DescentBB

Sirius wrote: ↑Fri Jan 05, 2018 5:05 pm The main reason I can think of is that it makes the in-built missions significantly harder than they were designed to be by Parallax. Rebirth historically has been very reluctant to mess with existing gameplay.

Since the in-built missions didn't use the D1 bosses, that change has less impact.

Alter-Fox wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2018 7:03 pm Could be, and it's nice to dream, but I don't think it's likely to actually happen -- at least not in time. May have to settle for the damage upgrade. And remember those trainee players probably can't even dodge D2's homers.

Xfing wrote: ↑Tue Dec 05, 2017 6:34 pm I did some tests and the results confuse me, to say the least - they make no sense at all. First off, the player homing missile is just as good as it was in D1, if not better. In D1 it would take 6 homers to blow up a super hulk, in D2 it takes 5. That would suggest they've actually become stronger in the sequel, of course apart from their turn rate (that's a whole other topic, amirite).

And yet, player homers (as wielded by the super hulk) do 43 damage to the player in D1, and 30 in D2 - even though in the latter their power rating in the data is 40. There must be some damage scaling algorithm at play in D2, because even on Insane, player homers when used by robots only do 4 more damage on direct impact, and have a projectile speed of 90, as opposed to the variable speed of the robot homer, capping off at 80 on Insane (it's 60 on all other difficulty levels).

I have no idea why a missile with the listed power of 40, only does 30 damage to the player. Might be a bug from the nightly versions of D2x-Rebirth, so testing under a stable version might be required, but this gave me a whole new idea:

Maybe we should give the player homer to the Lou Guard instead - it's only marginally more damaging and marginally harder to dodge on Insane than the default robot variety. Of course that would make the robot a bit tricky on Trainee etc, since player weapon values generally don't change throughout the difficulties - but then again the robot so dopey even on Insane that the player is usually able to pick it off before it even gets to fire once, so Trainee players will also probably be fine.

And then, we'd fine-tune the robot homing missile instead, bringing it to values identical to D1 on Insane, and then give it to the red hulk. That way we'd accomplish basically the same thing while sacrificing very little. Either that or we find out why the heck player homers do much less damage than they're stated to do.

EDIT: Just tested this - when fired by the player at a wall point blank, the homers do the same amount of damage in both D1 and D2 - around 31-32 points. That's more than getting hit by a player homer from a robot! There must be some mistake in the code, seriously. I'll test it on a DOSBox installation and see.

Aaaaand nothing changes. Even on a vanilla installation the homers do 30 damage to the player, while they clearly should do more.

Sum0Beatz wrote: ↑Wed Mar 07, 2018 8:19 am The mechs in descent 1 were way better than the mechs in descent 2 imo, I hope descent 1.5 brings back the dangers of super hulks

Sirius wrote: ↑Thu Mar 08, 2018 2:08 pm OK, on further investigation this is from D2 and not DLE. Matcens' robot lists are encoded in the RDL/RL2 format using a 64-bit bitmask; if a bit is enabled, the corresponding robot type will be produced by the matcen. That's a one-to-one mapping, though, and there happen to be 66 robot types in base D2 (Alien 2 Boss and Mini Reactor are also excluded from the list for this reason). All the Vertigo types are above the range that the matcen format has space for.

So yeah unfortunately this is unfixable.