Good Idea, Bad Idea? A new movement system.

[HideInLight]

Was lately thinking about ways the movement in UT3 can be improved without changing too much and at the same time making UT99 and UT2004 a little happier.

Here's what I came up with:

The Dodging:
There's a distinct difference between the dodging in UT3 and UT2004.
UT3's dodging is slower and has bigger height. I'm gonna call it "leaping".
UT2004's dodging is fast with little height. I'm gonna call it "quick dodge". It's almost the same as in UT99

Obviously both have their advantages and disadvantages. The "Leap" gives you extra with wall dodges which can get you to higher places or give you more airtime. The "Quick dodge" makes it easier to avoid stuff like rockets and mantas and is a lot harder to hit.

You probably seeing where I'm going at. Why not add both to the game?

How it can be implemented?
Well the main problem here would be ergonomics, a person only has so much fingers he can use.

Currently the only way to dodge is to double tap a directional key which also has a problem.
It's simply impossible to double tap forward or backwards without stopping, this simply just breaks your momentum and strafe jumping was born (moving and adjusting your camera then dodging left or right to move forward).

That kinda makes key combination FF and BB obsolete. This forward and backwards dodging could be put to better use as an alternative dodge, but in order not to break momentum it could be changed a little.

My solution.
Two keys that currently go unused in UT3 (at least for me is SHIFT and CTRL). I
Those buttons could be used as an alternative way to dodge. Pressing SHIFT
would make you "Leap" forward in the direction your moving.

The keys would look something like this:

LL - Quick dodge left
DD - Quick dodge right

(Shift + The Direction pawn is moving) - "Leap" in that direction

Ctrl + (The Direction pawn is moving) - "Quick Dodge" in that direction

This would also make the advantages of "strafe jumping" accessable to newer players.

[Nightmare85]

Just in case you don't know it:
I'm pretty sure it is possible to dodge without to stop.
(It's not as good as your idea, but I really think it is possible.)

When you move in a direction and want to dodge in this direction, you must quickly press the opposite keys while holding your direction key.
You hold W pressed while quickly double clicking S to dodge forwards.
I'm not 100% sure if this would help a bit.
(I barely use this, and sometimes my character stops moving for some ms.)

Cheers!

[shombowhore]

This makes no sense because there is not a significant enough difference between a UT2004 and a UT3 dodge... except the dodge-jump of course, which should be left out of UT3 entirely.

Bad idea, imo. If it's not broke, don't fix it.

[Rhykker]

When you move in a direction and want to dodge in this direction, you must quickly press the opposite keys while holding your direction key.
You hold W pressed while quickly double clicking S to dodge forwards.
I'm not 100% sure if this would help a bit.
(I barely use this, and sometimes my character stops moving for some ms.)

This is true. In my experience, it always makes you slow/stop a little right before the dodge, because when you hit the reverse direction key it (gasp!) reverses your direction.

Because of this delay, I stick to strafe-jumping.

Peace,
-Rhykker

[shombowhore]

Currently the only way to dodge is to double tap a directional key which also has a problem.

It's simply impossible to double tap forward or backwards without stopping, this simply just breaks your momentum and strafe jumping was born (moving and adjusting your camera then dodging left or right to move forward).

Also, as Nightmare and Rhykker have pointed out, this is wrong. The technique is not to use front and back dodges, but to alternate different types of dodges while angling your field of view to the direction you're going. This eliminates the pause, but it takes a while to learn how to do this smoothly -- partially because it's just different, and partially because your aim has to acclimate to the new style of movement. Regardless, the improvement will be worth the effort.

This style of movement is evident from watching demos of any higher level players.

edit: See this youtube video I just made.

[BlueCloud]

Another thread which will head nowhere and is almost flame baitish and will have many pages of replies which Epic will not read, and even if they do, will not care and will do their own thing. ANY change will have many vocal people who absolutely hate it or love it depending on their playing style and how much they've played UT99, 2004 and UT3 and the gametypes.

That said, this is my personal opinion. You're overcomplicating things to the level of hitting combos in Mortal Combat. UT2004's movement was good, but the dodge-jump distance was too much. Re-introduce the dodge jump but make it like 50% shorter so that dodge jumpers won't have too much advantage over normal dodgers and people don't fly around like 2004. Right now, UT3's movement is kinda simplistic and people succumb very easily to rocket, flak and stinger spam, esp. with multiple people targeting you if you're the orb or flag carrier.

I play only UT3 now, but the rare time that I fire up UT2004, the movement, response, mouse movement etc. is so wonderful that I wonder what was Epic thinking when they alienated this very large userbase of UT2004, which(along with alpha quality of release game) was one of the biggest contributors to the failure of UT3.

