Battlezone Forums

Obviously we all love Battlzone 1&2 which is why were are still here. What are some things you think could be improved upon? What are some things you wish carried over from BZ1 into BZ2 and vice versa? It is important to me to get feedback from fans of the FPS/RTS genre because I want to create my own game similar to Battlzone in gameplay and style. On TIGSOURCE I have come across some indie games that look very promising. Some developers are experimenting with the FPS/RTS/Minecraft sandbox style concept but none have that lovely vehicle combat we adore about Battlezone. If you take the old Domark game Absolute Zero and combine it with Battlezone that is basically my high game concept.

1. The first thing I would improve about Battlezone is the weapons. They are balanced considering the scope of the game but if you compare them to a simulation both the range and damage calculations fail miserably. Missiles rarely work like they should the only game to ever get this right was EarthSiege. Laser weapons are another rarely portrayed correctly and again EarthSiege and HeavyGear2 got it right. Bullets also strangely disappear after a rather short range. What kind of gravity exists on this planet!?!

2. Speed, Inertia, Momentum. While Battlezone does a decent job at this compared to the jumpy wild antics of most modern games today the physics do feel a bit restricted at times. Again this is either due to design, limitation, or both. But if my goal is to simulate an entire planet things must behave realistically.

3. No destructible terrain? Battlezone maps appear to made exclusively of height maps. Height maps can easily be deformed by changing the white and dark areas of the image. Red faction did something similar with its famous geomode technology. I'm not saying in Battlzone you should be able to dig a 500 foot crater but affecting the landscape with weapons is always awesome. Not the mention it can prove to be a tactical disadvantage or advantage in the right circumstances.

4. Dodgy on Foot or FPS mode. While on foot the input delay feels more like you're still piloting a vehicle. A vehicle that happens to look like a human. I got used to it over the years but the controls as a soldier/pilot feel sluggish on foot. A faster response time here would appeal to a wider audience of gamers. I appreciate the fact the player has to crouch and not move when sniping but you have no ability to go prone which would more easily hide you from enemy forces. My advice is to not even have a FPS mode unless you can give players a full range of freedom. It be neat if you could have a team of engineers inside a recycler and remotely pilot the scavs or other non direct combat units.

5. The one time use jetpack. While this might be realistic it's not very fun. It's more like a jump pack than a jet pack because your blast off into oblivion with no control over the thrust. It's weird that if you don't move you fall like a rock but a thunderbolt always falls at a maximum speed. (SLOW!) Jetpacks should have a maximum height and range but if your stranded 10,000 miles from your home back you might want the jetpack/jumppack rechargeable.

6. The guns don't work on the APC. The APC is one of my favorite units but you can't fly it, use its guns, or even direct the troops very easily. It be awesome if you could have 10 troops defend a bunker and watch them try to repel the enemy. If I include a APC or Transport unit in my game it will be fully usable in every sense. Once again I'm aiming more for a Simulation and think of Battlezone but on a planetary wide scale.

7. I love the Atilla. But the design is wildly impractical. With all the mass the unit has would it be so hard to fix a few rocket pods or even a minigun so it can defend itself when it runs out of laser juice? Overall it's a very poor Mechwarrior for anything other than its awesome range. Walkers are normally weapons platforms and used as siege weapons. In non combat roles they are often explorers/scouts because of their versatility over tracked or wheeled designs. The most useful kind of mech is called a Powersuit which mimics human movement. I like the idea of a Mech or Powersuit and likely one will appear in my game.

What do you think? Do you agree or disagree? Do you like some of my ideas or hate them? Please explain why.

Here is a screenshot of what I'm working on. Please note this is not representative of the final work. The HUD is off and none of these textures are original. Basically it's just a proof of concept for the spherical height map idea. My assets have many layers of textures but I'm saving all that hard work for a proper debut when the time is right. I'm not aiming for modern graphics because if I was the game would not be finished within this decade. If I can achieve something about as detailed as Halo1 I will be happy. Considering that I'm only one guy left to do all the programing and art the task is daunting. The multiplayer part is what worries me most but I will figure it out in time.



The engine tessellates the terrain. Right now the hard coded limit is 9000 polys to prevent ant visual popping from the LOD. The draw distance can easily be changed but it will be likely fixed so no player has a unfair advantage. I think the terrain looks okay but it needs better textures, craters, and more scaring in general to make it look better.

sounds like someone has been bitten by the bz2 modding bug again (or perhaps a relapse)

Sadly I never got into BZ modding back when it was more popular. I had no idea how to use any tools other than mspaint and I could barely wrap my head around even the map editor. Battlezone II is one of my 10 favorite games of all time that left a lasting impression on me. I was only 13 when it came out and so it has been with me a long time. I was also never active in the community I'd only poke around some of the forums once in a while just to see if any new mods or patches came out.

I want to experiment with material point-cloud based terrain (well point-surfaces) and transient build grids established either as dynamic best fit of the given area or based on the first structure's alignment. Point terrain and transient grids would allow for more dynamic maps with structures such as caves being build-able both on top of below, as well as terrain deformation.

