Experimental change: finite cycle width
Moderator: Z-Man
New wider tires
We got Fatter tires on our cycles yall!
I love it...yall need to learn to adapt to changes. It aint the first time the Z-Meister changes shit on us, so get used to it and adapt. Look at it this way it makes it more realistic now. You can still Turbo grind (double bind) if you are position number 2....you just have to make sure position 3 knows wtf he is doing and not squueeeeze ya so tight.
Now, can I ask that we try to work on the LAG factor and the slide issue...it is getting trully anoying. and I believe those two problems are far more important than fatter tires on our BIKES!
Love yall!
I love it...yall need to learn to adapt to changes. It aint the first time the Z-Meister changes shit on us, so get used to it and adapt. Look at it this way it makes it more realistic now. You can still Turbo grind (double bind) if you are position number 2....you just have to make sure position 3 knows wtf he is doing and not squueeeeze ya so tight.
Now, can I ask that we try to work on the LAG factor and the slide issue...it is getting trully anoying. and I believe those two problems are far more important than fatter tires on our BIKES!
Love yall!
i still hate it, heres another reason 
be4 if u had a team of noobs, u cud with 2 or 3 players still win or stand a chance. U needed 2 to double grind and 1 to def. This way u cud still hold ur flanks. Now the noobs cant grind correctly enuff to doublegrind or tight enuff to hold flanks. Result ur overun and lose. Especially if the other team has 2 good or average players that can work togeather and doublegrind, then u just get owned even more.
ANother rreason u did this to reduce doublegrinding and help the team, Some1 posted its not worth being dying 8 or 9 times outta 10 so u can be a hero in 1 or 2. Now what happens is ppl still try and doublegrind, they make it on average about 1 round in 2-5. When they die they bugger up the team as the team have less speed. The rounds they do get the advantage the very nature of the teamamte having to grind at 0.5 - 1 doesnt give any real advantage and the team cant get thru the flanks
be4 if u had a team of noobs, u cud with 2 or 3 players still win or stand a chance. U needed 2 to double grind and 1 to def. This way u cud still hold ur flanks. Now the noobs cant grind correctly enuff to doublegrind or tight enuff to hold flanks. Result ur overun and lose. Especially if the other team has 2 good or average players that can work togeather and doublegrind, then u just get owned even more.
ANother rreason u did this to reduce doublegrinding and help the team, Some1 posted its not worth being dying 8 or 9 times outta 10 so u can be a hero in 1 or 2. Now what happens is ppl still try and doublegrind, they make it on average about 1 round in 2-5. When they die they bugger up the team as the team have less speed. The rounds they do get the advantage the very nature of the teamamte having to grind at 0.5 - 1 doesnt give any real advantage and the team cant get thru the flanks
Belenus: The center is of course taken care of. You can't get squeezed from behind.
The squeezing rules are that if you're in a tunnel that is wider than .25, you're not harmed. Rubber eating starts at .25 width. In the hypothetical infinitely thin tunnel, rubber usage is four times what it is when you sit in front of a wall, quite deadly. In between, the rubber usage is blended linearly.
The squeezing rules are that if you're in a tunnel that is wider than .25, you're not harmed. Rubber eating starts at .25 width. In the hypothetical infinitely thin tunnel, rubber usage is four times what it is when you sit in front of a wall, quite deadly. In between, the rubber usage is blended linearly.
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DDMJ
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It's Gone?!?!
I see that you got rid of this rather interesting and controversial experiment. I thank you z-man!!!
i disliked the .1 at first, but got used to it and could still go down the middle of the other team. But then i go on now and its up to .25 now that is over doing it, thats like a 1/4 square grid.......... thats like 100 times bigger than ur tail and if you have it like this, make the bike show that it is this size so you can know how close of grinds you can go down
DDMJ, don't be meanie... some people like it. it's off now, but for sure it's not because of you or me or someone else begging... saying "thank you" is not appropriate because... i haven't seen z-man saying that he "got rid" of it!
Now, IMHO it's way better.
we can fill up another 10 pages talking about the tactical and strategical consequences of the change especifically on fortress servers, but i think this is way deeper.
garisimo, changes come and go, yes, but radical changes to the basic look and feel of the game are not very often. and this one isn't just a minor change. it's the deepest change to the look and feel since Armagetron became Armagetron Advanced. it's a totally different thing. it's another world with other physical laws.
i remember when a new client changed rubber behaviour: cycles actually stop when hitting a wall eating rubber. in older clients, cycles passed right thru the stopping wall then they swing back into position after the server sending the definit walls.
for noobs this must have been hard (but anyway, noobs didn't use so much rubber). for me, the swing thru the wall and back was a nice rubber meter! i dumped the new client and continued to play with the old one just because of that. only fortress made me accept the new look-and-feel of rubber usage because it was such an advantage to see the new, coloured zones spinning faster and faster when they get hot.
