Chaosforge Forum

  • March 28, 2024, 10:23
  • Welcome, Guest
Please login or register.



Login with username, password and session length

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Messages - Game Hunter

Pages: 1 [2] 3 4 ... 65
16
AliensRL / Re: AlienRL Wiki: How do we start one?
« on: October 05, 2012, 13:38 »
Everyone was prodding me about it, and now that it is finally up, nobody cares anymore? :/
I spent a good chunk of last night searching through the code to figure out how a lot of the game mechanics are formulated. Gonna need to spend some more time before I can start putting it in concise and understandable prose. I mean, sure, I can copy-paste what's already displayed in the game as much as the next guy, but there are very few of us who can actually write down, for instance, the process of an attack's accuracy from beginning to end. I'll have plenty of time for that this weekend, in any case.

EDIT: Just finished the data-dumps for Weapons and Items. Keep checking every so often for other additions!

EDIT 2: Added an "accuracy" article that explains exactly how weapons calculate their damage and hit chance. I'm guessing a lot of people are interested in this.

17
Some guns need to be made more/less common. As it is, FN SCARs are everywhere, while I saw a single combat shotgun in the entire run - and not earlier than Level 4-5. The lower levels were full of shells, though.
Agreed, although it should be somewhat within reason. If we're going to keep along the route that "all towers have ammo for some reason" then increasing the chance for weapons that match ammo found in that area is reasonable. Also, since I know we can't guarantee weapons without making things static, military tower should be really loaded with all weapons in general, even if you end up with a lot of low-end duplicates. (Gives you a reason to blow some multitools there, no?)

Mk12 Sniper Rifle is terrible. Even at Expert skill, it failed to put down aliens in time before they got into melee range, and the long time taken by each shot (1.5 seconds, I think) means they get many free hits that can easily put you into Pain -5, even with Plasteel armor.
A sniper rifle should probably have a consideration that you need to stand still for a little bit before its full accuracy comes into play, but have REALLY good accuracy at that point (I'm talking perfect/critical on 75% of shots). Additionally, perhaps its functionality can be expanded to see beyond normal range when in firing mode: pop a grenade to attract attention and watch the bugs meet their death. At the end of the day it'll need to be balanced but I'd like to take this direction in general for specialty weapons.

Being able to carry an extra weapon in the same class (sidearm, light, heavy) would help a lot during those moments where your current ammo is running out and you're full of other types of rounds. Perhaps making it a function of Fitness? Yes, USMC Marines are not the Doomguy with his hammerspace inventory, but they do carry a lot of ammo for weapons they might never see in a game.
A long while back I had a similar suggestion:
Right now the current inventory is very, very limited. This mostly has to do with a lack of items in general but, even then, the restrictions on the player are forced in some areas. First and foremost, I suggest that the player's limit to three weapons is expanded so that lighter weapons can occupy the heavier slots. This would mean that a player could wield three pistols, or two pistols and an SMG, or a pistol and two SMGs, or a pistol, an SMG, and a smartgun. The fact that the player can't occupy these slots currently with obviously-smaller equipment is arbitrary: if there are problems with a player being able to use, for instance, all three sidearms, this should be addressed as a balance issue instead of a fundamental one. (The switching between weapons can still be the same, at least roughly, if that is the concern.)
Already I can see this throwing off the current scarcity (in that you can much more easily have three ammo stocks to fire from) but I don't think it's so significant as to wipe out balance. At worst a player with mastery could abuse the additional weaponry, but honestly, if they already have mastery, the extra weapon is icing on the cake.

Another cool consequence is that heavy weapon mastery could let the player hold two heavy weapons. Talk about a fun boost!

The targeting function just wanted me to kill workers all day every day, even in the face of immediate threats like Warriors and Hunters. It also had a beef against defense turrets. Which apparently count as kills of my own when aliens get them?
Targetting's weird, I'll give you that. But you can cycle through targets with the TAB key, and since it locks on your previous target afterwards, it's really just a matter of getting into a good habit.

