Re: bloodstorm
What I've already said for one. Not viewing the game as a complete system and just randomly changing things with no consideration of how it fits everything else. The bridge tile sounds like a washing machine lid or something like that. I've walked on metal bridges before and I've never heard one that sounds like that. The tiles could stand to be normalized to a common gain and downmixed to mono. The revolver sounds ridiculous, like a defective fidget spinner on the draw sound and like some sort of weird synthesis of what a gun should sound like. The reload sound is just not realistic at all. I had to ask for a week why the axe hit sound wasn't playing, finally I found out yesterday that the file wasn't named correctly. Like, that would have taken less than 5 seconds to fix, and while I get that you're not going to release a client update just for that, I don't see why I had to ask most every day for near a week either.
Weapon draw sounds don't match their timers, so the sound will stop but you still can't fire. The most egregious example I can think of is the minigun.
Finally, most of what you guys do is stuff you don't even want to do but that needs doing, so you only do it when enough people bitch, but then it's half-assed, and needs tweaking across several server updates to be right. It's because of this that the game's not balanced at all. A time bomb only doing in the low hundreds of damage? It's a damn bomb, it should do minimum 750 and max 1500. To make up for that huge potential of damage, you can't spam it. Mines, I've said it time and again and again and again and again and again, you shouldn't be allowed to stack mines on top of someone else, or on top of each other. It's not fair. I've had it done to me and have done it to others and either way you slice it, it's not fair. I think mines should take like 3 seconds to place, and while you're doing that, you can't do anything else. They should have an associated placing sound and you're vulnerable the whole time until you can move again. You should also not be allowed to mine within 5 tiles of a travel point. Same with time bombs, but maybe like 1 second.
The cannon is fucked, because ever since that update where we can't walk with it anymore, we can't even turn. That's just ridiculous and low-effort in my opinion.It's a cannon, it should turn, that's kind of what they do, they pivot and tilt. If a cannon can't turn, it's pretty well useless unless your enemy just happens to be where it's aiming at.
There's a bug in the weapon class selection where if you change classes, but hit the same number of the weapon that was already selected in the previous class, the change will not be made, and you'll first have to select another number, then go back to the previous one. I should have kept my mouth shut about weapon classes. I take responsibility for this because I never should have said anything. It wasn't implemented correctly, again, a low-effort, half-assed job.
Let's talk about robots. What makes robots magically able to hit a player in the air even though nothing else in the game can unless it jumps or climbs to match the same Y level as the player. Why is their vertical range so great that even on top of the bridge, they can hit you from underneath it. I get simulating the ability to aim, but then actually make the robot stop moving and aim. I'll get back to robots in a minute when I talk about optimizations that could be made to reduce lag. And when I say optimizations, I mean real ones, not fake low-effort stuff like removing the cannon loop sound, which was stupid and which was actually useful. Let's face it, any lag that sound eliminated - which isn't going to be much - was just taken up by that lion pit.
Hand grenades aren't fair either. As much as I love to spam them at people for easy kills, it's not fair to them to have it done that way. Instead of having the grenades do a measly amount of damage, ramp up the damage but increase the time to throw. Remember, to throw a grenade, you first must pull out and drop or throw the pin, then wind up, aim, and lob the grenade. Those grenade sounds are choppable and can be made to work in any configuration, so audio isn't the issue there. Again, ramp up the damage, these are fragmentation grenades. The explosion isn't what kills you, it's the shrapnel that goes in every direction from that explosion point. They are designed to go through your skin and pierce your organs.
I've heard talk on and off about what to do about shield replacement. I feel this is something that needs addressed because I don't like having to find an animal or something to try to break my shield when I only have a few hundred HP left, but I know it's not going to hold up in a fight. I think you should be able to forfeit a shield, be penalized the 30 seconds, but then be able to replace it with a new one. Oh, and while we're on that topic, why doesn't the shield timer reset on death? Why are we still impacted by a previous shield replacement penalty if, we, die? I bet that's also an easy fix.
Onto antibiotics. Why are so many things in the game left to random chance, and why is the low end of that scale so very low? We're talking about a good antibiotic healing 500 or so, and a bad one doing maybe 100. It's just an unnecessary annoyance that they don't heal a decent amount at once, or that the lo end of what they do is so very low. We're already penalized so we can't spam them, so why feel the need to charge us an extra cycle. I would love it if they healed more but spawned less on the map as compensation.
Now about optimization. The biggest thing that I can think of is that everything that can move doesn't need to move each time through the main loop. You see this as nothing ever sits still except for thugs, and even when they're sitting still, they're mostly firing the entire time. Now, I will say that at least thugs seem to not fire when they're out of range, and start when you come closer. We've got lions, monkeys, thugs, robots, sharks, and uh, am I missing anything? All of those things seem to be moving each time through the loop and it's just unnecessary and creates overhead. Also, I'm just speculating, but if there are no players within say, 200 tiles of an animal, that animal does not need to be moving, or at least, it could go into a wandering state where it moves every 400ms rather than every 150, and also moves like 30 tiles and stands for a second or two. They could become more active when players come near, and if a player makes them mad, then they could go onto full chase mode. Animals on maps where there are no players on the map need not do anything, or even be spawned. This could easily be taken care of every 5 minutes or so to despawn any animals that aren't needed.
Weapons that allow you to hold space should be changed to not allow this, as this behavior seems to lag the server immensely. As far as I know, this is limited to the laser machine gun and the minigun. As far as I know, no weapons exist that have ranges more than say, 130 tiles. so, if a player is shooting, it could still make the sound for effect, but the server could be smart enough to not instantiate a bullet object into the world, because no matter if a player was along the bullet's path, the bullet would not hit because the player is too far away. Again, the bullet speed for all weapons should go up to reduce the number of stray bullets in the world. Bullets are still ridiculously slow. Though at some point, there'll be a time at which the server will need to communicate too quickly to each client and you'll start losing efficiency again.
Anyway, that's all I can come up with for now, but it is a fairly long list, let's see how much of it never gets touched, shall we?
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