Here are some of mine: The Encapsulator: Shoots out a small, fast beam of blue laser light and upon hitting someone, creates a glowing translucent "capsule" around them, rises them up a little ways into the air, and people are free to shoot him for a short period of time until it runs out. I''m running out of time before class so i''ll post the rest another time. What are everyone else''s ideas?

Bunny Wand: upon use, turns all enemies in the room into small harmless cute light-pink bunny rabbits. The wand randomly backfires, causing the user himself to turn into the rabbit instead of the enemies.

Hussle Hammer: Upon use, all enemies drop what they''re doing, line up in a line and do the hussle (very skillfully I might add). This renders all enemies completely harmless and vulnerable.

BSODG: Blue Screen of Death Gun. This one requires a little programming work, but it could be done. Fires a bright blue ball. If the ball comes in contact with an enemy, his texture fades to black, his shape starts mutating around, and he suddenly becomes a rectanglular cube with the texture of the illegal operation screen (often referred to as the Blue Screen of Death). The cube begins shaking back and forth, and the shaking gradually becomes violent. At last, the cube bursts into pieces (I''m thinkin something along the lines of how the agent explodes at the end of The Matrix)

Sure I guess you could just use a shotgun, but where''s the fun in that?

Well, no offence, but those ideas were just dumb...

A good selection of weapons should usualy have the folowing:

. Instant Kill (on normal health only, with a disadvantage to balance it (like hard to aim / affected by graviy / etc))
. Sniper (somthing to be an instant kill like a head shot, from a distance, with a zoom (rifle in unreal))
. A wide area weapon
. A homing weapon (needs disadvantage to balance it)
. A rocket weapon (because it is a clasic )
. A basic weapon (one to start with)


That basicly covers what is kind of NEEDED in a weapons system (although some can be combined / left out)

As for weapons doing cool stuff, here are some ideas:

. healing
. knockback
. disorentation
. black out (kind of fade there screen for a while)
. poision (your game would need an antidote)

That is a basic list to get you going

ANDREW RUSSELL STUDIOS
Visit Tiberia: it''s bigger, it''s badder, it''s pouyer...

quote: Original post by Ronald Forbes

Bunny Wand: upon use, turns all enemies in the room into small harmless cute light-pink bunny rabbits. The wand randomly backfires, causing the user himself to turn into the rabbit instead of the enemies.

Hussle Hammer: Upon use, all enemies drop what they''re doing, line up in a line and do the hussle (very skillfully I might add). This renders all enemies completely harmless and vulnerable.

BSODG: Blue Screen of Death Gun. This one requires a little programming work, but it could be done. Fires a bright blue ball. If the ball comes in contact with an enemy, his texture fades to black, his shape starts mutating around, and he suddenly becomes a rectanglular cube with the texture of the illegal operation screen (often referred to as the Blue Screen of Death). The cube begins shaking back and forth, and the shaking gradually becomes violent. At last, the cube bursts into pieces (I''m thinkin something along the lines of how the agent explodes at the end of The Matrix)

Sure I guess you could just use a shotgun, but where''s the fun in that?

LOL!!!!

(I think, though, that you forgot to use this guy --> )

Very funny!

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Just waiting for the mothership...

Just to stay on topic, has any game done level affecting weapons? I''m thinking of things like coating the walls with ice textures and changing the physics (or make temporary walls), or flamethrowers that actually set the walls on fire (allowing secondary strategies).

I''d like to see more remote control weapons. Sentry guns that I can control from afar would be great. Unreal''s Retaliator is just too much fun to use.

Maybe weapons that gain experience with use so there''s a gameplay advantage to using something other than the biggest and baddest?

And when are we gonna get dual weapons? I''ve been dreaming of Ripley''s smart gun/fling unit forever!




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Just waiting for the mothership...

I''m not sure what kind of a FPS you''re doing (Quake -like slaughterfest or something with actual content, purpose and realism), so this idea might not work in the former case. If you''re working on a game of the latter type, then how about something like this:

A double barreled weapon (held against your shoulder when firing), with one barrel on top of the other. The clip''s of the drum-loading type (similar to "tommy guns" in gangster movies), and holds 16 pairs of large canister-like shots, each pair of canisters separated by 45 degrees. Firing one of the canisters at someone isn''t lethal, but does hurt.

