I think what they are all trying to point out is that bunny hopping was a poorly designed feature (which is what it became when the devs discovered it and left it in), because it was not an intended feature, and as such was not designed holistically, was not documented anywhere, nor explained, nor even alluded to. There is no in-game tutorial for bunny hopping, which means it is not accessible to the majority of the game's player base (without third-party interference such as word of mouth or the internet), and therefore splits the community up between the informed elite and the remaining player base.
Now if it were something that only 30 people in the world could do, I could understand this debate going on this long. But it isn't. It isn't entirely difficult to learn it now, with all the information available these days. But honestly, why should you have to if there is a better, more intuitive implementation out there that provides adequately similar results?
I don't like bunnyhopping because I think it's a reflection of negligence at best and a terribly designed mechanic at worst, but if it gets put into a game that I intend to play competitively I'm going to learn it because there's no reason not to.
<!--quoteo(post=1860213:date=Jul 13 2011, 01:01 AM:name=KuBaN)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (KuBaN @ Jul 13 2011, 01:01 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1860213"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->But honestly, why should you have to if there is a better, more intuitive implementation out there that provides adequately similar results?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
What's the better implementation?
As I said previously, I'm not really for or against bunny hoping but I'm interested in this discussion from a game design point of view. Game designers want to create a game with a wide range of skill levels and a deep gameplay that requires mastery. It makes the game more enjoyable and interesting. If bunny hoping does that then it's a good thing, regardless if it's intended or not.
I try and relate this to a simple movement mechanic that I know well. In day of defeat you are required to stand still when firing certain weapons in order to maintain accuracy. If you counter strafe by pressing the opposite direction in which you are moving for a split second, you can stop yourself slightly faster than just letting go of the key. Strafing like this takes skill and practice and it isn't documented in a tutorial or anything (but it should be). If you get really good at it you can almost shoot without stopping at all and it makes you a lot more difficult to hit and you can shoot faster than your opponent.
I was thinking about if this mechanic didn't exist, and you just stopped instantly by letting go of the button, would that make the game better? I don't think so. It would probably make the game more accessible for people and a little easier to understand (because you would have one less mechanic to worry about), but in the long term it would just decrease the potential skill difference between the players.
Strafing well takes practice and improving at it will make you a better player. If everyone could strafe perfectly without having to practice then it would remove the fun in it. It would no longer be exciting for you to pull off a really quick shot, it would just be the norm.
The good thing about this mechanic as well is it scales with skill. The better you are at it, the more of an advantage you have over your opponent (this is the same as aiming an FPS games, it scales well with ability). It's not some secret move that you need to learn that instantly gives you an advantage over people who don't know it. Just as aiming for headshots isn't a secret move.
I used to play on public servers and dominant almost the entire team, but then I'd go and play against someone better than me and they would dominant me in the same way. IMO this wide variance in potential ability makes a game fun and keeps players coming back for more. Some people will argue that getting owned by someone better than you is no fun. I agree, but I think that will happen in any good game. Badly designed games keep the potential difference in ability between the players low and these get boring quickly. Well designed games have big differences in potentially ability and you can always improve by practising more. The most fun is generally when playing against people with a similar skill level.
From a game design standpoint I think it's better to try and include as many of these abilities that scale well with skill as you can. Aiming is one. Certain movement mechanics can be another.
<!--quoteo(post=1859410:date=Jul 10 2011, 12:45 PM:name=NurEinMensch)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (NurEinMensch @ Jul 10 2011, 12:45 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1859410"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Movement in real life is a lot more dynamic than in video games. There's so many things beyond simply moving in direction x that are hard if not impossible to model in a video game today. You can move your limbs independently, hold onto things to make turns, change your center of gravity and do a lot more than just going forward, backward, left, right and jump. So while things like bunny hopping, strafe jumping and and air control are not realistic from a purely physical point of view, they <i>are</i> realistic in that they increase your freedom of movement so that it is closer to what you can do in real life. It makes you feel more like a person instead of a tank.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
well said!
skill based movement must be given to the aliens, freedom of movement is required for this race. right now alien movement is really way to restricted, we need either something was ns1 had or some other passive ability which can enhance the alien race to give them better movement over the environment.
<!--quoteo(post=1860213:date=Jul 13 2011, 02:01 AM:name=KuBaN)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (KuBaN @ Jul 13 2011, 02:01 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1860213"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I think what they are all trying to point out is that bunny hopping was a poorly designed feature (which is what it became when the devs discovered it and left it in), because it was not an intended feature, and as such was not designed holistically, was not documented anywhere, nor explained, nor even alluded to. There is no in-game tutorial for bunny hopping, which means it is not accessible to the majority of the game's player base (without third-party interference such as word of mouth or the internet), and therefore splits the community up between the informed elite and the remaining player base.
It isn't entirely difficult to learn it now, with all the
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?act=findpost&pid=1838054" target="_blank">Technical Skill vs. Intellectual Skill</a><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Exactly, discovered and left in. I would hardly call that a design, but it was grave mistake for not devs not including tutorial for this (and reworking +jump for that matter). Now lets imagine for second that bunnyhopping would be added to NS2, would it be added exactly like NS1 with us needing to find secret to unlock it? No of course not it would be implimented way everyone would have access to it.
This is a very good post, I read it couple times, I find it very hard to distinguish Intellectual from Technical as a player (Marine/lifeform), to use some ledge / rail or box to your advantage you need both for example. I think you need both though, knowledge that you can use it and the skill to execute it. My point is that the game should have option to allows us to exploit the enviroments mappers have given us in a effective not completely obvious way and if the game is only required to have intellectual skill such as positioning your options are very limited.
<!--quoteo(post=1860213:date=Jul 13 2011, 12:01 AM:name=KuBaN)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (KuBaN @ Jul 13 2011, 12:01 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1860213"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Now if it were something that only 30 people in the world could do, I could understand this debate going on this long. But it isn't. It isn't entirely difficult to learn it now, with all the information available these days. But honestly, why should you have to if there is a better, more intuitive implementation out there that provides adequately similar results?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> It's not 2002 anymore. Bunnyhopping is pretty much non-existent, and the only relevance it has amongst game players these days is nostalgic bleating.
Players who could bunnyhop are well into their mid-20s and 30s. They have families. They have full-time jobs. They don't play games as much as they used to, and I'm sure most of them lost their edge years ago and aren't going to return to the competitive scene for a long time.
Bunnyhopping missing from NS isn't like we fell off some epic bandwagon and every other game left NS behind. Here's the truth - it's ###### irrelevant. Maybe something like it will make a comeback some day, but pining for NS2 to have bunnyhopping just reeks of some rose-tinted desire for the 'good old days'. You know what makes money these days? Not Quake. Most people don't even know what Quake is. The Unreal franchise just ate its last meal. The number one FPS dominating tournaments are things like Call of Duty. Scoff it if you will, but these tired ###### arguments about how games should be these identical cookie-cutter clones of the same god damn game over and over is getting really tiring, and isn't going to help anything. Almost every argument about something in NS2 can be traced back to 'It should be like this because it was like that in NS1', and you can trace that back to 'this feature should be like this, because it was like that in Quake'.
When you're asking for bunnyhopping, who honestly do you want that feature developed for? Me? I'll be selfish and answer it: I could not ever possibly again in my life give two ###### to the fast-paced twitch FPS genre. Once upon a time I did and I was pretty good at it. Looking back, I see those games as being childish and shallow. The respectable success and overall impact 'higher' games like Tribes 2, Battlefield, and even Planetside and, yes, ArmA had enlightened me to FPS gameplay that could actually be about things besides how ###### l33t your bithin' headshot skillz were. Things an intellectual level higher than smashing spacebar timing and then teabagging a corpse while screaming about how you owned some scrub f***ot, or any other charming behavior clan-tag wearing ***holes are associated with. They showed that FPS games weren't just about how awesome your aim was, and found ways to channel the intellectual aspect further than just bunnyhopping and shoehorning ridiculous concepts like Street Fighter combos into the totally esoteric and, honestly, completely bull###### buzzword "intellectual skill".
