Aim with guns

[Aayla Vigil]

I have tried ojp enhanced mod about a week ago, and I noticed that shooting there with a gun is much different from default, so I came up with a suggestion that could really help in my opinion:

Add an aim bar (or something like that) that lets you shoot right where you're aiming only when it's at maximum.
One should increase this aim bar only when standing still or just turning, and instead it should go down when you're shooting, running and jumping.

This would force a shooter to delay every shoot to gain a decent precision, meanwhile holding down mouse2 it would make you shoot only the first bolt where you're aiming, and then all around without hitting the center.
Also this would force the gunners to act more realistically, not hopping around avoiding being hit, but hide and try to gain more aim.

[Jared]

This would cut down the FFA feel missions tend to have...

But then conversely it would become more competative too... Nice idea though.

[Alanya Sgall]

A nice idea, but I don't think it'd work well in-game. It's already hard enough to shoot a Jedi in-game, and this would just make it impossible. The gunners would constantly have to be on the move because, if you've ever been on a mission with gunners, the Jedi just chase them around until they can slash them.

Maybe if the gunners got a stats boost to at least 200/200 and took reduced damage from lightsabers (cortosis weave armor, anyone?), then it might be alright.

[Cyril Feraan]

Nice idea, but Alanya nailed it on this one.

[Ctathos]

I guess none of you were on the Nar Shaddaa mission... weapons are way overpowered if you get 3 of them together against one Jedi. Ever try slashing someone with a gun? It's near impossible.

[Aayla Vigil]

I guess none of you were on the Nar Shaddaa mission... weapons are way overpowered if you get 3 of them together against one Jedi. Ever try slashing someone with a gun? It's near impossible.

Indeed: add lag-gunner jumping and running-gunners in group and you get a deadly cocktail.

What I wrote wasn't meant to be extremely underpowering for Gunners, but it should at least try to hold them to avoid running and hopping, instead they would stand and aim before shooting, like:
Gunner A runs to the location of the battlefield, jumps a wall rolls and finally arrived with empty aim bar: stands still 3 seconds, time to breathe and aim with his blaster, and THEN shoot precisely - either he can choose to shoot with what he have, tired and confused and miss the aim.

On the other hand another thing that I wanted to propose was that bolts speed should be increased (check ojp enhanced or MBII).

[Cyril Feraan]

I understand your point about the actual realism of such a feature. I still question though..is this yet another one of those things that can be fixed through normal methods? You mention hopping around. Any gunner who does that needs to simply rework their RP.

I am open to hearing about ways to make guns better, as it is currently not the best-implemented system I've ever seen.

I like the premise, but doesn't improvement start with actions themselves?

I guess none of you were on the Nar Shaddaa mission... weapons are way overpowered if you get 3 of them together against one Jedi. Ever try slashing someone with a gun? It's near impossible.

And I can't claim to have been on that mission, but since when have gunners beat down any Jedi Knight or Master, or anyone with decent saber offense/defense? Unless the gunner had heavy weapons, I don't see it happening. If someone is firing with a blaster, at worst you get hit a few times, but a full frequency lightsaber should disable them in no time.

If it were too easy for Jedi, there wouldn't be any problems in war. The Jedi Order would be like the Death Star in terms of general battle power.

Also, remember the mission to rescue Kishon? The gunners (who had limited ammo might I add) basically did nothing. They couldn't do anything. There were several Jedi and simply no contest. It was more like a slaughter than a rescue operation.

[Aayla Vigil]

The over-power of the Jedi is something that I'd like to talk separetely from the overpower of the guns, Cyril.
Since we have the support of a mod, I think it's wiser to recieve all the aid we get can from it (for which I would never stop thanking soh for what he has already done until now).

As for Jedi vs Gunners, Jedi should be underpowered too, with things like draining force by deflection, so that when a Jedi is out of force he won't deflect anymore (notice: running deflection would drain more, walking less, standing still almost nothing).
This would slow the battles, make them more movie-like, without troubling the gameplay, but simply (and most important is the simplicity) turn is lightly into a more fitting gameplay for our RP purposes.

Notice that what I wrote is being misunderstood:
Actually gunners are given of these reccomandations:
- Shoot with some delay please, possibly with primary attack.
- Try to act like gunners.

So my purpose was to disadvantage the "brust" fire, making it more unprecise. Although a gunner who follow the delay suggestion would get simply good shoots, right where he's aiming.
With delaied alt-attack shoots, he would still hit a target close, but that wouldn't work when the target is out of range, get that? Because there would be a small loss of aim, that would be more evident as much distant is the target.

Still, I didn't underline this of my purpose: the loss of aim has not to be very large, just a little more unprecise to avoid every shoot hit exactly the center. Instead it should be very unprecise if you hold down altattack for 2 minutes.
Same thing for the bar-gaining, it must not take too long, either the gunners would be *really* in trouble. Just a few seconds of delay, time to take a breathe and point the gun (if you considere it as would be in reality).



