New Chaos vehicle suggestions and discussion

All about Chaos for Unreal... (UT3, UT2004, UT2003, UT)
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-Penfold-
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New Chaos vehicle suggestions and discussion

Post by -Penfold- »

I don't know exactly how focused the Chaos team is on vehicles, but I'd like to add some suggestions, as well as hear some that will likely follow.

The first one I'd like to see most the most, but I think the others are decent as well.



1) A cargo aircraft that can carry several teammates or if only carrying the pilot, can pick up a goliath, leviathan, or hellbender. Dropping vehicles from excessive heights or at excessive speeds would have to result in damage or destruction to the vehicle, if it doesn't natively do so. Perhaps even have it carry a full load of teammates in its hull as well as being able to carry a vehicle. Carried vehicles could (hopefully) be manned, or perhaps unmanned to spare coding headaches. Certain or all vehicle weapons would be disabled during flight. An upscaled and widened human space fighter could probably serve as the mesh if need be. In order to maintain balance it wouldn't have any substatial weapons, if any weapons at all. It could fly like the manta (though slower and less maneuverable) but higher above the ground, perhaps, crouch button to lower to grab vehicles or for crew loading (this would be dangerous at high speed as rubbing the ground would be less forginving damage wise to the cargo craft and/or attached vehicle than the manta). Jump button would be for a temporary burst to clear steap slopes, left click would be to attach a vehicle, right click would be to unattach the vehicle.

For the sake of balance, it could not be repaired, to further limit it's use, and make for a less often and more unexpected surprise attack. It would not spawn very often at all, and should probably only be placed to spawn from a base. It should also have a massive explosion that would damage a vehicle if nearby, and destroy any vehicle if it were still attached.



2) a modified (additional, not substitution) manta that would carry a goliath like cannon. (though somewhat weaker). As the cannon would be heavy, the manta would not be as maneuverable (mostly it wouldn't rotate as fast). Also, the recoil would violently hurl the manta backwards. As a safety mechanism for the vehicle, the cannon could not be fired while the vehicle had any backwards velocity. This combined with a slower acceleration and turn radius would naturally greatly limit the vehicle's rate of fire to much less than that of the golaith.

Ground rubbing damage should be amplified to have negative consequences for shot from a badly chosen location. Vehicle hit points may need to be lowered for balance if the slow rate of fire isn't enough. Increased ground damage and lessened manuverabilty should make it so road rage kills are much less frequent (as it would be easier to get out of the way) and further balance the vehicles overall offensive capabilties.



3) Motorcycle: primary use: to get around FAST (fastest vehicle). Weapon: none. Driver must brake to within a certain speed before dismount. Ramming into an object at hight speeds will detroy the bike and the driver (thus no killing sprees because no one has low enough ping to take out the high speed bike). Hit points would be low, but not too fragile.

Primary fire: Nitrus boost (very slow rate of fire, very fast boost)
Secondary fire: Sharp turn (only effective at slow speeds)
Without secondary fire pressed, turns are very slight due to the high speeds.



4) The MHARS, (pronounced mars) or Mobile Healing and Resupply Scorpion. It fires weapons with small amounts of ammo. Will replicate and fire a short distance whatever weapon _pickup_ (not projectile) (certain weapons cannot be replicated though of course, like redeemer, etc) was equipped by player during vehicle entry. Contact of weaponpickup by any player will of course add to that players inventory.

Friendly-fire-link gunning the vehicle will NOT heal the vehicle, but rather the person linking to it. This will actually damage... er... deprive the vehicles energy core as will replication of each weapon fired. Left clicking launches weapon-pickup, right clicking honks horn (should sound different than other horns) Slow rate of fire. As the vehicle cannot be healed and is damaged each time it produces a weapon or heals someone it is of course, limited in its resupply/healing capacity and cannot be used indefinately. Exausting the vehicles energy will cause it to explode, so the driver should be carefull to bail out when it is low on energy, especially if someone is healing themselves. :) Does not come equipped with blades as it is designed to be driven next to teamates. Nor does it come with an offensive weapon. Enemy link-gunning the vehicle would damage it as normal. Hijacking the vehicle will make it heal the team of the driver. Cannot heal unless a driver is in the car (to prevent a driver from selfishly taking it for his solitary healing use).



If you like any of these ideas, please let it be known as sort of a vote for the Choas team to take note of. If you don't like them please state why and suggest what could be done to better acheive balance. And please post any of your vehicle own ideas.
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Isotope
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Post by Isotope »

If I may add on...

The exo-suit. A large humanoid robotic skeleton. Hop in one to wield a super-sized version of a chaos weapon, alternate fire could be the other arm's weapon, maybe a large sword. The whole thing acts just like a player, can jump, crouch, but cant do any of the dodge moves. It moves only slightly faster than a player. The pilot is exposed, and sits in the middle.

