breathing
Racer1
Join Date: 2002-11-22 Member: 9615Members
Join Date: 2002-11-22 Member: 9615Members
1. A swimmer doesn't breathe faster the deeper they go. However, it is believable that they would use more oxygen each breath. Same effect, but not the feeling that you are hyperventilating.
2. Once the player is out of oxygen, they shouldn't immediately black out. People can hold their breath. Maybe the player would slow down a bit, and not be able to pick up anything. After 5 seconds, peripheral vision should slowly go to black over the next 10 seconds, at which point they black out.
3. When you encounter dangerous/unusual things, that is when breathing should get faster for a bit.
P.S. Perhaps you are planning on upgrades/dna/whatever to improve these. I guess thats ok, but it is still not believable at the initial level. So some adjustment should be made.
2. Once the player is out of oxygen, they shouldn't immediately black out. People can hold their breath. Maybe the player would slow down a bit, and not be able to pick up anything. After 5 seconds, peripheral vision should slowly go to black over the next 10 seconds, at which point they black out.
3. When you encounter dangerous/unusual things, that is when breathing should get faster for a bit.
P.S. Perhaps you are planning on upgrades/dna/whatever to improve these. I guess thats ok, but it is still not believable at the initial level. So some adjustment should be made.
Comments
The amount of O2 you have in the bar includes the which is in your lungs, you can see this when you pick up the first tank, the bar extends its max value (without extending in length)
So it would make sense that you start to blackout right away. As with the breathing, I'm totally with you.
These other oxygen/breathing ideas occurred to me while playing:
* there is no indication of what the 'tank' gives you, it seems to be the same oxygen bar (just slower reduction) (some visual indication that it made a difference would be nice (maybe a seconds or bar number on the bottom of the oxygen bar?)
* (related to above) I assume there will be multiple ways to breath underwater (different tanks, gill mods, microbreathers (less inventory room)) So you'll some differentiation for those anyway, yeah?
* the 'up' function should be faster than the 'down' function (maybe by just 10% so that if you descend until you are 50% and then ascend you should have a little safety margin)
* there should be a 'panic' button where you drop all your inventory and emergency rise (it seems the bends does not always occur immediately so maybe you could also carry over some player limited/handicap until they get 'medpac'ed or something with critical problems occurring if they cant medpac in the required time (wikipedia has a table of time to bends, it seems 50% are delayed impact))
Number 3 might be useful if you had an adrenaline (cat pac
This also raises the possibility of a 'rest' mode where you use less when not moving (which might be needed to recharge body oxygen from gill implants or allow artificial gill breathers to recharge). Say your gill implants let your stay underwater for 5 mins (with normal use) but you need to outpace a sand shark for 20 seconds sprinting, then you'll need to find somewhere to rest to let them recharge (or reset or to clear lactic acid or some such).
OMG why am i typing so much for this game? ;-)
I also like the idea of progression through the breathing equipment. Initially, you're just holding your breath. It's not much time, but it's silent. After that, you go through your tank reserves, which are longer, but produce noise (that scares/alerts creatures). Then later, you get tech to craft a rebreather, which is silent and lasts longer, but way more expensive to craft/use.
I do like the idea of the tradeoff between more tanks for higher capacity vs slower speed for carrying more tanks.
For the panic button, maybe you could have some cartridges in your inventory, that when you press a button inflates a gas, which would help you get up from the water, kinda like those life jackets with the blow-up function (they work underwater too, I think)
That way, you won't have to drop everything on the button of the ocean, but you will consume another item to do it.
Realistically future tech probably wont use compressed air tanks.... and if you can extract dna from creatures to get upgrades you'd expect that any colony pod would have injections to adapt to a variety of environments, but for a game, having to do it the hardway makes sense