balanceFruit.cfg

(oh no not another balance thread )

PLEASE READ BEFORE VOTING

Me and kojn (and as of lately, several other curious testers) have been putting hours and hours into a new balance config with a temporary name "balanceFruit.cfg". The basics of the weapons' functions are there, and we've got some balancing done too . It's supposed to target being a default balance, so I'm now polling the community with a slightly less abstract question than the previous time...: Do you like the current direction of balanceFruit.cfg? Could you imagine this as the default balance of Xonotic? Try it out with a git clone by doing this:

Code:

./all checkout fruitiex/fruitbalance

Answering "yes" doesn't mean you have to support EVERY single change, leave a message about what you don't like!
Oh and as some of you like to say, Xonotic != q3a, Xonotic != Warsow, Xonotic != UT etc. (of which this balance imitates none, it is made from scratch pretty much) Now how about this: Xonotic != Nexuiz

The most important thing the balance tries to fix is that many weapons were too similar in Nexuiz. However by attempting to fix this, many have already e.g. complained about sticky nades (some without apparently testing them, please test now!), but there's a reason behind those!

Laser: Very unsure what to do about this still, many will want to say put it back at Nexuiz settings, others want to remove it completely. Kojn had an idea about disabling the laser for the flag carrier so he can't escape as easily, but that still won't fix the problem of elevating heights too easily
Currently it's set at half the force (400->200), no delay(0.03->0), lower dmg (35->20). Keep in mind that's still very very WIP and fully open for suggestions .

Shotgun: Primary has a longer refire time, more bullets, more damage, more spread. It stays the starting weapon however (max dmg from one shot is 64, quite hard to get all of that though) Secondary is simply disabled for now, as we didn't have any good ideas for that (MUST be fixed!). divVerent came with the idea that we could implement elliptical spread, and align it horizontally for primary, and vertically for secondary... Kojn on the other hand had the idea of a melee weapon for the secondary mode... Hmmm...! WIP!

Uzi: Primary fires faster, has massive spread, eats ammo, but also quite high dmg. Only usable in short range, but is pretty darn usable there if you manage to aim correctly. Secondary has much more spread than it used to, so it no longer is useful as a sniper weapon. Good for mid-range fights

Mortar: The perhaps most discussed change is the primary sticky grenades. Many ask why? Why not just keep the old mortar as it was? Yeah, I liked it too...: BUT! it was way too similar to the rocketlauncher in how it functioned! So having the nades stick to the walls instead of exploding right away makes the mortar primary have it's unique uses as opposed to what it used to be, very similar to the rocketlauncher. Of course they still explode if you hit someone straight in the face with an airshot . Not only is it really unique now, but it's a lot of fun too! Plant the nades on a path you think your opponent might take, and eventually hear the hitsounds go "tink, tink, tink" all while you can finish off your stunned opponent with another weapon if you so desire . The secondary is similar to what it was, but it has less speed (the primary does too, actually). Some have already mentioned the speed might be too low, but increasing it is no problem if the majority thinks so. The projectiles here use a new algorithm for calculating speed, so if you aim up your projectile would go WAY further than if you aim down. Might just be a thing we need to get used to, because aiming them where you want is much easier in close-mid range at these lower speeds.

Electro: Primary now serves as a lightning gun which does 100 damage per second if you hit the opponent for 1 full second. The secondary blobs are still there, but they shoot at a longer refire to prevent excessive spam. The lightning beam sets the blobs off at a distance of 50 units from the end pos of the lightning beam. (this code was just finished today, so the balance params for this likely need tweaking)
Oh and the beam range is limited to 800 units.

Crylink: The primary fires a hexagonal pattern with big spread, should be pretty useful in close-mid range especially in tight corridors. Secondary is a rapid fire mode resembling a Q3 plasma gun, but still isn't really that. Good for spamming a corner, and if you can lead it correctly it will deal a fair amount of damage.

Nex: Not much changed here, damage is at 100. Apparently gradually fading into half of that after a distance of 1000 to a distance of 3000. This is WIP I'd say.

Hagar: Bigger radius, bigger spread, instantly more useful. That's for both primary and secondary.

