Re: [Help-liquidwar6] Some Liquid War 6 news

[Christian Mauduit]

Hi,

> From what I understand, team-profile-[color]-[effect] will be defined
> in rules.xml of the map. This could be used to  by fine-tuning each
> map to give a specific single-player challenge. Each rules.xml could
> also have a value to define the number of bots and their color-teams
> in standard single-player.
Well, rules.xml, but not only. As usual, LW6 has this "you can define it
anywhere" approach. As far as *rules* are concerned, you get three way to set
them:
- through an environment variable "LW6_BOOST_POWER"
- with the config file setting "boost-power" in your config.xml
- through the interface, which is pretty much the same as editing config.xml
except it's sort of more user friendly, however this is only available for a
very small subset of paramters
- by specifying the argument when lauching the game, ie "liquidwar6
--boost-power=3"

It's my (strong) belief that:

a) most of the time, using defaults should be fine, we should work so that
defaults are cool, but the "you-can-tune-whatever-you-want" must be a plus for
the game, not a configuration nightmare until you get something fun

b) should there be a place to fiddle with "a few" options, then rules.xml is a
good place for it gives the opportunity to expose the various game settings in
configuration game/level (you/me) consider being interesting.

> However, if each teamcolor should have a fixed characteristica (great
> idea), shouldn't their settings be defined somewhere globally, instead
> of in each levels rules.xml?
So to answer your question, yes, you're right, the "best practice" is probably
to set up a nice player configuration in the default setup, and keep it
defaults most of the time. The strongest point being IMHO that it's nice to
have yellow behave always the same, if not, it would be confusing. However you
could imagine that on this very special map, the yellow "boost" or whatever
its characteristics is, is pushed to its limit.

And anyway it's nice to be able to re-mod the game, you never know, someone
might come up with something revamped & super cool.

Now, it "some upcoming version" (maybe not 0.0.11beta) I plan to add YET
ANOTHER CONFIG FILE (no kidding!). It could be something like an
"episode.xml". Let me explain: the idea would be to chain levels, and possibly
override defaults in them. This is typically for solo game. The idea would be
to set up configurations with various bots, game settings, trying to increase
difficulty, and let players do this, so that you're naturally challenged with
more & more difficult levels. The current "pure arcade mode" of LW6 makes it a
nice toy but probably not a real game. Also I idea I have would be to "lock"
(well, not too hard) the game with only 6 colors, and require some sort of
achievements to use the next 4 colors and their associated power ups.

BTW if you look at the latest changelog:

http://ufoot.org/liquidwar/v6/snapshots/20110811snapshot/ChangeLog.txt

you'll find out I'm sort of... coding like mad ;)

> When deciding the global team-colors characteristica, similar colors
> could be given similar properties. For instance, cold colors (colors
> with low wavelength) could be slower.
Yeah, for sure. I admit my creativity sort of stumbles on this, we have 10
colors, 10 special actions, 10 "profiles" we can imagine. Ideally, we should
come to a basic concept/character for each color, even scenarize it (remember
the fanfic
http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/manual/html_node/Fanfic.html#Fanfic)

> The "special actions" could also be designed as powerups which appears
> randomly, and is used by whoever touches it first with his cursor.
> This won't be as tactical, but will add some cheap fun to the game.
Yeah, I thought of this one. But finally when for the "charge then fire"
approach. In the current state (this does work) there's a charge time, about
30 seconds, and during this time you can't fire. Then you're full, and your
cursor starts to pulse, as well as your "gauge". Charge is faster if you're
numerous on the map so there's very few chance that teams are charged at the
same time, rather, the current winner will be able to fire first. Then you can
fire, when you fire, charge gets back to 0. Waiting until after the point you
were jut charged makes your attack stronger, for instance if you wait 45
seconds your "special action" could last 4.5 seconds, whereas only 3 seconds
after 3 seconds. There's a limit to this charge, after some time, it's useless
to wait. I didn't play it yet for the special actions themselves are not coded
yet, only the charge/fire mecanism is implemented, but I hope to have feedback
on this pretty soon. Very probably, as soon as special actions are coded, I'll
release, whatever the rest of the (network... network...) code state is, so
that you can try these out and possibly help on the "color characters".

> I hope to get the time to do some more levels - I had some ideas I
> never got finished.
Cool ;)

To come back to the previous subject on level design and solo game, I really
plan to simplify the interface, possibly taking back some parameters from it,
and setting up "fiddling with XML files" the norm to experiment weird
settings. I myself do not enjoy and never use these menus anyway, it's too
complicated, we'd rather make a super-cool 10-levels sequence/episode where
you play all colors and discover most of the game features with various
settings, then let people choose maps for network games and customize them
with XML if they need.

Most casual users will just play the game "vanilla", if it's cool & fun that
way they'll give it a try, if not noone will bother entering cryptic menus.
LW6 did IMHO a nice leap forward being less tricky than LW5, but we can even
go further I think.

Have a nice day,

Christian.

-- 
Christian Mauduit <address@hidden> - http://www.ufoot.org  ___ __/\__
Liquid War 6 - http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6      / _")\~ \~/
"Les amis de la vérité sont ceux qui la cherchent et non _/ /   /_ o_\
ceux qui se vantent de l'avoir trouvée" - Condorcet     (__/      \/