[HideInLight]

Another thread which will head nowhere and is almost flame baitish and will have many pages of replies which Epic will not read, and even if they do, will not care and will do their own thing. ANY change will have many vocal people who absolutely hate it or love it depending on their playing style and how much they've played UT99, 2004 and UT3 and the gametypes.

That said, this is my personal opinion. You're overcomplicating things to the level of hitting combos in Mortal Combat. UT2004's movement was good, but the dodge-jump distance was too much. Re-introduce the dodge jump but make it like 50% shorter so that dodge jumpers won't have too much advantage over normal dodgers and people don't fly around like 2004. Right now, UT3's movement is kinda simplistic and people succumb very easily to rocket, flak and stinger spam, esp. with multiple people targeting you if you're the orb or flag carrier.

I play only UT3 now, but the rare time that I fire up UT2004, the movement, response, mouse movement etc. is so wonderful that I wonder what was Epic thinking when they alienated this very large userbase of UT2004, which(along with alpha quality of release game) was one of the biggest contributors to the failure of UT3.

The dodge makes a huge difference. Here's the variables and values I used for my UT2004Pace mutator which effects the movement of the game. The whole idea was to get close to UT2004 feeling as possible. Note that I had slowed the game down to 0.9 when I tweaked the values. I made it to be used with a dodge mutator. Here's one I only recently discovered btw.

MutMultiDodgeV2
http://kiltersfunhouse.com/download/MutMultiDodgeV2.zip

The Variables:
Groundspeed = 462; //440
DodgeResetTime = 0.85; //0.35
DodgeSpeed = 730; //600
DodgeSpeedZ = 230; //290
Jumpz = 380; //322
Multijumpboost = -20; //-45

If you wanna see how much difference it makes try it out yourself, I'm quite interested in seeing what other people would come up with. Here's the console commands for those interested who cannot script at all:

set utgame.utpawn groundspeed 440
set utgame.utpawn dodgeResetTime 0.35
set utgame.utpawn dodgeSpeed 600	
set utgame.utpawn dodgeSpeedZ 290
set utgame.utpawn multijumpboost -45
set utgame.utpawn jumpz = 322

Note that if you die your movement is set back to normal.

Too makes things even more easier here's a little trick I learned.
Go to this folder
Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3\Binaries
Then create a text file, rename it to "movement" or something.
Copy all the console commands you want to execute into that textfile.
Ex.

movement.txt

set utgame.utpawn groundspeed 440
set utgame.utpawn dodgeResetTime 0.35
set utgame.utpawn dodgeSpeed 600	
set utgame.utpawn dodgeSpeedZ 290
set utgame.utpawn multijumpboost -45
set utgame.utpawn jumpz = 322

When in a game open up console and type in:
exec movement.txt

This will execute all the console commands in text file in an instant. This way you can mess around with the movement on the fly. Would suggesting running in windowed mode and keep changing the values until you get a setting your happy with.

[hypno]

the last thing this game needs is that, really

[jomi294]

Since you're saying something as basic as front and backward dodging is impossible without stopping, I'm going to have to suggest learning UT3's movement appropriately first before trying to replace it.

[HideInLight]

Since you're saying something as basic as front and backward dodging is impossible without stopping, I'm going to have to suggest learning UT3's movement appropriately first before trying to replace it.

I know UT3's movement and UT2004...Been playing it for like forever.

What I meant was you can't dodge forward via double tabbing forward and backwards without loosing momentum. You need to dodge sideways at an angle instead.

I want the replace the double tab forward and backwards with another move basically, because currently it serves not real purpose.
When on the ground anyways...

[shombowhore]

What I meant was you can't dodge forward via double tabbing forward and backwards without loosing momentum. You need to dodge sideways at an angle instead.

I want the replace the double tab forward and backwards with another move basically, because currently it serves not real purpose.

Not true; you just can't use any one dodge repeatedly. You can use front dodges all you like, so long as you alternate in side dodges as well. You obviously need to be able to alternate just side dodges in order to do this effectively.

[jomi294]

I know UT3's movement and UT2004...Been playing it for like forever.

What I meant was you can't dodge forward via double tabbing forward and backwards without loosing momentum. You need to dodge sideways at an angle instead.

I want the replace the double tab forward and backwards with another move basically, because currently it serves not real purpose.
When on the ground anyways...

When you say 'loosing momentum', what do you mean exactly? As far as I know, no momentum is carried over to your dodges.
So what you probably meant is without having to stop.
Which is obviously not true, forward and backward dodging works exactly the same as strafe dodging.

So for strafe dodge, what you do is probably this: hold^+>>
Which obviously you can then rotate/mirror to any direction to get your desired dodge. But again this is all very, very basic...