Ban4life

I know this if off-topic, but: WHAT!? I know I haven't played with the flame tank in a while, but surely they didn't remove the only aspect that made it better against tanks and characters? Without it is only good for buildings and flanked tanks... That aside, we want to showcase the potential that it had for non-believers and uninstall the scripts. We both play without any skins already so that is also no problem. Not that skins are problems. Thanks for the update.

We will probably do the tests on a LAN server, as we live in the same city and Want to record more while we're at it. Many people don't understand the flame tank has an alt fire for example, so we want to showcase it. Later we will invite you in later tests if we go on public servers. I have to say that I miseed something for moving targets and guns with a bullet velocity. I can't explain it in a few words yet, and as Einstein said "if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough". You might be right it makes next to no difference for bullet velocity guns and perspective. I'll look into it.

This actually should go in the "everything else" section, but hi =)

I have no idea, all what I wanted is to know what free aim is... I hope you now know We are now just nitpicking about if free aiming is a significant advantage or not over third or first person shooting. I think this discussion is needed atm.

Thank you Speedy059, this is what I wanted to hear =)

Education?

I can't make video's atm, but I still see what I meant in your video's. You were aiming I don't know how many pixels above the block, but your gun pointed at the block. This gives you that much more room where you still hit the block. If it where a head, you would be aiming about 2 heads above it. If you aim directly at the block, you will hit it right at that spot, so there is no change there. I've made 2 pictures, yes again pictures, to make it very clear. Here it is in short. The light is the FOV of the GUN (which is also your first person view). Your own FOV is different and a little behind the gun, so you can see things that the gun can't. The shadow is out of the FOV from the gun. You can see parts of the shadow. Aiming at the shadow will let the gun aim there, but is blocked by the opponent. Like the light shooting from the lamp, you can see the bullet will impact the opponent before getting to the spot where you aimed. The first is normal third person view. Green gives the outline of what you can hit in first person. Red gives what you can aim at and still hit the opponent in third person. The red cross is where I'm aiming. The blue line gives the trajectory of the bullet. Your view can look past it, the gun will try to aim at that spot, but is simply blocked by the opponent. With free aim you can get the next shot. Here you can see that much more of the shadow. So you can aim at much more that is not in the FOV of the gun. Anywhere you shoot that is outside this FOV, makes you hit the target. So here you see that the red and green outlined is where you can aim and hit. This will make the total surface area where you can shoot and hit bigger. I kept the distance from the wall to the object and the distance from the object to the light the same. Also the distance of the camera behind the light source is the same, but I cut in the first picture to make it bigger. In the game there is only an imaginary shadow.

Please do, but to convince me, you need to have a set of the same data. Show it with the same distance from you to the target with and without free aim, and a situation where you will fire at the imaginary shadow of my example. The shadow is my greatest concern and you will need to prove that the advantage you get is incredibly small. Just to be sure, for me you need to prove the effective area where you can shoot is much smaller than anticipated. My own quick experiments showed otherwise, but if you put a more thorough examination in a video I'll drop all complaints and free aim gets a green light from me.

Thank you. That is the right and only response. Imagine having to click three times on the login button to log in. It looks beautiful thanks to some nifty graphics (just imagine something great there). I would get used to it really quickly, but it is just a poor design. Clicking once should be enough. Looking at the design, I think you are right. One of my greatest problem is that I cannot refill as easy, as the 6 is much harder to reach with my fingers if I try to refill really quickly. I'm afraid I'll get an engineer much more than usual when I'll play Renegade-X. Double columns and putting the numbers left to right is counter intuitive, making it harder to know which button to press. Double columns are bad for any numbering, so don't put it up to down either! Changes in this UI will put off the old Renegade players for some time I think. Credits should be much more central and bigger. The silenced pistol and timed are small and forgotten, giving all focus to the right side. This can be a problem if you want people to have a more diverse weapon loadout. (If I see the footage, you need to change back to your normal loadout every time. So if you prefer a sub-machine gun, you have to change the silenced pistol to a machine gun every time you die?). For the rest the only problem is that the engineer and refill are next to each other in terms of character change, but my own opinion it is correct here, as it is a quick soldier thing. My only suggestion in grouping would be to make refill the first thing you encounter, as the rest is less important to have on easy hotkeys and take more deliberation. The next most important things are buying advanced characters and units. The low end units only the engineer is really important if you have to change quickly. Airstrike is the only item that would be bought in a real rush imho. I'll give some suggestions later. Scratch that, I'll probably forget it and just leave this discussion here but whatever. I know why it is done like this. There is a truly awesome background that is moving and showing off your weapons and stuff. In the end it is only a short background material, making the UI much more important than the background graphics (sorry guys. It's literally my job to improve these things by suggestion. It is still a lovely background, but not practical for the UI. Maybe put it in a different way?). In many ways, the old Renegade style had a much better UI. You quickly knew what you would buy due to full colour graphic appearance of weapons in the UI, which was later supported by the character visualisation that came with it. Not the shade you have going on here. A shade is good when the shade makes very distinct shapes, but I do not call out shotgun or grenadier the first time I see these shades. They are too complicated and beautiful in the real game to have shades. I would suggest filling some basic colour for recognition, but it would break with the visualisation as a whole. Its a big dilemma, but I would put UI first, graphics second. It is a quick terminal after all.

