time to make a hole even big enough for your tank let alone a tunnel for a rec, but some weapons should be great at terrain destruction like a mortar, or a large comet rocket, but energy weapons like the plasma cannon or the mag cannon will only burn the terrain or pull metal scraps around, since it is a magnetic weapon.

[Dick]

But what if the commander uses hovering to plant scavs, navs, and control his/her forces? The ability to hover over the battlefield gives players a generals viewpoint without having to enter that darned relay bunker.

That is exactly why hover was scorned by the community, it no longer required fighting over a location, just launch yourself high enough, send a scav there, enemy miniguns don't do much to ur scav and you own that pool, then once you have all the pools just defend them. Game over, it never required a commander actually venture there. So YES ... pick which one wasn't intended.

1. A commander/thug to go to a location and tell a scavenger to deploy at that location
2. A commander to get into the sat view and command it go there
3. Propel yourself into orbit, then look down and then command your scavengers ...

Its tough, i'll even give you three guesses.

Turrets are less effective than guntowers. Try commanding a IA game on 'hard' with the iceberg map without building ANY guntowers and good luck with that.

Your comparing BZ2 with my proposed BZ3 ... BZ2 has a ridiculous over reliance on overpowered gun towers ... fact. BZ3 will be decigned to NOT be like that at all, to cut the tedious crap that already exists. With that in mind ... I have no idea why your bringing up guntowers, iceberg map, and luck, to retort a statement on deployable turrets.

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1. Yes it is really big and screws up gameplay to have hovering
Hovering tanks and mortar bikes yes, mere scouts not really. There is no indication from the gameplay video I have seen which suggests that scout hovering is detrimental, provided you factor in upgraded AI turrets and make hovering easy to do.

Oh, so you watch a youtube clip involving 2 people using the same strategy and consider it all sweet by the community at large ...

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2. You will never produce a game that has '60 seconds' of fun, a shoot-em-up game is repetitive by nature,
That is your title not mine so go debate yourself on that issue.

Correction, my title was 30 seconds, not 60 seconds, 60 seconds would be implying the game is twice as good as MW2 or Halo for its shooting aspect, which is an unrealistic goal. 30 seconds would be commendable.

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I don't care if you put the manual in the game or pain it on my ceiling,
true that people initially skim manuals before playing but most go back looking for topical information, which is why I would put it in the game.

Skim? Thats an exageration.

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BZ2 terrain is horrible, its got magical trees that you can fly through and its idea of a mountain is just a really big pile of sand, there is no faces and therefore you just fly up it as if it was the ground. This is unrealistic anyway, the nose of the craft will dig right into it the face of this massive sand pile.
The BZ-2 terrain was crafted to run smoothly on a 400mhz P2 processor w/64mb RAM and a 16mb video card. PC game noobies don't understand the concept of making games fit the hardware therefore I suggest you 'edumacate' yourself. trees require little but "hit detection" and I call that the "stop_code." BZ-3 will have stop_code applied to large trees if I have anything to say about it.

Its rather condescending that your telling somebody that practically has a PhD in Law and a degree in information technology to go educate themselves. At what point did a criticise the game for its detail in relation to its time of release? I am more than within my rights to make criticism on the engine based on its graphical downfalls when you are proposing it is to be recycled for BZ3 10 years later. In fact, your statement directly contradicts itself yet again. You state 'PC Noobs' don't realise that the game is to fit the hardware ... yet you insist on using the BZ2 engine when our PC's can run 10 games of BZ2 without slowing down now, its like a midget wearing a basketball players shoe. I hope there is not 'stop_code' as you put it, its a tree ... tree vs 50 tonne tank .... yeh, its not going to stop me, but I won't magically pass through it either.

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If BZ3 has terrains like that picture (and i'm hoping) and instead of those silly sand piles that are considered mountains, it has real cliffs and mountains then a hovercraft is not going to be able to climb it unless it has a path build into it. If it has a path built into it then AI units can use it aswell.
Right, my concept of managing hovering uses cliffs which look something like the picture combined with the "stop_code" which prevents players and AI units from getting "on top of" the map. For scouts to hover they would need a cyber_ramp terrain feature which doesn't use the "stop_code."  Simple sloped hill, OK?. Right now you can climb nearly any canyon wall even with the 1.3 patch. That ends with Battlezone 3. The map makers decide where hover-units go.

