Yes, this blog entry also revolves arround the AvP2 Team Fortress mod. Thing is that the mod takes up most of my free time, so until it get's released, it'll be the focus point for all my blog entries.
Anyways, beta 5 will bring several major changes, some of them being already fully implemented, others being a work in progress.
One of them is the smartgunner.
If you hear the name of the weapon for the first time, the smartgun is actually an iconic weapon in the Aliens universe; you can see them being used by Drake and Vasquez in "Aliens" ( Youtube.com ). Since it actually appeared in one of the Alien movies, the weapon looks like a very good choice for a second heavy weapons class.
But there's a catch: you see, the smartgun is usefull also because it can track targets automatically. And this would enable a heavy using it to detect even cloaked predators: the enemy spies become visible and much more vulnerable. To tone this disadvantage down a bit, I decided to make the detection radius smaller, from 50 meters to 20. This is (by coincidence) the detection radius for the motion tracker, and since the smartgun detects only moving targets, it all makes sense.
While toying with the tracking system for the smartgun, it suddenly hit me: tracking should take into account the team the player is in. What started as a small adjustment for the smartgun turned into something much bigger:
- Have the predator red vision (electro) make visible red team members only, and similar, the blue vision (heat) disclose blue team members.
- Have all the tracking weapons weapons (smartgun, SADAR, shoulder cannon, disc, you name it) track only enemy team members
For the second one however, I didn't start searching yet. I hope it will not be too difficult, and the feature will make it into beta 5.
The TODO list for the mod is much bigger than this. However, the features I mentioned here seem to be of a greater magnitude, so I just had to talk about them.
