Unvanquished Forum

The egg, as you may know, is going to be redone as a more squat version to better fit the bounding box. Once it's in-game, we'll allow it to be built on walls, not just on ceilings and floors. This is largely because the Tremulous egg looks ridiculous when you build it sideways.

However, I'm more intrigued by the possibilities of the telenode. From what I've heard, there have been Tremulous mods that allow you to warp between them. This would actually lead into some very interesting tactical possibilities for humans, and would work very well with our build/resource system, which encourages you to make outpost bases. Humans could rapidly deploy themselves across the map, or address multiple alien contacts. The telenode could be made more expensive than the egg to compensate for this.

Either way, I really think that you should be able to choose your spawn location while waiting on the queue. This could be done via showing a scaled-up minimap and letting you click on the locations of various spawn points, or just cycling between them with the "[" and "]" keys. Would this be feasible?

Teleportation is an interesting idea, however human forward bases in tremulous were typically far stronger than an alien forward base (dretch can't attack turrets, etc) so I'm not sure it'd work too well.

I like the idea of being able to choose where you spawn, though.

KoRx mod

It was very useful and horrible at the same time.
Teleporting was like spawning new in another free node without knowing which one it will be.

i like the idea of nodes becoming teleporters and choosing where to spawn/teleport using the minimap.

aliens by definition have a lot more mobility than humans, and can typically transverse maps a lot quicker, so this sounds like it could be quite interesting.

forward bases would have to be forced to be more spread out however, in order to make this most optimal.

Could be interesting. Worth trying out.

I am 100% in favor of allowing eggs to be build on walls and to grant both team the choice of choosing where to spawn.

I am less convinced by the idea of ​​allowing teleportation to humans only, I'm afraid that it gives them an excessive advantage. To me, they already possess the ability to attack at distance, aliens need to be able to be more mobile as compensation; or allow both team to teleport.

kharnov wrote:

or just cycling between them with the "[" and "]" keys.

US keyboard spotted.

I could imagine to mark two telenodes with the ckit (like you would mark them for decon) to set up a teleportation between them.

krtv` wrote:

i like the idea of nodes becoming teleporters and choosing where to spawn/teleport using the minimap.

aliens by definition have a lot more mobility than humans, and can typically transverse maps a lot quicker...

I think this idea could address a fundamental imbalance in the game, and I had this same thought a long time ago for Tremulous (at a time when development wasn't active enought to try it, unfortunately).

We want aliens to be fast-moving and attack up-close, and for that to contrast with humans who are slower but attack at range. That's fine. What we don't want is for one team to have an intrinsic advantage controlling the entire map, since controlling the map is supposed to lead to victory. So humans need to be able to get around a map just as well as aliens while still being "slower" in skirmishes against individual aliens.

There are plenty of ways this could be accomplished without offending the idea of how humans in Unvanquished are supposed to feel, but I think the most obvious and simple would be to let humans warp between telenodes.

The key point is that this can't make them more mobile (on a map-wide scale) than aliens, which means there probably would need to be a time delay when warping between telenodes about as long as the time it would take a fast-moving alien to run between them. Or some other means I haven't thought of to achieve rough parity.

About warping between telenodes, the "invading personal space" problem must be solved, teleport kill is fun in a Human vs Human deathmatch game like Xonotic, but it's not fun at all in a Human vs Alien game when you get teleport-teamkilled just after you bought your badass armor and your big weapon after 30 min of hard effort to get the money for them.

About the time delay, I don't feel the idea of waiting while teleporting as a good idea, but waiting for a portal to open can be a good idea.

I'm thinking about the following scenario: you reach a telenode, you ask for a teleport, you wait some seconds for the portal to be opened. The portal is left opened for some seconds so some team mates can follow you, when nobody followed the last guy after some seconds, the portal is closed. It means a fun thing: if an alien comes in time, it can follows you if it jumps in the portal with you.

The idea is: since the portal can allow you to jump between the farthest point of thunder, it must have some drawbacks like waiting some seconds to open the portal, and the telenode being something very precious that must be protected a lot, since aliens can follow you through the portal if they get in time (or from the other side), not only precious because it's a telenode and because it cost credits: the human team must ensure the teleport will be safe when they ask for it, as a team work.