The canister ammo itself consists of a protective casing (for ease of storage when not loaded in the drum clip and against the weather), which is ejected through the back of the weapon when a shot is fired. Inside the casing is a small probe-like gadget, the tip of which is highly adhesive and will stick to almost everything non-organic (structures, vehicles, etc). When fired, the "probe" flies forward in a straight line and sticks to whatever it hits (or if it hits something it can''t stick to, it bounces off that surface and sticks to whatever it falls on). The other shot (in the other barrel) can be fired soon after the first one''s cleared the weapon.

Once the probe is attached to a surface, it''ll start "looking" for another probe with a matching FOF radio signal within a certain range. It''ll continue looking for the signal untill its internal batteries run dry (~30 minutes from full?). When the batteries are running low it will incinerate itself - it does NOT explode (bet you expected it to explode and cause damage beyond it''s proportions ), but instead it melts itself by combining certain chemicals that cause heat and flames.

Once these two probes get "contact", one aims and fires a small laser "tripwire" at the other probe (invisible unless there''s smoke, fog, etc, in the air), and the other probe serves as a receiver to that beam (both probes can send and receive the beam so there''s no need to build two types of ammo, one for receiving and one for sending). If the receiving probe can''t "see" the laser beam when the other probe is signalling it (meaning, there''s a wall or another object between the probes), the probes will continue trying untill one (or both) run out of batteries (something like ~20 minutes from full) or untill they manage to get contact. If one runs out of batteries before getting contact, it''ll incinerate itself and the other probe will continue looking for another probe within its reach.

If the two probes can initiate the laser tripwire between one another, they''re set to wreck havoc Anything that breaks the contact between those probes will cause both probes to zap the intruder (Quake shaft -like) with an amount of energy / damage set by the wielder of the gun. Lower amount of energy means lower damage but also means one probe can do more zaps (good against weak opponents), while larger amount of energy means higher daamge but less zaps (good against stronger opponents). Each zap eats away the batteries, so eventually the probe will run out of power (and incinerate itself). If the probe doesn''t have enough power to cause a zap as powerful as the wielder of the weapon had set, it''ll zap with everything it has before incinerating itself. Distance from the zapping probe also affects the amount of damage - the farther away the target is, the less damage is caused (but the same amount of energy is still used).

If the probes are not destroyed and they don''t run out of energy after the zap, they''ll keep the tripwire up and will zap whatever else passes through it).

Sounds pretty much like your basic tripwire mine, except that it does not explode, AND you can actually build a network of tripwires with this. Since every probe can both send and receive one signal, firing a third probe near two already connected probes makes the third probe make contact with the probe that''s not yet receiving a laser beam (if they can "see" eachother, that is).

The reason why the probes will continue to look for other probes even if they can''t connect from the start is simple - if you fire one probe to a wall and another one on the side of a vehicle, the vehicle might eventually move close enough to the other probe to create a link between the two - keep in mind that the probes don''t have to be stationary in order to upkeep the laser link and zap targets. Imagine this, for example:

You fire one probe to the wall of a building, and one to the side of a vehicle down the road. The area consists of the building with the probe, a sidewalk and the road, with a couple of trees between the road and the sidewalk.

You start the engine in the car and drive it closer to the probe attached to the wall of the building - as soon as the two probes are within range, they initiate the laser tripwire. Whenever your car happens to pass a tree in a certain angle, the laser tripwire is "cut" and the probes zap the tree. Once the tree''s not in the way again, they re-start the tripwire

Alternate ammo for this weapon could of course include explosive radio probes, which explode when they get close enough to one another: fire one to an alley, another one to a car, and as the car drives through the alley and past the probe, both probes blow up.

Once the whole drum clip is used, the player needs to replace either the whole clip with a new one, or fill the empty clip with new probes. The latter one will obviously take a good while, but what did you expect?

--JSP

The Encapsulator is pretty cool, and for those of you who think it needs a disadvantage put in, make the encapsulated target bob up and down--that way, it''d be a little harder to hit.

The weapon idea I have is based on "The Silent Blade" by R.A. Salvatore...in the book, he mentions that if one assassin kills another, that assassin basically gets credit for all the other''s kills. Therefore...the assassin gun, useful only in DM. It would do very little damage (1~5 health) and would have pretty limited ammo (maybe a frag a shot instead of normal ammo, you''ll see why...) so you couldn''t use it constantly. However, if you do manage to frag someone with it, you gain 1 frag plus all of them that your target had, and the target loses half, rounded down. (That way, he''s not totally out of the game.)

