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Revision as of 12:54, 24 June 2022 by Wildweasel (talk | contribs)
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Actual bits of writing

Ideas and general spitballing

A better way to handle synthfire

Okay. So, currently the way zdoom weapons are handled, the animation and the action functions are extremely tightly coupled to each other. This creates a mess and plays hell with things like changing the rate of fire on anything. So here's an alternate proposal:

  • Tuck all the things essential to the FUNCTION of the weapon into their own overlay state. Call that overlay on its own layer. Do not give it any duration. Here's where you'd fire all the pellets, eject the smoke, eject the shell.
  • From THAT overlay, call another overlay SOLELY FOR THE RECOIL ANIMATION. We can do some nice things with math and trig in order to ease it and tween it smoothly over a given duration, I would think. When calling this recoil overlay, call it on a new overlay layer each time so that they add together nicely and will always reset back to the original angle/pitch (if we're careful).
  • The weapon's native states all display TNT1A0. They're blank.
  • The weapon's actual appearance is on its own overlay. We're careful to always ensure that the weapon's overlay is always the same number and is never the topmost one (so muzzle flashes and other nice effects can go over the top of it).
  • When the weapon fires, the weapon graphic overlay is instructed to recoil. This is purely A_WeaponOffset trickery, we can do more nice math and trig to tween it around smoothly. We'll always run the graphic recoil on the same layer, so it'll work additively and make a nice effect on automatics.
  • The weapon's native fire state is never more tics than needed for limiting fire rate. This can then be very easily changed - for upgrades or balance purposes.
  • All this adds together to have an even cooler effect: with the fire and altfire states being only 1 tic long, and just keeping track of the "readiness" status of the weapon very carefully, we could have synthfire (for semi-automatic weapons only) without even needing the ACS script hackery.

A Non-Combat RPG

You are a new Lord of the realm. Your station is not especially high; your influence only affects ordinary citizens, and you still answer to the other Lords, the Senate, and the King, but you have influence nonetheless. The one catch: your legs have never worked. Whether through birth defect, disease, or childhood injury, you cannot go anywhere under your own power. In order to travel places, you need the assistance of your entourage. While this means you are protected everywhere you go, the entourage does not come cheap, and requires enough planning in advance that you can only realistically leave the castle once a day. At night, you may choose a study topic out of your library, increasing the skill of your choice by one point (or more). Skills influence available dialogue choices, a la New Vegas.

The Tangerine Dream Heist

An Ocean's Eleven-style heist operation...where every character and location just happens to be named after a Tangerine Dream album.

  • Atem is the Leading Man, the brains of the operation.
  • Phaedra is his ex-love interest.
  • Le Parc is the eccentric gadgeteer.
  • Melrose is the face-man.
  • White Eagle is the ex-SAS recon/intel man.
  • Tyger is your Leverage-style "hitter."
  • Sorcerer is your computer guy.
  • And Force Majeure is their mysterious benefactor that gives the orders.
  • Their job is to case a trio of casino resorts called Lily On The Beach, Stratosfear, and Green Desert.

"This is why life blows" story

[23:06:10] <wildweasel> an adventurer is about to defeat an evil lord, but towards the end of the battle he's mortally wounded as he kills the lord. the adventurer finds himself alive after blacking out for a while. when he enters town, people fear him, and he consults a priest to find what his problem is - turns out, he did die, and his ghost inhabited the evil lord's body, in the lord's last ditch effort to stay alive himself
[23:06:39] <ContraVania> Hmm... creepy.  
[23:06:40] <wildweasel> the adventurer finds that he is sharing the body with a small scrap of the lord's soul, which implores him on occasion to do nasty things to the people he loves
[23:07:02] <ContraVania> This premise sounds vaguely familiar, but original enough that I'm unable to match it to anything.
[23:07:46] <wildweasel> he finally finds someone who can purge the extra soul from his body, but unbeknownst to the adventurer, the person in question is the wizard who helped the lord attune his body in such a way in the first place
[23:08:32] <wildweasel> the wizard lives up to his promise to "purge the extra soul" - that soul ends up being the adventurer's, and the lord's body survives to build his strength and make a future attempt at world domination
[23:09:03] <wildweasel> i don't know why i called this idea a fairy tale
[23:09:23] <ContraVania> It's a very good "this is why life blows" story.  lol