whoa, it seems ati kicks the crap out of gforce in doom3

[dsm]

Ct_red_pants said:

kick button was great for finshing off undead when they fall on the floor (saving ammo) and distroying greats without switching weapon or wasting ammo. (have your sten ready to blast the two gaurds in front of the great).

True, but that was like the only time in the game where it was useful and I've thought up a way they might have made it a bit smarter:

Make a key combination to perform a kick, like combine the usekey with the sprint key - moving either bacwards or forwards, pressing and holding down the sprint key and press the use key - that wouldn't be too complicated an action to perform for the player.

Also peeking could've been done a lot simpler: Wolf3d had a bug which would allow you to actually "peek" around corners and see enemy guards without them seeing you. All you needed to do was move up to a wall corner and turn slightly away from the corner (turning to face the wall while still keep the actual corner of the wall in sight). They should just have incorporated this bug as a feature in RtCW and made it so that turning away from the corner would make you lean - then you wouldn't have to worry about those two peek keys.

The stuff about the chair could also have been handled a lot smarter: Make it so that you can pick up a chair with any weapon (not just one-handed weapons), but when you pick up a chair you "lower" your weapon and cannot use it. When you have picked up the chair, the chair automatically becomes the selected "weapon" and pressing the fire key will swing the chair to hit enemies.
Drop the chair and you will immediately be using the weapon selected before you picked up the chair.

[Grul]

AndrewB said:

Hexen:[/b] Had rich, rich atmospheres. Juts think of Darkmere. Chilly, foggy, gloomy (yet not dark), and very surreal. One of those games where after you stop playing, the atmosphere sticks with you and feel like you're still in Darkmere (my favorite level).

Oooooh yeah, Darkmere. Actually it took me several years to understand how great Hexen really was. The athmosphere was incredible, almost unparallelled even today. The game had other shortcoming, like script bugs, but still it is a great game.

[AndrewB]

Funny, I don't recall any significant bugs in the game. Maybe occasionally not being able to reach a certain secret level, and maybe the odd monster-spawn problem, but that's about it.

Yeah, I wish that games regularly had the atmosphere level of Hexen. I mean, levels like Darkmere consist of things that are from our world, but in combinations and recipes that are never found in this world. I wish games would use that simple formula more often.

[Wobbo]

You know a game you might really like ANdrewB? Alpha CEntauri, basically its Civilization 2 on steriods - in the future. It has all the great elements of SC2000

[AndrewB]

The great elements of SC2000 were SimCopter, and to a lesser extent Streets. Oh, and the newspapers. Those were awesome.

[Cyb]

AndrewB said:

I remember reading an article about a year ago, which demonstrated how a group of people managed to create this program where the characters reacted to the environment based on figuring out what the best action for them to take would be in real-time. So when placing the characters on a wobbly bridge, they would grab onto the string handrails and brace themselves to stay on the bridge. They said it was relatively simple to create such an engine, and it used relatively little disk space. They said that games would likely start using this type of engine-AI soon. I SO hope that is the case.

I think that games should move more toward something like this. Make the computer do the brunt work of delevopment, and end up with a flexible and interesting end product. Think of SLIGE, only much farther developed. Sure, with such a system, easter eggs and weird bugs are ineviteble, but for games that use such engines, those glitches usually turn out to be interesting, fun, and sometimes hilarious to discover.

That's essentially what Black & White was. It made gigantic leaps in terms of AI, though I don't believe the levels were made on the fly.

Most people agree though, Black & White sucked ass. I played it for a week while my cable was out (don't ask, the cable company here is populated with morons apparently), and once that week was over I went back to playing some online games (at the time counterstrike) and I haven't touched it since.