Rocket launcher: Remote detonation now removes 50% of the damage/force, so you have to really consider before using that! The idea with this is to put weight on aiming the rocket so it hits the floor near the opponent, or direct hits of course . Steering still possible at a rate of 45 degrees per second. OH! And they have infinite health finally, so no random blowing up of your own rockets in front of yer nose

Please take some time testing this, hopefully against human opponents, and give some feedback


Edit: Test server with default physics (and fixed maps!) coming soon, so for the ones who can't test for one reason or another, wait up with voting!
We'll also likely arrange a bigger balance testing event next week so we can test with bigger crowds, but at least the thread is already here

sorry to be a n00b but how do I make this the default config so I can test this?? by typing exec balanceFruit.cfg in the concole I get a really weird balance, with the laser not working, you start with machine gun, electro shooting lighting for primary but depleting in seconds, mortar shooting less far but without sticking, not being able to pick up medium health when at 100hp and many more changes?

edit: forgot to compile, will test later :S

I like most of the changes, from the sound of it, haven't tested it. But I don't like the idea of the nex fall of damage.

I didn't read everything, neither can I test balance changes anyway, but what I wanted to leave here is a suggestion about the laser: From what I understand, the fact that the laser is strong and can shoot instantly in Nexuiz 2.5.2 makes it quite powerful. Now, how about a quite long delay, with a charging effect? e.g. 0-4 seconds to get 0-100% push of the laser. An additional challenge could be added so that the player needs to time the laser correctly for high jumps, in a sense that the laser either automatically shoots when 100% strenght are reached, or starts hurting the player if he doesn't let go of the firebutton. A pitch-increasing humming sound could be played when players charge their laser, making him more vulnerable, since opponents will know where he is.

Another idea is to not allow changing to other weapons once the laser was used for 1-2 seconds, allowing players to use it to escape, but making it worthless for attacks, since the player cannot switch to a fighting weapon right away.

Tested and liked but would need some tweaks The pros and cons I state are my options for this config.

Pros:
-hanger much better
-crylink much better
-likes the mortar sticking feature, should maybe delay a little longer. Although trajectory may be very hard to get use to. I think it would be much better if this sticking feature was apart of the electro secondary instead of the mortar
-elctro beam is a nice replacement, although elctroballs are harder to detonate when needed with beam? would you fix this by making there hit boxes bigger?

Cons:
-can't stack health over 100 with medium healths? is this intended? not good imo. maybe a bug my end
-delay between nex shot and other weapon is to long, which doesn't encourage combos
-no delay(0.03->0) for laser means you cannot use jump in combination to make laser jump bigger. this makes it really hard to traverse vertically. also maybe 300 force is better, so u don't have to be standing right next to a wall to go up it.
-elecro beam needs to appear thicker
-in order to counter rl, I think destroyable rocket feature should be included, but perhaps with more health, so it can only be exploded by another exploded rocket.
-I'd like to see reload on all bullet based weapons, esp mg, meaning they can still be powerful but are disadvantaged due to reload and therefor not the most powerful weapons. Also good to stop machine gun spam

-elctro beam is a nice replacement, although elctroballs are harder to detonate when needed with beam? would you fix this by making there hit boxes bigger?

Yeah that needs fixing, either by allowing the beam to hit the blobs directly in midair and/or making the endpos combo set-off radius bigger.

Cons:
-can't stack health over 100 with medium healths? is this intended? not good imo. maybe a bug my end

Hmm yes, this is intended... The point is that you can't stack up to even near 200 hp, thus making picking up a megahealth pretty much useless. This also makes powerups way more important than in Nexuiz where you'd pick up a lot of 25 hp packs and get the same thing. (e.g. you might have to plan ahead who will attack the enemy base and let him take the powerups) You can still pick up small health.

-delay between nex shot and other weapon is to long, which doesn't encourage combos

Yeah, might be shortened a little, but has to stay. It's a weapon that is a little bit too effective in combos otherwise, and firing it now means at least a little risk in case you miss and have to wait for the switch time.

-no delay(0.03->0) for laser means you cannot use jump in combination to make laser jump bigger. this makes it really hard to traverse vertically. also maybe 300 force is better, so u don't have to be standing right next to a wall to go up it.

I thought no delay makes it easier to make vertical jumps with (time space+fire button at the exactly same time, or maybe space JUST slightly before). At least no delay makes it feel a bit more snappy, and at lower forces it should still be just easy to move horizontally with.