Can you upload pictures to this site? It would greatly support my argument. To clarify a perspective angle and how much it can boost your aim, lets make this simple. Think about a dark room. The character has a gun, which is just a big light source, giving off a bright light. The moment an opponent comes into your field of view, you cannot see it's shadow, as that is directly behind this person. You can see this extremely well with flash photo's in dark environments, as you can barely see any shadow. This means that if you aim at that person, you can only hit if if you reticule is directly on that person. Now lets change to third person view. Now you are slightly above the light source, and you are able to see parts of the shadows. First thing you notice is that if objects come closer, they cast a larger shadow. The further they are, the smaller the shadow is, but it will never be smaller than the character (due to one small point light source). If the opponent is dead ahead, you can see over him and see some of his shoulders and his whole head as a shadow. Now you aim. Aiming directly at the target, and the light source starts aiming there. So if the reticule is aiming at the head, the light source aims there and you hit the head. Simple, just like the normal view. Now third person allows you to target a part of the shadow. If you aim at the shadow's head, the light source will aim straight for it. The light source however is blocked by the real head. So when you fire, the light source fires in a trajectory straight through the head at the shadow head. Simply put, shooting at the shadow hits its the respective real part of the body. In effect, this gives you a greater surface area where you can fire, while still hitting a head or maybe the shoulders. Remember when the target comes closer, the shadow becomes bigger? This can give a surface area that is enormous, multiplying the surface area where you can aim and hit by I don't know how many times. It goes well over 5x the normal surface area from what I can see, and that is a very, very conservative estimate. My own bet is up to 12x from a second away. Oh and the character itself of course also gets bigger (duh) giving all perspectives a surface area "advantage". Just to mention that for a full picture. If someone stands right against you and you are in third person view, you can shoot practically everywhere on the screen and still hit. Even if the shadow gives "only" 5x more surface area, would you want to fight against someone who could fire at 5x more surface area? Yes it is not 5x easier to hit statistically, but it is still more than enough to win much more fights. Imagine someone with a headshot one hit kill rifle and you are pretty screwed. If the opponent is very far away, the worst you can do is that the shadow and the head have the same pixel, giving no bonus. But before that, you have a great distance that you have one extra pixel to shoot at, giving 2x more surface area. It might be just enough for that head shot. Now that is from just third person with the target dead ahead. Many people use this perspective. Now if the target is moved the exact same distance from you, but to your far right (imagine a circle and they just move on the line to your far right, staying the exact same distance from you). Now you would need free aim. What happens? You can see the whole shadow! Not accounting for the greater size of the shadow, it gives 2x more surface area to hit! If you do account for shadow size, it gives much more than 2x. The closer the target is, the greater the shadow.... Every thing between the far right and the middle of the screen exposes a little more of the shadow. So if someone made a perfect half circle around you, never coming closer, they would have the largest exposed shadow to either side of the screen, and the least when dead ahead. Now the distance of any object behind the opponent does not matter, as the shadow is cast anyway and just increases in size the further it goes. For your screen and aiming, this won't matter. Anywhere you shoot in that shadow, and the light source will try to fire there. Any light will hit the opponent first. Moving opponents does not matter, even if your bullets aren't instant. The shadow moves with them, meaning that if they move to a part you just fired, they will still cast that shadow, getting hit by any bullet you just fired within the shadow that wasn't there until recently. The only disadvantage of third person view is that the characters get smaller. [sarcasm] Wow. By so much [/sarcasm] This is why I'm not a supporter of free aim. It goes against my fair play instincts as it just makes for greater area's where you can still hit a person under the same conditions. If it is only used in ways that Error suggests, I have no problem, but with any firearm it just plain increases the surface area where you can hit, making it a no-go for me. Oh and any suggestions of "it's not in other FPS, so why would we add it here" is not a good argument. It should be viewed in this game and this game alone. Any glitch advantages like shooting through walls will be solved in Renegade-X, so that is no argument either.

