Right now we have 2 damaging hazard types in racing (and catch)
Walls. You can think of this as damage proportional to your perpendicular velocity component. Or "damage by speed".
Shock areas. As far as I can tell this is "damage over time".
There is a problem with the "damage over time" approach though. There is a counterplay to damage over time areas by going over them extremely fast, rather than trying to avoid them at all.
In "Catch" it seems like there is more incentive for redundancy and raw speed than careful navigation. There is nothing wrong with a challenge in redundancy and speed, but there isn't a challenge truly dedicated to careful navigation in that regard yet.
In the racing maps, leaderboard-grade speeds fly over shock-areas so fast that they are totally inconsequential, making the Phoenix and Tournament maps practically as featured as Hydrus but with with less difficult turns. Example of shock areas made totally inconsequential by speed: https://youtu.be/MCeprgLvRqg?t=284
Feature Suggestion:
New race/catch hazard area: Spikes/blade area. This type of area does "damage over distance", in contrast with "damage over time". The more distance you go through it, the more damage you take, up to very high damage. If you come to a standstill inside it, there is no damage over time. (But it will still take damage to navigate out once you get moving again.) The damage is low enough that escaping laterally (in races) should be feasible, but the damage should be high enough that pressing forward recklessly will be very punishing.
With only "damage over time" hazards, solving the map can be reduced to solving only one variable: speed.
With "damage over distance" hazards, the challenge again becomes to solve two variables, speed and hazard perception/reaction.
New race/catch hazard area: Barrier. This is "damage by speed", just like walls, except...... cutting into the roadway itself, making an impassable lane.
It could be done in any way, but I imagine this like any other hazard: Center lane, Left Lane, Right Lane
This is again to prevent race maps from being reduced to solving raw speed alone. Think about what makes the Hydrus Highway more difficult to solve than the Sagittarius Drag Strip. It's the very tight turns that are very very difficult to control at high speeds. Roadblocks may have the same damage mechanism as raw walls, but the drone design challenge to avoid roadblocks is very different from the challenge to avoid walls.
This again makes the maps a challenge in solving hazard perception/reaction, not just speed and simple waypoint following.
This already exists in the Catch tournament! Which is good! You can see that drones get caught on it very often, and even smash one another into it. This enriches the arena very much. Maybe there could be even more catch maps, including one with more barriers?
(Do not modify any existing maps, for obvious reasons. The above new area types would be good for new maps though. Particularly I would personally imagine these as higher difficulty hazards than what exists right now. Belonging to future, higher difficulty maps.)
Post
Sanaret
Pretext:
Right now we have 2 damaging hazard types in racing (and catch)
There is a problem with the "damage over time" approach though. There is a counterplay to damage over time areas by going over them extremely fast, rather than trying to avoid them at all.
In "Catch" it seems like there is more incentive for redundancy and raw speed than careful navigation. There is nothing wrong with a challenge in redundancy and speed, but there isn't a challenge truly dedicated to careful navigation in that regard yet.
In the racing maps, leaderboard-grade speeds fly over shock-areas so fast that they are totally inconsequential, making the Phoenix and Tournament maps practically as featured as Hydrus but with with less difficult turns. Example of shock areas made totally inconsequential by speed: https://youtu.be/MCeprgLvRqg?t=284
Feature Suggestion:
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