coding black magic
Back to news for coding geeks. I made 2 interesting things this week. It would seem like black magic to me a year ago but now I have uber c++ skills.
Posts from September 2010
Excerpt from the “Minimanual of Urban Guerilla”
The urban guerrilla’s weapons are light arms, easily obtained, usually captured from the enemy, purchased, or made on the spot. In general, light weapons are characterized as being short-barrelled. This includes many automatic weapons. Experience has shown that the basic weapon of the urban guerrilla is the light submachine gun. The urban guerrilla should not attempt to base his actions on the use of heavy weapons, To prevent his own death, the urban guerrilla must shoot first, and he cannot err in his shot.
1. He must take the enemy by surprise.
2. He must know the terrain of the encounter.
3. He must have greater mobility and speed than the police and other repressive forces.
4. His information service must be better than the enemy’s
IED
I’m making an IED (Improvised Explosive Device), which can be thrown like a grenade but works only with special attachments. These are easy to add with the attachment system I built. The IED attachments list is currently:
– timer (timing detonator, when this is attached it can work like a normal grenade)
– shrapnel (add shrapnel to the explosive damaging other players; these will be specified even more with damage particles like nails, petrol etc.)
– sticky (glue that makes the IED stick to any surface)
– bouncy (makes it jump like a jelly bean)
– proximity (human proximity detector)
– laser tripwire
– camo (camouflage the explosive so it isn’t easily visible)
– boobytrap (disguise the explosive as a different item, for example ammo clip)
– devicetrap (mounted inside switches and terminals; when a player uses it, the explosive goes off)
– remote detonator (used with remote control; this will work like pipe bombs in Duke Nukem)
– smoke (emits smoke after thrown)
– armor (additional layer of armor which prevents the explosive from being detonated by shooting at)
– kinetic (explodes after contact; with ground, wall or human)
I think one IED can have 3 attachments max.
Mutant firing a pistol
Sneak peak at the sprite work in Link-Dead
Thoughts on pre-alpha
More testing revealed more critical bugs. Since I know them I have to fix them instead of releasing a test. Another thing is I can see more clearly now that this game makes little sense in deathmatch and teammatch modes. The emphasis on tactics boils the game down to hiding if you have a weaker weapon and camping if you have a stronger one. Fortunately I did see this when I was designing the gameplay and I already defined the gameplay back when we were working on the weapon sprites with Victor Rojo. The solution is to diversify the teams. Right now I just made weapons for one team and they both use them. This only makes sense in Soldat but not in LD. The teams should be as different as possible.
So one team, called now the Ubermen, has access to all sorts of medium and heavy, gun powder, electro-magnetic and rocket weapons. It is generally an offensive team. The second team, called now the Mutant Men or the Undermen (haven’t decided yet) living underground, are a defensive team. This is congruent with the Link-Dead storyline. The mutants make use only of guerilla tactics. I actually read the Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla to define this team. So, they will only make use of very small guns and rely mostly on covert ops, explosives and traps. Thinking of this makes me very excited and I can’t wait to add some pipe bombs.
In the upcoming days I will squashing the bugs and adding the guerilla weapons.