I've just been playing some B23 after about a year away from the game due to a computer change (I've tried out B24 a bit, but it doesn't seem any different in terms of gameplay, so I'm just going to continue talking about B23 fo the purposes of this post). I want to post some thoughts about the gameplay - in particular the pace of the game.

The thing that stand out to me is that moving actors around feels very slow and sluggish, and I want to know if anyone else thinks this, and if so in what kind of ways this could be improved.

Forget jetpacks for a moment. I'm talking about walking and climbing. Anyone can get around with speed with a jetpack (I bet most of us spent the first months (or years) playing the game zipping around the skies blasting away at actors on the ground with something big and explody), but in B24 that's been nerfed, and it's the same in the mod I'm running (Brutality - surprise surprise), and I think that's a good thing. There's a kind of holy grail of combat game violence that lies between chaos and snails suffocating each other, and nerfing jetpacks moves us toward that point on the scale, I think.

I guess what I'm saying is that I think that in CC you should be able to navigate ground terrain (grasslands, hills, trenches, cliffs, tunnels, wreckage...) with a certain amount of ease, and I feel that that is lacking in B23/24.


Today I realised that even walking down a corridor to get to a target on the other side is a painfully lengthy experience. Therefore I think that somehow ground travel in CC ought to be speeded up.
On the other hand, though, I don't think it should be blindingly fast, like in Soldat, in which you bounce around like an idiot spraying bullets at the enemy like a kid with a pez dispenser and ADHD. The thing to aim for, I think, is fluidity.

You know that feeling you get when you watch the perfect arc of a grenade you've just launched curve over a barrier and directly into the chest of your unlucky victim? The feeling when you headshot-kill an enemy actor with a sniper rifle while in tumbling midair flight, then stand up and do it again to the guy standing next to him? It's about precise and deadly action in conditions of speed and danger. I think there should be more scope for that in ground combat - you know, between guys who are walking, not flying.


But how can that kind of fluidity be added to the walking-around part of CC? I don't know. That's why I made this thread. Here are my initial ideas:

- Instead of walking, why not have actors run? Not comically, but more of a I've-got-places-to-be-this-is-a-war jog than the current plodding pace.
- Increase jetpack power, but decrease flying time.
- Make actors lighter, so they get bogged down less.
- Magically improve the climbing mechanic so that actors actually climb things.
- Perhaps make terrain harder?




So anyway, what do you think about this speed thing? Please comment and tell me stuff.

Thanks.

If you want everything to be that little bit faster, you can try playing with the deltatime and other variables in that aspect of the game. As far as I'm aware Data was planning some running at some point; there seem to be a few actor variables relevant to it.

Hold down the (2) key (Not the one in numpad). That'll speed things up.

Those aren't really solutions to the problem, which is that walking is basically useless compared to jetpacking.
He only wants ground travel to be speeded up, not all of CC.

we need this badly

walking and climbing need sped up

The problem is the fact that actors actually walk, so terrain effects their speed, and balance.... It needs to be made so that the actors walking relies a little less on terrain and a little more on sparkle magic..... im not sure how, or if it would be a good thing, but it does need sped up a little.

I totally agree with this kind of idea. It would make combat faster and reduce the use of jetpacks as the sole means of transportation.
Also Non, I think the word you're looking for is "fluid".

not LUA, sparkle magic (im referring to editing the source here, which is pretty much magic as far as im conserned)

you could change it in the source, it would be far better if the base walkpaths in all forms and ways was improved to be faster. and yeah it just needs to feel much more smooth and fast!

We need some sort of no colliding with allied actors or something

no friendly fire along with it...

I think you'll find what you're looking for here.

No, but seriously. Yes, the walking in CC is, frankly, idiotic. It's not the only part of CC that feels like a slapped together kludge that's lasted through three+ years of active development.

But, uh, it's unlikely to change. That sucks, but it's the truth. Maybe an enterprising modder will do something that works so much better that Data will be like "yo, I'm having that" but let's be real.

Well we have TLB's hoverboards which go pretty fast. You can have floaty legless actors which move quickly, which for all its practicality, doesn't really fix the problem.

How feasible would it be to have floaty legless actors with sprited-on legs, or some such hacky jury-rig, to give the illusion of walking smoothly?

Honestly, you might as well use the default. I can live with it, even if it is pretty bad.

I think that climbing and walking shouldn't necesarily be faster, but they need to be less whacky.

Climbing ladders is almost impossible, and walking on rough surfaces sometimes ends in failure.

And if your end of your toe steps on a higher surface, your entire body is lifted up.

This, I think, is true. This is why I don't think that just increasing walk speed will do anything.

There needs to be some kind of increased fluidity in movement. I'm imagining characters bounding over terrain rather than crawling.

Ladder climbing currently being utterly useless is the result of a couple things
A) IsScrap issues, which Data has already addressed for B25, if I remember correctly.
B) Limbpath issues, which is the result of the developers not refining them, because they are low-priority details that haven't been addressed for recent actors.
C) Current actors are very heavy in comparison to older actors. A bit too heavy for their weight to be supported by concrete over the surface of their small hand atomgroups.
Solve those issues, and climbing works about as well as walking does. Which still isn't very well, but it usually works for the most part.
Try making a skeleton climb a ladder that was build inside a bunker, and you'll see that the current climbing system can work under its current system.

As others have said, revising human mobility mechanics for better fluidity and faster ground movement would be nice, but it's not very likely to happen soon if ever. And depending on who you're asking, making it work in a less physics-oriented way that works better for gameplay would fly in the face of the point of game. And a better physics-oriented way would likely need more effort than Data would want to put into it. So that's a bit of an impasse.