-elecro beam needs to appear thicker

It probably just needs a better model anyway xD

-in order to counter rl, I think destroyable rocket feature should be included, but perhaps with more health, so it can only be exploded by another exploded rocket.

Or perhaps a safety feature where they can't be exploded unless they are at a certain distance from the owner?

-I'd like to see reload on all bullet based weapons, esp mg, meaning they can still be powerful but are disadvantaged due to reload and therefor not the most powerful weapons. Also good to stop machine gun spam

Hmm, interesting idea sure, but wouldn't that make it a little too slow-paced

My problems with it:

- Laser should stay useful. What is with all the movements to make the laser entirely useless? 4 seconds charging - can just as well throw the thing away then. No laser for flag carrier? Yet another bad idea. That is just making the game your enemy, while the other players SHOULD be your real enemy. Making the laser's function less useful is absolutely the wrong direction to go. Maybe instead make it use more health (i.e. cause more selfdamage than other weapons) - this keeps it possible to do all sorts of tricks, except that you will be a VERY easy target during it or when done and die of a single MG bullet

- Electro primary lightning gun... although a nice idea from gameplay perspective, it cannot be implemented well until we have csqc handled player models. The beam getting thin when the wall is close is one of the problems with it that cannot really be avoided. Another issue is the quite bad sound... it SHOULD get an electric looped bzzzt sound, but that is not really possible without handling the beam via CSQC either. So this cannot work out well till some months ahead. If we can live with these issues, then we can use it.

- Shotgun needs SOME secondary. Don't care what or how useless that secondary is (just not identical to primary please).

My problems with it:

- Laser should stay useful. What is with all the movements to make the laser entirely useless?...

Thanks, div.

Need to test this, though, in order to be able to comment on this. As I don't know ANYONE personally who plays Xonotic, I depend on a public testing server in order to use the balance against human players. I'll try to stick around IRC whenever I am available for testing and see if someone would do me the favor.

Laser should stay useful.

Of all the following suggestions I'd vote for increasing selfdamage.

-I'd like to see reload on all bullet based weapons, esp mg, meaning they can still be powerful but are disadvantaged due to reload and therefor not the most powerful weapons. Also good to stop machine gun spam

Hmm, interesting idea sure, but wouldn't that make it a little too slow-paced

50 bullet magazine and 1-2 seconds reload. Will it really make it slow-paced?

Anyway, from yesterday testing I didn't see any mg spam.

First of all, good to see some positive feedback and suggestions.

Adding a reload to the mg will really make the weapon useless how it currently is, I am positive of this, it really isn't that powerful when your against a certain type of weapon, against the LG it is better at distance because the lg can't reach it and close up with good aiming it does a lot of damage, but even at mid-ranges primary loses it's effectiveness a LOT!

We made it chew through a lot of ammo so that if you use it, you can't just go mg spamming constantly or you will be out of ammo, also tested it vs the different weapons to see how it handled in different types of situations.

Lase:- divVerent the reason I suggested disabling laser for the FC was because it makes little sense to me why the FC can just grab the flag and always laser away making these 6-7 second caps that were all too familiar in nexuiz, it wouldn't mean you can't use it, you can still use it to attack and to chase the FC that was my reasoning, anyhow I actually prefer what frutiex did to be honest, I think I also agree with what someone said to increase the force a bit more for it perhaps, perhaps go to 250 with the force I think would be ok?

I would say either increase force slightly, or leave it as it was in nexuiz and increase self-damage to a high/er amount, I prefer to have a lowerforce so you need to do multiple laser walljumps if you want to get to somewhere high without taking a jump-pad or something.

Oh yea, physics also..I really lean more towards the XPM one's more and more compared to current default xonotic, more useable and easier to gain momentum not as sluggish when you have to stop/start, I admit there is a curve to learning them but there effectively the same as the xonotic one's except you need to learn to strafe, and if new movement is put in people are going to have to learn that movement anyway, just my thoughts.


And lastly I had a lot of fun just messing about playing ffa and clan-arena with those of you who tested them with us last night, haven't had that much fun doing that for a while, will try to organise a specific date, so we can get more people involved in playing and testing.

The big problem with XPM physics is that it can easily be cheated. It's fine to keep that as an option, but it really should not be default.

"Strafing" (by that you mean the Quake-world like movement) is abuse of a bug, and not a feature! And software can abuse the bug much better than any player ever will.