Yeah, you know what, I might never have the awesome pr0 skillz of Superman, but Superman is a ###### comicbook character for kids, and I for one have grown the ###### up in the last ten years.
Now before you all ###### that this is NS and I should GTFO, I'm going to point out that, like Superman, NS has always been a child of two worlds. There were fast, and there were slow aspects of it. And this is where the conflict of bunnyhopping comes from. Some of you want NS to be more like your childish gimmick games of the past where your Ritalin would wear off and you couldn't stand to be in a round longer than 2 minutes. Some of us remember the epic 1.04 games that would last four hours long and were less about flying around like a whirling dervish of teeth and claws, chomping 80% of the marine team to death in seven seconds, and more about strategy and concentrating teamwork directly at a weak point. In those games, individual skill never really even came into it.
The only correct answer to the BHop question is that there will never be an answer, because neither direction is really where NS has ever been. If NS2 were to walk the same line of NS1, it will only have succeeded if, when you play it, you find half the features to your liking, and half the features to be stupid and completely against what you think the game should be like. If that means that you have to give up your precious BHop for the glory of the slower, more strategic aspect of the game, then that's the price you're going to have to pay to play a hybridized game like NS2.
If you made it this far without erupting in volcanic rage, I suggest at this point that you start the video below and keep reading.
You want to be totally, 100% completely ###### honest here? NS never made it big-time. It had a few interest in leagues but those eventually dissolved into irrelevance. CAL collapsed under the complete suck that was the competitive community, of which opinions around here vary greatly but the general idea was that the competitive scene of NS was one of the most poor-mannered unsporting collection of asshats ever to have congregated anywhere on the internet who desired nothing more than to inflate their own egos at the expense of everyone else, new players or pub servers alike.
NS2 will never make it big-time either. It's sad, but true, and I think deep down you all know it. Begging for these features as if bunnyhopping is going to bring NS2 to the forefront of competitive gaming is something that will just never happen. Games just don't work they way they used to. The NS2 community hasn't really grown per se, and I wouldn't believe anything except that the vast majority of NS2 players are ex-NS1 players. This means the market is small, and isn't going to grow bigger. What's making things worse is the torturously slow NS2 production. Most of the die-hard NS1 players are probably playing it, or trying to, right now. This means that every moment NS2 isn't a completed product, people are growing bored. By 2012, 2013 when NS2 is actually a complete product, how many people of the original fanbase will still care? How many? Be honest here, how long will you maintain interest?
I appreciate the efforts of the devs, and they have my money. Supporting indie gaming is always a nice gesture. But arguments for bunnyhopping based on the premise that it's necessary for some sort of high-level competitive scene that will never exist is ridiculous.
The competitive gamers of 2002, the people who were the pros in NS were sixteen to nineteen years old. We all were about the same age at the time, and the same fogies are still around in this forum, still in <i>#naturalselection</i>. That means we're now in our mid to late twenties.
If your argument for bunnyhopping is based around the competitive scene, or the desire for one, I hate to break this to you but if or when there is a competitive scene, I doubt any of you will be a part of it. If we, and I mean all of us, were the peak twitch players in 2003, the next generation of players are not going to be in their upper-20s - they will be sixteen to nineteen years old.
Kids that age didn't grow up on Counter-Strike, Quake 2, and Tribes. They grew up on Halo and Call of Duty.
<!--quoteo(post=1860250:date=Jul 13 2011, 05:47 AM:name=Temphage)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Temphage @ Jul 13 2011, 05:47 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1860250"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->stuff<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Time have changed surely, but it is hardly reliable argument for not making different game than your generic war realism "action" story. You are talking as if the kids have changed in 10 years, like theres no market for different games I find it amusing because the dislike of lack of real gameplay more of a trend nowdays. You are under the impression that the game preference have changed probably completely disregarding the fact the game industry has changed in ten or so years how many tv-ads you saw advertising NS1?
I find amusing you think competitive scene as some kind of pit you throw everyone into and there can be only one winner. Competitive scene varies as well, some do it for the increased befriending, bonding more organized way of play where your thoughts and strategies actually have meaning even if the goal is to win, it is not everything or the most important part for everyone.
Years have changed is certainly interesting argument, but in your case you are just venting out some sort of rage bent up apparently over the years. Calm down go find out what it is about you'll find out is comes as natural as shooting but it is much more fun.
@Temphage
If you had to choose a game that your friend recommended to you ie. spread through friend recommandations or an add you saw on TV and wanted to test which one would likely be better?
Just incase you still dont get it CoD can sell through advertising and with the brand name it does not need to be that good. NS2 needs to spread like NS1 did with recommandations because simply there is no budget it has to be good. Half-assed gameplay with clunky movement wont work there are already plenty out there, with even fancier graphics.
<!--quoteo(post=1860257:date=Jul 13 2011, 04:30 AM:name=TrC)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (TrC @ Jul 13 2011, 04:30 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1860257"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--><Words and language that suggests I should feel offended and think you're kind of an ###### for your last line. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt this time.><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--coloro:cyan--><span style="color:cyan"><!--/coloro-->[<i>Citation needed</i>]<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--> on your entire post.
Yeah, I hate COD and Halo as much as the rest of us, but who is 'us'? We're the old, angry pissed-off bitter PC gaming masterrace. I can dig calling these games as "lacking real gameplay", but would the massive, unbelievable Bungie fanboy following agree with you on that? The people making tens of thousands of dollars on tournaments? The fact that Call of Duty: Black Ops is more popular than probably every fast-paced FPS game you can name <i>combined</i>?
I'm also amused by the fact that you <b>disassociated</b> competitive play and what I can only really call 'scrub play' by suggesting that anyone who isn't competitive is a friendless loser and that nothing higher can ever be maintained. This is patently untrue. In fact, plenty of NS1 servers had names for themselves where they were populated with loads of regs, good admins, lots of voice chat and teamwork. None of this was 'competitive'. We didn't "play 2 win" where we'd spawncamp the alien hive just to get ahead, and we didn't wear some sort of stupid clan tag.
The funniest part about this is when a real hardcore competitive player, a REAL one, would join and then pretend that he knew better than everyone else. Encourage use to engage in unsporting behavior and break the server rules, boss everyone around like he knew best, and try to flex is 'pr0-cred' like it meant anything. Eventually they'd start moaning about the server rules, start insulting their team, and after being warned, would engage in the time-honored NS tradition of accusing server admins for "banning skill". Why ban them? Because for us, there's more to the game than just seeing that you won at the victory screen. The journey to such, or even defeat, is where the fun is, not in simply winning. And to do so in a way that's managed to keep it entertaining for everyone makes it more enjoyable overall.
I know the NS competitive scene well enough to know that many people don't 'get' that, that finding joy in defeat is a foreign concept they'll never be able to understand, and that anything besides pursuit of winning is secondary. When those people would join these classy pub games like on NGL, maybe with a few of their buddies and try to pub-stomp, they'd find the server empty after their first round of spawncamping. Yeah, great, you get to declare victory. Now the server's empty, ######. Good job.
Ultimately, none of that is competitive playing, not in any true sense. I feel bad for you that you think you can't actually enjoy a game without having a 'Play 2 Win' mentality, that you have to be some sort of elite group in order to experience 'more organized play', but that's not true, and has never been. For NS1, as well as every game, there's a huge group of people who have good skill, but don't want to be part of the clan-tag wearing "elites" and engage in competitive play (real competitive play, which involves, you know, ladders and rankings) either because of time constraints, unwilling to deal with the inevitable drama, and maybe, just maybe, they've learned that you DON'T have to do any of that just to have a good time.