I dont know how feasible legged vehicles are, though.
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-Penfold-
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Post by -Penfold- »

Hmm... It'd probably be easier to increase the draw scale of the player and of the weapon. Have sheilds be the temporary "vehicle" health, and if the person doesn't "hop out" of the "vehicle" before the sheilds go to zero, the person blows up, no matter what his health was. When the person "hops out", the person will return to normal size and a duplicate large dummy mesh will fall to the ground, being the "vehicle".

Headshots and appendage shots would do the least damage and torso shots (assuming the "driver" is inside the chest) would do the most damage.

Dodging would be disabled but of course as you'd be huge and you'd be especially easy to hit, ofsetting nicely a more powerful weapon. Speed probably shouldn't be two-fold, perhaps 1.5x though, or it might be too powerful.

Increasing the player speed while changing the animation to walk would probably make the ground move well synced under the feet, while still increaseing overall speed.

I'm no modder like the members of the Chaos team though. I'm interested to hear how they might impliment it.

Thanks for the idea! :)
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Isotope
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Post by Isotope »

That was sort of my original idea, but I might as well make a wild guess, and paint the prettiest picture I can.

Oh, I like the motorcycle idea, maybe a sidecar is in order, where the passenger uses whatever weapons he's carrying?
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Post by FurrySound »

We are most definitely 'working' on some vehicles and welcome any ideas, input, etc... but at this time we are first working on completing some items that are under development (including conversion of ut2k3 chaos code to ut2k4) and getting some good game play time in to get a feel for the new setups/vehicles/gametypes/etc...
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WH00T
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Chaos Bike

Post by WH00T »

Ya, I brought up the idea of a Chaos HoverBike earlier. I think it was a generally liked idea, but we could never agree on what weapons it would have :P . I think it'd be cool to have a speedboost for primary fire and mabey like a jump or wheelie for alt. fire. Not to mention Big honkin' blades all over it that you could drag the dead bodies of weaklings around on :twisted:. It would be faster than the hoverboard but couldn't go over water and would do more damage to the driver if he crashed.

EDIT:How about just have the exo-suit let you use two weapons, one in each hand?
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Post by jb »

Hey these are not bad ideas at all!
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Kaboodles
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Post by Kaboodles »

Hmmm...

How about a Chaos Hoverbike that flies like one of the space fighters in AS-Mothership. The Hoverbike should be very weak and very fast, and any direct collision with anything other than a player should destroy the thing. I like these weapons:

Primary fire: either plasma blasters or booster thingy, don't really care

Alt-fire: Electro-Lance thingy. Hold alt-fire to charge up the lance and go into "lance mode." In lance mode, you lean to the right on your bike holding the lance and aim the lance with the mouse. Contact with a player causes him/her/it to explode into a million pieces. Contact with a vehicle damages the vehicle and messes up its controls for a few seconds.

How about a new racing gametype for this hoverbike? That would be fun.

And I like the flying transport idea. I was thinking of putting a few minigun turrets on it, so that it would not be too vulnerable. And the mecha exo-suit thing is neat too, but I think there is already an exo-suit mod somewhere for UT2K3. It had a suit with dual Miniguns and a suit with dual Rocket Launchers.

Well, that's all I have to add, for now...
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Post by Kaboodles »

Ooh! Another Idea!

How about an option to hijack vehicles with players already on them. If you somehow jump on top of an enemy scorpion or manta or a raptor, you can throw them out of the vehicle using the kick button. Should only work on enemy vehicles and should not work vs Tanks or Hellbenders or Leviathans.

Well, that's it
WH00T
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Post by WH00T »

LOL! Chaos GTA (evil) hmmm... dual miniguns on a hoverbike....
Oh, BTW, I have a nice concept drawing of the Chaos Hoverbike. Who should I send it to?
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-Penfold-
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Post by -Penfold- »

I think that anything that moves substantially faster than a manta should not have a weapon. Every vehicle needs noted advantage and noted disadvantage. As it would be small and fast making it very hard to hit, it should not have any offensive capability other than of course the fact that it can deliver a player to a given point very fast. It should also not be able to mow people over or have blades, as it would just do too much damage while recieving too little.

What makes the current vehicles so good is their balance. Each have strengths and weaknesses. An ultimate "mow 'em down by the hundreds" vehicle would be fun for a single player game, but in multiplayer it cannot suck exceedingly bad to be at the receiving end of such a weapon.