The goal is to have "strafebug-free" physics by default, but having them otherwise as similar in style as possible to XPM for consistency. However, the usual complaint even against the current physics seems to be that it is TOO FAST, not TOO SLOW!

Intentional differences between XPM and default Xonotic physics:
- slight sideways friction in default, helps with strafe+forward-turning and gives a penalty to too-fast turning
- airaccel_qw has a negative value (i.e. fix strafe bug)
- airstrafe*-effect is weaker - to allow using the strafe keys to dodge an incoming projectile without having to turn the view, also helps with circle strafing around an enemy. This makes the physics WAY better in combat, but worse for speedrunning/quick turning
- different aircontrol - a bit weaker to keep player speed down a little
- no doublejump - doublejump is a BUG, not a FEATURE
- no jumpspeedcap - because it is not predicted by client

The only thing that is REALLY important is the airaccel_qw change, however, the other things are very minor in comparison.

Making the laser's function less useful is absolutely the wrong direction to go.

I completly agree!

[...] the reason I suggested disabling laser for the FC was because it makes little sense to me why the FC can just grab the flag and always laser away making these 6-7 second caps that were all too familiar in nexuiz

A flagcarrier won't be able [making such fast] caps if your team has a good defense.

Shotgun needs SOME secondary.

I don't know if this would be doable, but how about a melee attack (beating someone with the shotgun, would perhaps take 50-60 hp, would need some testing of course).

Sure, why not a SG melee attack. Just, "beating someone" will not be that easy to animate... but would be very nice

But if it just takes 50-60 HP, there is no real reason to use it. Maybe something more effective...

As for fast caps: well, lower laser force is not bad per se, as long as one can still climb up walls with it. Does not have to stay as fast, but must stay possible. Also, laser should get its shot delay back, to allow using it easily for speeding up.

OK, Back to the Nexuiz laser it is then to do some minor tweaks! (once I get home)

Shotgun secondary might be interesting as a melee sure, but it must then have enough dmg to actually be useful... Maybe 100? Although this might make for some way too easy random/lucky frags in close quarters at the current sv_maxspeed of 400... I'm instead voting for a maxspeed of 320 (and maybe allowing a greater accel until speeds up to 800 or so?), and perhaps enabling footsteps/grunt sound by default? (hoping e.g. MickRip can impove the latter )

Sure, why not a SG melee attack. Just, "beating someone" will not be that easy to animate... but would be very nice

But if it just takes 50-60 HP, there is no real reason to use it. Maybe something more effective...

As for fast caps: well, lower laser force is not bad per se, as long as one can still climb up walls with it. Does not have to stay as fast, but must stay possible. Also, laser should get its shot delay back, to allow using it easily for speeding up.

Agreed on the still be able to climb walls on it but just with a lower force div0, I thought frutiex had already enabled it to do that still.

Also on the XPM physics, I thought you found a way to stop the bug abuse anyway with them or so that they could be used with the controller?

As stated before gave my reasoning why I would prefer to see the game have them then what is currently default.

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SG melee secondary to do 60-100 dmg per hit? I guess we can have a play once it get's implemented and then change the dmg figure from there depending how often you get near someone to use it and kill someone with it?

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Also, I think you go overkill on this bug 'abuse' stuff divVerent, it would be virtually useless in games anyway surely? And I have never seen anyone ever use some kind of bot in any game using those physics set..except you who made a bot to do it and even that was just in a complete straight line.

I would not disregard the current physics either with frutiex's suggestions they could be a lot better, current 400 maxspeed makes insanely fast dodging on ground, 320 was a lot better like in XPM, but then you need to make the acceleration quicker otherwise it takes absolutely ages, so I guess thats what he means with quicker acceleration upto 800 which I would be all for with the current xonotic default physics

FrutieX can you do those changes when you get back so we can test??

Yes, could e.g. use my physics set with a speedlimit of about 1500, more acceleration, and a walking speed of 320 instead of 400. 400 is not a requirement.

Just, it will feel FASTER than how they currently are, and many have complained about them being ALREADY too fast.

And such bots have existed before in other games, e.g. on the Warsow forum this apparently was not news.

