Why I don't wall walk
sumguy720
Join Date: 2011-02-09 Member: 81101Members
Join Date: 2011-02-09 Member: 81101Members
<div class="IPBDescription">It's a really good reason!</div>I read this in the design log:
"- Quieter footsteps when wall-walking (to encourage use of it)"
And I thought to myself: "Oh no, maybe they don't know why people aren't using wall walk!"
Well, the reason is simple! When you are on a wall, you cannot look away from the wall without falling off. When you are on the floor you can look freely.
Imagine if players had to look at the floor all the time while playing. They'd never see anything!
Wall walking adds a surprise advantage but kind of decimates environment visibility. So when I play it's better to be able to see others than it is to have that extra degree of mobility freedom.
so.... don't buff wall walking-- FIX wall walking! I mean, if you know what I'm saying and agree.
PS: I'm not saying the above quote is a bad idea, I just don't want wall walking to be better for the wrong reasons.
"- Quieter footsteps when wall-walking (to encourage use of it)"
And I thought to myself: "Oh no, maybe they don't know why people aren't using wall walk!"
Well, the reason is simple! When you are on a wall, you cannot look away from the wall without falling off. When you are on the floor you can look freely.
Imagine if players had to look at the floor all the time while playing. They'd never see anything!
Wall walking adds a surprise advantage but kind of decimates environment visibility. So when I play it's better to be able to see others than it is to have that extra degree of mobility freedom.
so.... don't buff wall walking-- FIX wall walking! I mean, if you know what I'm saying and agree.
PS: I'm not saying the above quote is a bad idea, I just don't want wall walking to be better for the wrong reasons.
Comments
It's useful to get around obstacles, and maybe to ambush people, but generally there's no point in it, making footsteps quieter won't help as nobody in their right mind would sacrifice actual mobility for quieter footsteps, and if they wanted to, walking is a better option.
My only suggestion would be to add some nodraw textures (I don't know what Spark would use, this would be my answer for Source's Hammer editor) to make the walls and ceilings more smooth for the skulk.
Edit: To the above post, you should use wall/ceiling walking in tandem with another friendly unit - 2 skulks engaging marines who're running on the floor is alot easier to kill than say, 2 skulks engaging the marines, one on the floor and one on the ceiling, and I think alot of people have problems with Z-fighting so I do believe that wall/ceiling walking makes you harder to hit, but I might be wrong!
My only suggestion would be to add some nodraw textures (I don't know what Spark would use, this would be my answer for Source's Hammer editor) to make the walls and ceilings more smooth for the skulk.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Floor 100% smooth,
Walls and Ceiling, not, you need to make them smoother to alloow better movement.
True, I would never be on the floors if walls were smoother.
I think you should check out ns2_turtle :p
The player has to have the option to toggle this on and off.
Some people will love it; other people will hate it.
Of course you are much harder to hit when you wall walk. Marines now have to track you in 3 directions instead of 2. I don't have a problem falling off when looking around. You can strafe on the wall too...just a hint.
Of course you are much harder to hit when you wall walk. Marines now have to track you in 3 directions instead of 2. I don't have a problem falling off when looking around. You can strafe on the wall too...just a hint.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
First off, marines only ever have to track you in two directions, because they use instant hit weapons, they only have to track your position horizontally and vertically on their screen. Distance is irrelevant.
Second, walking on walls just means that instead of moving left to right, you move up and down, in fact you are actually less agile, because jumping off walls is a lot harder than jumping off the ground. You also have to look up and down to move up and down, whereas on the floor you can move left and right independently from your view orientation.
Basically your controls are designed to have you running on the floor, because they're identical to the FPS controls in every other floor-based shooter, and running on the walls offers very little to offset the decrease in control effectiveness.
This isn't NS1, where the rooms and halls are very large and the wall space is an important and different space from the floor, this is NS2, where everything is crammed into tiny cramped spaces and wall/ceiling space is more or less the same as the floor space.
And you can strafe on walls, if you want to look around you just have to compensate for the angle with your movement keys.
The roof is a problem though, as you most likely want to look down on the floor while still walking on the roof. And there is no buttons you can use to compensate (sure strafing works as it is independent of your pitch, but it feels wierd to always walk sideways like a crab). I think it has to get way more forgiving at the angles, but if you walk forward and aim really close to the walls normal, you should detach even if you dont press ctrl imho.
If the guys in Unknown worlds can do something to help skulks look around while moving on the ceiling that would be just elite. There are simple solutions to this too, methinks, but I wont try to discuss these here because I don't want to derail the thread with trivialities.
Vision of the floor or surroundings isn't impeded very much either and only requires a pretty basic understanding of your surroundings. I personally don't think the angular tolerance when wall walking is too small (you don't need to be looking at the wall). Infact i think wall walking is a bit too sticky so much so its actually a hindrance sometimes when your jumping around attacking marines.
This is a really hard system to get right without copping out and going the perspective changing route although it'd be kool to see how changing the angular view tolerance would affect wall walking since you can always just press cntrl to drop anyway.
pfft, Jumping off a wall was a very late (3.0 ? ) addition to NS that I clamored about for years before it was added, kinda like the WELD ME hotkey
Ground, wall or Ceiling, once you're spotted as a skulk, having to cover any distance towards a marine is hazardous unless you have leap anyways.
