Redoing weapons to fix declining interest...

[jrgp]

Though everyone already hates me, so maybe I'll look into it for 1.6.8.

I feel like people would love you if you made the following weapon changes.  i mean adding appropriate gfx and new effects/sounds/physics/whole 9 yards:

minigun -> grenade launcher. shoot grenades that bounce on the ground and explode within 3 seconds or if stepped on

deagles -> replace this with ability to dual wield any of the guns and shoot with right click + left click, making jetpack use middle button in this state. does anyone not have 3+ button mice at this point? i mean really

m79 -> covenant fuel rod canon from halo1. longer range + green + arch

ak74/steyr -> needler from halo1/2 (shards which slowly follow their target)

fn minimi -> battle rifle from halo2 (burst fired thing; ~3 burst hits to kill)

law -> bfg9000 (kill everything on screen) and disappear/drop/get depleted upon first shot

knife -> get lodged in wall if it hits a wall. if it hits a player and doesn't kill, make it stick in their body and drop some health every few seconds until death or some way of pulling it out

saw -> how can you hold a chainsaw perfectly still continuously in real life? you'd be jiggling it slightly and it'd be vibrating the hell out of your hand. reflect this in the game. make it wobble, and also incorporate time to refuel - maybe 2 or so second delay

i know some of the above ideas are ridiculous but i think stepping in a different direction/outside the box is certainly worth some thinking about.

the weapon balance discussion on these forums have been exactly the same for the past 10+ years - you're just changing config values for each gun and occasionally changing mechanics slightly. how interesting is that?

consider you're some player with slight interest in the game. you play a lot, then leave for a month/year and come back. what new features will you come back to? increased screen resolution? minimap? OSX server? *kind of yawn* what they interface the most with and will remember the most are how the actual gameplay is. the weapons will look the same and they won't notice much of a difference if they've been gone for years.

Just think about how popular a soldat release with the tagline "Soldat 1.9: All new weapons + default colors/gfx!" vs "Soldat 1.9: bugfixes + reworked wm  balance"

[Szaman]

In my opinion there should be way much more available weapons (as much as we can imagine - normal weapons and stationary ones) and the admins should have decide which weapons will be available on their servers (for example in those slots that are now available in game).
That would highly increase the range of possibilities for modders/scripters/artists

Also - it would be nice to have non-static maps, for example:
- doors that can be opened/closed
- rotating maps
- etc.

The nice option would be to have a "fog of war" - you can see only a part of the map (configurable by admins).

Best regards,
Szaman.

[duz]

What about start to improve the engine? That's why Soldat is dying. This stretched thing is a little bit weird for new players.
Since 1.3 what Soldat needs is a touch in the engine.
The dev team will keep fixing minor bugs and doing secondary things but this will not change anything.

I was wondering if Shoozza had continued with the development of OpenSoldat...

[Shoozza]

I had some ridiciouls ideas myself when we had some devteam internal chat about that whole weapon stuff but I'd have to find where or if I saved them.

I think ideas which don't break how the game works are the best. Something that adds more depth to the game.
IMHO the core gameplay is good (people still play it after all these years).
Redoing the weapons need to be done in a manner that wont make people leave in frustration.

As for knife I think knife getting stuck in wall or body could be nice but catching the falling weapon when you hit someone is also nice.

duz we havent released any 1.X version yet (1.6 doesn't count as it was a huge cleanup release ) so maybe 1.7?

[Bonecrusher]

I'd agree on basically anything if it's possibly going to boost activity.

[Adam]

vectorized weapons (though it would never happen) would be cool and maybe more unique reload animations

[darDar]

I would better vote for classes than redoing the 'default' weapons.

e.g

Class1 - Soldier (default wepons)
Class2 - new weapon1 #1
Class3 - new weapons #2
...

Then, there could be an option in the soldat.ini like:

[Classes]
Soldier = 1
Class2 = 0
Class3 = 0

where 1 stands for on and 0 stands for off.

This would assure that every player will be happy since leagues or server owners can simply disagree on certain classes.
And it would surely add some depth to the gameplay and might give a boost.


Btw. you forgot the Railgun from Quake3!
Big F12

[nosejj]

F12 -> Knife lodge part / Saw.
F11 -> The rest.

[DutchFlame]

. If you start thinking about this, then you might want to start changing the ugly 2000 interface aswell

[Akinaro]

minigun -> NOPE, you can throw grenade if you want "bounce" :] :]

deagles -> nope. don't se the point of this

m79 -> wut?!

ak74/steyr -> no comments...

fn minimi -> hmmm... but nope.

law -> and I want nuke that would kill everyone for next 3 maps because of radiation...

knife -> seems good, But I would make it different, if you stab someone in the back he gonna bleed for few sec(and you cant get that knife), if you stab him in front its gonna be just like now.

saw -> I never liked this weapon, for me you can even delete it :] 90% of people use it ONLY for spawning for all time on map...


I said it few times and no one liked me for that: I know that fixing bugs is important but before you gonna make it "clean" you gonna have game for 10-30 people that play sometimes on private servers... You need to as fast as possible make better GUI, better maps, better menu. Sad but true new players ALWAYS evaluate game after first few sec, and they see old menu and maps. This game have almost 12 years, we cant wait another 12 for small changes.
New weapons? yes, but its in the middle of the list, Soldat have almost everything what good game need: its fast, dynamic game that you can play even for 5min and you gonna get the same fun like playing 5h, there are crappy players and good players so everyone have fun, but only new look is needed

[ZdzichU]

F12 -> Knife lodge part / Saw.
F11 -> The rest.