Handicap feature, and +noobquad setting

[console]

band together and petition Quadz to instate some type of skill ranking for all players, he could waste his time coding those ranks to a script which would disallow anyone above a certain skill level from playing on the vanilla server.

One thing I thought was kinda neat in Quake III, was the 'handicap' setting.  It was voluntary, but, if you set handicap to "75", then if I recall correctly, your weapons and armor would only have 75% of their normal strength... and opponent weapons would have 125% of their normal strength, sort of thing...

So if you tuned it down far enough, battling against newbies could be very challenging.

I think the handicap value should have been more prominent on the scoreboard, though.  It did show, but i think it should have been glowing/blinking to call attention to it or something...

  . . .

I've also considered adding a +noobquad option to vanilla... where anyone who is in the lead or tied for the lead can't pick up the quad.  (And if you did have the quad and became in the lead or tied for the lead, the quad would drop... and only someone with a lesser score could pick it up...)

But, uh.... *shrug*  dunno....

[peewee_RotA]

band together and petition Quadz to instate some type of skill ranking for all players, he could waste his time coding those ranks to a script which would disallow anyone above a certain skill level from playing on the vanilla server.

One thing I thought was kinda neat in Quake III, was the 'handicap' setting.  It was voluntary, but, if you set handicap to "75", then if I recall correctly, your weapons and armor would only have 75% of their normal strength... and opponent weapons would have 125% of their normal strength, sort of thing...

So if you tuned it down far enough, battling against newbies could be very challenging.

I think the handicap value should have been more prominent on the scoreboard, though.  It did show, but i think it should have been glowing/blinking to call attention to it or something...

  . . .

I've also considered adding a +noobquad option to vanilla... where anyone who is in the lead or tied for the lead can't pick up the quad.  (And if you did have the quad and became in the lead or tied for the lead, the quad would drop... and only someone with a lesser score could pick it up...)

But, uh.... *shrug*  dunno....

Those would both be very fun ideas, but i think it constitutes a gameplay mod and it would no longer be just a simple FFA.

Maybe set up another server (like vanilla2 or vanillamod) to try it out. I can make the dll side changes for you and send you the conde snippets if you'd like. Anything to save the master a little bit of time.

[quadz]

One thing I thought was kinda neat in Quake III, was the 'handicap' setting.  It was voluntary, but, if you set handicap to "75", then if I recall correctly, your weapons and armor would only have 75% of their normal strength... and opponent weapons would have 125% of their normal strength, sort of thing...

So if you tuned it down far enough, battling against newbies could be very challenging.

I think the handicap value should have been more prominent on the scoreboard, though.  It did show, but i think it should have been glowing/blinking to call attention to it or something...

  . . .

I've also considered adding a +noobquad option to vanilla... where anyone who is in the lead or tied for the lead can't pick up the quad.  (And if you did have the quad and became in the lead or tied for the lead, the quad would drop... and only someone with a lesser score could pick it up...)

Those would both be very fun ideas, but i think it constitutes a gameplay mod and it would no longer be just a simple FFA.

Maybe set up another server (like vanilla2 or vanillamod) to try it out. I can make the dll side changes for you and send you the conde snippets if you'd like.

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuude... if you're up for it, that would be awesome.

This is the current source for the mod used for vanilla, mutant, dm, railz....

  http://tastyspleen.net/~quake2/q2-ssp/q2-ssp-008-src.zip

Also available via anonymous CVS, as:

  cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@tastyspleen.net:/var/cvs/r1q2-ssp login
  cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@tastyspleen.net:/var/cvs/r1q2-ssp co r1q2-ssp


Because I use the same game binary for vanilla, mutant, railz, etc., it's important that all custom features can be enabled/disabled via rcon.  Usually by setting a cvar, although I suppose +noobquad might work well as a dmflag?  (Currently I don't use any custom dmflags for anything... so a boring old cvar like enable_noobquad or whatever would be fine as well.)

(How would you obtain the 'handicap' setting from the client?  Make it a userinfo var?  Also... I can't remember how Q3 works, but I think 'handicap' may need to be only set once when the map starts (or, when the player enters the game, i.e. comes out of spectator)... because it would be sort of cheating to be able to change it during the game... you know, playing almost the whole map with no handicap, then setting it to 50% right before the map ends so it shows on the scoreboard...)



Anyway yeah if you happened to have the time and inclination to code either or both of these features, that would kick ass!