The issue I see with removing hovering is the aerodynamic nature and feel of the craft might get destroyed so I was thinking it'd be cool if the tanks react more to the bumps in the terrain and have a very aerodyamic feel as they glide and tilt to steer all getting amplified as they go over a bump, so if your suggesting this in retarded laguage your speaking in, then yes, i agree. Still preventing units from getting to silly vantage points. Please speak english from now on. Thanks. This 'stop_code' and 'cyber_ramp' nonsense only makes sense to the person making it up as they go, just explain it then refer to it as what you have explained.

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If hovering remains, then there should be an altitude limit that prevents any ship from getting to a certain height, an invisible wall that prevents a ship getting to high, preventing tanks from climbing mountains to mortar bases from an unfair vantage and preventing this bug. Better yet, just remove it completely and save teh needless coding.
Agreed with the altitude limit although it would need to be quite cyber_high. In the hover video you can see the scout begin to drift into cyber_orbit. We don't want that and we know that setting a maximum height is possible within the code. I wouldn't delete the thrusters, more like

If {scout_y > 1,000};  scout_y = 1000;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loFKmuq1g0I&feature=related

Wow, you just agreed, then disagreed. You said - Yes, place a limit to prevent hovering , but make that limit so damn high that people can still hover ... wtf? I watched that video and that is EXACTLY what people want to prevent.

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just sounds like fantasy baseball without any methods of 'how' or better yet 'why', but merely 'I think its cool'.

This topic was debated for several years by the Pandemik team and all they could come up with was cutting thrust. But that didn't fix the problem, merely patched over it by implementing a bigger bug. So don't expect a solution to be easy, juast study the 1.2 gameplay videos and think happy thoughts.

I prefer that hovering is restricted as it means that people come back to earth and fight instead of exploiting the shit out of the game ... I'm not alone with that statement either. Those 5 authors on youtube releasing videos do not speak on behalf of the community, they are a minority. Furthermore the patch that 'fixed' hovering was implemented by GSH, not Pandemic. GSH did so by a majority request to stop the bullshit associated with hovering. 90% of people supported, 10% of people were afraid of change and realised if they wanted to fight on fair term, ont he ground they'd probably lose. Therefore, why would I study an outdated version of the game that does not appeal to the majority of the community? I suspect this is exactly why myself, Sam, and most others do not care much for hovering (and likely don't care for its removal) as we have learnt to live without it and realised the games are more fun without than with and abused.

Instead of studing what happened 10 years ago in 1.2 and foundating your decisions on that, why not look at what happened yesturday utilise a decade of development, growth and input to serve the greater good?

[Dick]

Arcan - I like the idea of timed thrusters, its practical and removes exploit. However, if you worry about timing it and just directly tie it into energy capactiy and it uses energy then that means that vehicles will only be able to hover for a certain amount of time anyway, therefore timed thrusters will apply based on energy, the tank will have to land and recharge before using it again. Thus preventing unlimited flying around.

As for ground manipulation, digging holes, tunnels etc ... sounds way over-rated, un-necessary and end-gaming, it will also prevent bases from being built properly ... unless the system I introduced a while ago involving buildpads that don't rely on random terrain spots is used.

Still, if we remove/restrict thrusting and we start digging massive holes, players will need thrusters to get out of them, thus rendering them both mutually exclusive. So I'm pretty anti grand scale terrain deformation because then you'd just fire what ever weapon does that into their base and they can't rebuild ... easy end gaming ... boring.

