What I'm up to for the next release of AVWW (probably for tomorrow).

[x4000]

What I wound up making a feature was the skelebots being able to hit your piercing shots to redirect them -- that was just too awesome.

In terms of riding enemies, I think that only works very well with something like pixelart; the graphics just don't look the best when you are standing on a rhino in this sort of thing.  Also, the physics of having one object carry another object is pretty complex if you're not doing a true physics simulation.  Having coded that in the past with some of the Mario clones I've coded, that's something I definitely don't look forward to trying to implement here.

Besides which, we have kind of a general rule that any enemies that you touch damage you, which I think is good for the sake of consistency.

[Cyborg]

- Rhinos taking revenge on the espers (in a later build), and meleeing them (and other rhinos) to death.

This should be a feature.

[keith.lamothe]

- Rhinos taking revenge on the espers (in a later build), and meleeing them (and other rhinos) to death.

This should be a feature.

That's what I said!

[zoutzakje]

Okay, two more funny/fun bugs that I just found:

-Enemies and self getting heads stuck in ceilings.  So there were a number of icicle leapers embedded in the roof of a cave, helpless.
-Enemies melee-ing spells that were hit at them.  Which mostly doesn't make any difference, the spell still hits them and all that jazz.  But what blew my mind?  I fired creeping death at a giant skelebot, and he takes a swing like a baseball bat, and knocks that creeping death off in a completely other direction.  He still got damaged by the spell, but that move was just made of awesomesauce.  I think I'm going to have to make that one of those "boss orb" modifiers.

the first one is the one I reported. My head got stuck in the ceiling when I went through a ventilation shaft lol. It was funny and a good thing that restarting the game fixed it for me

[tigersfan]

My favorite funny one was recently, where the AI could cheat in the battleground missions and literally take your base and bring it to them for easier destruction.

[Terraziel]

- Rhinos taking revenge on the espers (in a later build), and meleeing them (and other rhinos) to death.

This should be a feature.

That's what I said!

As a more general point, from a lore point of view are the rhinos and espers actually supposed to be on the same side? Rhinos and espers are a pretty good example of it being weird, but why are the rhinos helping the skelebots or vice versa? Why are dust storms helping anybody?

Rather, I always sort of liked systems where the enemies weren't always friendly with each other, it meant you had the opportunity to come upon battles which had nothing to do with you, which gives a better feel to the world.

[x4000]

That sort of freeform battle system is kind of interesting, and I've seen it done in an okay fashion in a few games.  But more often than not I feel like that really requires a lot more entities, also much STRONGER entities (Monster Hunter style), and a 3D environment.  I just don't feel this game would be conducive to this sort of flow, and mostly what would result would be your occasionally getting a glimpse of a rhino killing an esper (and thus overall having fewer enemies in the environments.

As to the question of if all the enemies are on the same time: at the moment, the answer is yes.  There will be other factions eventually, like minor factions in AI War, but that's waaaay post-1.0.  In terms of the actual enemies here and why rhinos and espers are working together... well, that's a bit of lore that you'll be able to piece through from some of the mystery clues you'll be able to start picking up soon.

[keith.lamothe]

I still liked it when skelebots would hit each other if they got in the way, and would gain xp and levels by killing each other

[x4000]

I still liked it when skelebots would hit each other if they got in the way, and would gain xp and levels by killing each other

That's going waaaay back to the early alpha top-downs.  Yeah, I remember when sometimes we'd run into a lvl 5 skelebot instead of a level 1 skelebot because he'd been so busy killing other skelebots that he was all buffed up.  It was... quite a surprise when he'd leap out of the grass and murder me out of the blue.

[Dizzard]

All the talk about rhinos attacking espers makes me think it would be cool to capture monsters and then make them fight each other. Sort of like a monster arena.

[Oralordos]

I think something like that was mentioned somewhere as a possible pvp mode. I can't remember where it was mentioned though.

[x4000]

I think something like that was mentioned somewhere as a possible pvp mode. I can't remember where it was mentioned though.

Yeah, we were talking about that at one point.  Though, as multiplayer has evolved/improved we could also now do some more direct PVP sort of modes, I think.

[keith.lamothe]

Yeah, we were talking about that at one point.  Though, as multiplayer has evolved/improved we could also now do some more direct PVP sort of modes, I think.

Not without it being possible to either be hit by something that would not have hit you locally or miss a player target that you would have hit locally

[x4000]

Yeah, we were talking about that at one point.  Though, as multiplayer has evolved/improved we could also now do some more direct PVP sort of modes, I think.

Not without it being possible to either be hit by something that would not have hit you locally or miss a player target that you would have hit locally

Actually, it would work just like enemy shots.  So sometimes you might fire at me, and miss or hit me when it looks like actually the opposite should have happened (from your point of view).  But from my point of view, I saw the shot and dodged it just like an enemy shot works now, no worries.  And from your end, it will just look like a brief lag hiccup, or else like you just barely missed (because at the scale of pixels we're talking about, it's fairly ambiguous, anyhow, unless you're the one being shot at).

That's why I think this would actually work for some lighthearted PVP.  But because of the nature of the way the game is constructed, it would never be good in terms of anti-cheating measures on its own (not like an RTS that is in sync), of course the really serious PVP wouldn't be advisable.  Too many ways to hack the client.  But if you take that part out of the equation, the rest should work well enough to be fun and playable in PVP, I think.