The game crashed on me once during this run.
Was it an OS-like freeze, or did the crash write to the error log? If you have a text file like that, please paste it here (preferably in code tags).

18
AliensRL / Re: (Spoilers)Skills and enemy mechanic
« on: September 27, 2012, 08:05 »
3. Fitness and Perseption - maxed skill is "expert" for everybody?
Yes, and I think it's important that master skills are explained a little better so you know how you should be investing your skills. Simply put, each skill that can be mastered additionally requires that you be a specific class. Namely:
  • Scouts can master Sidearms
  • Marines can master Light Weapons
  • HW Specialist can master Heavy Weapons
  • Medics can master Medicine
  • Technicians can master Technical
For Medics and Technicians, it would make little sense to invest so many points to get them to master anyway (edit: as a class that can't master them, I mean), but it's good to know regardless. Most of the masters' special bonuses are explained in-game, at least to some degree:
  • Sidearms mastery decreases reloading of sidearm weapons to 1/10th the norm
  • Light Weapon mastery decreases firing time of light weapons by 30%
  • Heavy Weapon mastery allows the user to carry all heavy weapons without assistance
  • Medicine mastery eliminates stimpack withdrawl and allows medpacks to be used like combat medpacks (i.e., no penalty during combat)
  • Technical mastery allows the user to repair terminals and force terminals without breaking them
In addition to these special bonuses, masters also improve what is normally improved by non-master upgrades (weapon accuracy, medpack healing, reduced multitool use).

Enemies can be categorized as per your own organization. Praetorians sort-of fit in the category of warriors (elite-plus if you will) but they're very much in a league of their own, challenge-wise.

Wiki will be up soon enough, I'm sure. When that happens, I'll do my best to pull out all of the "hard data" (to the extent that Kornel allows) so that people can make use of it.

19
AliensRL / Re: amazing RL!!! thanks coders!!
« on: September 26, 2012, 09:37 »
Am I the only one who thinks it is still too easy? :'(
It's very difficult to balance a game's challenge and its potential for replayability. The most creative and interesting challenges are often deterministically solvable, which means there's no point in doing them again. On the other side, replayability is best simulated by a perceived randomness, but its challenge also wildly fluctuates with each roll of the dice. Roguelikes try the balancing game, but it's hard to accomplish. Ideally a roguelike should always be solvable, but to be 100% effective you'll need ridiculous insight and perfect tactical acumen: an experienced veteran of the game would be in the 80-90% range by comparison (a number I pull from nowhere but sounds reasonable).

All I can say is that getting to the seventh floor on the seventh attempt in this game is quite good for a beginner. There's a lot to figure out (with regards to getting "good gear") and it's not obvious what to do or where to go. At the moment the game's pretty solvable, albeit requiring a little luck for good weapons to show up period. Simply leveling up the right traits at around the right times and knowing how to win (and how to handle nasty groups of bugs) are sufficient for reliable results.

20
Forum / Re: Can't Edit Wiki
« on: September 25, 2012, 13:45 »
You can't edit the wiki until you're at least a "Lance Corporal", which is at least 20 posts. It's an anti-spam thing (you'd be surprised how much spam we got on the previous wiki).

At this point, however, we haven't really had enough issues with forum spammers to require that high of a post count. Maybe when Kornel gets back to create the AliensRL Wiki, he can relax the edit requirement to something like "Private FC" (5 posts).

21
AliensRL / Re: Damage
« on: September 20, 2012, 16:19 »
Based on what can be gleaned from the game itself, damage works like this:
  • Each ammo type has a corresponding damage "value" and armor penetration rating: whenever you're carrying a weapon with a specific ammo type, these values can be found in the character information menu. The penetration ratings are L (low), M (medium), H (high), and UH(ultra high), and in that order they are worst to best at handling armor. (Presumably it can't increase damage more than the damage value, only reduce the reduction normally caused by armor.)
  • Every time you successfully hit an enemy with a bullet, that bullet's accuracy desciptor is displayed. Things like "barely scratched", "lightly hit", "perfectly hit", and so forth tell you how much damage you end up dealing. Based on this and the damage value, one can reasonably expect that the accuracy descriptors imply that the attack did damage equal to a fraction of the damage value: for instance, a perfect hit is likely close or equal to 100% of the damage value. By taking note of each accuracy descriptor, one can figure out a rough estimate for how much damage is dealt on a given attack.
Considering that the accuracy descriptor is directly related to how much damage is dealt, it's a very important factor when trying to increase one's damage. Accuracy depends on one's weapon skill and the weapon itself (neither are explicit but can be figured out through light experimentation).

