Good jesus, man, play the level that I made (HINT: posted on the other forum. Or here) and it really shows. On a flat plane, the shotgun is seen to have insane range. Shooting parallel to the ground makes projectiles go all the way across the area, with equal potency as they are at the beginning. Then again, Dummies have much better jetpacks...

or you can slide down a wall for extra deceleration.1: yes, this is cause both AI are rushing at the moment, which means there's a few seconds of total carnage with both teams suffering huge losses followed by a short mop-up period. It'll be different with more guns and different AI behaviours, at least here's hoping.
2: two words, "custom keybinds". I'm happy with the default keys and aren't going to change them up too much. Larger actors might have weapons with no reload (internal belt feed from a huuuge tank of rounds) and a special action bound to their reload key, or use it to switch fire modes or something, but I'm trying to keep this to UDLR + AB + mouse (analogue stick for console).
3: subjective.. It's not meant to be easy as it's a skill manoeuvre, but you can jump up an indefinite two-tile-wide vertical tunnel as a dummy, and get some stupidly powerful launches as a binbot.. I'm on the fence whether to make it much easier, considering the AI isn't going to be making good use of it any time soon...Just two factions as of now, though maybe later I'll make more. There's going to be a lot of variety within the factions with no double-ups to keep the game fresh, and with more than two factions it's hard not to end up with blurred designs in there somewhere. It also let's us put more polish on the content that we _do_ have.This is actually a hat-tip to tucker's comment on IRC at some point that I won't get into now. I won't be making the light or medium units much bigger than they are now, but I will try to make sure they have more of a presence on the screen with effects and the like.

Sorry if I missed anyone.

Anyway, exam tomorrow and lots of study now, so nothing major will get done tonight as I need my beauty sleep or some other facetious comment. Glad the response has been mostly positive

NINJA'D: I'll have a look at that map asap YHTFLKC, I know exactly what you mean though. I'll make them bounce less or lose a lot of velocity upon bouncing, and because their damage is tied to their velocity this should be a sufficient nerf over distance. I kind of like the raw power of the shotgun at close range though.

Agreed. Also, wall sliding, nice little almost-unnoticed implementation

OYA, SUGGESTION: Respawn plates, or something similar. Annndddddd, some shield or something. Kinda riot shield-y, with a pistol or something similar as the means of attack? Also, there's a bug with the custom level error message is kinda bugged. It still says 'Play the level!' after you input an invalid level, but it won't allow changing of the code unless you revert to the title.

I really hope that your start units will each have a different gun or somehing, like binbots having a couple of varieties of shotguns and GLs and Dummies having an LMG and an SMG and a sniper or somehting. Binbots need to be a wee bit bigger, they're hard to see. Jetpacking is a little weird, but I love how it's different depending on which faction. Perhaps areas only accesabble by each one depending on height or w/e? This is quite fun, designing levels will take for ♥♥♥♥ ever, so don't expect any from me for a while, at least until exams have passed. The speed of this game is amazing.

Dummy mgs need a bigger clip or a smaller reload time, and everything needs some placeholder sounds. It's hard to tell if you're hit because everything's moving so bloddy fast (which is fantastic btw) and you can't really see your ammo for the same reason. It's easy to read when you're standing still, but in the middle of combat, it takes a bit to catch.

Really loving the stark differences between the factions, and I think when you release a2 you should implement different ai styles per faction, perhaps like a more "Hold ground and aim" thing for dummies and somehitng like the current one for the bins.

quicktype'd, pardon the spelling and lack of punctuation

/quick study break

I'm not sure if it'll be in the next version or what, but I'm planning on having it so you can customise your starting squad per-unit (up to 30RP or so of units and guns, about 7 fully perked and armed light units) and then buy units based on what RP you gain from the match, be it from killing enemies or capturing tactical points or capturing the flag or waiting a minute or whatever. That part of the game hasn't even been drafted into code yet, but it's on the drawing board so to speak. Stage Two might just have random guns on your starting dudes based on their role, not sure.

The binbots are as big bigger than the dummies, I have no idea what you guys are on about there. They're also kind of meant to be harder to see, they're a more guerrilla-style faction (hence the grey, made-out-of-scrap-ness of them).

Re: "designing levels will take forever" - it's not the design so much as tweaking the tiles and placing vegetation. I'd love to see some maps from you guys though, YHTFLKC has made a "flatlands" style arena that highlights fixes that need to be made for the shotgun
USEFUL HINT FOR PLACING VEGETATION: HIT ~ TO GO TO THE CONSOLE, ON THE RIGHT UNDER FPS THERE IS THE CURRENT IN-GAME POSITION OF THE AIMING CURSOR. USE THIS TO YOUR BENEFIT.

I'm also planning on getting sounds for everything for the stage "1.5" patching release. God knows when that'll be, possibly wednesday.

F5 enables grid.

I don't understand how making the game so strategic will work out when you have so little control over your guys. Is it meant to kind of simulate an online experience?

Enemy have shotguns? Run at their face.
Allies in front of me? Enemies behind them? Shoot them in the back.

I lol'd at that. Yeah, Geti said something about fixing the AI next, so no worries. Are there going to be leaderboards?

I imagine Geti will do that at roughly the same time as the Prelude leaderboards.

!!!

Dummies can attach themselves to ceilings!

I attached myself to the highest point, then sniped the lot of 'em.

What map?

Edit, Geti- YOU CAN FALL OUT OF THE MAP, and due to the lack of escape without winning, you have to reload the page. Dummies have AMAZING wall jumping, too. They can jump up vertical surfaces, not just straight up shafts.

I'm aware. Hit K to suicide the current unit, it'll be fixed once there's a brain to lose connection from.

I'm confused as to what you mean with this, there's going to be the ability to set AI modes per-unit like in CC. Are you just having a go at the control fiddliness or.. ? I'm confused.

Glad someone found this. It's both a feature and a bug, or more a bug I felt I may as well keep.

EDIT: ASSING HELL the board got wiped. I've fixed the bug that caused it, but can't get the data back. Thankfully, the site will be migrating soon, which should fix up all the issues people are having with my host, and allow me to actually repair things like this if they happen again. YHTFLKC, feel free to repost the maps thread, since that was your thing...

MapMaking guide coming tonight, most likely.

No I think the controls are just fine but I dunno it seems like it would be frustrating to me to have complex objectives with self perpetuating consequences (success leads to buying stuff which plays a major role in subsequent success) while not having complete control over your guys. Like I know in Call of Duty it is very frustrating for most people when their team sucks, and CoD places a much greater emphasis on the individual than this game (in terms of view perspective and the relative power of an individual over others).

I dunno I'm probably wrong but it feels like you are trying to make it a sidescrolling RTS where you can only control one guy at a time. I'd feel really mad when I want to focus fire a potent individual enemy (for example a damage dealer or a buffer with low tanking abilities) and the chances of that happening are up to luck or your programming, which is very good but can hardly account for all situations. And even if it could I'd prefer it were ME playing well and making good decisions. I think Soldat works because you are controlling only one guy and I don't really think controlling multiple guys works very well in CC, having played extensive amounts of PvP and striving to come up with more effective modes of play. While a lot of CC's problems have to do with the physics and movement and the AI, problems that RvR doesn't/will not have, there's is still the primary problem that you aren't controlling the bulk of you forces.

But that's just my opinion and I'm sure I'd enjoy your game either way. Even in this early stage I'm getting a good feel for the soul of the game and it's enjoyable.