Regards,

quadz

[peewee_RotA]

Yer all a bunch of sad chaingun fucktards!!1

(How would you obtain the 'handicap' setting from the client?  Make it a userinfo var?  Also... I can't remember how Q3 works, but I think 'handicap' may need to be only set once when the map starts (or, when the player enters the game, i.e. comes out of spectator)... because it would be sort of cheating to be able to change it during the game... you know, playing almost the whole map with no handicap, then setting it to 50% right before the map ends so it shows on the scoreboard...)

Here's my idea. First put the quad in place through a server flag. Good idea as is.

The handicap would be a cvar that is set either by the client or through a wallfly setting. I think the best application is to have someone say "handicap 1" or a similar command and wallfly prints to the whole room that someone is handicapped. I don't have control over wallfly, so you'll have to take care of that. It could also print everyone that is handicapped when it is set, and if someone does some kind of inquiry command. I'll figure out what kind of var is set in the dll code once I get down to it.

I do have a few ideas of how it will function. I think that handicaps should be incremental levels. Like 0 for none, 1, 2 and 3.

The first idea is the simplest. Handicapped players deal less damage. 0 = 100%, 1 = 75%, 2 = 50%, 3 = 25%. I think that it is safe to assume that having handicapped players take more damage rather than deal less damage is a bad idea.

An expansion on this idea is that handicapped players do normal damage to other handicapped players.

Another idea is to have firing delays. So a handicap of one has 2 seconds between rail shots instead of 1. This would probably just end up being annoying. Just an idea.

Another idea is to throttle down projectile speeds for handicapped players and cause instant weapons to shoot slow moving projectiles instead. This would just be funny, probably not practical. But it does look cool for shotguns

An outrageous idea is to create a different set of weapons for handicapped players. Weapons that are less useful but different so that it gives players an incentive to try.

It could be as simple as making players with handicaps could use more ammo than other players. Possibly double. Or just making ammo pickups give less to handicapped players.

Lastly, I could make players with handicaps to have no splash damage, reduce the firing rate on rapid fire weapons, lower the amount of shots from shotguns, and cause the railgun to fire slower or cause some kind of kick back.

On top of any of those changes, handicaps could also restrict powerups. I.E. a handicapped player can't pick up a mega if they have over 125 health... and the mega respawns without waiting for the handicapped player's health to count down. That way that person cant control the mega. Something similar could happen with power armor and red armor.

I doubt that anything that drastically changes game play would be feasible to put into vanilla. I just love brainstorming.


One more idea that is a different application of the handicap concept could be to cause handicap to be a flag set when mymapping. If handicap is set then the player in the lead does 50% damage. 2nd place does 75% and everyone else does normal.


Anyway I'm just interested in getting more input. that's all the ideas that i came up with.

[quadz]

I think that handicaps should be incremental levels. Like 0 for none, 1, 2 and 3.

The first idea is the simplest. Handicapped players deal less damage. 0 = 100%, 1 = 75%, 2 = 50%, 3 = 25%.

Hmm.  I find percentages easy to understand and unambiguous.  Also, when I was playing around with handicap in Q3, I was using finer increments than 25%.  For instance, I might have found that "70" was a bit too hard last map so I'd raise it to "75" for the next map.  I prolly never used less than 5% increments... but at that point the numbers might as well reflect the percentage they really mean (i.e. I can't imagine wanting to say that 14 = 70% and 15 = 75% because we're enforcing 5% increments )

I doubt that anything that drastically changes game play would be feasible to put into vanilla. I just love brainstorming.

That's one nice thing about the Q3 approach being so simple.  It conceptually works in just about any mod.

(Interesting ideas re: splash damage and such, though.)


Prolly we ought to move this out to some non-entropy board...


Regards,

quadz

[peewee_RotA]

just quoting some text. Admins can feel free to move the actual threads here and delete this one:

band together and petition Quadz to instate some type of skill ranking for all players, he could waste his time coding those ranks to a script which would disallow anyone above a certain skill level from playing on the vanilla server.

One thing I thought was kinda neat in Quake III, was the 'handicap' setting.  It was voluntary, but, if you set handicap to "75", then if I recall correctly, your weapons and armor would only have 75% of their normal strength... and opponent weapons would have 125% of their normal strength, sort of thing...

So if you tuned it down far enough, battling against newbies could be very challenging.

I think the handicap value should have been more prominent on the scoreboard, though.  It did show, but i think it should have been glowing/blinking to call attention to it or something...

  . . .

I've also considered adding a +noobquad option to vanilla... where anyone who is in the lead or tied for the lead can't pick up the quad.  (And if you did have the quad and became in the lead or tied for the lead, the quad would drop... and only someone with a lesser score could pick it up...)