You're seriously making a lot of statements there that don't really have any basis in reality. Your definition of a "competitive scene" only serves to water down the definition of such. Real competition has ladder matches, ranking, and league play. If you want to call your collection of nerds a 'competitive team' because you don't TK each other to get in the CC to drop yourself a shotgun and then sell the entire marine base, or whatever other behavior you seem to suggest everyone who DOESN'T wear a clan tag engages in, go ahead and do that. But please don't shoehorn people like me into your own definition of competitive gaming. I would appreciate not EVER being associated with those kinds of people.
I also completely lost you on the TV ad thing.
EDIT: (Haahaha, get it?)
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Time have changed surely, but it is hardly reliable argument for not making different game than your generic war realism "action" story.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Interesting language you picked here. If I'm reading that right, you're saying we should make NS2 like <i>x</i> because it would be different from the "generic war realism 'action' story"? I guess a point could be made for it being different, but that's not what's at heart here. These same dumb ###### arguments were bandied around NS1 and the reasons were, ultimately "because it should be more like Quake". NS1 with bunnyhopping was not unique at the time, and NS1's popularity owed probably a lot more to the Half-Life 1 engine and Counter-Strike than it did to anything else. CS was just a mod, and NS, being a mod for the same engine, means people were more likely to pick up a mod for a game they were already getting mods for. If NS1 were a mod for, say, Unreal Tournament - yeah I'm going go on a limb and say that nobody would've cared about it nearly as much.
Finally, I'll point out that the entire theory behind the 'completely different generation of gamers' had little to do with the gameplay of Halo and COD being fundamentally different, but rather this sort of distinction that any FPS gamer automatically knows what bunnyhopping is. I started off my post by pointing out that BHop has become an antique relic of a bygone era. It's in almost no games these days, and hasn't been a staple of any I can name for a long time. So saying that FPS gamers are going to know what it is cannot possibly be right. Hell, I almost had no idea what it was and I'm <i>from</i> that Quake generation of players.
<!--quoteo(post=1860259:date=Jul 12 2011, 11:39 PM:name=Temphage)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Temphage @ Jul 12 2011, 11:39 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1860259"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->The funniest part about this is when a real hardcore competitive player, a REAL one, would join and then pretend that he knew better than everyone else. Encourage use to engage in unsporting behavior and break the server rules, boss everyone around like he knew best, and try to flex is 'pr0-cred' like it meant anything. Eventually they'd start moaning about the server rules, start insulting their team, and after being warned, would engage in the time-honored NS tradition of accusing server admins for "banning skill". Why ban them? Because for us, there's more to the game than just seeing that you won at the victory screen. The journey to such, or even defeat, is where the fun is, not in simply winning. And to do so in a way that's managed to keep it entertaining for everyone makes it more enjoyable overall.
I know the NS competitive scene well enough to know that many people don't 'get' that, that finding joy in defeat is a foreign concept they'll never be able to understand, and that anything besides pursuit of winning is secondary. When those people would join these classy pub games like on NGL, maybe with a few of their buddies and try to pub-stomp, they'd find the server empty after their first round of spawncamping. Yeah, great, you get to declare victory. Now the server's empty, ######. Good job.
Ultimately, none of that is competitive playing, not in any true sense. I feel bad for you that you think you can't actually enjoy a game without having a 'Play 2 Win' mentality, that you have to be some sort of elite group in order to experience 'more organized play', but that's not true, and has never been. For NS1, as well as every game, there's a huge group of people who have good skill, but don't want to be part of the clan-tag wearing "elites" and engage in competitive play (real competitive play, which involves, you know, ladders and rankings) either because of time constraints, unwilling to deal with the inevitable drama, and maybe, just maybe, they've learned that you DON'T have to do any of that just to have a good time.
You're seriously making a lot of statements there that don't really have any basis in reality. Your definition of a "competitive scene" only serves to water down the definition of such. Real competition has ladder matches, ranking, and league play. If you want to call your collection of nerds a 'competitive team' because you don't TK each other to get in the CC to drop yourself a shotgun and then sell the entire marine base, or whatever other behavior you seem to suggest everyone who DOESN'T wear a clan tag engages in, go ahead and do that. But please don't shoehorn people like me into your own definition of competitive gaming. I would appreciate not EVER being associated with those kinds of people.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<BAD> admin detected. Not even going to bother refuting your points since it's pretty clear you got spawned camped a few times in NS1 and now you're all :c over it.
<!--quoteo(post=1860257:date=Jul 13 2011, 04:30 AM:name=TrC)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (TrC @ Jul 13 2011, 04:30 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1860257"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->NS2 needs to spread like NS1 did with recommandations because simply there is no budget it has to be good. Half-assed gameplay with clunky movement wont work there are already plenty out there, with even fancier graphics.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I'm not going to comment on your speculations for how a half-finished game will play in several months or more down the line, but to suggest that in order for NS2 to be popular that it somehow "needs" bunnyhopping is simply a stupid thing to say. If you didn't get it, my two titanic posts here all lead up to the same uncomfortable truth: The BHop crowd is dying away by the day. No new games are incorporating it, so the number of players who are aware of it, much less can even do it or would care to learn it is not and HAS not grown. The players who make up this BHop 'crowd' are aging, their reflexes are slowing, and most don't have the time in their lives anymore to post angry rants on the NS forum about how much the pub scrubs are ruining what they perceive to be "THEIR" game. Good thing I still do.
Ultimately, making a game centric to BHop means you're making it for a very, very exclusive core group of gamers - gamers who, despite how important they really wish they were, ultimately form an <b>utterly insignificant</b> metric of gamers. Yeah, even NS gamers.
NS1's popularity owed probably a lot more to the Half-Life 1 engine and Counter-Strike than it did to anything else. CS was just a mod, and NS, being a mod for the same engine, means people were more likely to pick up a mod for a game they were already getting mods for. If NS1 were a mod for, say, Unreal Tournament - yeah I'm going go on a limb and say that nobody would've cared about it nearly as much.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--><BAD> admin detected. Not even going to bother refuting your points since it's pretty clear you got spawned camped a few times in NS1 and now you're all :c over it.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Haha, not even close. I thought the 'ban skill' thing was a giveaway, but I'm happy to see the #### attitude that NS1 managed to concentrate, like some sort of septic FPS drain trap, wasn't actually limited to just one or two servers. At least you guys were equal opportunity ###holes, even if you did completely drive interest in the game down the crapper. Honestly, why Flayra even thought you people deserved a sequel in the first place, after the clan-tag wearing #####bag crowd did their best to utterly crush any sort of casual interest in his first game...
I also enjoy how much it reflects upon you that the first thing you think of is that clearly I have some sort of vendetta over something that happened in a mediocre and pointless FPS game that I quit playing over six years ago. Really, are you so petty and shallow that that would be your first reaction? But, you know, good on you for being a great case study about my whole 'attitude' thing. Way to buck the stereotype that NS had one of the worst communities of the time that you somehow suggest it would be MY fault that YOU broke server rules and got banned for it.
<!--quoteo(post=1860259:date=Jul 13 2011, 06:39 AM:name=Temphage)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Temphage @ Jul 13 2011, 06:39 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1860259"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->stuff<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Dude calm down, I had to check my own post to see what the heck did I say cause you are exploding expotentionally.
I did not even hint that there would be no some sort of cooperation on public. I certain you can agree that it is much more complicated than building an extractor together (Now I'm exaggerating) since you have a constant touch with your friends instead of irregular one and you can do this in standard enviroment 6v6 in NS1. You can also be certain that your enemy comes with similar mindset.
You obviously have something against clan activity because your image is completely twisted, a real "pro" gamer, I rather use competitive player does not even wish to play on public, it would ideal if the game could be played with clan matches only. It is not that odd that a casual public may get shattered when few friends join to play but thinking that every competitive player wearing a tag you hate so much is there to bully you or showing off his skill is absolute nonsense and I preferred if you did not give such image to anyone reading this thread. I think it is very obvious that the player putting more effort should be rewarded and I dont mean hours played, real effort in understanding the game.