Just came up with another suggestion: (assuming the Space fighters strafe sideways) An aircraft that flies like a redeemer, where you aim is the direction you fly. Make it maybe 1.2x faster than the raptor and but less manueverable than the redeemer. It cannot brake, cannot strafe, travels faster the more it's pointing downward, and slower when it climbs. Maybe make it look like an X-15 on crack. As it can't brake, it can't land, (not too many runways in unreal maps) Weapon selection would probably have to be decided from playtesting, though the weapon should likely be faster and more damaging than the raptors, as it can only fire at a particular target while traveling toward it. Probably be best to have a rocket like shape, small profile from the weapon end, larger profile from the side.

Or, perhaps make the crouch feature deploy a parachute, which will slow the craft down to land, and does not disconnect until touchdown. Takeoff would require a nice blast of fire and plume of smoke, which should do some damage to those nearby. Parachute would have to stay on until touchdown to avoid Maverick like "we'll hit the airbrakes and he'll fly right by" actions over and over. ;)

BTW, what is your opinion of the MAHRS? I think this would be a great way to promote teamwork and "hit'em hard" all at once tactics. Though, for balance sake, I'd like to ad that it should only spawn at the base in onslaught, or at least that each team should get one at the same time interval as the other team, regardless of who has more nodes. Imagine having one of these baby's just over a hill that you could fall back to for health. Also, it shouldn't take any link gun ammo to heal yourself, though you would of course need at least a few rounds so that you could arm the link gun.

Note that the car itself cannot heal an attacker, each attacker has to turn around, get within link range, and spend time healing themselves. So while it is beneficial, it's not as though the thing is tossing health packs.

Perhaps even remove the weapon launcher and have it so the weapon that was selected just prior to when the to-be-healed player arms the link to arm/heal up is the weapon that slowly get's ammo filled along with health. Or maybe even have it so getting health and ammo comes somewhat quickly, but costs the player link ammo in the process. Link ammo could not be recharged by the MHARS, and so no single player or large number of players could benefit way to much as link ammo limits for each player, and MHARS damage cause by healing/ammo dispensing limits too many players benefiting too much. Just another way to give it some balance...
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necro45
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allow dead bodies to interact with vehicles

Post by necro45 »

would be wicked if when you ran someone over, their body would go up and over some vehicles - not through them. i can just see the bodies flying over my scorpian like it had a scoop on the front :twisted: - also be wicked to see someone plasterd to your windshield while driving in cockpit mode :lol: (or firstperson -whatever).

I guess it would be allowing the dead bodies physics to interact with the cars the same way they do with walls and the ground and what not. one more way to make the wicked physics engine fun to watch :lol:
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WH00T
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Post by WH00T »

Ahh, but a smaller vehicle means it's harder to ram people, penfold. Not to mention a small vehicle like the CUT Hoverbike wouldn't have half as much health as, for example, a scorpion. You may be right about the blades and guns though. But if primary fire is a speedboost, what would secondary fire be?
Oooh, I know, how about, since the bike would be mainly for transportation and scouting and stuff, alt. fire could like switch to first person mode and bring up a HUD that points out the direction/distace of the enemy base and all vehicles, kinda like the little triangles that appear over your teammates heads. or alt fire could be a stunt brake for like skids and stuff. or, better yet, you could hold down alt. fire to have it switch to first person and let you look around and use the primary fire of whatever weapon you have. the vehicle would just keep continuing in it's current direction until you let go of alt. fire. hehe, it'd be awesome if you could use melee weapons like that too.

BTW I'll try to get my concept drawings in real soon. They look SWEET, and would TOTALLY fit in with the other ut2004 vehicles.
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TKATK
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Post by TKATK »

Well,my idea

A Bike/hoverbike,look is based on how other vehicles look so that it fits in

Vortex bike

Primary fire:Gravity release-releases everyone
Secondary:Gravity stop-Stops the vehicle in a jippy and lounches it a bit into the air

It is a portable vortex,every footman or person in a light vehicle like the hoverboard in its radius will get sucked on to it and cant get off its path unless they get strangled in a obstacle,i doesnt have offensive weapons but it can kill,and kill dozens....

It should have 40-80 Health and be as fast as the manta,the suction the people follow it should be as fast as it can drive,if someone gets sucked into it the Vortex bike is destroyed and sucks all the other following people into a mini vortex affecting only them(by killing them),the following people can shoot so the rule to kill many with the bike is,evade good,drive fast,get tons on your back,dont get shot and let someone get sucked into you then,if you get killed by another way than a sucked in person you just explode,no mini-vortex



so if one of theese with the whole enemy team on its back gets killed,everyone is livin just as before,but if it gets someone sucked in ------Monsssssster killlll----Godlike------
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Post by jb »

WH00T wrote:LOL! Chaos GTA (evil) hmmm... dual miniguns on a hoverbike....
Oh, BTW, I have a nice concept drawing of the Chaos Hoverbike. Who should I send it to?
Me click on any one of my buttons to contact me (ICQ, Email, MSN, Yahoo, ect).
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