To start let me state that DB has two stages for it’s locomotion design & implementation:
- basic locomotion - ‘baby learns to walk’: standing, crouching & simple jumping.
- advanced locomotion - ‘man learns to fly’: anything else.
Our main motivations are:
- Reflect player intentions with immediacy.
- Try not to take control away from players.
- Maintain a good conservation of momentum.
- Simple to pick up; hard to master.
- Balanced for both the 1st person player and any player trying to track their movement in 3rd person.
Currently we’re at the stage where basic locomotion is sufficient. Some of the most important things we’ve taken care of so far include signalling player states in 1st and 3rd person, making sure the animations can transition quickly and freely between states while not flipping around like a possessed tentacle monster. Things we still need to improve with basic locomotion are signalling the movement intentions rather than just reflecting the current state and ensuring the gameplay values match the level collision for a smooth experience.
Over the coming months of we will continue to polish this basic locomotion while also starting to look at the advanced stages of locomotion. There are no firm plans what moveset or tweaks this will include but all decisions will be taken to reflect the motivations as set out above.
There has been a lot of talk already about DB locomotion but I’d like to respond to a couple of points specifically.
I can categorically say the decisions about locomotion in DB are not being driven primarily by the design doc of CoD or BF3. From an animation perspective it’s important to ensure our quality compares favourably to our competitors but that is all.
For the most part this statement holds true with the design motivations for DB locomotion. Brink’s SMART locomotion suffered from lacking immediacy, locking the player into moves and failing to convey momentum fluidly enough. W:ET met all of the rules above, for the most part. However, there is a fundamental problem with strafe jumping.
While doing a great job of providing high levels of mastery, the level of information required to convey exactly what strafe jumping is and the actions required to perform it are too convoluted to be considered a simple to learn movement mechanic. It is not a move that a player can attempt to understand by simply competing against another player on a server without a full description of what is going on from an external source. Indeed it is such a bizarre move and so breaks the other rules of locomotion in almost every game it does feature in that it is often seen by the uninitiated as a hack or cheat. As such strafe jumping as a move in and of itself is not under consideration for inclusion in Dirty Bomb.
As such we are considering other options, which as DarkangelUK put it, offer ‘a decent level of movement that really didn’t require much training to take advantage of, then those of us that want to take it further usually can, which means they cater for both side of ‘advanced’ fence.’