But, uh.... *shrug*  dunno....

band together and petition Quadz to instate some type of skill ranking for all players, he could waste his time coding those ranks to a script which would disallow anyone above a certain skill level from playing on the vanilla server.

One thing I thought was kinda neat in Quake III, was the 'handicap' setting.  It was voluntary, but, if you set handicap to "75", then if I recall correctly, your weapons and armor would only have 75% of their normal strength... and opponent weapons would have 125% of their normal strength, sort of thing...

So if you tuned it down far enough, battling against newbies could be very challenging.

I think the handicap value should have been more prominent on the scoreboard, though.  It did show, but i think it should have been glowing/blinking to call attention to it or something...

  . . .

I've also considered adding a +noobquad option to vanilla... where anyone who is in the lead or tied for the lead can't pick up the quad.  (And if you did have the quad and became in the lead or tied for the lead, the quad would drop... and only someone with a lesser score could pick it up...)

But, uh.... *shrug*  dunno....

Those would both be very fun ideas, but i think it constitutes a gameplay mod and it would no longer be just a simple FFA.

Maybe set up another server (like vanilla2 or vanillamod) to try it out. I can make the dll side changes for you and send you the conde snippets if you'd like. Anything to save the master a little bit of time.

One thing I thought was kinda neat in Quake III, was the 'handicap' setting.  It was voluntary, but, if you set handicap to "75", then if I recall correctly, your weapons and armor would only have 75% of their normal strength... and opponent weapons would have 125% of their normal strength, sort of thing...

So if you tuned it down far enough, battling against newbies could be very challenging.

I think the handicap value should have been more prominent on the scoreboard, though.  It did show, but i think it should have been glowing/blinking to call attention to it or something...

  . . .

I've also considered adding a +noobquad option to vanilla... where anyone who is in the lead or tied for the lead can't pick up the quad.  (And if you did have the quad and became in the lead or tied for the lead, the quad would drop... and only someone with a lesser score could pick it up...)

Those would both be very fun ideas, but i think it constitutes a gameplay mod and it would no longer be just a simple FFA.

Maybe set up another server (like vanilla2 or vanillamod) to try it out. I can make the dll side changes for you and send you the conde snippets if you'd like.

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuude... if you're up for it, that would be awesome.

This is the current source for the mod used for vanilla, mutant, dm, railz....

  http://tastyspleen.net/~quake2/q2-ssp/q2-ssp-008-src.zip

Also available via anonymous CVS, as:

  cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@tastyspleen.net:/var/cvs/r1q2-ssp login
  cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@tastyspleen.net:/var/cvs/r1q2-ssp co r1q2-ssp


Because I use the same game binary for vanilla, mutant, railz, etc., it's important that all custom features can be enabled/disabled via rcon.  Usually by setting a cvar, although I suppose +noobquad might work well as a dmflag?  (Currently I don't use any custom dmflags for anything... so a boring old cvar like enable_noobquad or whatever would be fine as well.)

(How would you obtain the 'handicap' setting from the client?  Make it a userinfo var?  Also... I can't remember how Q3 works, but I think 'handicap' may need to be only set once when the map starts (or, when the player enters the game, i.e. comes out of spectator)... because it would be sort of cheating to be able to change it during the game... you know, playing almost the whole map with no handicap, then setting it to 50% right before the map ends so it shows on the scoreboard...)



Anyway yeah if you happened to have the time and inclination to code either or both of these features, that would kick ass!


Regards,

quadz

(How would you obtain the 'handicap' setting from the client?  Make it a userinfo var?  Also... I can't remember how Q3 works, but I think 'handicap' may need to be only set once when the map starts (or, when the player enters the game, i.e. comes out of spectator)... because it would be sort of cheating to be able to change it during the game... you know, playing almost the whole map with no handicap, then setting it to 50% right before the map ends so it shows on the scoreboard...)

Here's my idea. First put the quad in place through a server flag. Good idea as is.

The handicap would be a cvar that is set either by the client or through a wallfly setting. I think the best application is to have someone say "handicap 1" or a similar command and wallfly prints to the whole room that someone is handicapped. I don't have control over wallfly, so you'll have to take care of that. It could also print everyone that is handicapped when it is set, and if someone does some kind of inquiry command. I'll figure out what kind of var is set in the dll code once I get down to it.

I do have a few ideas of how it will function. I think that handicaps should be incremental levels. Like 0 for none, 1, 2 and 3.

The first idea is the simplest. Handicapped players deal less damage. 0 = 100%, 1 = 75%, 2 = 50%, 3 = 25%. I think that it is safe to assume that having handicapped players take more damage rather than deal less damage is a bad idea.

