Onos Charge

Funkatron · March 2005

I just remember hearing/reading once upon a time about the possibility of skill changes for some of the aliens?

Only one I can think of as of now is the onos' 4th ability: charge. I recall some people complaining about fade's acid rocket, but I don't think any word was ever mentioned that it might be changed.

Anyway, just asking about the onos' charge ability. My only beef with it is I just find it looks incredibly stupid. The concept and idea behind with it I'm overall fine with. Giant creature with horns on its face... logical that it would perhaps charge time to time... bulls, elephants, rhinos do it afterall. But the way it looks in NS, probably cause of the limits of the HL engine, is just terrible.

One second the onos is charging in the 0* direction (* = degree sign). Without any signal or animation, the thing suddenly does a 180*, continues hauling **** in the complete opposite direction. As mentioned, it doesn't loose any speed nor is there any sign that it's about to move in some other direction. Absolutely no animation. You can basically activate charge and go nuts on your directional pad, and basically any marine that makes contact with you gets injured.

If this skill is still being considered replaced, I'll sign for it. Otherwise, I'd appreciate if it actually had some limits or something so the onos moves in a somewhat realistic manner.

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And as for combat, so many servers now have those awful plugins with like 50 levels. I don't know why these are so popolar, but it gets old trying to find decent combat servers that aren't full or with high pings. But if you ever played on one of these, you probably know where I'm going with this... the onos infinite adrenaline plus charge syndrome. I know these are 3rd party things and nothing to do with the devs here, but it's the worst crap ever.

Sky · March 2005

1) Wrong forum. There's an I&S forum for a reason.
2) Like you said, 50 level combat servers are both annoying, and not the dev's problem.
3) Are you saying that charge is so powerful that it needs a movement reduction in order to be more realistic and balanced? You do understand how ridiculous it seems to most people for the hive3 ability of the most powerful (well, most expensive) alien to just make him run really fast? The damage on charge is pathetic, to be honest; it's only use is to run quickly into a bunch of HAs, devour one, then run away quickly. Charge doesn't need a nerf, it needs a buff.

typical_skeleton · March 2005

I don't really know that this type of thread belongs in I&S... it's not really a specific suggestion, just a general discussion about the Onos charge ability and animation.

I&S is for ideas and suggestions, not general discussion. =P

Sky · March 2005

I would consider a nerf to charge a "suggestion". You can't talk about the animation until you talk about whether or not the ability requires the animation change.

Apos · March 2005

yes, the devs are facing an engine limit here, and I have to admit, unless there's something really crafty they can do, NS:S won't solve the problem. The issue is that turning animations can never really capture what turning should look like: not until the days when we have real physical modeling of the actual legs pushing off against the ground. The issue is that turns of different degrees involve very different movements.
Couple this with the fact that NS (and HL in general) allows near instant 180degree turns in most situations (which is done because restricting turning speed feels very clunky to the player, and wouldn't be very popular), having a creature moving very fast and spinning around is not going to be able to be animated properly, not even if NS did have a full-time professional modeler, which it currently does not as far as I know (soon though, we hear!)

I expect that in NS:S or further versions, charge will thus work differently. Either:

1) the turning speed and radius will be drastically reduced when charging so as to allow turning animations that make some semblance of sense without being too performance crushing
or
2) charge could even be a mostly straight ahead rocket shot, sort of like Link's dash attack from the later Legend of Zelda games. i.e., Onos will pick a direction, charge full speed in that direction, and do massive damage to whatever they hit along the way, losing momentum or stopping only if they contact heavy enough objects

These are not I&S ideas: these are just the only solutions I can think of that would make charge able to look "realistic." Given the fact that NS:S will allow ragdoll deaths of marines, I would think that the above options might be more palatable to the devs, as the single shot Onos charge could thus be a means to bowl over marines without making it so powerful that it could litterally clear out a room in a few seconds of smashing.

As I noted in a constie thread, there are a lot of hard issues having to do with physics that you might not think of right off the bat. For instance, immediate and significant knockback would be necessary when hit by an onos charge (otherwise the onos would hit you... and stop dead... pause for a few seconds standing still... and then suddenly your dead body would fly off away from the onos and it would rush forward, all its momentum magically regained), but this is itself a pain to animate (if you are dead, no problem: just ragdoll, but if you are alive, then you CANNOT ragdoll, and any animation you play might match up very poorly with the environment, since there's no way to animate a "marine getting up" move that can anticipate every surface and wall)

In short, charge is a really tricky problem. I think the current implementation is the best that we can hope for on this engine as far as looks. Some might argue that it needs a buff, though in my experience, it always appears too late to make any real difference to the outcome of the game.

Onos Charge

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