I love using all available terrain too, lol, but I don't understand how that contributes to the discussion. It's kinda like discussing how to make cheese more aesthetically pleasing then someone coming along and saying "Cheese is tasty". :P
I think people are kind of misunderstanding the point however, what I was saying with the nodraw idea is not to make it a completly flat surface. In source, a trick you would use to make walking up some stairs smoother is putting a clipping/nodraw texture and have it align with the corners of all the steps. It would make for smoother walking going up stairs instead of that jittery feeling. This is the kind of method I would like to see implemented. Instead of coming up to a bump on the surface and either pushing yourself over or end up dropping because of the bump, there'd be this invisible texture that effectively lets you glide up this bump.
I have to go all out here and say that people who think that these irritating bits of bumping are "part of the gameplay and fun" are a bit stupid. It simply doesn't detract from gameplay using smoother bumps. Having these bits of scenery intefere with my ability to get from point A to point B in the fasshion that I choose simply puts me off doing it (bringing the original point of the thread back!). It's like playing a racing game only to be stopped for a couple of seconds to play a minigame you really hate (that analogy is an exaggeration, but it's 6am and I can't think of a better one).
I believe this has stuff to do with collision, but I may be wrong, but this kind of thing needs to be improved without damaging the gorgous looking maps!
Edit: Another good example of the bump being irritating is using personal cloak and trying to crawl somewhere - bumps in the floor can sometimes force you out of it. This is effectively what happens when you're running along as a skulk on the wall/ceiling and you hit a bump and fall off.
The obvious problem with this is your camera might get confusing with how eager the game seems to put you on a wall, especially in places such as vents. Dystopia, a source-mod has done this with their "cyber-space" combat. The only time in that game it really got confusing was going from the floor to the ceiling.
<!--quoteo(post=1881538:date=Oct 24 2011, 01:25 AM:name=Smaug)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Smaug @ Oct 24 2011, 01:25 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1881538"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->In source, a trick you would use to make walking up some stairs smoother is putting a clipping/nodraw texture and have it align with the corners of all the steps.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I couldn't agree with this more. I don't know if it's a limitation with the engine or what, but mappers -really- need to optimize their maps' collision with nodraws and playerclips. Colliding with random pipes and floor tiles isn't particularly fun, and I'd rather have surfaces that are nearly flat. This problem extends to things like railings. As a skulk, trying to climb up the railing is nearly impossible because of the large section of it that is missing. The lack of such collision optimization and clipping creates inconsistent, awkward movement. I think above all collision should be <b>predictable</b>, which it is not currently.
just did it instinctively
not sure what I usually do... maybe I was moving backwards? that way you can face down and the back key will push you up against the wall?
**edit
Hmm on that note though.. would be a good idea to make it so you are 'stuck' to whatever surface you are on so you can wall-walk a lot easier without falling off
and then.. to actually leave the surface, you 'jump' (or leap) off...
Too much junk with "accurate" clipping. The geometry used by player collisons against the world should be this nice and smooth surface that you can slip and slide against without getting caught on any small details. In NS this was mostly provided for free as a side-effect of harsh wpoly limits; but there were still some problems with outer edges where brushes meet at an angle which created phantom "lips" and "stairs" that you could not slide over.
The movement code in NS inherited a lot from the HL SDK mod code(see pm_shared.c). It was never intended to be realistic; it was just developed for quake because it felt right for a fast-paced shooter and inherited by half-life and NS in turn. It had a tendency to "exaggerate" rather than "dampen" movement; if you're strafing slightly into a wall, it didn't slow you down, it sped you up slightly; if you were strafing and turning gently it didn't slow you down compared with running in a straight line, it sped you up; you had fairly precise control over movement while in the air; it just felt very responsive.
NS2 has a poor/inconsistent framerate due to various performance issues. For me, occlusion culling keeps ###### the bed; which means that after a while my framerate is jo-joing between 5(drawing the whole map) and 50(culling works or looking outwards from the map) as I spin around. Others seem to have input lag or hitching. If you're only sampling the keys each frame, then obviously there's a random error in the length of a keypress that could be as long as the time it takes to render one frame. If you just tap a movement key to peek out or adjust your position slightly behind a building, you're going to move a random distance that may be much greater or smaller than expected.
I wall walk but I find some of the complex ceilings cause me to fall off.
This leads to alot of wall walking but less ceiling walking.
Perhaps the developers and playtesters know more about the code that they wall walk more than us?
oh and +1 to the jump off of walls too.
Also, holding shift should prevent a skulk from falling off any surface (unless you also use ctrl for a silent detachment).
"- Quieter footsteps when wall-walking (to encourage use of it)"
And I thought to myself: "Oh no, maybe they don't know why people aren't using wall walk!"
Well, the reason is simple! When you are on a wall, you cannot look away from the wall without falling off. When you are on the floor you can look freely.
Imagine if players had to look at the floor all the time while playing. They'd never see anything!
Wall walking adds a surprise advantage but kind of decimates environment visibility. So when I play it's better to be able to see others than it is to have that extra degree of mobility freedom.
so.... don't buff wall walking-- FIX wall walking! I mean, if you know what I'm saying and agree.
PS: I'm not saying the above quote is a bad idea, I just don't want wall walking to be better for the wrong reasons.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I'm not sure why but not only did this not bother me, I also never noticed it...
PS: Cheese is tasty :p