Flying is slooooowwwwwwwww

[Quilluck]

I am struggling to figure out why this change would go through. I can not wait to flop around RK in my chugboat, oh sorry "jetbike".

[Headthumpa]

What is the point of the yalm in the Vet shop now... It was there because it was an instant free 81VA yalm.

[Waffen]

Sorry guys. The Phasefront vehicles enabling flying and the existing Yalmahas were supposed to get their meshes/descriptions changed to hot air balloons. The ground vehicles changed to pedal cars or tricycles. Look for them in 18.7.1.

[Ophiuchus]

Sorry guys. The Phasefront vehicles enabling flying and the existing Yalmahas were supposed to get their meshes/descriptions changed to hot air balloons. The ground vehicles changed to pedal cars or tricycles. Look for them in 18.7.1.

Flintstones meshes available to buy in the Item Shop SoonTM!

[Vhab]

So a lot of this I'm pulling from memory, it's been several years since this change had been made internally.
And there may have been someone to fiddle with the values and movement code after I made these changes.
Considering 18.7 spanned 3 game directors, some changes may not have been tracked as rigorously as they should have (office politics and scope changes are hard work too etc).


The original speed calculation code was a mess, so it got cleaned up. It also got you your new more desirable behavior for swim speed.
So, what was intended to change and likely did change (going for 'likely' as it's been a few years since I've messed with this):

- Minimum runspeed went up.
- Maximum runspeed came down.
- Maximum flying speed stayed where it was. (previously the same as max runspeed).
- Thus maximum flying speed now has a higher cap than runspeed. So finally someone on the ground can't keep up with a yalm.
- Flying speed should now scale with skill instead of making you "instantly awesome". Flying is intended to be faster than you would be walking and have the added benefit of well.. flying.
- I may or may have not touched strafing speed. I don't recall whether I ended up fixing this or leave it as intended behavior.

All of the above sounds reasonable right?

Now, what may have happened is:
- The new minimum speed of flying is still too low.
- Someone may have fiddled with the numbers after I left.
- Or yalms haven't been retested to see if their numbers need tweaking instead of the base values.


I'd highly urge you to do some testing. Get a feel for these changes. Race someone running vs yalms.
See what feels right and what's wrong. I'm sure Michi would love the feedback.

[Litestrider]

The original speed calculation code was a mess, so it got cleaned up.

Whether or not this outcome was intended or desirable, I'm super happy to hear that old code is being gone through and cleaned up!

Flying speed should now scale with skill instead of making you "instantly awesome"

This makes me wonder, should flying speed scale on runspeed... or should it scale on vehicle air? That would give a pretty cool reason to spend IP in a skill that is otherwise "worthless". Letting us have some IP to spend on tertiary skills like this in the first place is a different matter altogether, but still.

I may or may have not touched strafing speed. I don't recall whether I ended up fixing this or leave it as intended behavior.

This makes me wonder, is there any intention or consideration about trichording? That is, strafing while your run, which in AO and many other games simply adds the runspeed and strafe speed so you can get a small speed boost while running at the right angle. I think the effect is minor enough to really not worry about, but I'm interested to know if it's acknowledged and if so what is thought about it.

[Vhab]

This makes me wonder, should flying speed scale on runspeed... or should it scale on vehicle air? That would give a pretty cool reason to spend IP in a skill that is otherwise "worthless". Letting us have some IP to spend on tertiary skills like this in the first place is a different matter altogether, but still.

Do note I don't work on AO anymore. But doing that would go against the same reasoning that caused us to remove the swimming skill.
I'd rather see runspeed renamed to something generic to indicate it buffs all forms of movement.

This makes me wonder, is there any intention or consideration about trichording? That is, strafing while your run, which in AO and many other games simply adds the runspeed and strafe speed so you can get a small speed boost while running at the right angle. I think the effect is minor enough to really not worry about, but I'm interested to know if it's acknowledged and if so what is thought about it.

