Steady and I have been testing some new ideas for a battle mode in Rail Racer where you can shoot weapons at your opponents, drop mines, fire missiles, raise shields and the like. Kind of a dogfight on the track. I am convinced this can be done properly now, and I'm looking from feedback from fellow racers on the idea. Here is what I have roughly outlined so far along with Steady's help: Once you go into battle mode with the caps lock key, the keys on the left side of the keyboard change function. If you are behind an opponent you can fire a phaser at them with the spacebar, but you must match their lean angle first. Your Rail Racer battle system will indicate to you if your opponent is right or left of you, as well as when you are in range both in distance and angle. Right now, I have it set up so you can only fire at a player ahead of you, but it could be designed so the racer has rear mounted phasers as well. If you are being pursued, you can drop a mine which will be locked to your current target player only, so other players don't have to worry about jumping over it. To clear the mine, you must achieve an altitude of at least 10 feet when you pass over it. Currently this is all I have programmed into the system as a test, but there are many more possibilities. We could have shields that deflect phaser fire at a cost to speed, or perhaps you only have a certain amount of shield energy to use. Also, we could have stinger missiles that can be locked onto your target, with accompanying chaff to throw the stinger off if it is released in time. Also, I would like to include power ups in battle mode, roughly what I am considering now is a energy trap that lies on the rail, with a power up hovering above it. You must jump the trap, but to get the power up you would have to be a certain altitude above it as you fly over, say 20 to 30 feet when you are at the point of the power up. Another possibility here is the ability to select your power up based on your lean. For example, if you are leaned 90 degrees to the right when you hit the power up point, you may get extra shield energy. Or if at zero degrees you may pick up another nitro, etc. We may have to limit the number of players on any given track, as battling with 10 people at once will get quite chaotic, but further testing will reveal if this is an issue or not. Also, due to the complexity of the battle system, the track designs will have to be quite different overall. Based on testing with steady with the limited battle system we can already tell that having lots of curves is going to make things very hard to balance. To this end I am going to reprogram the track editor into a new variant that will allow battle tracks to be created. These tracks would include inclines to the rail so you could be going up and down hill with respective changes to acceleration and top speed. Of course there would still be curves, but they would need to be strategically placed and designed. Also, the power up traps would be included along with anything else Team Rail Racer comes up with. If you have an interest in playing Rail Racer, You are a member of Team Rail Racer by the way, grin. I want to get the feedback of players to these ideas, so I can build the best and most fun system possible for all of us. Racing online has been a blast, and I think this will definately take it to the next level, pulling in people that aren't necessarily into the racing thing. So here are a few questions I'd like input on: 1. Should there be a points system to determine the overall winner of a contest? For example once you get hit 10 times, you are out of the competition with the last person standing being the victor. Alternatively, damage could be taken with each absorbed shot, until your racer is destroyed, losing speed along the way. Any other ideas here welcome. 2. What do you think about the power ups idea, is there a better way to do it than what I have outlined? 3. What kind of weapons would you like to see in the game, additionally what kinds of defensive systems, shields etc? 4. Should some sort of bonus be given for overtaking an opponent? We want to keep the aspect of speed intact here as well as the fighting. Feel free to write back to the list or to me directly at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] I will be using beta testers for battle racer from a list of players that own the game I have already selected, and I may give a wider call out for testers when the project is a little further down the rail. Thanks for reading all this, and I look forward to your input, I think this is going to be another really cool game for us all to take part in. Again thanks to Steady for his time and ideas with this, besides being probably our best racer, he is quite a guy. Later, Che
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