I think my first major delve into game creation (well actually I've done some already but that was prototypes in "experimental gaming") is going to be 2D however (well, planning 3D rendering but all ortho-planes), so its going to be a while before I get to the point of full 3d.

A modder did experiment with changeable terrain in bz2, 2 things you should consider are that a requirement for flat terrain for building bases on is not really compatible with the ability to turn it into a 500 foot crater. Also your pathing coding would need to be very robust if players can alter it live in game. These are the reasons why permanent terrain altering is not likely to appear in a bz2 mod, The game was simply not designed with it in mind.
Much of both bz 1 & 2 is very "computer game" in its physics, few of the weapons even try for realistic, this is probably the best way for any multiplayer game, the unrealistic bullets and beams that just vanish after x meters, the spring powered mortars, and low explosive missiles are how the balance is created and the game made playable. Realistic artillery would need realistic sized maps and nobody wants to drive for 1/2 an hour just to get to the enemy base. Realism is much overrated.

I agree. In fact for the last part with the more realistic distances, that was already tried by EPIC which proves that it's possible to make the gameplay more expansive where you can see for over 1000m and have long range weapons and arty and aircraft that work properly -- it just takes a considerably larger amount of work to make it work and even then the engine has its limitations.

Basically it's just a proof of concept for the spherical height map idea.

Another idea would be the orbital concept (See Culture novels by Iain M Banks) A very large ring type structure with the terrain on the inside, spinning to create artificial gravity via inertia, this would fit into a Game structure well as the linear construction would limit access to new area's. Different environments could exist on different segments, providing a wide range of world-maps all linked together as a succession of different levels.

MrTwosheds wrote:

Basically it's just a proof of concept for the spherical height map idea.

Another idea would be the orbital concept (See Culture novels by Iain M Banks) A very large ring type structure with the terrain on the inside, spinning to create artificial gravity via inertia, this would fit into a Game structure well as the linear construction would limit access to new area's. Different environments could exist on different segments, providing a wide range of world-maps all linked together as a succession of different levels.

Interesting, was reading this and thought Halo

Several games use the functionality. For instance Mass Effects Citadel is basicly the same thing.

The idea of a spherical height map is to simulate a planet not a ring world. A ring world would have edges that would be impassible. In the lore of my game the earth has a artificial satellite (ring if you want to call it that) around the entire planet to help sustain the atmosphere and assemble star ships in space. I loved the original Halo even if looking back it feels like loosely thrown together levels of varying quality. It was just so damn fun I could ignore the flaws.

Interesting, was reading this and thought Halo

Its an old SciFi concept, from small ring type space stations right up to orbital worlds with a surface area many times that of a terrestrial sized planet. Halo has no claim to originality. Putting one around a planet is highly impractical and would almost certainly cause some gravitational/geological disruption problems for both objects.

Another Iain M Banks idea is the Shell World, a very high tech structure consisting of hollow spherical shells inside each other, each containing different environments. A very useful concept if you want to put a bunch of highly diverse species all together and avoid annoying technicalities such as space flight.

I believe it was Larry Niven who first came up with the concept for the Ringworld novels in the 1970s.

NostalgicRCB wrote:I loved the original Halo even if looking back it feels like loosely thrown together levels of varying quality. It was just so damn fun I could ignore the flaws.

Same here, still go back to the game from time to time. Same for Halo 2, but than only the 'tank-part' of the campaign, I so love that part of the campaign

3. No destructible terrain? Battlezone maps appear to made exclusively of height maps. Height maps can easily be deformed by changing the white and dark areas of the image. Red faction did something similar with its famous geomode technology. I'm not saying in Battlzone you should be able to dig a 500 foot crater but affecting the landscape with weapons is always awesome. Not the mention it can prove to be a tactical disadvantage or advantage in the right circumstances.

BZ2's design made this a lot more difficult. With terrain-owning buildings, and tunnels/etc, editing terrain height in real time presents real problems that could only be solved by ditching heightfields and going to voxels -- which are extremely expensive and/or don't look good (Minecraft). If you allowed a heightfield to be modified, people would carve out things near buildings -- or worse, bridge endpoints -- and demand everything fall over realistically. BZ2's physics was expensive enough as-is, and yet it's garbage, because it had to run on a Pentium 166MMX w/ 64MB RAM. Seriously, go code for such a system.

Additionally, re-updating DirectX vertex buffers for heightfield changes is expensive enough to be a reason to not modify them if at all possible.

-- GSH

I love both games and have enjoyed seeing the many improvements put into bz2. Some of the things that I believe would have won more of the bz1 players is if they had kept some of the same commands you can give to units such as repairing and reloading. Sending a unit to hunt might have been a good idea if the maps were of the same size and scale as bz1. A big one that I'd like to see would be the ability to access your satellite anywhere in the field, I'm surprised they limited that feature in bz2. This last one I know is going to be controversial but faster vehicles, not lower gravity or the ability to jump higher, just faster tanks.

Other than that I really appreciate what you've done GSH. Both you and Spork have put so much time and effort to keep this legend alive, now how to stop the haters from ruining the ST games, maybe start to have moderators in the game lobby? We get old players coming back that get hashed by cocky vets all the time, if it weren't for them I feel we'd have a lot more players.