Armagetron is the only sucessful Tron game ever written, and the reason is the unique gameplay, look and feel of the game. infinit thin walls and cycles are part of the look and feel since forever. and IMHO, since forever they are the main reason for the sucess of the game (along with wall aceleration) because they allow for fast, risky, sometimes rough, sometimes surprising game play.
i tried the solid cycle concept yesterday, i thought it could be nice, but actually i was bored. just as bored as with another five or ten tron cycle games i tried and dumped before coming across armagetron. sorry. it's a BAD Thing.
bugfarm fortress is back to the original game look and feel for now, but i still feel uncomfortable just because i know now, what i once thought to be a physical law in armagetron world, now it's a parameter... brrrrr
Now, IMHO it's way better.
we can fill up another 10 pages talking about the tactical and strategical consequences of the change especifically on fortress servers, but i think this is way deeper.
garisimo, changes come and go, yes, but radical changes to the basic look and feel of the game are not very often. and this one isn't just a minor change. it's the deepest change to the look and feel since Armagetron became Armagetron Advanced. it's a totally different thing. it's another world with other physical laws.
i remember when a new client changed rubber behaviour: cycles actually stop when hitting a wall eating rubber. in older clients, cycles passed right thru the stopping wall then they swing back into position after the server sending the definit walls.
for noobs this must have been hard (but anyway, noobs didn't use so much rubber). for me, the swing thru the wall and back was a nice rubber meter! i dumped the new client and continued to play with the old one just because of that. only fortress made me accept the new look-and-feel of rubber usage because it was such an advantage to see the new, coloured zones spinning faster and faster when they get hot.
Armagetron is the only sucessful Tron game ever written, and the reason is the unique gameplay, look and feel of the game. infinit thin walls and cycles are part of the look and feel since forever. and IMHO, since forever they are the main reason for the sucess of the game (along with wall aceleration) because they allow for fast, risky, sometimes rough, sometimes surprising game play.
i tried the solid cycle concept yesterday, i thought it could be nice, but actually i was bored. just as bored as with another five or ten tron cycle games i tried and dumped before coming across armagetron. sorry. it's a BAD Thing.
bugfarm fortress is back to the original game look and feel for now, but i still feel uncomfortable just because i know now, what i once thought to be a physical law in armagetron world, now it's a parameter... brrrrr
YOu know, route, I think you're absolutely right about the look and feel stuff. It's the same stuff that hooked me. And like you, I liked the older clients better, in general, than 0.2.7.1. I've kinda kept it to myself because I was pretty vocal about getting people to adopt it back then, but that had more to do with the server-side changes, which were very important to me (I've wasted enough of my time dealing with rip-grinders and the whole lot of other people).
But I'm going to respectfully disagree with you on some parts. I don't think cycle width is fundamentally incompatible with the infinite points thing you're describing, it all depends on the setting. It can be argued, although I don't really want to, that the good old bounce provided the effects of cycle width, and it did to some extent. Not completely, but to some extent.
But now we have to consider other things. When the cycle turns, where does it turn? Does it turn on its back wheel or its front wheel? If on its back, then it has to swing the front into position. Does it have room? I think this is a very interesting idea well worth pursuing. Not just width, but volume and mass (density
). We have to deal with mass on some level at some point, we probably need volume as well, some of us really and truly want tanks and those flying things (name escapes me), helicopters, and so forth. It turns out that the engine that drives the game is a very good engine. We can bitch all day long about a number of things, but the one thing z-man indisputedly did right is the core engine. It's very fast and very accurate. Ask yourself, why does this really weird physical system actually feel so realistic? Because the damn physicist that wrote it made it so. I'm sure he'll nitpick his code all day long, but the fundamentals are right as rain.
So adding to them? We can argue all day long about performance, at the end of the day stick a profiler on it or we're just shooting from the hip. What about the physical model? Ahhh, you begin to see where I disagree.
