improving the axe?

[ceriux]

so my thoughts on improving the axe works like this.

instead of firing just one trace line an attack send out two or three in the direction the axes animation is playing.
this will simulate the slashing motion it might have. if you hit closer to the center you have a chance to inflict more damage than if you barely skimmed the player.

this in my opinion make the axe both more useful and more fun. anyone else thought of anything?

ex:

[Supa]

What I'm doing in my game at the moment is handling on-hand melee with cones in place of traces: each melee attack fires off a findradius for hostiles, performs a dot product to check if any found hostiles are within the actual cone while recording the closest distance found for any that are, eventually picking out the closest hostile found and damaging that. Each melee anim then fires off a single cone on multiple frames to further increase the chance of landing a hit, though once a hit is actually landed the melee attack stops firing off scan cones.

By using cones I do lose a bit of precision - it's hard to sell a hit when your viewmodel 'obviously' didn't hit it - but given that the player movement makes Doom look slow it makes up for it by making on-hand melee generally easier to hit with and thusly more useful. :)

[ceriux]

i was thinking of something similar to that, but for what i was thinking your way seems to make it too easy? but that would be my opinion. i havent tested mine yet, mine could be over powered =)

[Dr. Shadowborg]

I generally prefer the multi-hitscan method, largely because it tends to add a little bit of technique to using the axe.

Supa's method works better for multiplay however, where player vs. player becomes a real challenge due to the speeds players move at.

[goldenboy]

Supa's method is, unsurprisingly, pretty smart. *makes notes*

Another thing I do is to check for an attack from behind the enemy, using some code from, I believe, Stealth Quake. I then quadruple the damage and shout "Backstab!". Playtesters were pretty fond of this.

I set standard damage to 40, IIRC. A sharp lump of metal swung around on the end of a stick should do good damage.

I also like different impact sounds depending on what you hit. Improves the feedback and makes the weapon feel more real. My axe even has a water hit sound.

[ceriux]

neat i hadnt thought of doing something like that.

[Supa]

One anecdote I want to add, so long as we're talking about just the Quake axe in single player and not aFPS on-hand melee in general: Tronyn's episode (I might be misremembering which one, though) enables the axe to gib zombies, which takes it from id1's mildly useless spawn weapon status up to a situation specific utility tool.