Your favorite grappling hook

[leileilol]

[Lardarse]

[Error]

[scar3crow]

[Irritant]

Yeah, onhand ftw

[goldenboy]

Remake Quake's.

Offhand hook (tied to a pickup item), immediate pull (accelerating/decelerating), swing, dangling, mwheel reeling, safety dropping (impact damage...) and only allowed on mapper-placed grapple points (think Tomb Raider). On death, you lose the grapple and it can be found in the backpack.

A single grapple point allows several moves, combined with air control and acceleration, you can trickgrapple around two corners and onto a walkway etc while reaching speeds of over 1000 ups. A map will typically have between one and six grapple points which is totally enough. Singleplayer will have more than DM (for example DM6RQ only has a single grapple point near the RA which is enough to add several new moves).

Due to the grapple point system, it can and is being used in singleplayer for all kinds of weird stuff. Grappling monsters is fun, too, especially underwater so it lets you close the distance quickly (before the bastards have a chance to drown or escape). In a game where half your weapons don't work while submerged, this can come in handy.

The last word in grappling I hope. And the final argument to get a multi-button mouse for singleplayer.

[Dr. Shadowborg]

I voted painkeep harpoon gun because it struck me as being most unique of the listed options.

In general though, unless it's CTF I find grapples / harpoons to be a pain in the ass and rather gamebreaking, which is why hellsmash only has the super jump ability.

[MeTcHsteekle]

whoa, a four-way tie

[r00k]

Since I have played ctf weekly since 1998, I have noticed a difference from ticrates and broadband, and how it relates to the morningstar hook.
The default values for our servers are:
Hook Fire Speed: 1100
Hook Pull Speed: 800
Hook release delay: time+ticrate [/color]

Hook return Rate: 100ms [/color]

[Cobalt]

[Wazat]

The big problem with weighing down the player with his items is in Quake you don't have the ability to off-load weapons and ammo or otherwise manage your speed. Thus, picking up that cool new weapon or getting more ammo will often hurt the player more than help him.

The games that do slow down the player invariably do it only (and/or list below):
A) When the player has the ability to throw away items and/or choose to not pick them up; often, as with D&D-based games, Fallout3, etc, you don't slow down gradually, you just slow down if you hit the hard limit of your maximum carrying capacity. This makes it a lot easier for the player to manage his item burden.
B) The player only gets slowed down by the weapon he's currently holding (ala counterstrike, fallout3, and many other games; Edit: also the armor he wears etc.). This way picking up a new weapon doesn't carry an instant punishment in movespeed for the player. It's only when he wields the weapon that it can slow him down, and he can put it away when he needs faster movement.

Mitigating the negative downsides of a weight-slowness feature is crucial. It's far, far better to be wholly unrealistic than realistic and unfun. I've played mods that kept slowing me down every time I picked something up, and it wasn't a cool feature. However, when properly implemented, weight management can add a very interesting dynamic to the game that gives greater dimension to resource management and challenges the player -- in a good way.

[jim]

I've done some weight thing for my old Doomsday mod and it worked just fine, because you were able to throw away stuff you didn't need. Ammo didn't add into weight, maybe that might have been a bit complicated at that time, but that doesn't mean it couldn't have worked... I think I will have stuff like that in my Darkplaces mod too...

If I was going to make a grappling hook, I'd probably go for the simplest solution... or as complex/realistic that I'm able to do...