Alla Poor Ca, I knew ye...

[smoth]

so 1000s of revisions later and ca has tons and tons of cool new features.

for example, I love the new piro, i think he could use some lups love on his cool grate head and maybe a bit of a better texture but I digress...


Ca for me has gone on a tangent from the awesome visual crack that I used to sopp up like a starving child with a bowl full of soup and a loaf of bread.

scenes like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Ga5F4o ... re=related
were what I associated with ca.

but a few years later and many bad design decisions have left it feeling lackluster.

first of all I ABSOLUTELY HATE that there is faction specific weapons. That is stupid, the units help show the faction for god sake let them have whatever cool weapons they want.

bring back the beam and rapid fire lasers..

bring back quantum, suck his dick, buy him hookers and fill the man's fridge with beer. When he was around ca was like a sort of candyland for my eyes!

I dunno, I miss it, I miss what ca was. Don't know, not that i don't like the new models, that little flying toaster/minifridge, it has grown on me.

but all this talk about realism and shit...

fuck that bring back some of the old effects I had to roll back to revision 171 to see some of quantums old magic. And there was some magic in that old silk hat.

http://forums.smoth.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4231

before all this shit...

godamnit come back quantum, ca needs you, my eyes they suffer from all the whole wheat bread and nasty vegimite that is the current ca!

[Pxtl]

While I agree that some of the whiz-bang special effects are missed, I think the "faction specific weapons" are important - it makes the units self-documenting. CA has a farktonne of units. Learning the usage of each one, if each one had unique armnament, would be just impossible for the player. So, the weapons are consolidated so that their special-effects are known. A player see that lightning = stun. A player can see that fire = burninating.

To me, the only problem with CA's weapons are the lack of magic on the vehicles (L1). You have to upgrade to tanks before you see any crazy special powers. I mean, the most exciting weapon in the whole vehicle fac family is the riot-gun leveller. Everything else is vanilla-enough to fit into an OTA mod.

[MidKnight]

One thing I really dislike as a CA unit maker and player is the weapon standardization. Samson's laser may be almost invisible, but it can't be changed because it's been standardized by some laser thickness script. Give the new hammer model a different weapon to accommodate its larger barrel? No chance. And yet core fighters and arm AA use the same missile technology.

CA has great gameplay and tons of features, but making things consistent, while making it more accessible to *A players, has muffled some of the uniqueness in the units.

[Otherside]

*A units were hardly unique if you think they were your tarded.

Arm and core were pretty cloney in terms of weapons and units. If anything CA units are more unique and weapon standardization inkeeps with each factions theme.

[Pxtl]

One problem with the laser standardization is how silly it looks next to the missiles. Compare the impressive missiles on the Core Sam truck vs. the Arm Laser truck. The Core one looks like it's kicking ass, while the Arm one looks kinda harmless.

[Super Mario]

Some of the projectiles didn't match some of the arm units. Seriously a big gun should shoot a big projectile not a little one.

[MidKnight]

Some of the projectiles didn't match some of the arm units. Seriously a big gun should shoot a big projectile not a little one.

Give the new hammer model a different weapon to accommodate its larger barrel? No chance.

and:

*A units were hardly unique if you think they were your tarded.

Arm and core were pretty cloney in terms of weapons and units. If anything CA units are more unique and weapon standardization inkeeps with each factions theme.

If this is in response to my post, I didn't say *A units were unique , I said weapon standardization makes CA more accessible to *A players. Even there, though, I may be wrong. It wasn't a very strong point.

[Sgt Doom]

That air battle was beautiful *wipes tear from eye*

[smoth]

That air battle was beautiful *wipes tear from eye*

for the dearly departed..

[Gota]

gfx is not as important.
Gfx might bring in some new players but only gameplay will hold them.
Each person has his own likes and dislikes when it comes to gfx but at the end of the day if the game has passable gfx and excellent gameplay nobody would care much about the gfx.

I personally think that cartoonish gfx is not fun to play with others think it is...whats most important is that ca devs decide on one way of making gfx and stick to it.

[Neddie]

gfx is not as important.
Gfx might bring in some new players but only gameplay will hold them.
Each person has his own likes and dislikes when it comes to gfx but at the end of the day if the game has passable gfx and excellent gameplay nobody would care much about the gfx.

I personally think that cartoonish gfx is not fun to play with others think it is...whats most important is that ca devs decide on one way of making gfx and stick to it.

I wish it were so, but sales of titles since the dawn of time exhibits a trend completely opposed to the statement you've made, with some exceptions cropping up in various smaller genre at times of flux.

Anyway, game design and graphical presentation both dropped off some time ago. Hardly matters, still a better game than the majority in the genre, really only a concern to a perfectionist like Smoth or myself.

[Gota]

HA?
I said that GFX is good to bring in new players but nto good in making them stay for the long run.
Meaning that they will buy the game but will stop playing it pretty fast.
For commercial games that is perfect for open source free games its exactly the opposite.

[Saktoth]

The problem with the hammer is the retardation of the modeller. The projectile does barely any damage, so its small. The big gun is a dumb mistake.

From my post regarding this on the CA trac:

What changed? The Anni laser no longer has long streaks (the streaks were Evil's doing AFAIK) and the carpet bombers now shoot napalm (IMO cooler).

On the fighter side, the lasers have lower RoF now. The fighters looked cooler because they travel slower and turn and twist more, and their ranges are huge- this was just done for cool screenshots.

Fighter behaviour has been changed dramatically since then. Most notably, they dont need to be right behind the target to fire. This means you can micro them etc and they still fire, instead of relying on fight commands to line them up perfectly to get a shot off (ala BA). If you gave them their old RoF ('streams' of projectiles) they would fill the sky with fire as soon as they were in range of anything.

[Pxtl]

I have to say that I actually think that current CA air battles look better than the video shown. The way the fighters haphazardly skate around the sky is just gorgeous. Physically ridiculous, but beautiful to watch.

[1v0ry_k1ng]

its a funny truth that from rev 500ish, CA started to get uglier again

[reivanen]

I understand you smoth, and i mostly agree. Some time ago i was astonished how much better the visuals were in eg XTA.

So i decided to do what little i can, and try to cook up some better effects. I am not that good a coder, but at least i got some of the fugly default ones spiced up quite a bit. I am sure many of the gurus would out-do these in no time, and tbh be my guest. I did these just because no-one else showed interest in anything but killing off IP.