So my question is: is it better to have all the classes overpowered and live with that, or it's better slowly talk find easy solutions to make them more realistic and direct the battles into a more film like direction without touching the fun and the simplicity of the game?
Right now missions are too far like deathmatches, and I can't say that is all fault of low quality of RPers.
(Underlining simplicity I want to evidence that the gameplay must not become too much impraticable or too different from the base JA, which would lead to a real confusion just like in MB2 and OJP, but only with a few thin additions that could help alot).

Another way to solve the problem would be saying:"People need to increase their RP skills during battles", but this didn't seem to have worked too well, so it's way better to direct the gameplay into a more realistic way, in my opinion.

[Sereryth]

Sounds like the MovieBattles solution. I concur.

[Gabe Alkorda]

I also like the whole concept of adding the targeting system, would make it more realistic.

However, there is an obvious problem with Jedi being more powerful than gunmen.

What can be done, however, that is a huge fault in basejka, is increase the damage amount that a blaster bolt does. In the movies, if the gun is set to kill (like soldiers rifles), one hit kills, two tops. This can be changed easily by editing the weapons.dat file (not hard to figure out if you just look at it). It could be included in the mod, but I believe it would be a clientside edit, not sure on that though.

I also liked your idea, Aayla:

with things like draining force by deflection, so that when a Jedi is out of force he won't deflect anymore (notice: running deflection would drain more, walking less, standing still almost nothing).

I'd say it could be done, but again, I don't know anything about modding things such as that.

Overall, good idea, and hopefully we can fix the ffa effect that missions have when jedi are up against gunmen.

[Sereryth]

I also liked your idea, Aayla:

with things like draining force by deflection, so that when a Jedi is out of force he won't deflect anymore (notice: running deflection would drain more, walking less, standing still almost nothing).

I'd say it could be done, but again, I don't know anything about modding things such as that.

Overall, good idea, and hopefully we can fix the ffa effect that missions have when jedi are up against gunmen.

You could try hitting up the MovieBattles forum or member of staff to see how they managed to do so.

[Asrelia Mhy]

[...]and hopefully we can fix the ffa effect that missions have when jedi are up against gunmen.

Simple solution: have training for gun-saber interaction. I think it was discussed a while back when a campaign was in the works, but never saw the server because the campaign fell through.

I feel there shouldn't be a mechanical change to fix something that can be solved through a little player skill development.

[Aayla Vigil]

I also liked your idea, Aayla:

with things like draining force by deflection, so that when a Jedi is out of force he won't deflect anymore (notice: running deflection would drain more, walking less, standing still almost nothing).

I'd say it could be done, but again, I don't know anything about modding things such as that.

Overall, good idea, and hopefully we can fix the ffa effect that missions have when jedi are up against gunmen.

You could try hitting up the MovieBattles forum or member of staff to see how they managed to do so.

MBII doesn't seem very open to give their code, and I personally dislike their work, however I heard that OJP is more an open source if this might help, and I think it has something similiar implented too.

[Sereryth]

I also liked your idea, Aayla:I'd say it could be done, but again, I don't know anything about modding things such as that.

Overall, good idea, and hopefully we can fix the ffa effect that missions have when jedi are up against gunmen.

You could try hitting up the MovieBattles forum or member of staff to see how they managed to do so.

MBII doesn't seem very open to give their code, and I personally dislike their work, however I heard that OJP is more an open source if this might help, and I think it has something similiar implented too.

Or you could do that, yeah.

[Soh Raun]

First, I would like to say I'm not too much for modifying the gameplay (be it for weapons or for lightsaber combat). Small edits ok, but over-complicated changes like OJP or MB2, difficult to understand and that remove all the fun, definitely no.

The idea of having an aim bar seems a bit over-complicated to me.. I understand its purpose and it would indeed be more realistic, but is it really needed? .. especially as I don't think this would be possible to implement without breaking BaseJKA compatibility (because yes, despite all the features of RPMod, it is still BaseJKA-compatible).


So what to do? well, concerning the precision when shooting, the blaster alt fire already does what was suggested (shooting all around but not in the center of your aim). So, maybe we could use that in missions instead of primary fire, with the recommandation of not holding down the button ? what do you all think?


Otherwise, increasing the bolts speed is easy to do and will probably be done soon.

Increasing the damage hmm.. that might be a solution, and it makes sense, but I would like more opinions about it. By the way Gabe, no it's not weapons.dat , this file is only used in the SP game. In MP, the server has the damages hard-coded (i.e. defined in the code, not in a file). Maybe I could change that to parse the various properties of a bolt (speed, damage) from a config file, but it's more work than just changing the values in the code. Anyway, as a general rule, almost everything about game logic happens in the server, the client only displays and renders what the server tells it to.

Draining Force when deflecting is possible and easy, and would be realistic I believe. But there again I would like more opinions about it.

As a concluding note, yes OJP is open source and I've been using some of their code already (ledge grab, visual weapons in 0.4.0, rgb sabers, bug fixes...) although I modified everything . So if you want to refer to a specific feature from a mod, try to describe OJP features since I can look in the source code. However not everything from OJP Enhanced can be done in RPMod, because OJP Enhanced is not BaseJKA-compatible.