ZK abuses

Most of those are legitimate things, and no significantly effective abuse of nanoframes was seen in my experience (which could probably be gotten rid of).

I'm unsure if it's technically possible to make shield-like nanoframes, but it sounds like a kinda good idea.

Regardless of whether they stop projectiles, they also stop units, which is a much trickier problem to tackle.

To be clear, this is not abuse, they're not 'bugs'. Zero-K models physical systems, and the result of those physical systems can be fun, funny, awesome, and sometimes insane.

Almost everything like this we are already well aware of and have discussed at length. Sometimes something stupid or crazy like orbital snipers happens and we have to remove or nerf it. Often though, it's hard to do that while preserving the mechanics.

Terraforming affecting terrain ALREADY has a delay. We put this in precisely because it was so easy to sink a heavy unit. So we went back in time and implimented your suggestion.

Last I recall Spring 95 actually displaces units if they're on unpassable terrain. So terraforming just sort of knocks the unit out of the way. It's not very elegant looking but design wise I think it's the best solution (If this is even considered a problem: I do but others would say this is legitimate and prevents heavies from being OP!).

We've looked a lot at nano-blocking, and it's kind of problematic. If projectiles just pass through, then how do you stop someone from building? Do you auto-fire on these or does it detect their HP and not fire on them if the nanoframes HP is less than the projectiles damage...? But then you want to fire when it's below the 1-shot threshold otherwise it might not kill the nanoframe and complete anyway and then he finishes a HLT and kills you and...

It's more complicated than you think. There are other options, like short delays before the nanoframes goes up (TA did this with upack anims), but that slows everything down to fix this niche case. Right now shot-wasting is considered a lesser evil than the alternatives, and has been a legitimate strategy since OTA.

I think we actually could have a projectile keep travelling if it 1-shots a nanoframe... that's a really elegant solution. You're still going to have to convince people that this thing which has been around since TA is undesirable. I think the test of 'If this was a widget would it break the game and make it awful?' is a good test. I say yeah, it would.

We've been discussing these mechanics literally for years SuperNoob14. Regardless of Failer's motivations, it's legitimate to discuss this though calling it 'abuse' is obviously specious.

Calling automating nanoshielding or terratrapping 'abuse' is equally specious though. If you have enough APM, you could do this manually, which means at some level of skill, it becomes a problem if, indeed, it is a problem.

Roach Cannon was in fact automated and does ruin some maps, like Speed Metal. Eventually we decided that basically SpeedMetal is not worth saving. Scouting with it was a particular problem, and we removed that in the end. If it comes to dominate the meta we might do something else to it.

When a strategy comes up that just makes the game feel awful or becomes the only solution to a problem, we will change it...

Noone of this mentioned above is abuse. Expected to hear something like space skuttles or similar new things here which were actually OP where is your creativity!.


Oh wait I know old not changing engine and all creativity was fixed away.

PS my favorite was hadron colider bug when you you shot units from factory now that was fun (also back then units didint die when out of map).

quote: ...becasue u can beat 24k detri with 10 rectors this way.

If you can take down a detriment with 10 rectors then you're the better player. ZK strategy isn't just "how much metal have I got walking towards the other team". One of the best things about the game are the open possibilities and fluid tactics. Rushing a heavy in the early game should get beaten, and a stand-alone walker without enough support to be disabled by rectors deserves to be disabled.

[pikts]wolas autoflea.lua exists, it avoids static defenses, it dodges projectiles, etc.

The proposed widget is actually really trivial, especially the terraform one. As developers we actually talk about this stuff all the time, often we go ahead and make the widget ourselves, implement it, and see if it breaks the game... (flea automicro).

Quoting:

quote: Calling automating nanoshielding or terratrapping 'abuse' is equally specious though. If you have enough APM, you could do this manually, which means at some level of skill, it becomes a problem if, indeed, it is a problem.

It's hard to estimate how high is the optimal manual nanoshield performance.
I think nanoshielding can be compared to a more difficult to execute glitch,
like ignoring turret facing on low turnrate plasma cannon (See picture, it is a Big Bertha firing over 90 degree out of neutral turret arc).



It's a great advantage, Especially on something like Crabe - It can't anymore be soloed by a raider running faster than the turret is able to follow.
While this theoretically affects the metagame on Kurczak and Trololo_zombie.smf, where you are often faced with such corner case situations, the timing constraints on the glitch are so tight that I've never seen it used in a real game. Conversely nanoshielding has a really low newbie startup cost - Just place a building.

In Super Metroid SNES console game speedrunning (= Complete game as fast as possible), the current optimal route includes an instance of Continuous WallJump (CWJ), video below:


It was initially thought to be too inconsistent to be incorporated. But after many many hours of searching for and drilling the optimal setup, it turns out doable, introducing an expected average random delay of about 2 minutes and below.

The important detail is that noone seems to be able to perform consistently. Due to 2 frame timing constraint, human physiology is the limiting factor.
The Spring turret facing glitch seems AFAIK to activate if weapon target is changed exactly the frame before firing. Adjusting for Spring's 30 frames per second versus SNES NTSC console 60 frames per second, the time constraints for the two tricks match up.

It is therefore possible, that the turret facing glitch would never become a problem - At any skill level. But could become a problem if scripted.
If fashioning an automation script that surpasses human levels can result in removing the mechanic, it's a very unfortunate situation.
This is so especially because the required Lua bindings (eg. Access to inflight projectile data) used to not exist in Spring. This was a very frustrating ommission when trying to make maphack. Engine had to be tweaked. Of course building a hacked executable that does not desync is an another issue...
Random Spring dev decisions of which API to expose to the Widget side of Lua so dictate the mechanics in ZeroK.

In nanoshielding you mostly just mash buttons to make the magic happen. Faster mashing = more magic, where doing it at all already brings benefits. So I can see how it could be OP - In a different game where 90% of units do not have high enough fire rate or are not totally unaffected by nanoshield (eg. Laser weapons).

Nanoshielding is also not a critical type mechanic. With the turret facing glitch you get 'Ahaha now I pwn all these nubs with mah sniper Bertha' situations. Not so with the shielding, as it has only defensive use.
It'd become OP only indirectly, such as 'My opponent built a Grizzly monoculture army. The Grizzball fires only once per 10 seconds so my Widget assisted cons will march infront of my units, blocking the shots allowing a close-in'.

I dont think any of those are abuse, If a con gets up in a detri's face you deserve to lose it.

I want nanoframs (and shields) to just reduce the projectile's damage by their health.
-> Ofcouse some weapons might have "instable" projectiles which release their whole damage at once.

BTW: You can even block tac nukes with Zenit-Nano-frames, did this once to troll someone and do this to improve tac-nuke resistace (maybe it also works vs EMP...)


About terra:
How do you think about smoth terra first, then sharpen the edges?
Or that kbots just ignore everything below 1/3 their leg height and tanks everything below 1/2 their weel/chain-weel height?