Are you trying to get this thread closed because of your hate of bunnyhopping or competitive gaming because it certainly seems like it?
<!--quoteo(post=1860130:date=Jul 12 2011, 08:20 PM:name=Underwhelmed)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Underwhelmed @ Jul 12 2011, 08:20 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1860130"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->You can't have options available without a way to execute them. Like I said, if you don't like it, the onus is on you to present a viable alternative. You keep insisting the current control scheme is "arbitrary" (Which as far as I can tell, is just codeword for "Anything I don't understand"), so why don't you come up with an non-arbitrary alternative?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> I just came up with a ingenious system that allows you to have more options without bhop or other non-intuitive, stay with me.
you can have abilities, or skills, that do different things. Let's say we give the skulk the following abilities: <ul><li>move forward</li><li>strafe left</li><li>strafe right</li><li>move backward</li><li>jump</li><li>bite</li><li>parasite</li><li>leap</li></ul>
combine this with mouse movements and other effects like maybe wall-walking?
Now all the abilities will be mapped to the keyboard for easy execution, maybe W for forward and so on. (just brainstorming here) now you have all these options just a key press away and it's up to the user to pick and choose from all there options, that gives us a infinite combination of "combos" that you have to learn how and when to use correctly to maximize their effect.
The common misunderstanding is that being "pro" gamer in FPS games is only about twitch-skills, you couldn't be more wrong. For example let’s look about the major skill of any FPS game: aiming. It's not just about godly hand-eye coordination and out-of-this-world reflexes. It’s beautiful that so simple thing as aiming in reality is really complex thing: in nutshell it’s all about creating good shooting angles by your own movement, positioning and anticipation of your enemies’ movement. Those aren't simple things to do.
Like aiming bunnyhop is also more complex than it may look at first glance. I don't really care so much about speed it gives but control which gives you freedom of choice. The air control is the most important thing in bunnyhop because it gives you infinite way to approach your enemy and only your own creativity is your limit. Without similar skill-based movement range vs. melee games become very boring and simple-minded indeed.
<!--quoteo(post=1860388:date=Jul 13 2011, 04:28 PM:name=Yuuki)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Yuuki @ Jul 13 2011, 04:28 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1860388"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Don't you guys have some ideas for different implementations, maybe more "realistic", of skill based movement ?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Even mouse/keyboard combination is pretty limited when you compare to any realistic body muscle stuff. I don't think we had been arguing over this for years if there was any clearly better way of implementing movement that does similar stuff better than the HL1 system does.
I think much of the disdain of bhop comes from fear and misunderstanding. Really there are only two camps who provide insight to the issue: people who know how to bhop and support it, and people who know how but don't like it. The latter camp usually fueling fear or mistrust in the newer crowd- who may have never even experienced bunnyhop first hand.
Now I call BS to "anyone who can bhop is in their mid 20s to 30s". I'm 21, and I still play NS and have played bhop maps with 16 year olds who are eager to learn it and eventually do master it.
I also call bs to the people who don't understand the mechanics behind bhop saying it's an "esoteric key combination that produces a highly unrealistic zig zag dodge pattern". Bunnyhop (and more importantly) the physics behind it provided the basis for air control. Speaking of the "zig zag pattern" anyone can easily track the predictable back and forth.
Just for the hell of it I uploaded a small snippet of fade blinking, it's by no means good compared to some of the good fades out there but I already had it in a fraps video so it's convenient. About 4 seconds in is where I start.
I'm not doing exaggerated evil commands to get unrealistic speed boosts and destroy the immersion by unrealistic movement... rather I'm using air control to get around the corners as I go back to hive. The current fade model only allows for linear blink, both in terms of direction and velocity. There is NO control whatsoever, and by extension no room for improvement.
We've had A LOT of internal discussions regarding bunnyhop, and general player movement.
We have always supported the idea of advanced player movement of some sort, but we still want to see if it can be done without coding in exact NS1 style BH mechanics. Yes, there are a lot of people who say there can't be any mechanic as good as BH, and people who say if BH is NOT in the game NS2 will suck, and people who say if it IS in the game, NS2 will suck. I don't want to get into that discussion right now.
What I can say is this:
We want more mobility for players in general, especially the skulk. We are looking into more air control for all players, and will be doing more side by side comparisons with NS1 and NS2 to see if we can get that same "feel" back. Additionally, we have some ideas that we are going to try out regarding advanced movement abilities for the skulk, that will be built into the gameplay mechanics for everyone to see, but require skill and practice to pull off the timing and execution in order to get speed/distance boosts. And we are hoping to incorporate the use of vertical surfaces more as part of it. Currently the skulk is largely played on the ground with leap, and only occasionally uses the walls for ambush purposes now and then. We really want his ability to use all surfaces to factor into his overall mobility.
There is a good chance that leap may end up going back to a hive 2 ability, rather then being there at game start. Please, don't everyone start freaking out, its just being discussed, and would only be done once the skulk has been given more maneuverability in other ways.
As far as the actual topic itself goes, we also are not happy with the jump spam on the marine side, and are looking at solutions. We generally hate to impede player movement as a solution, but in this case we may need to add some slowdown/height drop when spamming the jump key, particularly when strafe jumping. NS1 had something similar, though its not yet clear if that would fully solve the problem.
Anyway, player movement as a whole, for all player classes is important to us, and we still have a lot of plans to improve and enhance in that area, though of course there is only so much we can do at once.
Obviously, anyone who knows what bunnyhop infers on the community side (supporter of it or not) knows that bhop isn't even an option in a modern game. The people against bhop don't understand that, for the people who WANT bhop, we don't care if it is actually "bunnyhopping". I think I speak for the majority when I say we just like skill based movement. Personally, I think a game can easily have skill based movement without the rage-inducing, exploit-calling silliness of jumping around constantly.
One idea I've been playing around with in my UDK project has been using the mouse movement seen in Quake 3's strafejumping as inspiration for a "mouse gestural" based movement. Something like: hold down a button to start sprinting, and the speed of your sprint depends on how well you move your mouse along an ever-changing (based on velocity) invisible path. In Quake 3, this path was X-axis only, you simply had to be looking a certain degree left or right in order to accelerate. This could be expanded on to make the path more of a "U" shape, imitating the torso movement when someone is actually sprinting, so the player would have to move his view along this shape in a "U" that gets tighter the faster he goes.
For a better explanation and visual of how Quake 3's mouse movement related to velocity increasing, check out this video at 4:05: <a href="http://www.own3d.tv/video/10844/Tutorial__Genesis_-_The_Beginning_of" target="_blank">http://www.own3d.tv/video/10844/Tutorial__...he_Beginning_of</a> (at 4:40 he starts going into the technical side). Notice the green bar that gets smaller and smaller as he gains velocity. It should be noted that this simple mechanic (amongst others) spawned an entire community around "trickjumping" including a professional racing mod known as Defrag and hundreds of race maps. It took months to master. My main point here is that <b>the main complexity in Quake 3 was how you moved your mouse, NOT that you constantly jumped, thus I believe an equal level of skill can be obtained without including jumping at all.</b>
<strike>Also as a side note/suggestion, can you guys either remove crouch-jumping or make it automatic? It's such a relic of the old half-life 1 days and I really don't understand it's inclusion in a modern game. There is no skill, thought or strategy here; it's simply a gimmick that forces the user to hit two buttons instead of one to perform a menial action: basically, it's just an annoyance.</strike>
IeptBarakatThe most difficult name to speak ingame.Join Date: 2009-07-10Member: 68107Members, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow
edited July 2011
<!--quoteo(post=1860431:date=Jul 13 2011, 04:30 PM:name=Asraniel)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Asraniel @ Jul 13 2011, 04:30 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1860431"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->actually crouch jumping is not in NS2. Crouch jumping will not make you jump any higher, because it wont get your legs up, but your torso down.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I hope they fix this soon. It doesn't make sense to fall faster when I hit the crouch button midair.
