No Punishment For Slight Adjustments In 0g

[PrettzL]

Getting around in 0g is very difficult without near perfect use of grapple.

I would like to see adjusting your forward momentum left right up and downward to not kill your speed so much, especially not while using a grapple.

[Ilses]

For the most part, you don't need near-perfect use of grapple -- you just need to be using it at almost all times.

To clarify, you can make large corrections as long as you are (1) your grapple is latched, (2) you are using the grapple's right-click, and (3) your course corrections aren't more than 120 degrees or so from the direction of the latch point.

That said, course corrections without doing this will eat up a lot of your speed.

There are probably a few ways to make it easier to maneuver:

• Easier grapple use
  • Faster grapple latch movement
  • Faster weapon switch to/from grapple
• Other movement:
  • Faster weapon switch to/from TB
  • Faster weapon switch to/from RL, or stronger rocket inheritance
  • Slower speed loss when applying impulse in a direction other than that of your velocity
  • Another movement option with less penalty -- e.g., holding shift could activate 0g-thrusters that allow stronger course corrections, but cause soft damage while active

[JustinPierce]

Would this be a problem?

[PrettzL]

That looks amazing...

[JustinPierce]

Think I'm getting close to something nice by using acceleration curves to allow me to tune low speeds vs high speeds and forward thrust vs side thrusts.

edit: with music: http://webmup.com/2cdb3/ (I also posted this to twitter)

[Ilses]

Those course corrections are much more drastic than what I had in mind, but I like this development direction a lot -- it's how I expect thrust in 0g to work. Although, you might need to add more outdoor obstacles to compensate

Regardless, the next playtest is bound to be an interesting one XD

[JustinPierce]

Those course corrections are much more drastic than what I had in mind

Yeah that was just with the default thrust values -- I toned it down a little bit. Going at an extreme angle to do sharper turns was more fun than I expected though, so I wanted to keep some of that -- feels like you're drifting in a car or something, except zero g. We'll see how it affects gunplay, but I'm pretty confident we'll keep this direction for zero g movement.

[Ilses]

I think the extreme angles will end up being really fun to watch

As of now I can only speculate as to whether drifting will displace outdoor grappling, or whether the two would have cool uses in tandem... I imagine you can't aim a gun while drifting, at least at high speeds and extreme angles, so if you could attack while grappling (e.g. an always-active sentinel beam that doesn't lock-out soft damage) then the grapple would still have an outdoor niche (and chasing would be a bit easier).... though I'm straying into feature request territory.

As always, I'd have to play with it first

[JustinPierce]

I've tried to tune it so that the grapple is still necessary (for example, the sharp turns through the second flag stand still need a grapple when doing the race challenge), though I had already planned on buffing the grapple anyway so you can expect it to become more useful in the future.

[PrettzL]

Does this mean that holding forward while in 0g accelerates the player in the direction they are looking?

Or will it be up to using the grapple to accelerate after the changes are done to it?

[JustinPierce]

At this point, simply holding forward still won't get you to high speeds. Boost/spider jump/grapple still used to get up to speed.

[JustinPierce]