I think that the reason the game is so great is because there is so much variety available, and has been for quite some time. I said in the gltron thread that we can play his game on our grid, can he play ours on his? No! What is our game, anyway? It's a whole bunch of things. It's infinite walls and no walls, walls that stay up forever and walls that go down immediately. It's frozen time locally when you touch a wall, and if you don't turn fast enough you're dead, or it's death just for looking at the wall. When it comes to defaults, I think we should fire up 0.2.6 every now and then and play off it, then play the newest version and work up the defaults. But when it comes to possibilities, I think there's a lot more game under the hood, if we can stroke the code just right, we squeeze out more games.
So, yeah, maybe we'll work cycle width in as a default setting, and maybe it'll be somewhere around 0.000002 or something, maybe it'll be 0.004, maybe it'll just be 0. We'll have to see, only testing will determine that. But there's group of people here who've been wanting it, and now there's a group here who likes it. I will be happy to play with or without it. I like it both ways, I"ll take it both ways. I like vanilla ice cream, I like chocolate ice cream. I like Mexican food and Chinese food. I like Paul Simon, Megadeth, and "The Devil Went Down to Georgia". I like green eggs and ham.
But I'm going to respectfully disagree with you on some parts. I don't think cycle width is fundamentally incompatible with the infinite points thing you're describing, it all depends on the setting. It can be argued, although I don't really want to, that the good old bounce provided the effects of cycle width, and it did to some extent. Not completely, but to some extent.
But now we have to consider other things. When the cycle turns, where does it turn? Does it turn on its back wheel or its front wheel? If on its back, then it has to swing the front into position. Does it have room? I think this is a very interesting idea well worth pursuing. Not just width, but volume and mass (density
). We have to deal with mass on some level at some point, we probably need volume as well, some of us really and truly want tanks and those flying things (name escapes me), helicopters, and so forth. It turns out that the engine that drives the game is a very good engine. We can bitch all day long about a number of things, but the one thing z-man indisputedly did right is the core engine. It's very fast and very accurate. Ask yourself, why does this really weird physical system actually feel so realistic? Because the damn physicist that wrote it made it so. I'm sure he'll nitpick his code all day long, but the fundamentals are right as rain.So adding to them? We can argue all day long about performance, at the end of the day stick a profiler on it or we're just shooting from the hip. What about the physical model? Ahhh, you begin to see where I disagree.
I think that the reason the game is so great is because there is so much variety available, and has been for quite some time. I said in the gltron thread that we can play his game on our grid, can he play ours on his? No! What is our game, anyway? It's a whole bunch of things. It's infinite walls and no walls, walls that stay up forever and walls that go down immediately. It's frozen time locally when you touch a wall, and if you don't turn fast enough you're dead, or it's death just for looking at the wall. When it comes to defaults, I think we should fire up 0.2.6 every now and then and play off it, then play the newest version and work up the defaults. But when it comes to possibilities, I think there's a lot more game under the hood, if we can stroke the code just right, we squeeze out more games.
So, yeah, maybe we'll work cycle width in as a default setting, and maybe it'll be somewhere around 0.000002 or something, maybe it'll be 0.004, maybe it'll just be 0. We'll have to see, only testing will determine that. But there's group of people here who've been wanting it, and now there's a group here who likes it. I will be happy to play with or without it. I like it both ways, I"ll take it both ways. I like vanilla ice cream, I like chocolate ice cream. I like Mexican food and Chinese food. I like Paul Simon, Megadeth, and "The Devil Went Down to Georgia". I like green eggs and ham.
Check out my YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@davefancella?si=H--oCK3k_dQ1laDN
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Phytotron
- Formerly Oscilloscope
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Yesterday I gave it another quick try with the latest widening, and though I'm still not exactly sure how it differs significantly from a mindistance of around 0.1, I still think it's a good thing. I rather like it.
There are also a couple things you guys who are freaking out need to keep in mind:
1) Bugfarm is a test server. It's meant for testing these things.
2) If cycle width is officially adopted, it would be a server-side option, not something ubiquitous. In fact, it's unlikely that many server admins would use it anyway, simply because it probably won't ever be all that popular (unfortunately).
3) You're all criticising its affect on the "strategies" and "moves" in this specific fortress server, apparently forgetting that there's more to this game than just fortress mode. Consider how this setting could affect regular gameplay, not just your one or two cherished fortress moves.
There are also a couple things you guys who are freaking out need to keep in mind:
1) Bugfarm is a test server. It's meant for testing these things.