True, gameplay has changed a lot. The dev's did not give a change sheet in such detail. Keep in mind that they aren't full time paid professionals. They do this as a hobby. As for damage ratios and such. All health values are the same. Orca has 300 hp, med and flame tank have 800, 1000 credit characters have 350, etc (added health and armor together). All damage values are kept really close to Renegade values. Changes are more noticeable like with a slight weapon spread. If the damage values are radically different, the weapon was altered completely. An example is the mammoth tank. Primary fire is chamged only a little. It now has two shells in the clip, firing them in quick succession, but with a longer reload time. It looks like the damage total per minute is about the same as in Renegade. Its rockets are changed completely. They are longer range and are shot 4 at a time, much like an MRLS. They have a longer reload time. Both systems cannot be fired at the same time, but as there is no "cooldown", you can fire them right after each other. The mammoth tank needed a boost from the old, so here it is. Other changes Rocket launcher (weak) is now a single shot launcher with more power (?) And with a reasonable goid lock on Nod basic rifle now does the same damage as the gdi basic rifle Machine gun now has 250 bullets per round, a slight warm up time before full power and 500 bullets total. Flachette gun and tib auto rifle are now a secondary weapon that can be bought on every character when you captured a tib silo. Patch now has a hard hitting automatic rifle with incendentary bullets. Much slower than the flachette. The Sydney (weak) has been replaced with McFarland and has a grenade luancher that also is a shotgun. The personal ion cannon and railgun now have a clip of 4. Not sure if it evens out with reload times. Damage is the same as far as I can tell. Laser rifle has 30 more powerful rounds but shoots much slower. Laser chain gun shoots slower when warming up like the chain gun. Orca shoots 2 rockets and needs to reload, long reload. Has a 30 clip for the machine gun. Apache has 4 rockets and I'm not sure about the clips and reload. Flying coffin is now upgraded to a chinook with added passenger machine guns with exploading rounds. Artillery has a slight but noticable drop-off. Mrls rotating turret. Flame tank lost its secondary fire (shoot out only one nozzle and do just under double damage) Those are the biggest changes from old to new that I can think off right now. Most changes will be small for balancing issues and work nearly like the old. Others needed some bigger change, like the mammoth tank. There is much more like a 0 credit sniper rifle thing with no one hit kill headshot. Also airstrikes, grenades (replaces c4 when chosen), extra sidearms, some must be paid for and a lot more. You'll just have to look for that yourself, but it's pretty cool.

Yes and no. It is a good addition in many situations, making it no exploit or anything. In firefights it is hard to learn. When learned how to control it, you automatically shoot heads easier when in third person. So you neex to have skill first before you can have easuer targets. In Renegade-X it will probably not be as bad, as high powered single shot weapons have a little weapon spread. This makes aiming down sights important, negating any effect from free aim/third person view. Still a consideration though.

Free aim is best explained with a tank. With the old Renegade you could lock the camera to either the chassis or the turret. Locking to the turret gave you a view that looks like being in a normal character. You can look behind you and the turret follows. Locking to the chassis is like free aim. The camera now only looks forward. If you move the mouse, you keep looking forward, but your reticule goes over the screen. You cannot look behind you, but you can look in one direction and aim in the upper right corner for example. Free aim is achieved by pressing "v". You keep looking in the same direction, but you are free to aim anywhere on your screen. It is a handy tool, but requires some skill before you can gain it's potential. One of the problems that some people have, me included, is an aim advantage in certain situations. When in third person view, you have a small advantage. This is because if you aim just above a player, due to the perspective the reticule snaps onto the head, giving a slightly taller area where you can hit the head. Free aim increases this unintentional perspective bonus the further you aim to the sides of the screen. Free aim has many uses that do not exploit this, but any firearm, especially snipers, benefit from free aim if you are familliar with it.

It should be totally up to the server staff to decide. Considering how some admins ban for personal reasons on their servers, (which they totally can, it's their server after all) I doubt it would be a good idea to have global bans. Plus considering the game is free nothing will stop a person to play under another alias/ip/account/whatever to circumvent the global ban. That's what people do in tf2 to bypass VAC, since VAC bans on all secure servers. I agree, but if you get banned for confirmed cheating in two or three communities, you deserve a ban for a month or two. The severity is bad enough for global if done on a few servers if you ask me. Let them make another account earlier in the process to prevent him from fucking up all the servers before being globally banned. All the rest must be server specific, in that I completely agree. Bad behaviour or small exploits is no global matter.

