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I probably wont ever write this game, but I thought of it today and figured I would bat it around here to see if it turns into anything.

Some of you will know my opinion of fps frag games, and so today I was thinking of ways to spice them up a bit.

Firstly I figured i'd go for three teams, and give each team different objectives and this immediately made me think of what I thought would be a good theme: Judge Dread Block Wars.

Two teams would be rival blocks, fighting for territory with respawn timers based upon how much of their block they still control.

A third team would be the judges, their job is to neutralise the gang members and protect the innocents which would use the same graphic set as the gangs but without guns, running away from the violence.

The gangs would achieve victory by gaining total control of the others block, the judge team achieves victory by more gang members being fragged than innocents+team deaths.

I'm not a big fan of Judge Dread, or rather, when I was a lad I wasn't, but the idea seemed like it might be fun to me so I wonder what you guys think of it, and can add to the concept?

Sounds fun, I like slower paced FPS games where strategy is a big element, capture the flag variants are always fun - but yeah, we can do with some fresh elements.

Battling for control of anything tends not to be too much fun unless your playing human opponents - AI just isn't good enough yet to make it fun, human vs human is the way to go and have any bots supporting the humans. I hate when a lone bot runs off into the enemy base just to get a sniper slug in the back of the head.
The unreal series tried to give you authority over the bots but it just does'nt work as well as it could. What would be awesome is if the bots could scout ahead a little and just warn you about enemies, like they might scoot ahead and peek around the corner and give a hand signal (Vietnam GI style) that the other bots react to.
I really like the system in Rainbow Six 3 where you point and send your support there, probably worth copying.

One of my favourite FPS games ever for deathmatch was DukeNukem3D, I still haven't found a game that let you be anywhere as sneaky. You had trip mines to stick to walls, and pipe bombs that could be clustered together - just with those 2 weapons you can have a great deal of violent fun laying traps for your enemies. Some sort of indirect killing solution would be good, like sentry guns ala Aliens, or maybe debilitating gasses that you can pump into the air remotely or through a sorta smoke grenade. Eventually a losing team will want to hide somewhere and a few different ways to tackle that would be cool.

A must is security cameras, you should give each block a security room - like one player might want to sit watching the cameras and warning the other players. Cameras rarely get used to good effect in FPS games, the only game that springs to mind with cool cameras is Timesplitters2.

I reckon you should go for it and start working on this - or even save it for FPSC and whatever add-ons it provides for DBPro (besides the media and levels). FPSC should be a pretty good package for anyone writing an FPS in DBPro - does away with all the BSP headaches.


Van-B

For clarity on the AI thing the only AI I had in mind myself was for the innocents that the judges cannot kill (punks wouldn't care either way about their fate).

The security camera idea is good, gives a kind of Goldfinger feel to it, but would have to be very carefully placed in the block because of the fps hit that can result from multiple cameras, I would hazard that controllable cameras are not the order of the day, especially if going for a bank of monitors. An addition to this could be a 5th Element style door camera on some of the appartments in the block.

I agree with passive weapons, the more the merrier. Smoke and flashbangs just arn't enough. I'd like to see the scenery used for interactive traps such as exploding garbage chutes, doors connected to trip wires exploding grenades elsewhere - that kind of thing.

Indirect fire can also be fun, helicopter gunship support for instance although I think things like mortars and rocket launchers and fixed emplacements like a lot of games have are a little dull, you cant see what you are shooting at, and you cant see what has shot you... but if the judges controlled the street between the blocks calling in a riot van could be quite amusing.

So nobody is a Judge Dread fan around here?

I like Judge Dread. Not an online fan though, and don't understand the lingo that you used to describe the game.



Most of that, I haven't heard of before.

I want an fps with player models that have cubes for heads, textured with all our avatars. That would be fun.

I like the idea alot
@Pincho,
respawn timers - the time between getting killed and being placed back on the map to fight.
I can only guess at the blocks bit, probably somehting to do with judge dread? but i'd assume it would be like controlling flag/capture points in BF1942, so your team would have to occupy a block(a building?) for a certain amount of time befoe it became "yours", the more blocks you have the quicker you can respawn andif you get them all then you win

There's a part of the Judge Dread history that is about neighbouring city blocks blowing each other up, I dont know much about it as i'm not much of a fan to be honest, but it seemed like a good basis for the game .

Innocents would be non-player civilians wandering around the map trying to get out of the line of fire.

Judges are the policement and would be a 3rd team. The other two teams would be gangs originating from each city block.

Oh blocks as in areas of property. I don't really asociate blocks with respawning...seems a bit disjointed. Timing a respawn seems wrong. Although the owning land part sounds good..It could maybe result in capital for buying weapons, which is associated with land. Anyhow, I think you should always maintain some sort of association.

I'd design it like a domination game where gang members gain points for holding check points. Judges would score points for taking down perps and lose points for injuring citizens. To add spice, I'd have guest appearances by raiders, a berserk ABC warbot, and perhaps even Judge Death.
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TAZ