[arcanise]

yes the terrain can be deformed but that dirt/terrain that got thrown out of the ground has to go some where, it wouldn't be hard to make a vehicle thats tracked thats automated and heavily armored that goes around and repairs terrain in an area that you designate.

but i was talking in extremes we could easily just stick to small deformation of the terrain, or make the ability to make my extreme deformations but it would require such a heavy amount of weaponry it would be impractical, and extremely time consuming, or perhaps the scavengers have a plow which pushes dirt particles around the main base or whatever area you want flatter. or as i said a minute ago we could always just make the deformation very small and only there for show, and build pads would be great, make them optional and cheap and use them as a way for the player to cover large craters that were formed by a random meteor or by many many minutes of artillery striking. 

[Dick]

Yeh, I agree with small scale, non-gameplay changing deformation of terrain would be cool, but nothing that effects unit movement or building locations.

It just opens up a whole can of bugs, exploits and lengthy development that I really am not convinced would amount to much worth added to the game. If all that time in development it only acheived a series of exploitable bugs, it really is 10 steps backwards.

I don't want a unit that just acts as a 'terrain prettier' its pointless, if anything a constructor would do it automatically and very quickly just before constructing, not have a new utility unit that just acts as bob the f'ing builder :p. I really see it just causing more problems, and if you look at the other threads i'm trying to encourage about an ideal building system, you won't have the ability to build your base anywhere you want, but the maps will be designed that you wouldn't want to build it anywhere else but the location your given ... much in the same that BZ2 works, you can put your recycler anywhere you want ... but you always place it where it spawns, kinda defeats the purpose of wheels ...

[BZRanger]

I would prefer eliminating the jump key altogether because it defies the laws of physics.

[arcanise]

ok here lets finalize this, the tanks can levitate above the ground due to anti-gravity thrusters, same reason why in star wars movie cars could fly with no wings, second, i propose and strongly encourage the use of a limited strength full consuming jump thruster for terrain mobility, and i also propose other optional ship utilities to include afterburners and shields that can be used instead of jump thrusters, or the game host could disable any of the upgrades before the game starts to his choosing, then finally make the game look fucking realistic, and sure add some thrusters on the vehicles so they have a reason for why they can do what they do, add build pads and allow weapons to alter terrain and create living plants and animals that roam the planet realistically and can be destroyed to the point where all thats left is burnt soil. and fix the water/fluids when i shoot water i expect a huge splash followed by ripples in the water, and i expect my thrusters to kick up some dirt and water and any other light weight object, and throw in some reactivity of metal to certain weapons like the mag cannon. finalize with strong AI and awesome environmental controls and weathering. BAM! perfection

[Dick]

Nothing is happening with this project, debating over something non-existent is like having a debate over the delusion of god. I have no time for nonsense. Probably my last post until the BS stops.

Scav baiting is another example why I wish to see the scav obsolette. Considering a car is 1 tonne, I'd happily guess a tanks weight at 50 tonne, even if half that, it will still bulldose a tree down and not 'stop' when it collides with it. Try reading the point of my statements and not get bogged down with arbitrary numbers with no meaning and using them as a pointless attempt of retort.

Incase you didnt detect the sarcasm, you said yes to limit hovering, then want scouts to fly around the map ... which is the most retarted and most contradictory statement i've ever heard.

Arcan, your speaking from feeling and not from thought. Your telling a story and nothing concrete, it just sounds like fantasy. From what I got from paragraph. Improve graphics and improve AI. Improve graphics? How, why don't you go research the best engine to do this? Then you can make foundated statements instead of making this entire sound like a depressing fantasy.

[arcanise]

the unreal engine is not suited for what i propose but id do know graphics of which i speak is possible, we may have to make our own engine to support the tessellation and rendering aspects of which i am talking about but i know it can be done

[Dick]

People that make comments about creating their own engine, likely do not realise how painful and long a process that would be, moreso how shit the engine would be with a team of 5 people on the other side of the world attempting to collude to make an engine from scratch that is comparable in qualitiy to, for example, Unreal 3 engine. Epics massive scale, highly collaborative and processed structure and overall efficiency resulted in an engine taking about 10 years to fine tune to the state that its in now.

The mere concept creating an engine from the ground up is disturbingly funny.

[BZRanger]

]the tanks can levitate above the ground due to anti-gravity thrusters,