Replacing spawn weapons

So, you want to remove a funny, geeky feature, that tells Xonotic apart from the many other FPS games, and that some people including myself have already fond memories of.

Yes, don't remove trouting.

The main problem lies in implementing the other two features into the same gun. Laserjumping should be on a different gun, because laserjumping allows you large freedom in movement. You can gain speed, height, maybe even dodge with it. If you'd place this feature along a "powerful" primary firemode, it'll be too easy. Like in Minstagib or OverKill, but in those gamemodes it is fine, those are based on hecticness anyway. The movement freedom coming from laserjumping MUST be penalised somehow, and it already is: you have to switch a gun for that. Though if with playtests this comes out to not to be a problem, I might be fine with it.

One can put in a delay after firing a weapon until you can laserjump, which will fix this.

Since laserjumping is such an often used feature in Xonotic, it should have a dedicated button EVEN if everyone does not have a 42-button mouse, I'll try and explain after the next quote:

But again, what about the melee? I stated a lot of stuff about it already, and honestly, I can't accept FruitieX's standpoint, about mouses in general having more than 3 buttons+scrollwheel. NO THEY DON'T. For a casual gamer or computer user, no. And Xonotic has to be fun for them too, you can't tell in the system requirements "needs mouse with more than 3 buttons". You can say, bind it to the keyboard then, but this can be frustrating and a no go for a lot of people (like me too, even though I have a mouse with 5 buttons, but I still haven't lost empathy to others...)

If we'd go ahead and remove the laser as a weapon and put it's often used laserjumping functionality behind a dedicated button, then we'd at least free up the "1" key (or whatever they have bound to laser, must be close to WASD anyway). You can still press 1 while holding W, although it's a bit awkward, but then maybe that player will prioritize the laser and swap its key with what they have on either E or Q and accept that they have to get used to this change. (muscle memory!)

Right now, personally, for me (only? ) it sounds like a brilliant idea to put Xonotic's main movement trick behind a dedicated button, which could double as a dedicated melee/trouting button as well. (no matter which weapon you are holding!)

Here's my suggestion for how it could work:

1. Remove the laser weapon entirely.
2. Put the juggling functionality on the shotgun secondary (it could work precisely as the laser primary does now, and if needed, could also be swapped to primary by player's choice)
3. Implement the dedicated button like this:
- When you hit the button, there would be code that checks if you are currently aiming at a wall that's near enough to you for laser splash damage to affect you.
....- If true, fire a special laser projectile that can only damage you, and will go through other players (just in case), and expires when it can no longer hit you.
....- If false, there will be trouting action!

Notes:
- Wall proximity code should also account for your current velocity, so if you *would* be within range when the laser projectile explodes, this code will return true
- For the sake of simplicity I think we can assume that no player will, during normal conditions, travel faster than the laser projectile
- Before you could melee/laserjump using the dedicated button, there would be code checking if you've fired a weapon in the last x seconds, same delay for every weapon IMO (possibly around 0.4 seconds, that should be about the same as it is currently: weapon animtime + duration of switch animation). Also obviously, after hitting this button there will be a delay until you can fire again (either after the trouting animation is done, or say 0.4s after firing the special laser projectile)

What could possibly go wrong? :-)
(Oh yes, Samual disagreeing with me, because this is how our universe works.)

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Would be a hilarious mod tbh, but I don't think this will work for default gameplay without carefully re-balancing the damage output or switch time.

With an artificial delay after firing your weapon (that can be equal to how long it takes to switch to the shotgun now), there should not be any balancing issues at all. (as suggested earlier in this post)

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@Samual: Please don't remove the melee. I'll do the coding for a dedicated button this summer if that's needed. (Take that as a warning Samual, *you* should know why )

How is this supposed to work? Being able to slap with all weapons? Might be stupid when slapping someone with the grenade launcher deals more damage than actually letting a grenade explode right into his face. Just saying

Again not an issue with an artificial delay. With correct values, the damage output would be identical to what it is currently, that is switching to the shotgun first, then trouting.