A new map is cool and all, but there are still a lot of fundamental things that should have been fixed before adding a new map. Let's see...
Flamethrowers not removing bile from structures
Flamethrowers "shooting" only like a few times a second, allowing fast aliens to move directly through the flames without getting burned
Whips not reflecting grenades from grenade launchers
The gun jam bug
Fade's stab ability being worthless
Hallucinations' A.I. still bad. Watch a hallucinated lerk. It literally just glides at around 1mph for the entire duration. I'll admit hallucinated gorges have an awesome A.I. though.
Shade's ink being useless against anything but arcs. The ink effect should actually disorient marines, not just make 3 tiles in the room slightly darker.
There's probably more, but these are the main things I can think of now.
A new map is cool and all, but there are still a lot of fundamental things that should have been fixed before adding a new map. Let's see...
Flamethrowers not removing bile from structures
Flamethrowers "shooting" only like a few times a second, allowing fast aliens to move directly through the flames without getting burned
Whips not reflecting grenades from grenade launchers
The gun jam bug
Fade's stab ability being worthless
Hallucinations' A.I. still bad. Watch a hallucinated lerk. It literally just glides at around 1mph for the entire duration. I'll admit hallucinated gorges have an awesome A.I. though.
Shade's ink being useless against anything but arcs. The ink effect should actually disorient marines, not just make 3 tiles in the room slightly darker.
There's probably more, but these are the main things I can think of now.
One of the CDT can explain it a lot better, but here I am being the forum first respondeder.
It is not as simple as you put it. Loki works on the map, not the coders who would fix anything you mentioned. Loki is not a programmer. There are only so many CDT members who each work on what they can work on best. Making derelict had nothing to do with anything you mentioned.
To be fairly blunt, I honestly think that everything in your list is pretty small and unimportant compared to what ns2 needs. I do agree that everything you listed is something that needs improvement. I am one of the biggest advocates for a flamethrower buff, change, or anything. I find how slow flamethrowers shoot to be incredibly silly. Still I find it minuscule to ns2's real problems such as player retention.
That gun jam bug has been nearly impossible to figure out. Untold hours have been spent on it by the playtesters and UWE. Do you know how to reproduce it consistently?
Look at this post from ironhorse on things that may or may not make it into the next build. Hit Reg fixed is pretty amazing. Most, if not all, mentioned in this post seem more important than the balance changes you mention.
Can someone give me the highlights of why this next build matters and why it will lead to a higher playercount? It seems like the CDT is hyped and I feel like I missed something.
*DISCLAIMER* : Not promising any of the items mentioned will make it in the next patch or any, ever. This is just a reader's digest version of some developments on our trello board
Besides the new map Derelict from @Loki (new maps tend to pique interests and playercounts, historically speaking) a few items of interest are:
Main menu can be changed to any official map, or can rotate through all of them
Fixed first person spectate causing hitching for player
Rookie Only servers
Temporary Voteban option
Unstuck command
Redplug issue resolved
Bilebomb and gorge spit projectiles now predicted
Queue for a server while playing in another server
Phase gates no longer phase into same room
Maxfps command no longer has to be reapplied every mapchange
Auto reconnect at "red plug" after x secs if server is available
Blacklisting servers feature
Allow drifters and cysts to pass through alien structures for smoother navigation
Progress Bars during loading screen for mods
And many more....
The one not in that list that I am very excited for and is not yet planned for any patch is null move insertion, which would fix jittery, teleporting players who get an unfair advantage from their crappy internet / packet loss laden connection.
Remember that anyone can vote for cards that are not yet approved, to show their support and desire for that item to be approved / implemented.
Hope that is the answer you were looking for @NotPaLaGi
Take care
See, @yojimbo, quoting not copy pasting. Although I guess I did copy and paste the quote.
DecoyJoin Date: 2012-09-11Member: 159037Members, Super Administrators, Playtest Lead, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Silver, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts, Retired Community Developer
Nordic beat me to it!
@Farewelltoarms Loki working on Derelict literally has 0 impact on any of the bugs getting fixed. He doesn't code fixes, he makes maps. The coders still code, regardless of what he's doing or working on or how close he is to finishing it. Fixes are great and they're still being done, this is just a lovely bonus Should we hold off on releasing a map because there hasn't been an adequate number of bug fixes, despite it being done? Nordic truly covered it all in his post!
