Re: [Help-liquidwar6] Some random thoughts

[Christian Mauduit]

On Fri, January 8, 2010 1:13 am, Kasper Hviid wrote:
> 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.
2 workarrounds:

- in style.xml, set "background-style" to "void"
- in config.xml, set "display-background" to "false"

> 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.
mmm, I tend to disagree. This might be the case in a given mode which is
"non-streched map" in a 2D context, but it's not always the case (think
about zooming, unzooming, technical hud which might reserve some space). I
would tend not to fiddle too much with window size from the program
itself. If one plays windowed, the window is resizable, period.

> 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 suspect this is because 1) there's a slight lag between the actual move
of the cursor and its move on the screen and 2) LW6 calculates moves in on
thread and displays in another, the result is that sometimes it moves
twice before being displayed and sometimes it can display twice the same
position.

> 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.
Probably, too. Third reason.

> 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.
This is a very interesting idea. As I understand it we would give some
"inerty" to fighters, and this would automatically smooth things. I'll
seriously think about that one (but it's a serious hack).

> 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.
mmm, I should look if SDL supports several mouses. I suspect it does, but
would need to check.

> 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?
Well, in deathmatch, it also makes sense IMHO, since you have to stop at
one point and say "OK this is over let's count points". The other
alternative would be to wait until one has a given frag count but this is
somewhat weird since LW counts "negative frags" (indeed, it's very hard to
know *who* killed someone when it's trivial to know who died).

Have a nice day,

Christian.

-- 
Christian Mauduit <address@hidden> - http://deca.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     (__/      \/