Metroid Online - Pre-release Party Post

[OmegaDragon]

OMG I missed the release??? I was hoping it was going to be a thread in the release forums and spent all my time watching for any signs. I really need to pay more attention

[n00b1n8R]

anybody want to play on the HIV server now?

[odseraphim]

Well since you've been more than frank, I'm going to go ahead and do the same:

I don't understand the exclusion of crouching and melee, along with the lack of the morph ball it actually feels like movement has been dumbed down quite a bit.

Yeah, it has dumbed down a bit because you aren't stuck on one tier of the multi-tiered terrain, rolling around in a lethargic ball, dropping bombs. You don't need crouching, you halotard Melee might be added, but we'll see.

For some reason, practically everything has homing. There's no reason for that, only missiles and the wave beam charge shot should have homing.

Sorry, go play Metroid Prime. Every charged beam, and actually every beam has homing when locked. Since we can't have locking without the use of an app, that's what you get.

The lack of any sort of pickups makes the environment completely pointless to explore, and starting with all the weapons means you can basically just figure out which beam you prefer and never change from it. It would be better if the weapons were all pickups, and they could even be colored spheres like in Hunters for more metroidy flavor. Some other items from the Metroid universe would be nice as well, such as perhaps a phazon beam for uber spraying and a sonic boom that sends people flying

You are right, there is a lack of pickups and environment exploration, because we released two small-sized maps. Deal with it. There's a constant barrage of health and missiles to pick up. The weapons aren't going to be little orbs for you to pick up, it's bad enough arranging everything in the first place, let alone making you dash over to some area to get your favorite beam. And, you've obviously not had any interaction with the Halo Editing Kit in awhile, or you'd know why we only had the number of beams we did and why we dropped one for oddball and ctf: you can only hold 4 weapons/items at a time.

Power beam stuns enemies, charge shot gets headshots

No it won't, do you have ANY idea how annoying stun is in Halo online? You try getting one person to play the mod after that addition, I doubt it would happen. Charge shot shouldn't have headshots, if anything should it should be the only beam somewhat like a sniper rifle, the Plasma beam.

Plasma beam has a scope, charge shot sets fires that do actual damage

Scope is an ok idea, but once you zoom in, we'd have to create a faux HUD on the scope itself, or make a weird-looking custom one. Fire is about as annoying as stun. You just dance around, on fire, and you really can't judge when you are about to keel over and die, SORTA LIKE THE FLAMETHROWER!

Wave beam annoys people with purple screen flashes, charge shot has homing and a more intense screen flash

We.. have that already?

Havoc beam and missiles are pretty much fine as they are, though the missile damage could use some rebalancing.

We made the missile damage the way it is to balance out the beams. If you aren't precise with your plasma fire (any of the beams), we give you a missile, similar to a grenade in damage and shockwave (manner that it pushes you backwards/propels you). It's a glorified grenade, trust me.

The Power Beam effects are pretty schizophrenic, they should all be yellow not rainbow colored

They are yellow with a slight blue contrail encasing them.

The wave beam charge trail doesn't always line up straight (though the rest of the wave beam effects are fantastic)

That's because of homing then, or the way Halo handles contrails, not really that big of a deal if you can deal with something not being perfect that you can't change.

The arm cannon still isn't shiny, and the arm cannon permutations should be a little more pronounced. At times it was hard to tell what beam I was even using

The shininess is something we could fix easily, I'll look into that. The arm cannon permutations are also marked by a specific display on the bottom right to show you what beam you are using. The box slides into the middle, the colors represent each beam: power, havoc, wave, and plasma. Shoot one, you should be able to figure out which one is which.

The Plasma Pistol reticle needs to go, the R aiming reticle from Prime would be better

I agree, but it sorta gets in the way, we chose a minimalistic reticle for the mod, so there wasn't a huge scope the size of 4 people's heads in the middle of your HUD.

There's no need to have the arm cannon come back up when picking up the flag, since all the beams have the arm cannon in the same place, just have the animation for taking out the flag have samus move the arm cannon over a bit

There sorta is a reason, it's used for melee. It actually (if you look at it) pulls up, out of the way. It's not like you can't see with it there, we just made it that way to show that you still had the ability to use your cannon.

The dying animation is pretty lame, a nice explosion would be better. With no damage, but a bit of force maybe (especially since the animation plays an explosion sound)

A 'nice explosion' causes exceptions. You have problems when you make the biped disappear, trust me, a LOT of problems. The animation plays a death sound and the sound of her suit shutting down, I don't recall an explosion..

The charge beam balls are way off in third person, and don't seem to give off any light

They give off light, go into 3rd person in a LAN server, and you'll see. We know about the charge balls, we'd just have to move them by hand, and we didn't have the opportunity, since we were working on more important things.

[DaneO'Roo]

Plasma beam has a scope, charge shot sets fires that do actual damage

Scope is an ok idea, but once you zoom in, we'd have to create a faux HUD on the scope itself, or make a weird-looking custom one.

Er, thats not hard.



The Plasma Pistol reticle needs to go, the R aiming reticle from Prime would be better

I agree, but it sorta gets in the way, we chose a minimalistic reticle for the mod, so there wasn't a huge scope the size of 4 people's heads in the middle of your HUD.
:lack of effort:

make a new reticle dammit, also not hard.

.

[ODX]

People have no respect, they did tell the truth though, but it's so addicting I don't really care.
http://forum.halomaps.org/index.cfm?...&topicID=13499
Nine great pics are on my xfire.
http://xfire.com/screenshots/odx999/
This one is my favorite:

[p0lar_bear]

Great job on the release so far, but I have just a couple minor grievances, mostly with cosmetic things.