22
AliensRL / Re: YASD - My first Technician...
« on: September 15, 2012, 08:19 »
How does one, by the way, take screenshots of post mortems in a easy way? F10 fails to deliver in post mortem (but works well when actually playing).
There's a mortem.txt file in the AliensRL directory that saves your latest post-mortem.

23
Announcements / Re: AliensRL 0.8.2 RELEASED!
« on: September 10, 2012, 14:35 »
I made a quick (quick for me anyway) preview of the latest version. If you want to see some of the new content, or perhaps you haven't seen AliensRL at all, check it out right here!

24
Requests For Features / Re: New Ideas for Special Levels
« on: September 05, 2012, 12:21 »
Anybody have a good Monster AI tutorial anywhere???

I mean, a complete one...
If you have any specific questions about whether or not certain algorithms are included in the API, go ahead and ask them in the Modding Tutorial thread. I believe that I covered most of the important ones, but I know there are some special circumstances that involve less obvious functions.

If you want to know "how to make a monster smart", that's not specific enough to give a concrete answer. Rather, you should pose the question by stating an action or series of actions, then ask "how to I get my monster to do this?" Writing artificial intelligence has less to do with DoomRL and more to do with the analysis and evaluation of algorithms. Hopefully all of the necessary pieces are provided to you in the API, at which point all you have to do is write out the steps yourself. (Specifically, the AI object in DoomRL is extremely open-ended and, aside from what is explained as the "rules" in the tutorial, entirely up to the modder with regards to its makeup.)

25
Bug Reports / Re: Badge not Awarded
« on: September 04, 2012, 11:20 »
I think we can consider this a bug.
Quote from: Known Bugs Sticky
  • I got a full victory, but I didn't get any badges or medals for it. What the heck?
    • This is intentional: a full victory does not imply that the game has been "won". There are conditions by which the game will award you a standard or full victory, but without surviving the full-victory boss: in these cases, you will not receive badges or medals that require you to complete the game. Note that, in a later release, partial victories may also differ from standard victories in terms of awarding certain badges and medals.
More importantly, partial, standard, and full victories are going to mean something outside of a checkbox stat in newer versions. DO note, however, that trying your hand at JC and dying to him, in spite of getting past Mastermind, is not a victory: gotta go all-or-nothing. This will be more explicitly defined later on.

26
Discussion / Re: Quick questions thread!
« on: August 08, 2012, 14:45 »
So do some weapons actually have multiple reload choices?
Combat shotguns and their derivatives (assault shotgun, tactical shotgun, etc) have a "full reload". Double shotguns (and maybe their dervatives such as super shotgun and focused double shotgun) have a "single reload". Alternate reloads are accessed with the alt reload keybinding, default "R" (in contrast to the default reload "r"), so you're correct on that matter.

I know that single reload is bugged right now, but what is it normally supposed to do, let you reload one round at a greatly reduced speed than normal reloading?
Single reload will allow you to reload half of a double shotgun at half the firing time. By itself this sounds a little silly (about as good as the difference between normal and full reload on a combat shotgun, which is only subtly important), but double shotguns also have a "single fire" alternate, allowing them to shoot only one shell at a time. This means you could very well use the double shotdown to attack two separate targets and reload as necessary. Single reload might be a tiny bit more than half to deter a complete need to always use it ("reload spam syndrome"), but it should make the double shotgun type considerably more useful as a whole.