AsranielJoin Date: 2002-06-03Member: 724Members, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, Retired Community Developer
<!--quoteo(post=1860432:date=Jul 13 2011, 10:32 PM:name=IeptBarakat)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (IeptBarakat @ Jul 13 2011, 10:32 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1860432"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I hope they fix this soon. It doesn't make sense falling faster when I hit the crouch button midair.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> well, problem is, you want it back like HL1, and somebody just a few posts back wants it not like HL1 (without realising that it already isn't the case). So its probably hard to make the right choice.
<!--quoteo(post=1860431:date=Jul 13 2011, 04:30 PM:name=Asraniel)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Asraniel @ Jul 13 2011, 04:30 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1860431"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->actually crouch jumping is not in NS2. Crouch jumping will not make you jump any higher, because it wont get your legs up, but your torso down.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Huh, you're right. How strange - I could have swore in past builds there were some jumps I could only make while crouch jumping. I've been investigating it further and now it seems like max jump height is almost... random? This could be an FPS issue or something, but if I try to jump over the highest rails in Summit MS (up by the power node), it seems I can jump over them, or not jump over them, at random. Huh.
When I try to jump over this rail with high FPS (45+), sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. When I try to jump over it with low fps (15-30), I can make it seemingly every time. Amusingly, this also existed to a lesser extent in Q3... oh 3d game engines, you so crazy.
Anyway sorry for the offtopic posts about something that doesn't even exist. My bad!
What is the difference between bunnyhopping to circumvent the engine's limited speed while running, and just increasing the players natural running speed to match it?
<!--quoteo(post=1860439:date=Jul 13 2011, 04:56 PM:name=eisiger)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (eisiger @ Jul 13 2011, 04:56 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1860439"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->What is the difference between bunnyhopping to circumvent the engine's limited speed while running, and just increasing the players natural running speed to match it?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> The former requires you to learn, practice and master the movements, the latter puts everyone on the same level.
IeptBarakatThe most difficult name to speak ingame.Join Date: 2009-07-10Member: 68107Members, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow
edited July 2011
<!--quoteo(post=1860434:date=Jul 13 2011, 04:44 PM:name=Asraniel)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Asraniel @ Jul 13 2011, 04:44 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1860434"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->well, problem is, you want it back like HL1, and somebody just a few posts back wants it not like HL1 (without realising that it already isn't the case). So its probably hard to make the right choice.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Appearing as though you're being pushed to the ground faster when you press crouch is the problem.
Jump: You go in the air. Crouch: You bring your torso down by bending your legs in front of you, so you can get closer to the floor. Crouch-Jump: You jump in the air and bend your legs towards you. You can't bring your torso downwards midair. Thus being able to clear minor obstacles your feet would normally hit.
Sure.. there was an exploit where you actually jumped higher while crouching. But that isn't what I'm talking about.
<!--QuoteBegin-a random wiki+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (a random wiki)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteEBegin-->The reason this trick works is not because it makes you jump higher. What actually happens is that, when you do a normal jump, the place you're trying to jump to is occasionally too high, and your feet will hit the platform edge, preventing you from landing on it. When you crouch jump, your hitbox becomes smaller (as it would while crouching), and the edge of the platform stops being an obstruction.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Comments
I think what they are all trying to point out is that bunny hopping was a poorly designed feature (which is what it became when the devs discovered it and left it in), because it was not an intended feature, and as such was not designed holistically, was not documented anywhere, nor explained, nor even alluded to. There is no in-game tutorial for bunny hopping, which means it is not accessible to the majority of the game's player base (without third-party interference such as word of mouth or the internet), and therefore splits the community up between the informed elite and the remaining player base.
Now if it were something that only 30 people in the world could do, I could understand this debate going on this long. But it isn't. It isn't entirely difficult to learn it now, with all the information available these days. But honestly, why should you have to if there is a better, more intuitive implementation out there that provides adequately similar results?
I don't like bunnyhopping because I think it's a reflection of negligence at best and a terribly designed mechanic at worst, but if it gets put into a game that I intend to play competitively I'm going to learn it because there's no reason not to.
<a href="http://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancing-multiplayer-games-part-1-definitions.html" target="_blank">Fairness</a>
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?act=findpost&pid=1838054" target="_blank">Technical Skill vs. Intellectual Skill</a>
What's the better implementation?
As I said previously, I'm not really for or against bunny hoping but I'm interested in this discussion from a game design point of view. Game designers want to create a game with a wide range of skill levels and a deep gameplay that requires mastery. It makes the game more enjoyable and interesting. If bunny hoping does that then it's a good thing, regardless if it's intended or not.
I try and relate this to a simple movement mechanic that I know well. In day of defeat you are required to stand still when firing certain weapons in order to maintain accuracy. If you counter strafe by pressing the opposite direction in which you are moving for a split second, you can stop yourself slightly faster than just letting go of the key. Strafing like this takes skill and practice and it isn't documented in a tutorial or anything (but it should be). If you get really good at it you can almost shoot without stopping at all and it makes you a lot more difficult to hit and you can shoot faster than your opponent.
I was thinking about if this mechanic didn't exist, and you just stopped instantly by letting go of the button, would that make the game better? I don't think so. It would probably make the game more accessible for people and a little easier to understand (because you would have one less mechanic to worry about), but in the long term it would just decrease the potential skill difference between the players.
Strafing well takes practice and improving at it will make you a better player. If everyone could strafe perfectly without having to practice then it would remove the fun in it. It would no longer be exciting for you to pull off a really quick shot, it would just be the norm.
The good thing about this mechanic as well is it scales with skill. The better you are at it, the more of an advantage you have over your opponent (this is the same as aiming an FPS games, it scales well with ability). It's not some secret move that you need to learn that instantly gives you an advantage over people who don't know it. Just as aiming for headshots isn't a secret move.
I used to play on public servers and dominant almost the entire team, but then I'd go and play against someone better than me and they would dominant me in the same way. IMO this wide variance in potential ability makes a game fun and keeps players coming back for more. Some people will argue that getting owned by someone better than you is no fun. I agree, but I think that will happen in any good game. Badly designed games keep the potential difference in ability between the players low and these get boring quickly. Well designed games have big differences in potentially ability and you can always improve by practising more. The most fun is generally when playing against people with a similar skill level.
From a game design standpoint I think it's better to try and include as many of these abilities that scale well with skill as you can. Aiming is one. Certain movement mechanics can be another.
well said!
skill based movement must be given to the aliens, freedom of movement is required for this race. right now alien movement is really way to restricted, we need either something was ns1 had or some other passive ability which can enhance the alien race to give them better movement over the environment.
It isn't entirely difficult to learn it now, with all the
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?act=findpost&pid=1838054" target="_blank">Technical Skill vs. Intellectual Skill</a><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Exactly, discovered and left in. I would hardly call that a design, but it was grave mistake for not devs not including tutorial for this (and reworking +jump for that matter). Now lets imagine for second that bunnyhopping would be added to NS2, would it be added exactly like NS1 with us needing to find secret to unlock it? No of course not it would be implimented way everyone would have access to it.
This is a very good post, I read it couple times, I find it very hard to distinguish Intellectual from Technical as a player (Marine/lifeform), to use some ledge / rail or box to your advantage you need both for example. I think you need both though, knowledge that you can use it and the skill to execute it. My point is that the game should have option to allows us to exploit the enviroments mappers have given us in a effective not completely obvious way and if the game is only required to have intellectual skill such as positioning your options are very limited.
It's not 2002 anymore. Bunnyhopping is pretty much non-existent, and the only relevance it has amongst game players these days is nostalgic bleating.
