3089 v0.92: Weapon balancing & important fixes Thread - 3089

Hey all,

Big weapon balancing update! Thanks to all of the feedback in the forums, I'm hoping both guns & melee weapons will feel more fun and varied. The general consensus was multi-shot weapons were overpowered & minor weapons like pistols & daggers were not very useful. So, I made some changes. First, daggers will provide a short "stun" effect when hitting targets, which should make them more useful. The "burst" attribute, which counts the number of shots available before a longer delay, was made more important and pistols get the best "burst" attributes. You will know how many "burst" shots you have left with the addition of the burst meter on the HUD -- it will reset after waiting a few seconds. Multi-shot weapons have been "nerfed" a bit -- the more shots a weapon shoots, the less homing, explosive & damage per shot they will have. However, I've increased their accuracy a tad & they still will do more damage if all shots hit compared to single-shot weapons. Lob-based (e.g. grenade) weapons will fire with more force, which should make them easier to aim & use.

Some graphical improvements have been made. Textures on terrain should seem less stretched on slopes & new melee graphics have been added. A few shadow-related bugs have been fixed, including a nasty memory usage problem.

A handful of other fixes are included, like robots following you when flying a ship and flying enemies won't hover over you (or other targets) indefinitely.

I highly recommend following @3089game to find multiplayer games to join. If you see a new Tweet here, you can start the game and join in! The game will be listed on the "find games" option. I'm planning on getting back to multiplayer coding & some more testers here wouldn't hurt

Complete list of changes: 3089game.wordpress.com

OK, back to work!

- Phr00t

Seems like another good update here. The change to the "burst" bit is a welcome one, though I havent gotten to mess with rebalanced guns much yet simply due to my current character being in no position to buy a new gun at the moment. Daggers are interesting though... I like the effect, but are enemies supposed to totally stop firing at you once you hit them with one? As that seems to be what happens, which basically means that the very first strike essentially wins the fight, with the remaining attacks being a formality. Aside from that, it seems like a good idea indeed for daggers.

One suggestion for the burst thing: When using things that dont have the "burst" but that DO have recharge, perhaps have it display that instead; there can be obnoxious moments with those things (usually swords and timewarps) where you're hitting the button over and over and wondering "why the heck isnt this blasted thing firing yet?!?". Displaying the remaining time until the thing is usable again is a quite small change, but it'd be a welcome one.

Overall, pretty positive currently. I'm liking the altered pacing of the game that the addition of the bosses caused as well.

My central problem with the game remains the quest stations (seriously, ONE non-stealth mission out of a total of 27 available ones in a particular building is.... yeah. Happens alot.).

Oh, and flying enemies seem to have that bizarre attention-span problem that causes them to wander off and attack random far away targets during combat with the player.... it can make some kill quests take amazing amounts of time to complete since you spend so much time chasing them down.

It all goes well otherwise! I'll probably chime in with some more feedback later about the weapon changes after I've messed with them more.

Oh, cool new sword/dagger graphics, by the way.

No major bugs to report this time either, aside from the flying thing one.

Edited by: Misery55

Hrm... maybe I can color the crosshairs depending on how long you have to wait to fire? Right now, they are red when you can't fire, and green when you can. I could have it go from red, yellow and finally to green smoothly... however, I wonder if that would be distracting for fast firing weapons... maybe I could make the "burst" indicator in the lower right change color smoothly instead?

When you say "non-stealth mission", do you mean any task getting a stealthy modifier? Like, if one task gets a "you cannot kill", do you consider that a stealthy mission? I'm trying to figure out what you are hoping for here... I don't want to make it too easy to ignore all stealth aspects of the game, but I don't want to make it too frustrating if you don't have a stealthy character.

I did make a change that modified flying robot's attention spans. Before, the flying robots would hover over targets, like yourself, indefinitely.. following you around & being almost impossible to shake off (unless you found cover). It also made it hard for other robots to engage flying enemies that were always directly above them. So, I made robots occasionally fly off (but they should return, unless they find something more important to attack). Tough one.. how would you tweak it?

Phr00t wrote: Hrm... maybe I can color the crosshairs depending on how long you have to wait to fire? Right now, they are red when you can't fire, and green when you can. I could have it go from red, yellow and finally to green smoothly... however, I wonder if that would be distracting for fast firing weapons... maybe I could make the "burst" indicator in the lower right change color smoothly instead?

When you say "non-stealth mission", do you mean any task getting a stealthy modifier? Like, if one task gets a "you cannot kill", do you consider that a stealthy mission? I'm trying to figure out what you are hoping for here... I don't want to make it too easy to ignore all stealth aspects of the game, but I don't want to make it too frustrating if you don't have a stealthy character.