2) If cycle width is officially adopted, it would be a server-side option, not something ubiquitous. In fact, it's unlikely that many server admins would use it anyway, simply because it probably won't ever be all that popular (unfortunately).
3) You're all criticising its affect on the "strategies" and "moves" in this specific fortress server, apparently forgetting that there's more to this game than just fortress mode. Consider how this setting could affect regular gameplay, not just your one or two cherished fortress moves.
Yeah, the test is over. I'd rate it as a success, everything basically worked as expected. I think everyone learned something during the last days. Some learned new tactics, some learned that they're playing on a test server, some found a world outside of Tron exists
I suck with every cycle width, beating grinds erratically only, so my play isn't influenced all too much by this setting. What I liked about the very fat cycles of yesterday is that even when everyone grinded the middle player as tightly as possible, you still could make out who drives where. And, joe, .25 is the approximate width of the cycle model.
Now, what to do with the results? For 0.2.8.3, we'll definitely get the extended asymmetric tunnel detection so you also can get killed if you grind a single wall too closely. We also can make it so that sparks server as a visual clue when a seal is tight at all widths.
What probably is too difficult for now: make the cycle stop before entering tunnels, using up rubber. That's very difficult to do just with the engine means available now, I'd rather attempt to add "rectangle casts" first. A particularly nasty problem is the behavior if you're about to enter a tunnel made partially by a recedeing trail end. I think the "use rubber while you're in the tunnel" possibility is enough for a last minute addition.
Also off the list are the other graphical adaptions, showing the cycle getting squeezed and showing it with the right width when in the open. That would be modifying code that's scheduled for heavy reworking.
New test: The two basic MINDISTANCE_ settings are at zero now. This shouldn't influence whether which grind gets deeper, only how deep it can possibly get. I hope to detect some phasing bugs, should they be around in significant quantities (they're definitely around, insert bitching about engine here), that way.
I suck with every cycle width, beating grinds erratically only, so my play isn't influenced all too much by this setting. What I liked about the very fat cycles of yesterday is that even when everyone grinded the middle player as tightly as possible, you still could make out who drives where. And, joe, .25 is the approximate width of the cycle model.
Now, what to do with the results? For 0.2.8.3, we'll definitely get the extended asymmetric tunnel detection so you also can get killed if you grind a single wall too closely. We also can make it so that sparks server as a visual clue when a seal is tight at all widths.
What probably is too difficult for now: make the cycle stop before entering tunnels, using up rubber. That's very difficult to do just with the engine means available now, I'd rather attempt to add "rectangle casts" first. A particularly nasty problem is the behavior if you're about to enter a tunnel made partially by a recedeing trail end. I think the "use rubber while you're in the tunnel" possibility is enough for a last minute addition.
Also off the list are the other graphical adaptions, showing the cycle getting squeezed and showing it with the right width when in the open. That would be modifying code that's scheduled for heavy reworking.
New test: The two basic MINDISTANCE_ settings are at zero now. This shouldn't influence whether which grind gets deeper, only how deep it can possibly get. I hope to detect some phasing bugs, should they be around in significant quantities (they're definitely around, insert bitching about engine here), that way.
I havent read all the posts since mine.. only read up to like page 5 or 6...
zman- didn't mean to give you an order, its just that i have strong feelings against the new cycle width rule, for a number of reasons, irrelevant, but in general, srry
Didn't mean to order you around, that's really not what i intended--i went back and edited the post to most likely what i would have wanted it to have been at the time i wrote it (which was, i believe, about 6:30 in the morning right before i went to school. Didn't mean to be so commanding and such.. apology accepted?
zman- didn't mean to give you an order, its just that i have strong feelings against the new cycle width rule, for a number of reasons, irrelevant, but in general, srry
Didn't mean to order you around, that's really not what i intended--i went back and edited the post to most likely what i would have wanted it to have been at the time i wrote it (which was, i believe, about 6:30 in the morning right before i went to school. Didn't mean to be so commanding and such.. apology accepted?-
2020
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wow
i read all the posts till page 6
decided to play the game
only to find the experiment is over
wow
radian hits the mark for me...
your game is better than the visualisation on the film
(
the film director probably needed a very visual way
to explain to the average bod
the narrative of escape from the grid
hence the huge gap...
)
i read all the posts till page 6
decided to play the game
only to find the experiment is over
wow
radian hits the mark for me...
your game is better than the visualisation on the film
(
the film director probably needed a very visual way
to explain to the average bod
the narrative of escape from the grid
hence the huge gap...
)
hold the line