Players who could bunnyhop are well into their mid-20s and 30s. They have families. They have full-time jobs. They don't play games as much as they used to, and I'm sure most of them lost their edge years ago and aren't going to return to the competitive scene for a long time.
Bunnyhopping missing from NS isn't like we fell off some epic bandwagon and every other game left NS behind. Here's the truth - it's ###### irrelevant. Maybe something like it will make a comeback some day, but pining for NS2 to have bunnyhopping just reeks of some rose-tinted desire for the 'good old days'. You know what makes money these days? Not Quake. Most people don't even know what Quake is. The Unreal franchise just ate its last meal. The number one FPS dominating tournaments are things like Call of Duty. Scoff it if you will, but these tired ###### arguments about how games should be these identical cookie-cutter clones of the same god damn game over and over is getting really tiring, and isn't going to help anything. Almost every argument about something in NS2 can be traced back to 'It should be like this because it was like that in NS1', and you can trace that back to 'this feature should be like this, because it was like that in Quake'.
When you're asking for bunnyhopping, who honestly do you want that feature developed for? Me? I'll be selfish and answer it: I could not ever possibly again in my life give two ###### to the fast-paced twitch FPS genre. Once upon a time I did and I was pretty good at it. Looking back, I see those games as being childish and shallow. The respectable success and overall impact 'higher' games like Tribes 2, Battlefield, and even Planetside and, yes, ArmA had enlightened me to FPS gameplay that could actually be about things besides how ###### l33t your bithin' headshot skillz were. Things an intellectual level higher than smashing spacebar timing and then teabagging a corpse while screaming about how you owned some scrub f***ot, or any other charming behavior clan-tag wearing ***holes are associated with. They showed that FPS games weren't just about how awesome your aim was, and found ways to channel the intellectual aspect further than just bunnyhopping and shoehorning ridiculous concepts like Street Fighter combos into the totally esoteric and, honestly, completely bull###### buzzword "intellectual skill".
Yeah, you know what, I might never have the awesome pr0 skillz of Superman, but Superman is a ###### comicbook character for kids, and I for one have grown the ###### up in the last ten years.
Now before you all ###### that this is NS and I should GTFO, I'm going to point out that, like Superman, NS has always been a child of two worlds. There were fast, and there were slow aspects of it. And this is where the conflict of bunnyhopping comes from. Some of you want NS to be more like your childish gimmick games of the past where your Ritalin would wear off and you couldn't stand to be in a round longer than 2 minutes. Some of us remember the epic 1.04 games that would last four hours long and were less about flying around like a whirling dervish of teeth and claws, chomping 80% of the marine team to death in seven seconds, and more about strategy and concentrating teamwork directly at a weak point. In those games, individual skill never really even came into it.
The only correct answer to the BHop question is that there will never be an answer, because neither direction is really where NS has ever been. If NS2 were to walk the same line of NS1, it will only have succeeded if, when you play it, you find half the features to your liking, and half the features to be stupid and completely against what you think the game should be like. If that means that you have to give up your precious BHop for the glory of the slower, more strategic aspect of the game, then that's the price you're going to have to pay to play a hybridized game like NS2.
If you made it this far without erupting in volcanic rage, I suggest at this point that you start the video below and keep reading.
You want to be totally, 100% completely ###### honest here? NS never made it big-time. It had a few interest in leagues but those eventually dissolved into irrelevance. CAL collapsed under the complete suck that was the competitive community, of which opinions around here vary greatly but the general idea was that the competitive scene of NS was one of the most poor-mannered unsporting collection of asshats ever to have congregated anywhere on the internet who desired nothing more than to inflate their own egos at the expense of everyone else, new players or pub servers alike.
NS2 will never make it big-time either. It's sad, but true, and I think deep down you all know it. Begging for these features as if bunnyhopping is going to bring NS2 to the forefront of competitive gaming is something that will just never happen. Games just don't work they way they used to. The NS2 community hasn't really grown per se, and I wouldn't believe anything except that the vast majority of NS2 players are ex-NS1 players. This means the market is small, and isn't going to grow bigger. What's making things worse is the torturously slow NS2 production. Most of the die-hard NS1 players are probably playing it, or trying to, right now. This means that every moment NS2 isn't a completed product, people are growing bored. By 2012, 2013 when NS2 is actually a complete product, how many people of the original fanbase will still care? How many? Be honest here, how long will you maintain interest?
I appreciate the efforts of the devs, and they have my money. Supporting indie gaming is always a nice gesture. But arguments for bunnyhopping based on the premise that it's necessary for some sort of high-level competitive scene that will never exist is ridiculous.
The competitive gamers of 2002, the people who were the pros in NS were sixteen to nineteen years old. We all were about the same age at the time, and the same fogies are still around in this forum, still in <i>#naturalselection</i>. That means we're now in our mid to late twenties.
If your argument for bunnyhopping is based around the competitive scene, or the desire for one, I hate to break this to you but if or when there is a competitive scene, I doubt any of you will be a part of it. If we, and I mean all of us, were the peak twitch players in 2003, the next generation of players are not going to be in their upper-20s - they will be sixteen to nineteen years old.
Kids that age didn't grow up on Counter-Strike, Quake 2, and Tribes. They grew up on Halo and Call of Duty.
Yeah, the times they are a changin'.
<center><object width="450" height="356"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/xrIPQxrog8M"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/xrIPQxrog8M" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="450" height="356"></embed></object></center>
Time have changed surely, but it is hardly reliable argument for not making different game than your generic war realism "action" story. You are talking as if the kids have changed in 10 years, like theres no market for different games I find it amusing because the dislike of lack of real gameplay more of a trend nowdays. You are under the impression that the game preference have changed probably completely disregarding the fact the game industry has changed in ten or so years how many tv-ads you saw advertising NS1?
I find amusing you think competitive scene as some kind of pit you throw everyone into and there can be only one winner. Competitive scene varies as well, some do it for the increased befriending, bonding more organized way of play where your thoughts and strategies actually have meaning even if the goal is to win, it is not everything or the most important part for everyone.
Years have changed is certainly interesting argument, but in your case you are just venting out some sort of rage bent up apparently over the years. Calm down go find out what it is about you'll find out is comes as natural as shooting but it is much more fun.
@Temphage
If you had to choose a game that your friend recommended to you ie. spread through friend recommandations or an add you saw on TV and wanted to test which one would likely be better?
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN0CVZ2G6FQ" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN0CVZ2G6FQ</a>
Just incase you still dont get it CoD can sell through advertising and with the brand name it does not need to be that good. NS2 needs to spread like NS1 did with recommandations because simply there is no budget it has to be good. Half-assed gameplay with clunky movement wont work there are already plenty out there, with even fancier graphics.
<!--coloro:cyan--><span style="color:cyan"><!--/coloro-->[<i>Citation needed</i>]<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--> on your entire post.
Yeah, I hate COD and Halo as much as the rest of us, but who is 'us'? We're the old, angry pissed-off bitter PC gaming masterrace. I can dig calling these games as "lacking real gameplay", but would the massive, unbelievable Bungie fanboy following agree with you on that? The people making tens of thousands of dollars on tournaments? The fact that Call of Duty: Black Ops is more popular than probably every fast-paced FPS game you can name <i>combined</i>?
I'm also amused by the fact that you <b>disassociated</b> competitive play and what I can only really call 'scrub play' by suggesting that anyone who isn't competitive is a friendless loser and that nothing higher can ever be maintained. This is patently untrue. In fact, plenty of NS1 servers had names for themselves where they were populated with loads of regs, good admins, lots of voice chat and teamwork. None of this was 'competitive'. We didn't "play 2 win" where we'd spawncamp the alien hive just to get ahead, and we didn't wear some sort of stupid clan tag.
