Beppo, in all fairness, I don't see the reason behind a gametype either. He's not changing the game; he's changing how elements inside the game are used, like the weapons. For a long time, even Infiltration only needed a mutator because all it did was add weapons to the fray. This is what TS and RA did to the game as well; they use the same weapons, but in this case, modify the stats.
The first time you download a 600 kilobyte mutator, you know *something* is going to be different. Even on broadband, it'll take a minute or two. Anyone playing UT for this long will know that a mutator that big is going to change something important. At this point, anyone playing Infiltration will have played some UT before...it just isn't going to happen like the old days, when people would run out and get UT just to play Inf. Those new players will then ask about the large mutator they downloaded, or at least be curious. In all my years of playing the Real Aim mutator, I don't know of less than two or three times a newbie wasn't greeted with "Hey! Welcome to RealAim" or something along those lines. For a while, even, I was practically an official greeter on AFA2. Being worried about the distinctiveness of Infiltration being misinterpreted is not going to be a problem in that regard.
The biggest problem of making it a gametype is it will be
instantly unplayable with any and all other new game modes, which by the mutie’s nature, it should. Even if he creates gametypes subclasses for each of those new gametypes, his package then becomes dependant on those other gametypes. He could create a separate mutator for each new gametype, but that would then create extra garbage that people will need to download in addition to the mutator, when adding a single mutator would be possible otherwise. If anything, TS and RA were Arena mutators, replacing all of the previous weapons with their version of the weapons. Arena mutators have been long supported and made for UT; this is nothing new. Getting upset over TS is like getting upset over someone using ChaosUT or (god forbid
) that Goldeneye wannabe arena mutator with Infiltration. The only difference with RA and TS is that they're specifically designed to work with INF.
Let me also remind everyone that RA, the mutator very much like TS, was released before Infiltration 2.86, and was used on the servers in less time than has passed now since the release of Infiltration 2.9.
Then there’s also the issue of whether the gametype modifications actually work. I have not attempted making one yet and compiling it, so I have no knowledge. However, Yurch has not, from what he has told me and said on the forums, had success in making a new gametype show up as an “Infiltration All” gametype. I don’t know the reasons behind this, it could be something minor that has been done with his gametype that interferes with it, or the way it is classed. After I finish this post I will go and try to make my own and test it out, and will report back with my results. However, the using gametypes because ‘a information message about it is available’ being the main reason to use it is silly. The browser for Infiltration All doesn’t tell the gametype in the part that people look at (the server name), and the first bit of information that comes up when you join a server is the info lines that the administrators write. Every RA server back in the day stated explicitly what mutators they used, and that information popped up immediately upon joining. That information was in the server info slots, making sure that information about the server’s setup would be available at *any* time, not just startup.
The biggest problem I assume most people have with this mod is the gunsight addition, and not the slightly modified gravity or the compensated bullet physics. In all reality, the gravity difference is going to be absolutely minor and for the most part unimportant. Toad, I’m sorry I didn’t e-mail you with my thoughts, but I’ll lay them out here and now for ya. I think the gunsight
concept is just as revolutionary as free aim or iron sights were, and I think it’s come way before its time when most people will accept it or even implement it right. Just now, commercial games are starting to learn the joys of iron sights, but few have dared to take it further, or take out the CS level cone fire. For the record, I really like many aspects of gunsight. However, the implementation decisions regarding it make me not want to play it. Many times it was suggested that gunsight represents you ‘focusing’ upon your target, yet it can be used at any time. If it were restricted to only the same time when you
actually look through the sites, I would be much more liable to think of it as realistically implementing the ‘focus’ part. Also, the zoom level bothers me. While it has been claimed to be a 2x zoom, doing measurements from the standard fov of 90 degrees indicates that it is actually a change of 2.8 times. If it were at all possible, having this reduced to an actual 2.0 zoom would be preferable, even if it makes the FoV some other number. As for the rest of the mod, I can’t say I noticed much difference. I didn’t sense a speed or stamina change as I was running around, so I assume nothing had been affected there. Any other changes you made were minor enough that it was not noticeable with the weapons I tried.
Beppo, you’re asking him to create a handle class for a class, the mutator, that is already a handle class for weapons. TS doesn't change the gametype, it changes the guns and physics. Infiltration's original UT mutator did exactly that, and not much more. Toad’s mutie does much, much less.
Basically, it comes down to whether you really want us to mod Infiltration 2.9 or not.
Saying that a gametype is going to change the way people perceive the game is silly. Online
players don’t choose their gametype, they only see what is on the list of populated servers. If a TrueShot game appears with people in it, or a regular game appears with people in it, it doesn’t make any difference for the novice. If you don’t want people playing modified versions of Infiltration, just come out and say it. Please don’t tell us it should be a gametype, or it’s too early. If that were the case, RA would have been treated the same. RA ‘fixed’ many things about Infiltration that Yurch thought were unrealistic, but they were always
his vision of a realistic game. His release schedule for his mod was earlier than Toad’s, and no one had a problem then. If those kinds of things were an issue for the SentryStudios team, they would have stepped in when the first mutator like this, RA, was released. It may have been a different time, and an ‘incomplete’ game, but you did release a version with your vision. Now, a new version has come out, one that you have said to be your final vision for a game for UT.
Does this mean your vision must be
the final vision for Infiltration UT? Is this a Raven Shield situation, where we shouldn’t touch the code any further from its “pure” form? Or is this a UT mod, where people are allowed to modify the code into whatever their vision for a game is?