Such bots barely give you any advantage in FFA, CTF however. They probably only are in the way unless used together with an aimbot/triggerbot, at which point the player should have been banned anyway

Kojn, I'll likely be back home at about 9 my time.

Regarding the laser, you folks should also try one with the same force as before but more damage. That way people can't say it is less useful, they just won't be able to use it as often. It might also make the Laser a competent back up weapon, since it is not ammo dependent, so that two backup weapons will no longer be required (in a game where each weapon can have two attacks no less).

The big problem with XPM physics is that it can easily be cheated. It's fine to keep that as an option, but it really should not be default.

"Strafing" (by that you mean the Quake-world like movement) is abuse of a bug, and not a feature! And software can abuse the bug much better than any player ever will.

Agree! Bug != Feature

And strafe jumping is the weirdest, most convoluted and painful to execute thing ever on top of it.

Movement should be an art and not a science; making it a precise science takes away the fun and makes it a target for cheating artificial intelligence.


For a shooter as focused on movement as this, I'd recommend not making this a choice between the lesser of two evils-- laser spamming and exploiting physics bugs.

If more ways to move are needed, there's plenty of options to choose from, with sprinting and wall jumping being the only ones left that are known to mankind and not already integrated into the engine in some form or another.

Yes, could e.g. use my physics set with a speedlimit of about 1500, more acceleration, and a walking speed of 320 instead of 400. 400 is not a requirement.

Just, it will feel FASTER than how they currently are, and many have complained about them being ALREADY too fast.

And such bots have existed before in other games, e.g. on the Warsow forum this apparently was not news.

Are you sure they didn't complaina about the ground movement being too fast, at the moment it is insane due to the walking speed, when you strafe left to right in combat it's madness especially if you add a jump too into the mix, could be the ground-speed was too fast, or I'm completely wrong and you mean the actual movement/hopping

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Regarding the laser, you folks should also try one with the same force as before but more damage. That way people can't say it is less useful, they just won't be able to use it as often. It might also make the Laser a competent back up weapon, since it is not ammo dependent, so that two backup weapons will no longer be required (in a game where each weapon can have two attacks no less).

The big problem with XPM physics is that it can easily be cheated. It's fine to keep that as an option, but it really should not be default.

"Strafing" (by that you mean the Quake-world like movement) is abuse of a bug, and not a feature! And software can abuse the bug much better than any player ever will.

Agree! Bug != Feature

And strafe jumping is the weirdest, most convoluted and painful to execute thing ever on top of it.

Movement should be an art and not a science; making it a precise science takes away the fun and makes it a target for cheating artificial intelligence.


For a shooter as focused on movement as this, I'd recommend not making this a choice between the lesser of two evils-- laser spamming and exploiting physics bugs.

If more ways to move are needed, there's plenty of options to choose from, with sprinting and wall jumping being the only ones left that are known to mankind and not already integrated into the engine in some form or another.

Strafing is an art

Go to youtube, type in w3sp strafes, and watch an art

But on a serious note, strafing really is not that difficult once you know the basics, it took me a while to do also but now I absolutely love the freedom of the XPM movement, same as warsow/CPM movement, and ton's of people play those games. Anyway, rant over

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Oh and fair enough on the laser comment, your right people wouldn't be able to say it's less useful then just like what you said, they would just need to use it less, but for this to happen it would need to have a relatively high self-damage, which then would not allow people to wall climb much, so there's two ways we can try and test both, low force, less dmg, and nexuiz default settings + high/er self damage.

Flying_Squirrel get onto irc

Are these the physics on Fruitie's server? If so, I cannot say anything about weapons, but here is what I have to say about movement.

Good:
Movement is quite nice, easy to gain speed.

Bad:
Absolutely no vertical side-to-side air control. This is a serious flaw.
I really don't like the sticky mortar. It means that you can't just hit the wall or ground next to your opponent and have them take damage. If you and the majority are hell-bent on sticky grenades, to it with secondary, because nobody uses secondary anyway.
(It also seems you've removed the ability for others to detonate your rockets? I am also against this.)


Oh, and alternative to sticky mortar is sticky electro (which I have made with fruitie's code). Sticky electro is much more usable to rig doorways, can be triggered, and also is much more easily detected (you will not see sticky mortar easily unless map is pure white, you must be blind and deaf to not see glowing electro balls and hear the buzzing).

