I. Preface

I have found that in this game, with Ballistic Sprint activated, it is oftentimes remarkably easy to simply charge at a person with a knife or other pointy object and kill him with it. Similarly, it's very easy to run away in a pitched battle when you find yourself outmatched, as your opponent would not be able to match your speed while keeping any sort of accuracy with his weapon.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that Ballistic Sprint is rather flawed, in that a single jump will deplete your stamina bar, while a double-jump does not deplete it doubley as it probably should, and a dodge or dodge-jump does not deplete it at all. You could easily hold the Sprint button while dodge-jumping to fly through maps at incredible speeds for a very long time, as the stamina bar actually recharges when you're flying through the air. This should be addressed.

The second reason is that aside from a drop in hit points and shields, there is very little consequence in being struck by an individual bullet. If you get struck by a .45 caliber round, you're probably going to slow down a bit due to the pain of a bullet smashing into your body. This does not happen in BW (aside from the M353 physically pushing you back from the momentum).



II. The Idea:

I would like to see a system in place to model the stopping power of a weapon. If you get shot, your movement speed should slow significantly for a short time, depending on the damage done to your health points and the location of the shot.

A shot from a D49 to the chest or head would slow you to 1/2 speed for, say, 1 second, while a shot to the leg would double that number. One to the arm would slow you half a second while juking your aim significantly. An RS8 round, doing less than half the damage of a D49 round, would slow you for less than half those times, while a Fifty-9 or XK2 round would be almost unnoticeable, until you get hit by 8 of them and the effects stack up.

Guys wearing body armor would be less affected, of course, as most of the damage is being done to their shields not their hit points. Additionally, a player hit in mid-air, whether from jumping, dodging, or falling, would not feel the effects of this until they hit the ground, where they'll crawl for a bit until they shrug off the effects of whatever damage they accumulated in the air. Momentum from weapons like the Machine guns or Minigun would probably have to be lowered to compensate for this as well.

Additional effects for headshots, like temporary blindness akin to the AM67's flash device would also be neat.

one word: wicked!!

I never play with Ballistic Sprint, there are already too many buttons for everything.
But with this, I'll certainly add it into my list of mutators!

Hmm... t'is okay I guess... but it should only come into play when Ballistic Sprint is activated from the Mutator list (I don't play the damn thing 'coz bots don't use 'em... I only activate Muts that bots can properly utilize).

I don't.

Bots cheat, so I'd aswell if I get angry at their cheating.
I once made a map (NO PATHNODES), where I sat on a walkway with a bot sitting under it. You could look trough the walkway but the bot were too dump to see anyone trough it. Well, I pulled my face above the walkway and he spotted me. He fired some railgun rounds at me and I threw a nade at his nouse. BOOM.
I was hidden on the walkway again before he respawned. He just sat there, not shooting me or anything. But the scary thing was... he looked at me... right trough the walkway... he saw me, he looked right in my face.
I walked away, not seen by him. A little further on the walkway I looked down again... he was still looking at me!!
That is cheating, they have wall-hack, aimbot and INSTANT reaction time. Real humans need time to let their brains notice the missile coming at you, but with bots... they jump excactly when you shoot a skrith projectile.

Well, they cheat, i cheat. So I use the sprint feature to balance their cheating.

ANYWAYS. Back to topic.
If you get a bullet trough your head, you'd slow down. But this should be optional. This shouldn't be something that is forced.
Just like the Chaos and the Recoil bar in the settings, this would be a new one. How higher, the more you get effected by a bullet hit. You can switch it off by pulling it alll down.

Um... I'm not too sure you really tested out BW fully before you say this...

When I'm charging someone, I can easily be stopped in my tracks by heavy fire. Granted, the effects of getting shot only effect you for a very small time, but one heavy hit to you and you can lose all your momentum. Repeated assault from automatic weapons stops you quite throughly, assuming a good portion of the shots hit.

I've tested this out quite a bit. The effect doesn't seem very apparent at long ranges, but that could be due to the lack of shots hitting me. I do know that if I run towards someone though, that right before I'm in striking distance and I'm under heavy fire, I stop, or at least slow down.

I have quite a bit of experience in charging enemies, and have encountered this many times.

