[Help-liquidwar6] Some random thoughts

[Kasper Hviid]

THE AREA OUTSIDE THE MAP

Seing my 4:3 levels displayed on my laptops 16:9 screen has irritated me a bit more than other 4:3 games I have played on my laptop. I think I have figured out the reason.

While most game shows a black color outside the game area, Liquid Wars maps are seen on top of a 2½D parallax-scrooling background. Since the animated 2½D background has a higher level of realism than the non-animated 2D map, the levels illusion is broken: It looks exactly like a jpeg-file flowing underwater. Also, movement attracts the eye naturally. I think a black background would work better. More like, "there's nothing here".

WINDOW MODE

How about that when in window mode, the game-window keeps the natural aspect ratio of the level? It don't makes much sense to let the window be wider or highter than the map.

LW6 MOVEMENT

When I play LW5, the movement seems to be more smooth than LW6. I can't exactly point at the difference, but it is like the movement of LW6 seems more jagged somehow.

I think it is because of the difference between arrow key movement and mouse movement. In LW5, the cursor and the liquid had almost the same speed, which caused them to move along together. In LW6, the cursor can be anywhere on the screen in less than a second. The jumpy movement of the mouse is transfered to the fighters movement.

Maybe we could smooth out the movement of the fighters. So maybe they cannot make a straight U-turn, but will have to slow down, maybe slowly change direction, then speed up. The theory is that if each fighter acts in the spirits of the laws of physics, the whole flock will move in a more natural fashion.

INPUT DEVICES

Personly I have 5 available input devices: The mouse, the touchpad on my laptop, my cintiq and my old wacom. Would it be somewhat possible to assign each device to a different cursor in lw6? It could be practial for local multiplayer.

THE TIMER

What is the purpose of the timer? I think of it as some kind of a natural emergency brake, to stop fights which has been going on for too long. Some kind of deadline for the fight. Also, it can give a fight a bit of an edge. However, this is only the case in one-life matches. In deathmatch mode, it should either be off, or represent how long we want to play before we declare a winner. Perhaps there should both be a deathmatch and a one-life timer?