Friendly fire penality - Better with or without?

[divVerent]

Making it depend on team game modes or not would be necessary, I think...

what you can do to get more space is making all multiplayer tabs larger, and the dialog around them. Player setup is squeezed a bit too, after all.

[MirceaKitsune]

Making it depend on team game modes or not would be necessary, I think...

what you can do to get more space is making all multiplayer tabs larger, and the dialog around them. Player setup is squeezed a bit too, after all.

I tried stretching the dialog in height a little bit (just a single line so another line could fit in) but a weird issue happens; If I go in dialog_multiplayer.c and modify ATTRIB(NexuizMultiplayerDialog, rows, float, 24) by writing anything other then 24, the game crashes at startup with some "height mismatch" error. It spoke about some other .c files which I checked where the mismatch should be but there was no other numeric value mentioning the height there so I don't know why it does that.

As for making it dependent, I tried that as I said but don't know enough coding to get it working yet so maybe someone with more experience then me can set it to be grayed out when selecting non-team games. Wish I could do it myself but I don't know what to write the SetDepentent() to... I tried making it dependent of g_tdm = 1 for a test for example, but that didn't work and it was always grayed out between clicking DM and TDM.

[divVerent]

I tried stretching the dialog in height a little bit (just a single line so another line could fit in) but a weird issue happens; If I go in dialog_multiplayer.c and modify ATTRIB(NexuizMultiplayerDialog, rows, float, 24) by writing anything other then 24, the game crashes at startup with some "height mismatch" error. It spoke about some other .c files which I checked where the mismatch should be but there was no other numeric value mentioning the height there so I don't know why it does that.

The height of all tabs of the dialog, i.e. dialog_multiplayer_*.c, must be set toi the same value (e.g. 26), and the master dialog (dialog_multiplayer.c) must be increased by the same amount (e.g. 28 then).

[MirceaKitsune]

Done. I pastebinned the updated patch here. Made that window a tiny bit taller to fit things better in and also fixed a space in Player Setup with that occasion. However I still can't get the dependency code working sadly

[sf17k]

The biggest problem with friendly fire is the "you moron/retard/idiot" sounds that play for even the slightest stray bullet hit. The game is less fun because of this barrage of verbal abuse. Mirror damage isn't great either. People run around with low health quite often; if you have the flag and die from shooting a teammate, even though you would've died of a shotgun blast, it's very possible that you could've gotten to health if you survived.

I propose this mechanism to deal with the problem: The amount of team damage a player does is kept track of. It decreases to 0 over time. If it goes over a threshold, mirror damage is applied and a complain sound is played. Under the threshold, no mirror damage is dealt. I have implemented this in a patch. Notes: This minimizes the buzzing noise by only playing it if teamdamage > 0.25*threshold, mirror damage and sounds still work normally if friendly fire is on. Adds these cvars:

g_teamdamage_threshold (120) - threshold over which to apply mirror damage
g_teamdamage_resetspeed (30) - how fast player's teamdamage count decreases

Patch here. I'm new to qc, so feel free to fix errors that I have probably made in adding the cvars or anything else.

[divVerent]

The patch looks good, but doesn't this defeat the whole purpose of mirror damage? Especially if it kicks in only after 120 damage, which is a whole lot.

[sf17k]

With the patch, mirror damage still kicks in after a nex shot (140 damage) and anything beyond one rocket hit. It only punishes serious offenses. This is because I think it's better to fail to punish a guilty player, than to punish an innocent one. It doesn't defeat the purpose; mirror damage has to be kept so that there IS something to punish serious teamattacks. I set the threshold high to minimize damage and annoyance to innocent players (who might accidentally rocket a few a teammates while trying to kill the enemies chasing them), but it's open to adjustment (wish I could test it online).

And let's not forget the buzz sound. Most players would (subconsciously) avoid shooting teammates just so they don't have to hear that. It's even more effective than mirror damage at teaching clueless players not to laser friends, because it's a more obvious indicator to stop.

[divVerent]

Well, I'd rather use a small cutoff.

The whole point of mirror damage is that you watch where you shoot. Do not shoot if you may be hitting a team mate - as simple as that.

One thing that might be good would be a threshold of 50 (yes, only 50), falloff of 50 per second. But the buzz sound should still come for accidental single hits too. On the other hand, when such a threshold is set, mirror damage does not need to be just 20 percent. 50 percent of the damage dealt would be quite fine then, as it doesn't happen for accidental single hits any more.

Basically - watch where you shoot. Play AS IF there were friendly fire. Do not hit team mates. If team mates are running around in your line of fire, don't shoot.

[tZork]

Mirror damage bugs be because: I often play defensive of centre in ctf. No ff and mirror damage on mean most ppl just ignore staying out of your line of fire, fairly often zapping more health from me then then the other team do. I think mirror damage should mean the same amount of ff damage (after all what are you punished for otherwise?)

I like the idea of a thresh, even 50 would be nice. its a big mess of curses when you are fighting in some hallway.

[divVerent]

Having mirror damage AND friendly fire actually makes sense.

What about 50% mirror damage, 20% friendly fire, and a mirror damage threshold of 50 damage units?

That means:

- Same mirror damage at 83.333 damage units; higher than now above, lower than now below
- At this 83.333 damage units, you have dealt 16.667 units of damage friendly fire. That's the highest amount of FF you can do without getting punished more than your target.
- Nex shot = 140, makes 45 mirror damage, 28 friendly fire.

Applied the patch with these parameters.