27
Discussion / Re: Quick questions thread!
« on: August 08, 2012, 14:05 »
the wiki says that a Full Reload "...will reload the weapon's entire magazine. The amount of time taken is 0.2s plus the time it would take to normally reload the amount of missing ammo. For the combat shotgun, the weapon will also be pumped." Isn't this what regular reloading does anyways (sans the pumping)?

And for Single Reload "...Single reload will reload only a single ammo into the weapon's magazine. This time taken is the same as a normal reload." Why would you only reload one ammo if it takes the same amount time to do a normal reload?
Full reload is identical to continuously reloading the weapon until it's full. (IIRC the extra 0.2s is only included if you need to pump, as one would expect.) It's there for the convenience of easy reloading when you know there isn't going to be something attacking you in between rounds.

The single reload issue is actually a bug. The wiki states the current functionality in order to deter people from using it.

Lastly, I see "moving reload" mentioned a lot; is this just a result of Shottyman or is there another means of reloading while moving at the same time?
Moving reload (or move-reload) is exclusive to Shottyman, at least in the sense of literal reloads: some equipped or prepared weapons will regenerate their ammo as long as you aren't shooting, which technically allows for the weapon to reload while you're moving, but is typically not the same context for which move-reload is used.

28
Requests For Features / Re: Polished product
« on: August 01, 2012, 09:49 »
Why not have the whole level map be visible?
It's plenty visible...if you have the screen resolution to handle it. The tiles themselves are 32x32, so on an 80x25 map you'll need a monitor with a 2560 pixel width. On my 1920x1200 monitor it's not bad at all: the game only has to scroll left and right, so I'm not missing much at a given point in time.

Trying to create 16x16 or 24x24 tilesets would be a lot of extra work, and I really doubt the current tileset is very shrinkable (that is, maintain high quality after compression). This may be worth looking into, though: I do agree that the graphical version has an odd disconnect with the console one when it comes to currently-available information. The GUI for the graphical version is getting a pretty significant facelift next version, so we'll try to see to it that the minimap is appropriately improved.

and has way less mojo
You're going to have to explain this part. The "bad looping" I can understand, and it's potentially something we can fix with some editing, but if you just don't like the music then you should probably go with something else. (IIRC, the MIDIs suffer the same looping problem, albeit more subtly.) Generally speaking, Kornel's trying to move away from the ID property stuff as much as possible, which means using sound and music that are under free-use licenses. The players, however, are free to modify their own sounds and music in whatever way they desire, so this is only an issue insomuch that the package released with the game may not have what you want.

29
Nightmare! / Re: [N!|AoP|100%|YaUW] True Purity, Damageless
« on: July 16, 2012, 16:40 »
I do a *LOT* of runs to generate one of these, so I don't want to record 500 practice runs + 100 normal runs until I get something.
Honestly, this makes me feel a lot better when it comes to game balance. Since I was basing your success rate on mortem-displayed data, it gave me the impression that you were getting a pretty high success rate on the beyond-ridiculous challenges, which in turn caused a good deal of brainstorming into what could be so expoitable as to allow for that (because, even for a seriously hardcore gamer such as yourself, damageless N! YAAMs should be pretty rare when compared to # of games played). If you're investing that many tries into these kinds of attempts, then I can definitely worry less about the high-end tweaks: even if most of your runs end at a very early stage, this is within current balance expectations.

But yeah, with the new challenge changeups, you should be able to definitively prove these kinds of crazy shenanigans without a video.

30
I wanted to make a Powered Duelist armor, but never got to that point...
BTW this isn't something that can be created. Powered armors are only compatible with "basic" armors: green, blue, and red.

How is Quartermaster Diamond even possible? (AoRA UV YAAM).
These days the best way to aim for it is probably Shottyhead: I used Fireangel back when I did it but the speed of MSh is surely better for it. Alternatively you could treat it like a Gargulec Cross run (except you can use shotties for the early-game) and pick Blademaster for the speed. I'd be careful about certain special levels, although if you manage to get far enough with the melee method, everything goes by rather quickly.

Pages: 1 [2] 3 4 ... 65