I thought about minigames (look at this topic) and I got a good idea but it's not related to building. The most fun thing about jeep is drifting (press W and A or W and D so You circle around in place). Sadly, Empires allow jeep to drift for about 270 degrees and then it stops, so it's not that fun as it could be. The other thing is that jeeps are hard to steer (I play for a while but still I keep ramming walls when I drive). My idea for a minigame is to enable drifting and make jeep gain get grip bonus after a while of drifting. Race cars really drift just before the race to warm up tires (or they warm tires up and keep in a thermos and put it on car seconds before race begins). However, We don't want to see a whole server of players that drift for fun for hours. So there should be a slider (like the stamina one and buildingone and health one and most important the engine temperature one) that has zones like (sorry for ascii drawing): this is the way it starts: ========|======================== If You stand on water or snow, tires cool down and You slide even more than normally. ==|============================== Ever compared riding car/bike over dry concrete and snow or ice? The former is easy, the latter is freaking hard and dangerous. If You drift Your jeep, the slider begins to go right (it has to do it pretty fast so if You don't keep attention You will overheat Your tires). Dependent on the length of drifting You may: drift too short: ===============|================= You just wasted some time, nothing unusual happens to the jeep steering. drift perfectly: ==================|============== Your tires have a perfect temperature, You get a steering bonus that lasts until Your tires cool down (20s? 30s?). When tires cool down, You can drift again drift too long: =====================|=========== You overheated Your tires, You get a grip penalty and it's harder to drive than if You didn't try to drift at all and just drove away from the base. Alternatively Your jeep may jam or Your tire can blow or whatever. Or tire-cooler may turn on with a sound of vaccum cleaner + it would decrease Your speed because cooler uses Your engine (cooler can produce heat). Anyway, You don't want to overheat Your tires. That makes You NOT want to spend half of the game drifting in base. If it's possible to code, the slider should go right faster on hard surface (concrete, street) and slower on dirt, snow, beach, grass etc. If You walk on a surface, sound differs, so the engine must somehow know what's the surface made of. NF's jeep has bigger tires so its slider speed should be slower, so You must drift longer than with the BE jeep (that has small tires that are easier to warm up). However, NF's jeep should have a longer grip bonus to compensate (larger tires cool down slower, they have larger heat capacity). Slider speed could be like = (drifting_length*surface_factor)^2, so in the begining of drifting slider goes very slow, but it increases it's speed very fast. It will take some practice to learn how to drift to get a bonus. It's easier to drift perfectly on a beach than on concrete, but it takes more time. I remind: You can ignore the drifting feature and drive Your jeep like You did before. Someone could ask why there is no yellow field between green one and red one. That is to make drifting more risky about overheating. Perhaps the speed formula will make speed at the green zone so high that the yellow field between perfect green and overheat red will be required.
Then we'd need to code in Dynamic Motion Sickness and Ragdoll Vomit Physics. Its just not worth it to spin in place and piss off both teams at once.
We don't want people to ONLY have fun. We also want them to play the rest of Empires, not only the jeep minigame. If there would be no limit on drifting minigame, You would notice after an hour of playing, that many people so much like to have fun with their "little jeep" :p that they don't care about Res nodes, enemy tanks, flags, and stuff like that. That is not my intention. Limiting drifting seems to be necessary, but it's implementation-dependent. We always can make emp_sv_jeep_drifting_limit (on|off) for "all those fun servers"
this is an interesting idea... I gotta say I like the origionality and it certainly would be fun. But theres a couple gripes i have with it.... This is a war game, and past jeep races does it serve much purpose? Krenzo have very limited coding time. this sounds like a very very difficult think to implement: hud icon, changes to vehicle code, check for bugs. Is this suggestion actually going to be fun past the first couple of times that you do it? does it fit the atmosphere? -------------- I honestly think that as fun as it would be at the start, there are suggestions that make the game better and more exciting in the long run. mebbe it's just me.
Well, it increases Your grip, so if You want Your grip increased, You will use it every time when You drive a jeep. I personally think it fits and You don't seem to be certain that it doesn't fit Hud sliders are already implemented, checking for bugs has to be made on all changes to the code (even if You only remove something) so it doesn't count. It involves changing the code like every suggestion and I would say it's a moderate change, compared to other suggestions. I must agree that there are some other suggestions, that: are easier to implement than jeep drifting minigame would improove game more than jeep drifting minigame So I will store the suggestion into "organize stuff" topic as it's a good idea and when We will have more developers or when some developer will see it and flag it as a must, he will just implement it. Otherwise, it can just wait forever, documented. If anyone sees any pros or cons, this is a good time to reply. I'll post it all to "organize stuff" tomorow.
Cons: Makes jeeps even more annoying for people who actually like to play Empires. Adds nothing whatsoever to the gameplay. Most pointless suggestion ever. There is one coder, and I doubt he would even consider it. Most pointless suggestion ever.