The funniest part about this is when a real hardcore competitive player, a REAL one, would join and then pretend that he knew better than everyone else. Encourage use to engage in unsporting behavior and break the server rules, boss everyone around like he knew best, and try to flex is 'pr0-cred' like it meant anything. Eventually they'd start moaning about the server rules, start insulting their team, and after being warned, would engage in the time-honored NS tradition of accusing server admins for "banning skill". Why ban them? Because for us, there's more to the game than just seeing that you won at the victory screen. The journey to such, or even defeat, is where the fun is, not in simply winning. And to do so in a way that's managed to keep it entertaining for everyone makes it more enjoyable overall.
I know the NS competitive scene well enough to know that many people don't 'get' that, that finding joy in defeat is a foreign concept they'll never be able to understand, and that anything besides pursuit of winning is secondary. When those people would join these classy pub games like on NGL, maybe with a few of their buddies and try to pub-stomp, they'd find the server empty after their first round of spawncamping. Yeah, great, you get to declare victory. Now the server's empty, ######. Good job.
Ultimately, none of that is competitive playing, not in any true sense. I feel bad for you that you think you can't actually enjoy a game without having a 'Play 2 Win' mentality, that you have to be some sort of elite group in order to experience 'more organized play', but that's not true, and has never been. For NS1, as well as every game, there's a huge group of people who have good skill, but don't want to be part of the clan-tag wearing "elites" and engage in competitive play (real competitive play, which involves, you know, ladders and rankings) either because of time constraints, unwilling to deal with the inevitable drama, and maybe, just maybe, they've learned that you DON'T have to do any of that just to have a good time.
You're seriously making a lot of statements there that don't really have any basis in reality. Your definition of a "competitive scene" only serves to water down the definition of such. Real competition has ladder matches, ranking, and league play. If you want to call your collection of nerds a 'competitive team' because you don't TK each other to get in the CC to drop yourself a shotgun and then sell the entire marine base, or whatever other behavior you seem to suggest everyone who DOESN'T wear a clan tag engages in, go ahead and do that. But please don't shoehorn people like me into your own definition of competitive gaming. I would appreciate not EVER being associated with those kinds of people.
I also completely lost you on the TV ad thing.
EDIT: (Haahaha, get it?)
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Time have changed surely, but it is hardly reliable argument for not making different game than your generic war realism "action" story.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Interesting language you picked here. If I'm reading that right, you're saying we should make NS2 like <i>x</i> because it would be different from the "generic war realism 'action' story"? I guess a point could be made for it being different, but that's not what's at heart here. These same dumb ###### arguments were bandied around NS1 and the reasons were, ultimately "because it should be more like Quake". NS1 with bunnyhopping was not unique at the time, and NS1's popularity owed probably a lot more to the Half-Life 1 engine and Counter-Strike than it did to anything else. CS was just a mod, and NS, being a mod for the same engine, means people were more likely to pick up a mod for a game they were already getting mods for. If NS1 were a mod for, say, Unreal Tournament - yeah I'm going go on a limb and say that nobody would've cared about it nearly as much.
Finally, I'll point out that the entire theory behind the 'completely different generation of gamers' had little to do with the gameplay of Halo and COD being fundamentally different, but rather this sort of distinction that any FPS gamer automatically knows what bunnyhopping is. I started off my post by pointing out that BHop has become an antique relic of a bygone era. It's in almost no games these days, and hasn't been a staple of any I can name for a long time. So saying that FPS gamers are going to know what it is cannot possibly be right. Hell, I almost had no idea what it was and I'm <i>from</i> that Quake generation of players.
I know the NS competitive scene well enough to know that many people don't 'get' that, that finding joy in defeat is a foreign concept they'll never be able to understand, and that anything besides pursuit of winning is secondary. When those people would join these classy pub games like on NGL, maybe with a few of their buddies and try to pub-stomp, they'd find the server empty after their first round of spawncamping. Yeah, great, you get to declare victory. Now the server's empty, ######. Good job.
Ultimately, none of that is competitive playing, not in any true sense. I feel bad for you that you think you can't actually enjoy a game without having a 'Play 2 Win' mentality, that you have to be some sort of elite group in order to experience 'more organized play', but that's not true, and has never been. For NS1, as well as every game, there's a huge group of people who have good skill, but don't want to be part of the clan-tag wearing "elites" and engage in competitive play (real competitive play, which involves, you know, ladders and rankings) either because of time constraints, unwilling to deal with the inevitable drama, and maybe, just maybe, they've learned that you DON'T have to do any of that just to have a good time.
You're seriously making a lot of statements there that don't really have any basis in reality. Your definition of a "competitive scene" only serves to water down the definition of such. Real competition has ladder matches, ranking, and league play. If you want to call your collection of nerds a 'competitive team' because you don't TK each other to get in the CC to drop yourself a shotgun and then sell the entire marine base, or whatever other behavior you seem to suggest everyone who DOESN'T wear a clan tag engages in, go ahead and do that. But please don't shoehorn people like me into your own definition of competitive gaming. I would appreciate not EVER being associated with those kinds of people.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<BAD> admin detected. Not even going to bother refuting your points since it's pretty clear you got spawned camped a few times in NS1 and now you're all :c over it.
I'm not going to comment on your speculations for how a half-finished game will play in several months or more down the line, but to suggest that in order for NS2 to be popular that it somehow "needs" bunnyhopping is simply a stupid thing to say. If you didn't get it, my two titanic posts here all lead up to the same uncomfortable truth: The BHop crowd is dying away by the day. No new games are incorporating it, so the number of players who are aware of it, much less can even do it or would care to learn it is not and HAS not grown. The players who make up this BHop 'crowd' are aging, their reflexes are slowing, and most don't have the time in their lives anymore to post angry rants on the NS forum about how much the pub scrubs are ruining what they perceive to be "THEIR" game. Good thing I still do.
Ultimately, making a game centric to BHop means you're making it for a very, very exclusive core group of gamers - gamers who, despite how important they really wish they were, ultimately form an <b>utterly insignificant</b> metric of gamers. Yeah, even NS gamers.
NS1's popularity owed probably a lot more to the Half-Life 1 engine and Counter-Strike than it did to anything else. CS was just a mod, and NS, being a mod for the same engine, means people were more likely to pick up a mod for a game they were already getting mods for. If NS1 were a mod for, say, Unreal Tournament - yeah I'm going go on a limb and say that nobody would've cared about it nearly as much.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--><BAD> admin detected. Not even going to bother refuting your points since it's pretty clear you got spawned camped a few times in NS1 and now you're all :c over it.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Haha, not even close. I thought the 'ban skill' thing was a giveaway, but I'm happy to see the #### attitude that NS1 managed to concentrate, like some sort of septic FPS drain trap, wasn't actually limited to just one or two servers. At least you guys were equal opportunity ###holes, even if you did completely drive interest in the game down the crapper. Honestly, why Flayra even thought you people deserved a sequel in the first place, after the clan-tag wearing #####bag crowd did their best to utterly crush any sort of casual interest in his first game...
I also enjoy how much it reflects upon you that the first thing you think of is that clearly I have some sort of vendetta over something that happened in a mediocre and pointless FPS game that I quit playing over six years ago. Really, are you so petty and shallow that that would be your first reaction? But, you know, good on you for being a great case study about my whole 'attitude' thing. Way to buck the stereotype that NS had one of the worst communities of the time that you somehow suggest it would be MY fault that YOU broke server rules and got banned for it.
Dude calm down, I had to check my own post to see what the heck did I say cause you are exploding expotentionally.
I did not even hint that there would be no some sort of cooperation on public. I certain you can agree that it is much more complicated than building an extractor together (Now I'm exaggerating) since you have a constant touch with your friends instead of irregular one and you can do this in standard enviroment 6v6 in NS1. You can also be certain that your enemy comes with similar mindset.