As for the sprinting, I use it plenty, but yeah, it is quite flawed. My opinion on how to fix this is to outright remove dodging and double jumping, but I don't know if too many people would be happy with that.

And for getting melee kills easily with sprinting, I think you deserve the kills if the person you charge at can't get you from a distance.

HEY!! Dodging is good. Maybe if you did remove the double jump. But... we got muts that do that already so.... not much need to do that. but yeah, I'm the one who does the sprint double dodge jump. I mean... it's as fast as a hellbender at times!!! Only if you are super good at it though...

Eh, this is one situation where I must disagree with my colleague...

One of the primary attractions of BW is its intense speed and pace. Everything about BW is better, bigger, faster, more visceral. It requires more skill, better timing, and is simply more fun because of this. Nerfing sprint or having really debilitating shots would just be lame. It would slow down the game immensely and toss out the window all the excitement involved.

Speed, is GOOD!

Sun, I do not believe Ballistic Weapons was by intended by its developers to be a fast, run-and-gun style fragfest even faster than vanilla UT2004. Every feature of the game (except for Sprint, which really seems more of an afterthought to me) points to a slower, more tactical game. I'm not saying I know what the developers want, but that's what it seemed like they were going for.



I think you're referring to just the momentum of the bullets, with the kinetic energy of the bullet physically slowing you down (which is unrealistic, really. It was proven on Mythbusters that it's not the kinetic force of the bullet that knocks a man down). I've experienced it myself when I was physically pushed back by a mounted M353 while I frantically waved my knife in the air in hopes of stabbing my opponent. Such a feature would conceivably allow you to physically stop Hellbender or Scorpion in its tracks with bullets, which borders on the ridiculous.

Besides, it doesn't help when you're chasing down someone. Blasting a runner with a shotgun would only send him further away from you, not cause him to stumble from the pain of getting shot.

Hmm... I guess I was mistaken. I thought the knock back (as I know now it really was) seemed to have more of an effect when you are at higher speeds, but I guess not.

Maybe it was just a strange set of coincidences then, as I just tested it it on a 1on1 match and found your explanation to be true.

That's odd though because I never really seemed to be very effected by knock back when I wasn't moving much in the bigger DMs I had. I guess I must've just not noticed it.

I think that even though knock back is unrealistic, it should still be present in BW. I think that some sort of effect when you get hit would be a great feature too, as it does seem kinda odd that shooting someone fleeing from you with a shotgun would in fact help out their flight, if they do survive.

I guess if knock back was removed and instead something that makes you stop what you're doing would be fine, but I think you should still get knocked away from the shot still, just to emphasize the fact that you got hurt.

Of course, knock back from concussive forces should still be present, but I think you might've already said or implied that.

And yes, BW is intended to be slower paced than normal UT2004. But, it isn't intended to be a tactical game. It's pretty much made so any type of player can really find their place in it.

Wouldn't this make the life of the guy being shot even worse? Cause he can't barely move out of fire to shoot off a few rounds. Wouldn't it make those rapid fire weapons insanely powerful?

The paralysis effect would depend on the amount of damage dealt, so an individual bullet from an SMG would be hardly noticeable. You'd have to hit him a bunch of times in order to do the same amount as a D49 or sniper round.

That's why guns like the Colt M1911 .45 semi-automatic pistol was developed. Angry tribesmen in the Philippines or New Zealand, pumped up on rage, adrenaline, and whatever drugs they were taking would just shrug off the bullets fired on them by the smaller sidearms and continue to charge. Not so much with the Colt .45.

I think there should be some sort of limit on how paralyzed and/or immobilized a person should be, as UP gives a good point. If you just keep someone under fire, you could essentially get the same effects as if you held them with a lightning gun, save for the disorientation. Their control would not be there's any more, but instead just pinned down there with nothing to do save maybe look around.

Like I said, paralysis is determined by damage, so you'd have to pump a lot of rounds with an SMG or M353 into a guy to slow him significantly.

On knockback from concussive force, most of a bullet's kinetic energy is spent deforming the bullet and smashing the tissue on impact, so it really wouldn't knock a guy back from force alone. It would also make it very hard for a melee guy to reach a shooter, although that is probably a good thing.

From concussive forces I meant things like rockets and other explosions.