MephillesGermanyJoin Date: 2013-08-07Member: 186634Members, NS2 Map Tester, NS2 Community Developer
I remember due to a bug in compmod4 the flamethrowers had a firerate twice as high as they should have for a short amount of time and were incredibly OP at that point
Going through the entire UI to make sure it scaled properly at all resolutions was the most boring thing I've done in a good while, but that's for 276.
I remember due to a bug in compmod4 the flamethrowers had a firerate twice as high as they should have for a short amount of time and were incredibly OP at that point
If you just doubled the fire rate, or even quadrupled like I think it needs, you would have to lower the damage to the DPS was the same. It is silly when a lerk, fade, and sometimes skulk can just go right through the flamethrower without taking any damage.
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
I know the cdt are busy with bringing their first patch around, but is there any chance we can take another look at the some of the gameplay mechanics and core features the game had never fully realized?
For instance, originally all the marine weapons were supposed to have alt-fire modes like the assault rifle had as a gl replacement and the pistol in early development had a 'sniper' mode, but later the alt fire was stripped from the pistol and now the assault rifle is the only marine weapon that still has the alt-fire functionality but as a melee bash.
Now I'm not calling for the gl attatchment to return, but either the game should expand this functionality beyond a riflebutt for all weapons or just simply remove/replace it overall.
After seeing that list all I can think of would be
• fix it so you come out of eggs/ip's aiming where you're looking or just don't let us move our mouse period, kind of disorienting
• stop letting the automatic 2nd IP spawn within bile range of the first
• server tag for minimum/maximum hours similar to the reservedslot tag, so rather than having a rookie spend anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes connecting to a server where he's going to get kicked and leave a sour taste in his mouth, he can instead get a nice little popup explaining why he can't play in the server as soon as he attempts to join.
We've tried to resolve this one before.. it's quite sneaky and not exactly clear why it's happening. I'll bring it to the front for some more attention though.
Good idea
This is less of an issue in 276 due to the fast loading times. But still good idea
A new map is cool and all, but there are still a lot of fundamental things that should have been fixed before adding a new map. Let's see...
Flamethrowers not removing bile from structures
Flamethrowers "shooting" only like a few times a second, allowing fast aliens to move directly through the flames without getting burned
Whips not reflecting grenades from grenade launchers
The gun jam bug
Fade's stab ability being worthless
Hallucinations' A.I. still bad. Watch a hallucinated lerk. It literally just glides at around 1mph for the entire duration. I'll admit hallucinated gorges have an awesome A.I. though.
Shade's ink being useless against anything but arcs. The ink effect should actually disorient marines, not just make 3 tiles in the room slightly darker.
There's probably more, but these are the main things I can think of now.
Whips haven't been deflecting grenades for a long time... that's working as intended.
cool dude. Become a CDT member.
It'd be great if we could finally give the other weapons their intended secondary abilities as well, but if it's going to be limited to 1/11 weapons it should be replaced by something that gets more use.
If the cdt does intend to expand on the feature, the switch axe and the grenade would be the easiest to implement. Just taking cs and hl2 as an example we could have a slower vertical swing attack for the switch-axe and the ability to lightly toss a grenade instead of throwing it at full force.
Whips haven't been deflecting grenades for a long time... that's working as intended.
cool dude. Become a CDT member.
I know they haven't been deflecting them for a long time now... but that's the thing. I'm pretty sure it was never removed for gameplay reasons, but simply because the calculations required to deflect the grenades were a huge drain on processing power.
Whips haven't been deflecting grenades for a long time... that's working as intended.
cool dude. Become a CDT member.
I know they haven't been deflecting them for a long time now... but that's the thing. I'm pretty sure it was never removed for gameplay reasons, but simply because the calculations required to deflect the grenades were a huge drain on processing power.
No... they were removed for gameplay reasons. Calculations involved are pretty straightforward.
So rather than trying a nerf , whacking nades is just disabled, interesting.
It wasn't disabled for balance reasons, it was disabled because grenades were changed to be predicted client side. This makes them much better to use, but causes technical issues with the Whip whacking, because it is not a predicted action. Given more time and effort there might be some workarounds, but considering that GLs are already so underused, it doesn't seem to be worth the effort at the moment.