You obviously have something against clan activity because your image is completely twisted, a real "pro" gamer, I rather use competitive player does not even wish to play on public, it would ideal if the game could be played with clan matches only. It is not that odd that a casual public may get shattered when few friends join to play but thinking that every competitive player wearing a tag you hate so much is there to bully you or showing off his skill is absolute nonsense and I preferred if you did not give such image to anyone reading this thread. I think it is very obvious that the player putting more effort should be rewarded and I dont mean hours played, real effort in understanding the game.
Are you trying to get this thread closed because of your hate of bunnyhopping or competitive gaming because it certainly seems like it?
I just came up with a ingenious system that allows you to have more options without bhop or other non-intuitive, stay with me.
you can have abilities, or skills, that do different things. Let's say we give the skulk the following abilities:
<ul><li>move forward</li><li>strafe left</li><li>strafe right</li><li>move backward</li><li>jump</li><li>bite</li><li>parasite</li><li>leap</li></ul>
combine this with mouse movements and other effects like maybe wall-walking?
Now all the abilities will be mapped to the keyboard for easy execution, maybe W for forward and so on. (just brainstorming here)
now you have all these options just a key press away and it's up to the user to pick and choose from all there options, that gives us
a infinite combination of "combos" that you have to learn how and when to use correctly to maximize their effect.
Like aiming bunnyhop is also more complex than it may look at first glance. I don't really care so much about speed it gives but control which gives you freedom of choice. The air control is the most important thing in bunnyhop because it gives you infinite way to approach your enemy and only your own creativity is your limit. Without similar skill-based movement range vs. melee games become very boring and simple-minded indeed.
This is neither funny nor productive to conversation.
Even mouse/keyboard combination is pretty limited when you compare to any realistic body muscle stuff. I don't think we had been arguing over this for years if there was any clearly better way of implementing movement that does similar stuff better than the HL1 system does.
Now I call BS to "anyone who can bhop is in their mid 20s to 30s". I'm 21, and I still play NS and have played bhop maps with 16 year olds who are eager to learn it and eventually do master it.
I also call bs to the people who don't understand the mechanics behind bhop saying it's an "esoteric key combination that produces a highly unrealistic zig zag dodge pattern". Bunnyhop (and more importantly) the physics behind it provided the basis for air control. Speaking of the "zig zag pattern" anyone can easily track the predictable back and forth.
Just for the hell of it I uploaded a small snippet of fade blinking, it's by no means good compared to some of the good fades out there but I already had it in a fraps video so it's convenient. About 4 seconds in is where I start.
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gN45jsRSOU" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gN45jsRSOU</a>
I'm not doing exaggerated evil commands to get unrealistic speed boosts and destroy the immersion by unrealistic movement... rather I'm using air control to get around the corners as I go back to hive. The current fade model only allows for linear blink, both in terms of direction and velocity. There is NO control whatsoever, and by extension no room for improvement.
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVVte550dyU" target="_blank">Real life example</a>
We have always supported the idea of advanced player movement of some sort, but we still want to see if it can be done without coding in exact NS1 style BH mechanics. Yes, there are a lot of people who say there can't be any mechanic as good as BH, and people who say if BH is NOT in the game NS2 will suck, and people who say if it IS in the game, NS2 will suck. I don't want to get into that discussion right now.
What I can say is this:
We want more mobility for players in general, especially the skulk. We are looking into more air control for all players, and will be doing more side by side comparisons with NS1 and NS2 to see if we can get that same "feel" back. Additionally, we have some ideas that we are going to try out regarding advanced movement abilities for the skulk, that will be built into the gameplay mechanics for everyone to see, but require skill and practice to pull off the timing and execution in order to get speed/distance boosts. And we are hoping to incorporate the use of vertical surfaces more as part of it. Currently the skulk is largely played on the ground with leap, and only occasionally uses the walls for ambush purposes now and then. We really want his ability to use all surfaces to factor into his overall mobility.
There is a good chance that leap may end up going back to a hive 2 ability, rather then being there at game start. Please, don't everyone start freaking out, its just being discussed, and would only be done once the skulk has been given more maneuverability in other ways.
As far as the actual topic itself goes, we also are not happy with the jump spam on the marine side, and are looking at solutions. We generally hate to impede player movement as a solution, but in this case we may need to add some slowdown/height drop when spamming the jump key, particularly when strafe jumping. NS1 had something similar, though its not yet clear if that would fully solve the problem.
Anyway, player movement as a whole, for all player classes is important to us, and we still have a lot of plans to improve and enhance in that area, though of course there is only so much we can do at once.
--Cory
One idea I've been playing around with in my UDK project has been using the mouse movement seen in Quake 3's strafejumping as inspiration for a "mouse gestural" based movement. Something like: hold down a button to start sprinting, and the speed of your sprint depends on how well you move your mouse along an ever-changing (based on velocity) invisible path. In Quake 3, this path was X-axis only, you simply had to be looking a certain degree left or right in order to accelerate. This could be expanded on to make the path more of a "U" shape, imitating the torso movement when someone is actually sprinting, so the player would have to move his view along this shape in a "U" that gets tighter the faster he goes.
For a better explanation and visual of how Quake 3's mouse movement related to velocity increasing, check out this video at 4:05: <a href="http://www.own3d.tv/video/10844/Tutorial__Genesis_-_The_Beginning_of" target="_blank">http://www.own3d.tv/video/10844/Tutorial__...he_Beginning_of</a> (at 4:40 he starts going into the technical side). Notice the green bar that gets smaller and smaller as he gains velocity. It should be noted that this simple mechanic (amongst others) spawned an entire community around "trickjumping" including a professional racing mod known as Defrag and hundreds of race maps. It took months to master. My main point here is that <b>the main complexity in Quake 3 was how you moved your mouse, NOT that you constantly jumped, thus I believe an equal level of skill can be obtained without including jumping at all.</b>
<strike>Also as a side note/suggestion, can you guys either remove crouch-jumping or make it automatic? It's such a relic of the old half-life 1 days and I really don't understand it's inclusion in a modern game. There is no skill, thought or strategy here; it's simply a gimmick that forces the user to hit two buttons instead of one to perform a menial action: basically, it's just an annoyance.</strike>
I hope they fix this soon. It doesn't make sense to fall faster when I hit the crouch button midair.
I hope you do add skill based movement, the game feels extremely slow paced especially from the aliens point of view, very limited.
well, problem is, you want it back like HL1, and somebody just a few posts back wants it not like HL1 (without realising that it already isn't the case). So its probably hard to make the right choice.
Huh, you're right. How strange - I could have swore in past builds there were some jumps I could only make while crouch jumping. I've been investigating it further and now it seems like max jump height is almost... random? This could be an FPS issue or something, but if I try to jump over the highest rails in Summit MS (up by the power node), it seems I can jump over them, or not jump over them, at random. Huh.
<img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/154355/ns2rail.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
When I try to jump over this rail with high FPS (45+), sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. When I try to jump over it with low fps (15-30), I can make it seemingly every time. Amusingly, this also existed to a lesser extent in Q3... oh 3d game engines, you so crazy.
Anyway sorry for the offtopic posts about something that doesn't even exist. My bad!
The former requires you to learn, practice and master the movements, the latter puts everyone on the same level.
Appearing as though you're being pushed to the ground faster when you press crouch is the problem.
Jump: You go in the air.
Crouch: You bring your torso down by bending your legs in front of you, so you can get closer to the floor.
Crouch-Jump: You jump in the air and bend your legs towards you. You can't bring your torso downwards midair. Thus being able to clear minor obstacles your feet would normally hit.
Sure.. there was an exploit where you actually jumped higher while crouching. But that isn't what I'm talking about.
<!--QuoteBegin-a random wiki+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (a random wiki)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteEBegin-->The reason this trick works is not because it makes you jump higher. What actually happens is that, when you do a normal jump, the place you're trying to jump to is occasionally too high, and your feet will hit the platform edge, preventing you from landing on it. When you crouch jump, your hitbox becomes smaller (as it would while crouching), and the edge of the platform stops being an obstruction.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->