I have played with friendly fire on. When you see people with a negative 10000 points, you play with friendly fire on. It was just not a good mode as people started to kill their own bases. It just takes one guy and you're screwed. Doesn't the airstrike have an announcement for both teams? It would give a warning, but not where. It might also not be heard with all the fighting. I sometimes nearly missed the announcement in the movies.

A global ban might not be the best. If a person cheats or severely exploits the game on several servers, then maybe a global ban. All other transgressions should be punished per server or server network. You could get banned from all servers, but not for the rest. It will give you a chance to reflect and change your behaviour. You should be able to immediately return to another server, as only the most severe transgressions should have a more than that server/server network span.

Stay on topic please. It's very rude to just bash on someone who can't defend him/herself. This does not add to a good community. Anyway it is nice to know that there are some good considerations made by the communities. If it will be enough... time will tell. In the end, time will always tell.

That right there is a pretty bad design decission. I dont see why. Sure, Renegade and RenX arent meant to be totally realistic, but isnt the entire point of RenX to introduce graphical upgrades to the original? And isnt a graphical upgrade's entire purpose, by definition, to bring the virtual world closer to a realistic world? And is it not true that spotting a single person from a distance in real life can be a little difficult due to things like light reflection/refraction, blooming, and pattern recognition? I think the point they tried to make is 'lower graphics=better visibility=better play' I have to disagree. Although some graphic settings are troublesome (motion blur is the worst!), better graphics in general will probably give an advantage.

Probably not. They need to pay for it themselves and I understand the tools and rights aren't cheap. If you really need a console touch, you can plug in special controllers in your computer and map them.

Yes. I want to play Renegade to death before X starts. The rest doesn't interest me though. I have the original cd's and twice the The First Decade cd. A real Renegade-fan would tough origin for Renegade

Any chance to get some anwsers ? Hate might not be able to answer you, but I can try on what I've seen. There were several threads, requesting to translate Black Dawn. I think they had some people already translating for Renegade-X, so there will probably be an in-game option to change to several languages (including German I think). Maybe not at first release though. Again, I advise against changing it on your own. It might be unstable and bar access to servers. My knowledge in this is severely limited, so best to wait on a dev. I think it's too much hassle to create a locked version, so no early downloads. They do have torrent possibility besides the sites, so my suggestion is go torrent, seed in the time you have spared yourself and then start playing. My computer can't handle the game atm, but will provide a 5mb/s upload for some time.

I thought that was a joke at first... He starred in an april fools joke. Probably where your confusion comes from. In addition to _ERROR: the way I get it, Farlands weapon is going to resemble the UT version of the flak cannon. So to prevent confusion no anti-air, but one shot is a grenade and the other a shotgun. @Rex: it's no business model. Just a hobby that got out of hand and fuels people's CV and reputation. No money because of the contract as already stated. I'm psyched

European Players Strike Back ...hopefully with a 2,2m cyborg with immense strength, swords of light and ancient mystical powers

If you just joined it is a nice thing. Also, you can perform very well, but just do things that deliver very little points. For example, patrolling with a APC through the base, killing any SBH is a very strong play, preventing a real threat. How many points does it give? Next to nothing. In games where your GDI ref is gone and you don't have any base defense (anymore), you will have to patrol a lot for all the people trying to infiltrate your base. They should be able to gain some money from the people only playing for points for an effective team. On the "pure" gamemodes, I can remember that there were some starting credits, endgame beacon was optional but most servers had it on, money crates (I think 100 every crate but not sure) and that was it. I'm conflicted about the random weapon spawn but I think it wasn't on by default. With Renegade-X it will be different. With the server side options, you will have to create a standard, or possibly several standards. The mods in Renegade have changed a lot of what is accepted, creating new possibilities. Just like you put 5v5 and 10v10 matches in a different statistic, you do the same with the several "pure" standards.

Or just not add it? Add a different unit all together than a recon bike might solve a lot of the problems and concerns a lot of people have. Put a tech building where they can buy first generation laser/railgun tanks or something. I would also prefer the Humvee with a TOW missile to the Recon bike. A recon buggy even. @BroTranquility If you put any vehicle there that has one of the team's strengths like stealth it would be bad. Nod has stealth an no other. Just like I would not give any ion based units to Nod this way. It's not really "natural". I remember servers with stealth crates that made the next vehicles you got into stealth. Ever seen mammies come out of nowhere and crush everything? I've been on both sides of that coin, and it's really awesome for a few games, but then the fun is over. Nod has SBH and Stanks and that should be it in stealth.