An expansion on this idea is that handicapped players do normal damage to other handicapped players.

Another idea is to have firing delays. So a handicap of one has 2 seconds between rail shots instead of 1. This would probably just end up being annoying. Just an idea.

Another idea is to throttle down projectile speeds for handicapped players and cause instant weapons to shoot slow moving projectiles instead. This would just be funny, probably not practical. But it does look cool for shotguns

An outrageous idea is to create a different set of weapons for handicapped players. Weapons that are less useful but different so that it gives players an incentive to try.

It could be as simple as making players with handicaps could use more ammo than other players. Possibly double. Or just making ammo pickups give less to handicapped players.

Lastly, I could make players with handicaps to have no splash damage, reduce the firing rate on rapid fire weapons, lower the amount of shots from shotguns, and cause the railgun to fire slower or cause some kind of kick back.

On top of any of those changes, handicaps could also restrict powerups. I.E. a handicapped player can't pick up a mega if they have over 125 health... and the mega respawns without waiting for the handicapped player's health to count down. That way that person cant control the mega. Something similar could happen with power armor and red armor.

I doubt that anything that drastically changes game play would be feasible to put into vanilla. I just love brainstorming.


One more idea that is a different application of the handicap concept could be to cause handicap to be a flag set when mymapping. If handicap is set then the player in the lead does 50% damage. 2nd place does 75% and everyone else does normal.


Anyway I'm just interested in getting more input. that's all the ideas that i came up with.

I think that handicaps should be incremental levels. Like 0 for none, 1, 2 and 3.

The first idea is the simplest. Handicapped players deal less damage. 0 = 100%, 1 = 75%, 2 = 50%, 3 = 25%.

Hmm.  I find percentages easy to understand and unambiguous.  Also, when I was playing around with handicap in Q3, I was using finer increments than 25%.  For instance, I might have found that "70" was a bit too hard last map so I'd raise it to "75" for the next map.  I prolly never used less than 5% increments... but at that point the numbers might as well reflect the percentage they really mean (i.e. I can't imagine wanting to say that 14 = 70% and 15 = 75% because we're enforcing 5% increments )

I doubt that anything that drastically changes game play would be feasible to put into vanilla. I just love brainstorming.

That's one nice thing about the Q3 approach being so simple.  It conceptually works in just about any mod.

(Interesting ideas re: splash damage and such, though.)


Prolly we ought to move this out to some non-entropy board...


Regards,

quadz

   that should be it

[playboy]

/signed

[Whirlingdervish]

sounds good as long as there's an extra-super-newbie setting of like 300% for guys like KrenZ.

 

[[BTF]Dizzy]

I think vanilla2 might make a nice test bed, if possible?

[|iR|Focalor]

Wow. It appears as though I'm the father of this dumb idea. Any possible way I could give up custodial rights without having to pay child support?

[[BTF]Defiant!]

Even easier idea..

All players spawn with BFG.  Every frag you are "demoted" to a lower weapon, down to grenades, and blaster.  Upon final kill with a blaster, level change.

Upon death without getting a frag with the weapon, you respawn with that weapon.

[playboy]

Defiant, cool idea.

[peewee_RotA]

Even easier idea..

All players spawn with BFG.  Every frag you are "demoted" to a lower weapon, down to grenades, and blaster.  Upon final kill with a blaster, level change.

Upon death without getting a frag with the weapon, you respawn with that weapon.

Defiant, cool idea.

I remember a mod just like this but it wasn't as cut and dry. It basically had tiers of players. Everyone started with a railgun, and an RL i think. As you started to get more frags, you would be demoted weapons. I think it was like every 4 frags. The last weapon was a blaster. It's a similar idea in theory, but in practice I honestly think that your idea is better. Just watch out for short games. The only weapons that slow down good players are the regular shotty and the blaster. It will probably take less than 5 min to get the other 9 kills.

No Item Quake (NIQ) is a happy medium between these two ideas. It forces every player to have the same weapons and amount of ammo. Health and ammo regenerate and weapons switch about every 30 seconds. I think that Gator's TX servers used to have a server for this. That was one of the best gameplay mods for Quake 2.

[playboy]

Many cool ideas can be brought around this kind of theory. Like maybe even the higher your frag count, the less health you start out with? That'd be fun to play with as well. I like this weapon idea.

[peewee_RotA]

Just got the time to download the source. Starting now. I'll keep everyone posted with the progress. I honestly expect this to take like 2 hours but you never know.