Experimenting with bugfix feature

[Z-Man]

It has been pointed out that hitting your own trail's end is deadlier than hitting another player's trail's end; the other player's trail usually continues to receed, and your rubber saves you for the split second it takes to move out of your way.
Your own trail, however, stops to receed when you hit it, so you get stuck and die.
Well, no more, there is CYCLE_RUBBER_WALL_SHRINK. Your used rubber is multiplied with that value and your wall length is reduced by that. If it's set to 1, your wall will continue to receed with the same speed even if you hit a wall.

I'll set it to .5 on the Test Fortress. The effect is not visible any client but one built from current b0_2_8 CVS. Your trail will give way only 2.5 grid squares max with this.

Fun stuff to test later when clients that support it are around: make CYCLE_RUBBER_WALL_SHRINK * CYCLE_RUBBER = WALLS_LENGTH, that turns your own wall into a health meter; you lose your wall as you take hits. If your wall is gone, you die.

[Tank Program]

Sounds cool except as walls shrink it'll get harder to make people hit them... Sort of exponentially... Then if everyone gets short at the same time it'll never end, unless the grid shrinks too...

[Z-Man]

Yeah, it'd either be useful if the health regenerates (finite rubber_timescale) or if it's on a fortress server where the conquest settings are so that one defender can hold the fortress against one attacker just long enough for a second defender to get over to the undefended attacker's base and turn it over. Then, 1vs1 with tails that got very short already is won by the attacker, and 1vs2 by the 2 if the one has only a short tail left.
Or on a nuke zone server

[Fonkay]

This new feature has already come in handy several times on fortress.
Thank you.

[Lackadaisical]

I like this feature, but is it a possibility to not make the bike completely stop on other peoples screen when you do this? Right now it can be used to do some pretty nasty tricks where one makes his own bike stop (on the enemies screen) while hitting his own tail and suddenly appearing at some suprise location.

[Z-Man]

Yes, have the other players upgrade to 0.2.8.2_rc1 That one displays and handles the shrunken wall correctly. Production servers should probably lock out older clients if they use this feature; the settings system takes care of that automatically. I did a manual override on CVS Test, though.

Increasing the frequency of cylce sync messages would also help old clients, but consumes vastly more bandwith.

[wrtlprnft]

Fun stuff to test later when clients that support it are around: make CYCLE_RUBBER_WALL_SHRINK * CYCLE_RUBBER = WALLS_LENGTH, that turns your own wall into a health meter; you lose your wall as you take hits. If your wall is gone, you die.

I found out that works best together with WALLS_STAY_UP_DELAY 0 because cycles don't get synced reliably after they die (you told me that), so the remains disappear on the client, too.

Another thing I tried successfully is WALLS_LENGTH 0.001 and CYCLE_RUBBER_WALL_SHRINK -40 with CYCLE_RUBBER 5. That makes walls shoot back as you use up your rubber, that makes for funny effects, although i don't see an immediate use