FTWinston

There's no way around it; slow homing rockets are ridiculously fun. In Stealth Deathmatch, there is an upgraded version of every weapon available, and players select the weapons they want to upgrade. We tried out the RPG upgrade for the first time, and it significantly slows down your rockets, but causes them to home in on enemies instead of following your laser dot.

Their "AI" is ridiculously simple: every player in front of a rocket (within 90 degrees of the direction its travelling) that is in line-of-sight is assigned a score, the closer a player is, and the closer to the rockets' direction of travel they are in, the higher their score.

The rocket flies towards the player with the highest score, and if it can't see anyone, it flies straight. These rockets are only very slighly faster than than a sprinting player, to make for interesting chases. And as they're heat seeking, it makes no difference whether you're cloaked or not!

If you see a rocket coming towards you, its natural to assume that if you hide around a corner, you'll be safe. Since the first proper test of them yesterday, its clear that this is not always the case here - one of these homing rockets will fly to where it last saw you (at the corner), and then if you are visible from there, will happily turn the corner and come straight at you once again.

Similarly, some tall wooden pillars on dm_runoff appeared to offer some protection as they were quite densely packed, but the rocket, if it sees you through ANY of the gaps, will fly straight through that gap and blow up on you. And if it doesn't see you through ANY of the gaps, it will just fly around the pillars, towards where it saw you last, and then if you're visible from there, will come and explode at you again.

So what can you do? These aren't meant to be guaranteed kill rockets, so there are essentially three options:

1. Run away, around TWO corners: Get out of sight, and then get out of sight of the place that you were last seen at.

2. Shoot it down: Currently working on letting these rockets be shot down, but will want to give them reasonably high health so that they're not all easily killed off, on account of how slow they are.

3. Pass it on: These homing rockets continually re-assess who their best target is, so if you can get them pointed at another player and then step aside, they'll lock onto that player instead! This is possible even with the player that fired them, with the added bonus that that player can't use any weapons until their rocket detonates. In one game, I managed to get a rocket to chase me around a pillar and then lock onto the guy that had fired it at me - then he promptly did the same thing, and killed me with it!

In fact I am now so infatuated with homing rockets, I'm trying to work out if an entire mod could be built around them... the answer is probably "no," but that won't stop me dreaming!