Movement should be an art and not a science; making it a precise science takes away the fun and makes it a target for cheating artificial intelligence.

How is holding forward more of an art than something that requires a little skill and dedication to master; strafing?

Holding forward = max accel makes me think of real life, where you sprint to get the max speed. Good games are often unrealistic, at least IMO

How is holding forward more of an art than something that requires a little skill and dedication to master; strafing?

It's not holding forward, its using forward, side to side and backward to intelligently evade your opponent while laying down fire and jumping over obstacles, finding routes and steering smoothly around corners while keeping your speed with hopping, finding and hitting just right ramp jumps to make a gap or launch yourself over an incoming projectile, using a quick wall jump for evasion or height, pulling off around corner or midair stunts with hook, flying just barely through a narrow opening using jetpack to escape a pursuer, mastering the physics of each vehicle and character class. . .

Movement can be so many fun, skillful, deep and intuitive things.

But making it pointlessly unintuitive and complicated to simply move forward using a 15 year old physics exploit is not one of them.

ID must of been doing something terribly wrong with there Quake series then..I mean they obviously only have a massive fan and playerbase for the games they made using that 'unintuitive and complicated' movement

Sorry I couldn't resist I will no longer speak on the matter though

Flying_steel have you had an opportunity to test the weapons out yet, and do you use IRC?

Yes, back on topic please, physics is another issue (even though it technically plays a very important part of balancing )

Strafing absolutely doesn't need to be in the default physics if people are against that. This would then be the second thing that differs from the defaults in the "promode" settings, first thing being the removal of the laser (in "promode").
That is, if balanceFruit.cfg gets approved.


Feedback so far has been quite positive, people tend to dislike the sticky nade idea at first but after playing a bit many eventually end up liking it. Also the long weapon switch delay after firing the nex seems to be disliked by some, but I would really like to keep it like this because:
- The nex was one of the top weapons in Nexuiz. Often especially duels ended up being a fight over the mortar, rocketlauncher and the nex (at least from my experience). It could use some nerfing, and I feel this is the best way of doing it.
- Nex was the #1 weapon for combos, high damage, yet you could switch away from it instantly even if you missed. So there was no real "risk" in firing it, you could just happily try your luck and switch to another weapon if you miss. Now it's a little more important to think before you act, and especially in close range fights you want to make sure you hit, or just use another weapon instead... There, missing with the Nex can be devastating! In mid-longer range fights it doesn't make any big difference.

Oh and I've increased the usefulness of the electro combo by making the radius for setting off blobs a bit higher, and speed slightly lower to make aiming a bit easier (range of lightning is only 800 units anyway, so no point in being able to shoot blobs beyond this distance). Hoping to also make it possible to set them off in midair, that would be cool

- The nex was one of the top weapons in Nexuiz. Often especially duels ended up being a fight over the mortar, rocketlauncher and the nex (at least from my experience). It could use some nerfing, and I feel this is the best way of doing it.
- Nex was the #1 weapon for combos, high damage, yet you could switch away from it instantly even if you missed. So there was no real "risk" in firing it, you could just happily try your luck and switch to another weapon if you miss. Now it's a little more important to think before you act, and especially in close range fights you want to make sure you hit, or just use another weapon instead... There, missing with the Nex can be devastating! In mid-longer range fights it doesn't make any big difference.

You could increase nex reload.

Also, I've been suggesting removing the weapon switch delay totally. My arguments for this:

- The weapon switch delay inhibits the use of combos. When you fire one weapon, you can't switch to your next weapon to continue the combo. In some cases, the opponent can easily get out of your control.

- The weapon switch delay is what causes the "gun jamming" frequently complained about on some servers. For those not familiar with the phenomenon, gun jamming is when you fire a weapon, then switch to another weapon and *while the weapons are switching* you try to fire - this causes no shot to be fired and makes it seem like the gun is jamming. What is really happening is that you are missing an opportunity to get a hit.

Oh and I've increased the usefulness of the electro combo by making the radius for setting off blobs a bit higher, and speed slightly lower to make aiming a bit easier (range of lightning is only 800 units anyway, so no point in being able to shoot blobs beyond this distance). Hoping to also make it possible to set them off in midair, that would be cool

Electro balls can be triggered by almost anything, not just the electro. I wouldn't touch the ball throwing distance. I also think that stickiness is all they need to be more useful.