Sure, it''s completely unrealistic, but most FPSs are...whoever heard of being able to hold 100 shells, 200 nails, 100 rockets, and axe, and 7 guns?
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WNDCLASSEX Reality;
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Reality.lpfnWndProc=ComputerGames;
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RegisterClassEx(&Reality);


Unable to register Reality...what''s wrong?
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Dan Upton
Lead Designer
WolfHeart Software

Well, I suppose if you want to have really serious weapons in a really serious game, then stick with variants of the ''classic'' set, pistols, plasma rifles,rocket launchers - up close and personal style weapons like a shotgun, or sneaky sniper rifles and so on.
That''ll put your game right in there with the ''same meat, different gravy'' style of FPS games that never really go anywhere and will end up on a street corner somewhere accosting people for spare change in an exchange for their wild stories about having once been a famous Game.
Then again, if you fill your game with ridiculous weapons, like the Pencil of Agonizing Doom, or the dreaded Bootlace of Mild Discomfort, people will just laugh.
The whole point about weapons is that they are designed to maim or kill people(or aliens, or giant robots etc), and what you have to do is to give the player a few stock weapons, that will have predictable results, on time every time, like a machine gun or a laser rifle. Point, click and Splat. Simple, no fuss. For the times when he doesn''t care about anything else but survival.
And then you should sprinkle this with a few non-standard weapons, that have functions a little bit different from your usual ones - a weapon to stun all enemies in a given area, or to make them implode in a gruesome/funny fashion, or as the first suggestion went, to hang them in mid-air for all to shoot at freely.
I personally would love to have an angle-grinder type weapon, that you could detatch the disc from....send it flying into a room at 10000rpm, and watch it bounce off walls and carve through everything in its path - something that''s not as predictable as a normal gun, but will produce spectacular fountains of blood and gore if given enough use and time.
Or a sticky bomb. Some sort of bomb that you could stick onto a monster or player by stealth, and then wait for them to wander back to home base or into a room full of other players...*BOOM*.
Or if there''s outdoor areas, an electronic Marker, that you drop and it calls in an Artillery/Airstrike after a certain amount of time. Stuff that you can plan out, to cause maximum damage and fun, instead of just localised mayhem.

But I still reckon the bunny wand is the best.
This one is a close contender though, the Banana Skin of Doom. Drop this innocently yellow colored item along a darkened corridor, and laugh at the hilarity as your enemies go bottom up and break their necks....
Or,from Monty Python, the Most Dangerous Joke in the World..recite this joke in a room full of monsters. Then sit back as their expressions turn from hate to confusion, then watch the slow smile spreading across their faces as they realize the TRUE meaning of humour. Bask in your great talent as they roar with laughter, and smirk nastily as they die screaming from genuine mirth.

I had an idea once of having both a flame thrower which sets someone on fire and they burn continuously until they die, and a freezing weapon that encapsulates someone in ice and they eventually die, and the two could counter-act eachother if say someone wanted to extinguish one of their teammates or melt one of their teammates.

Also the sniper rifle would be cool if it had a special lense (maybe as an upgrade to the rifle) that allowed you to switch between infrared, x-ray, night-vison, and normal vision.

let''s have some fun, eh?

I wanna see heat seeking missles! Or homing missles.. one guy, a sniper, puts a laser on a target. Other guy launches a rocket.. the sniper holds the beam, then.. BLAM! hehe.
Also, how about some wickedly cool stuff? Proxy mines that can blend into the texture of the wall and when a signal is transmitted from the people who set them.. will deactivate to allow them to pass. This way you don''t hafta worry about your own mines killin you.. and it rather makes sense.
Also, why not have something like a landmine you can plant underground? If you''re outside, shouldn''t be too hard! but it''ll take time.

Now let''s go to wierd guns. How about one which fires white hot plasma? hehe. Or one that can hit an opponent with nerve gas ;p And i like artilery weapons that have actual range-finders on them!
Also, make real body damage. If someone''s right arm is hit, then they drop a weapon.. and perhaps can''t pick it up. Bleeding should also be real. If shot hard, and not dead.. you might bleed to death. And having the screen appear to "limp" after being shot in the leg would be cool.

J