Comments
There's probably more, but these are the main things I can think of now.
One of the CDT can explain it a lot better, but here I am being the forum first respondeder.
It is not as simple as you put it. Loki works on the map, not the coders who would fix anything you mentioned. Loki is not a programmer. There are only so many CDT members who each work on what they can work on best. Making derelict had nothing to do with anything you mentioned.
To be fairly blunt, I honestly think that everything in your list is pretty small and unimportant compared to what ns2 needs. I do agree that everything you listed is something that needs improvement. I am one of the biggest advocates for a flamethrower buff, change, or anything. I find how slow flamethrowers shoot to be incredibly silly. Still I find it minuscule to ns2's real problems such as player retention.
That gun jam bug has been nearly impossible to figure out. Untold hours have been spent on it by the playtesters and UWE. Do you know how to reproduce it consistently?
Take a look at this. https://trello.com/b/91ApENY6/ns2-cdt-development-tracker
It is a list of stuff the CDT would like to get done. Look at all the cool things they have in there.
Look at this post from ironhorse on things that may or may not make it into the next build. Hit Reg fixed is pretty amazing. Most, if not all, mentioned in this post seem more important than the balance changes you mention. See, @yojimbo, quoting not copy pasting. Although I guess I did copy and paste the quote.
@Farewelltoarms Loki working on Derelict literally has 0 impact on any of the bugs getting fixed. He doesn't code fixes, he makes maps. The coders still code, regardless of what he's doing or working on or how close he is to finishing it. Fixes are great and they're still being done, this is just a lovely bonus
But yeah working on maps does not mean I take any coders time away from fixing bugs / improving performance + load times etc etc
Its a new map, free for anyone who has NS2, just for people to enjoy nothing more
I actually didn't realize it was you without that lion picture there.
For instance, originally all the marine weapons were supposed to have alt-fire modes like the assault rifle had as a gl replacement and the pistol in early development had a 'sniper' mode, but later the alt fire was stripped from the pistol and now the assault rifle is the only marine weapon that still has the alt-fire functionality but as a melee bash.
Now I'm not calling for the gl attatchment to return, but either the game should expand this functionality beyond a riflebutt for all weapons or just simply remove/replace it overall.
I vote alt fire becomes either a "Throw Grenade" button, or "use welder" button.
Being able to toss grenades without having to switch to them might make them get used more often.
But yeah, either add an alt functionality for all weapons, or remove the rifle butt, just to make it more consistant.
I imagine it would make pulse grenades actually useful. Its ok though, an axe kill is more satisfying than rifle bash.
OH... it's ALL done now...
• fix it so you come out of eggs/ip's aiming where you're looking or just don't let us move our mouse period, kind of disorienting
• stop letting the automatic 2nd IP spawn within bile range of the first
• server tag for minimum/maximum hours similar to the reservedslot tag, so rather than having a rookie spend anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes connecting to a server where he's going to get kicked and leave a sour taste in his mouth, he can instead get a nice little popup explaining why he can't play in the server as soon as he attempts to join.
Edit: Added items to trello board
Whips haven't been deflecting grenades for a long time... that's working as intended.
cool dude. Become a CDT member.
Sounds like something that should be fixed.
It'd be great if we could finally give the other weapons their intended secondary abilities as well, but if it's going to be limited to 1/11 weapons it should be replaced by something that gets more use.
If the cdt does intend to expand on the feature, the switch axe and the grenade would be the easiest to implement. Just taking cs and hl2 as an example we could have a slower vertical swing attack for the switch-axe and the ability to lightly toss a grenade instead of throwing it at full force.
Damn straight!
*spits tobacco juice*
This must be what insanity feels like**.
**j/k
Maybe the rifle bash launches a grenade? XD
I know they haven't been deflecting them for a long time now... but that's the thing. I'm pretty sure it was never removed for gameplay reasons, but simply because the calculations required to deflect the grenades were a huge drain on processing power.
Grenade Baseball! Im cool with this
No... they were removed for gameplay reasons. Calculations involved are pretty straightforward.
Actually I hate to be that guy, but... http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/130628/build-249-is-now-live-on-steam-natural-selection-2/p1 .
According to that thread, they were disabled for technical reasons rather than balance ones.