I personally dislike the speed gain you get from strafing in games. In most games it's the result of lazy coding, not intentional behavior.
I just don't remember if I changed the behavior in AO.

[Litestrider]

Do note I don't work on AO anymore. But doing that would go against the same reasoning that caused us to remove the swimming skill.
I'd rather see runspeed renamed to something generic to indicate it buffs all forms of movement.

Good point. I'm not sure exactly what the name for a combined skill would be, but I'm sure something will be dreamt up (and the explanation will probably be 'BECAUSE NANOBOTS!')

I wonder if we might eventually see the three vehicle skills rolled into one as well? Perhaps even rendered completely obsolete, combined into adventuring or runspeed or another skill that's "worth IPing".

I personally dislike the speed gain you get from strafing in games. In most games it's the result of lazy coding, not intentional behavior.
I just don't remember if I changed the behavior in AO.

Let me check it now... Yeah, you gain a slight speed boost, but it's extremely slight, like less than a second of time crossing OA Hill. I'd be shocked if anyone actually, say, caught up to someone else in the battlestation and killed them using that, even if they were chased from one end to the other.

I'm kind of torn on whether I like it, in Descent where I think it was most famous, trichording added a ton of skill and intrigue to the game, since you were navigating a super confusing maze already and now you had to do it partially blind. These days it makes me think of Mario Kart where you powerslide 90% of the time if you can help it! In AO it feels much more like an oversight though, it'd probably be nice to see strafing and running properly vector-calculus'd into a constant speed, but I don't think it'll be a big deal at all if they just ignore it too.

[ByLogic]

Do note I don't work on AO anymore. But doing that would go against the same reasoning that caused us to remove the swimming skill.
I'd rather see runspeed renamed to something generic to indicate it buffs all forms of movement.


I personally dislike the speed gain you get from strafing in games. In most games it's the result of lazy coding, not intentional behavior.
I just don't remember if I changed the behavior in AO.

Almost sound like transform / physics in AO are advanced coded :P . Not much momentum behaviour. I agree with you on the strafe lerping in games.


Any ways.. Runspeed should never effect flight speed (no gravity fall movement) That is just plane wrong.

[Scvm]

Thanks for that post, Vhab. Sounds like all the promised changes to runspeed from back in the Means days. You don't happen to recall what the new cap is supposed to be, do you? I'll assume strafing and reverse got the same cap too, but are they still modified by skill at the same lower rate as before? Or for that matter, was forward movement changed any or will it hit the cap at around 2k skill now or something? Was anything done about ability trickle adding to runspeed skill but apparently not affecting movement speed?

As for strafe-running/trichording/whateveryouwannacallit, it's been disabled on live for years—I want to say since mid-2009. So either it sneaked back into 18.7 or Litestrider's little OA test was predictably unreliable. I liked strafe-running because it actually made buffs at high levels and high skill in general serve a purpose beyond off-setting snares, but I wouldn't say there was much of a skill factor involved as it so quickly becomes second nature.

[Ophiuchus]

I cannot handle just how painful it is on low level characters now. I really cannot. The vast majority of my characters and twinks are below TL6 and I have no motivaiton to log any of them, now it takes forever to get anywhere.

Remove RS-dependence for flying. Have a scaling Flying speed so the flashier yalms are faster if you must. But the for the love of everything you hold dear, don't crucify characters that have the audacity not to be 220 with pocket fixers and engis.

[ByLogic]

well look at the bright side, when you cybor with Quantium wings you are actually are using your legg

[Scvm]

So, it looks like the effectiveness of runspeed skill was decreased as well. Before you gained 1 m/s for every 200 pts, now it seems to be 1 about every 280 pts. Also, trickle still increases what you see your runspeed skill as, but does not actually seem to count towards movement speed. I didn't bother to look at strafing by itself or running backwards. Strafe-running is still no faster or slower than normal running.