I did make a change that modified flying robot's attention spans. Before, the flying robots would hover over targets, like yourself, indefinitely.. following you around & being almost impossible to shake off (unless you found cover). It also made it hard for other robots to engage flying enemies that were always directly above them. So, I made robots occasionally fly off (but they should return, unless they find something more important to attack). Tough one.. how would you tweak it?

Hm, it does occur to me that I might not have actually thought to fully explain what the stealth problem is..... heh.

Generally what I mean is these three: 1. "Only target can attack you", 2. Target cannot attack you, and 3. "You cannot be attacked", the sorts where you essentially lose if you are noticed whatsoever, either by enemies in the area, or the specific target. The bug-planting ones are impossible as well, though of course those only appear with one of those other 3. Even on the occaisions when I've tried out a stealthy character, these three are still the easiest to screw up in, as they seem to be incredibly reliant on wether or not your stealth stat is above a certain unknown number, which means they're usually literally impossible if you're using a non-stealth character because you will never have that necessary number. The very random presence of other enemies in the area, as well as the landscape, just makes it that much worse. These also seem to be by far the most common of the stealth-type objectives and seem to appear in the majority of missions at least once, particularly the harder ones that have more objectives. They're the major part of the problem, in my opinion.

The "dont kill anything" sorts arent a problem.... I'm sure those are technically much easier with stealth, but there's plenty of approaches to them even without it, it's just a bit more dangerous (sometimes alot more dangerous), but there's no "immediate failure" if you dont have stealth. That seems to me to be the best approach to a "stealth" idea in general, where you dont HAVE to have it to finish the mission.... but it makes it alot easier if you do.

The spy ones can be kinda iffy... sometimes they seem to work even without it, if I can stay far enough away from the target and even moreso if the target gets distracted by firing at random shiny things, other times they notice me anyway or they appear in an area that makes it sorta impossible from the start (in the water, usually).

Uhhh.... I could swear there was one more to mention, but I cant recall what it is.... or maybe that's all of them. It really is mainly those first 3 that are the issue.

The recharge thing, just changing the color over time of the "burst" indicator is a good idea, I think. Keeps that in the same spot on the screen, doesnt impede on anything else.

As for the robot attention-span thing, hmm... in terms of them not just sticking over your head permanently during fights, they are indeed doing that properly, moving around alot more and such as they should, making them harder to hit and such; the problem is that they randomly switch targets entirely for no (apparent) reason at all, often to a target that isnt even remotely near where you're fighting the thing, and when they fly off they tend not to come back (often getting distracted by even more things), and sometimes wander quite some distance away. It's very inconsistent, as any other type of enemy will just constantly target you once they're in a fight against you, only switching targets if a new direct threat attacks them enough. It's the sort of thing that, when it happens, it really LOOKS like an AI glitch, even if it technically isnt. Heck, sometimes you cant actually see what it is that has suddenly drawn their attention, and it looks even more strange when there arent any orange bots within your view at all; it ends up looking like the enemy ship just got bored and left. Bizarrely, this all seems to happen the most often with quest-target flyers.

Not sure what to suggest for that one... maybe someone else might have a good idea to help there. It does kinda seem like the sorta thing that's not very easy to fix.

Edited by: Misery55

2 words to say about the weapon changes (now that I've had a chance to try them out...): LOVING THEM!

The daggers are so much more fun now - no more "charge, runaway, rinse, lather, repeat"; now it's more like "charge, stun, shank shank shank shank shank, laugh maniacally, shank some more"

Being able to quickly flick on the hoverboard is great for close combat - again, you can swoop in, do the damage and get the hell out of dodge when their buddies show up.

and as for lobbing weapons... well, I can finally make use of the energy launcher bits I've picked up. Lobbers still aren't great for 'regular' combat (1v1, flat ground, mid-close range - then again, that's not what they're designed for...), but when you find one of their 'strong' situations (like a bunch of enemies collected at the bottom of a steep ravine... that was fun ) they're much easier to use now. I can see them being very useful for 'base jumping' ambushes and 'parachute' attacks, since you can get the distance between yourself and the shot so that you don't land in the middle of an explosion anymore

There's only one problem: I have a level 2/3 mixed gun, and I want to take it up to level 5 before I deal with my next boss enemy... however, the level 2 magazine I'm using has 15 burst... I can't decide between upgrading (for way more damage) or keeping the massive firing speed advantage First world problems hey?

Glad you are enjoying the changes, YetiChow!

I'm working hard on the multiplayer stuff now, I want the next multiplayer release to be "playable" (e.g. all the basic things, like locations, damage & behavior to/ sync correctly).