Pods

[jitspoe]

With the discussion of the new player model, pods came up.

To summarize:

Pods: I've considered using pods for ammo, but this would inevitably make people complain that I'm changing the game too much.  On the plus side, it would mean people would eventually have to reload as opposed to constantly spraying and picking up ammo packs around the level.  On the minus side, it would be one more key to bind and an added layer of complexity to a game that has a fairly steep learning curve as it is.  Also, ammo pods and CO2 are much more difficult to distinguish from each other than ammo boxes and CO2, especially at a distance.  A box has a much lower poly count, too.

Although pods definately do come in black, it is much more common to have florescent colored, clear, or silver pods for visibilty. In real paintball, after a pod is used it is quickly tossed out of the way only to be retrieved at the end of the game. Therefore pod visibility is important. But I kinda like the boxes myself.

The problem here is if you start wanting to add pods you open up a whole new can of worms:
Do you allow people to pickup pods with a max of three or four per person?
Do you make people pickup boxes of paint that fill the pods then force a manual reload via a button?
Then do you have a speed or jump penalty the more pods you have attatched?

You see where this is going? ...nowhere, cause it will never end till you just said to heck with it and went and played real paintball.

Ooh. For the pods, you should just have it so a player has this- an ammo count, and an infinite amount of pods that hold ~100 paintballs. Every 100 paintballs, it just reloads automatically... as if you had a pod. If you don't understand, it's my fault.

And my reply to eiii:
Infinite ammo sounds like a bad idea.  I'm not going to add features that reduce thought and strategy.

Also, there would need to be a paintball reload key if we go with the pod idea, otherwise it will be like the old days of Quake paintball where you sprayed until you used up the last of your CO2 so you could reload.  If you've only got, say, 20 balls left, you wouldn't want to have to use those up before you could reload if you're in the clear at that moment.   Another issue that complicates things is: say you have a 100 round hopper with 20 balls left and you reload.  Now you've got one pod with 20 balls in it, and another with 100.  Next time you reload, which pod would you use?

[Eiii]

Yeah, you didn't understand. Then again, I screwed up typing it.

It's easier to explain like this-- each hopper can only hold ~50/100 balls. You have to reload it when it runs out with the extra balls you have. Confused? No.

[jitspoe]

Right... how else would you do it?  The problem is if your "extra balls" aren't infinite (which I don't think they should be), which pod do you take them from?

[S8NSSON]

Barring all the other good points you've made I will say this...

Scenerio:
You have 20 balls left in a 100 round hopper. You dump a 100 round pod into the hopper.

Solution:
You do what happens in real paintball. The hopper becomes 100 paintballs loaded, the pod becomes empty, 20 paintballs go to paintball heaven (in real paintball they just spill out onto the ground), and you go on playing.

I've sat behind a bunker with a quarter filled 180 round hopper knowing I was about to get into a lengthy fight for a position. I just flip my hopper lid, grab a pod, and pour till the hopper is full (well almost full cause the HaloB will break balls if completely full ). I'm going to through that pod to the side no matter what. It's MUCH too hard to try to put it back in your pod-pack just for a few left over balls.

[jitspoe]

That makes sense, and I guess it's closer to the way paintball2 currently works with ammo (if you've got 99 balls in a 100-round hopper and pick up a 200 round ammo pack, 199 balls go to paintball heaven).

The way I had envisioned pod filling, though, was you'd have to hold the reload button down, and the longer you held it down, the more balls you'd load.  As soon as you let go, you'd stop reloading and save whatever balls were left in the pod for later, but I guess the reload-till-full-and-drop-what's-left idea would probably work better.

[Eiii]

That's exactly what I was saying, but I couldn't explain it...
Meh.