1. You should swap out the shader type for Samus's eyes; putting a transparent shader behind anothr transparent shader makes her eyes glow.
2. A certain something at the back of the Tallon map is making my framerate hit the floor and keep going.
3. The Samus model doesn't have LODs. This might cause some framerate issues in full servers.
4. Please to be getting rid of the gametype icon.
5. Particle and charging effects completely miss the arm cannon; you need to move the marker down just a tad on the third-person model.
   
   

[Rosco]

Ditch the secret room seraph, atleast the idea of the room, keep what it has. I tell you, once I exploited it and accidently said about it, server gameplay went dead.

Also what's the deal with the death anim?

Also ODX, terribly sorry about being a jerk. Didn't realise I was 10 years older than you. Lmfao.

[flibitijibibo]

"C:\Users\Shdwsnipa\Documents\Isolation RC1.zip: CRC failed in Isolation RC1.map. The file is corrupt"

Noooooes!

[Pooky]

Yeah, it has dumbed down a bit because you aren't stuck on one tier of the multi-tiered terrain, rolling around in a lethargic ball, dropping bombs. You don't need crouching, you halotard Melee might be added, but we'll see.

The lack of crouching just feels wierd, and samus' fall speed is still too floaty.

Sorry, go play Metroid Prime. Every charged beam, and actually every beam has homing when locked. Since we can't have locking without the use of an app, that's what you get.

Believe me, I played the shit out of Metroid Prime and I don't recall that, but I'll take your word for it.

You are right, there is a lack of pickups and environment exploration, because we released two small-sized maps. Deal with it. There's a constant barrage of health and missiles to pick up. The weapons aren't going to be little orbs for you to pick up, it's bad enough arranging everything in the first place, let alone making you dash over to some area to get your favorite beam. And, you've obviously not had any interaction with the Halo Editing Kit in awhile, or you'd know why we only had the number of beams we did and why we dropped one for oddball and ctf: you can only hold 4 weapons/items at a time.

It still couldn't hurt to have health and missile pickups so you don't have to rely completely on defeating an enemy who is far better equipped than you.
Besides having large swathes of unused environment on the map is annoying.

Scope is an ok idea, but once you zoom in, we'd have to create a faux HUD on the scope itself, or make a weird-looking custom one.

Effort. :|

Fire is about as annoying as stun. You just dance around, on fire, and you really can't judge when you are about to keel over and die, SORTA LIKE THE FLAMETHROWER!

I disagree, having it set fires on the ground would make it sort of like the bio rifle, and add a little bit of strategy. But that's purely a matter of opinion.

We.. have that already?
That may have been my fault for playing on a shitty PC in a laggy server

We made the missile damage the way it is to balance out the beams. If you aren't precise with your plasma fire (any of the beams), we give you a missile, similar to a grenade in damage and shockwave (manner that it pushes you backwards/propels you). It's a glorified grenade, trust me.

It's not even so much the damage they do, but the fact that you can spam 3 missiles very rapidly makes it easy to jump into a crowd with no missiles and get a killtacular.

They are yellow with a slight blue contrail encasing them.

The impact effect is green tinged and the charge effects lack blue. It would look nicer if the colors were all consistent. i.e. the charge beam ball has a blue tinge on the edges, as do the impact effects

That's because of homing then, or the way Halo handles contrails, not really that big of a deal if you can deal with something not being perfect that you can't change.

You know perfectly well that was just a nitpick. As I said the wave beam effects (and really all the beam effects) look incredible, I was very impressed by the mod from a graphical and aural standpoint.

The shininess is something we could fix easily, I'll look into that. The arm cannon permutations are also marked by a specific display on the bottom right to show you what beam you are using. The box slides into the middle, the colors represent each beam: power, havoc, wave, and plasma. Shoot one, you should be able to figure out which one is which.

I know that, as I said before I played a ton of prime. It's on that basis I made that statement in the first place, sometimes it's annoying to have to look at the HUD to really tell what beam I'm using... and due to the as yet large focus on long range vertical fighting, firing off a shot could give you away easily. But again, it's a nit pick.

I agree, but it sorta gets in the way, we chose a minimalistic reticle for the mod, so there wasn't a huge scope the size of 4 people's heads in the middle of your HUD.

You could always just take the Prime reticle and scale it down.

There sorta is a reason, it's used for melee. It actually (if you look at it) pulls up, out of the way. It's not like you can't see with it there, we just made it that way to show that you still had the ability to use your cannon.

I think you took my meaning the wrong way. Notice how when you pick up the flag, the arm cannon mysteriously disappears off the screen, and comes up again? Since the animations for all the beams are largely the same, it would look better to have samus simply change to the power beam and move the arm cannon to the side a bit, so the animation flows better.

A 'nice explosion' causes exceptions. You have problems when you make the biped disappear, trust me, a LOT of problems. The animation plays a death sound and the sound of her suit shutting down, I don't recall an explosion..

I honestly wouldn't know, I prefer to play rather than content create, and give feedback when I can. I haven't touched the HEK in a long time. I swear I can hear a faint explosion in the sound, and since samus explodes in virtually every 2D metroid game I don't see why it would be different in prime. If nothing else you could try having a bright flash or lens flare without having the biped disappear, so you get the impression some critical suit part failed. That brings up something else I forgot to mention, there's very little indication of how much you've actually damaged someone, which can be frustrating at times.

They give off light, go into 3rd person in a LAN server, and you'll see. We know about the charge balls, we'd just have to move them by hand, and we didn't have the opportunity, since we were working on more important things.

It's more important than you think, the funky 3p charge balls do a pretty good job of killing the immersion.

[ExAm]

Seraphim, please, either alter the homing so it doesn't make you miss half the time, or take it out entirely.