[airstrike] Respawning bug making the game unbalanced

[Ulf Ekström]

Hi. I am amazed that people play the game enough to notice things like
this. :)

On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 12:21:31PM +0200, Kujansuu Pekka wrote: > Hi,
>  I found a little bug in Airstrike making it unbalanced: The red
> player respawns longer after he has died. This makes unbalanced
> situations where either the red player wins when both players die at
> the same time in a 4-4 situation, or the blue player gets a head
> start. I made a patch for biplane.c against the pre5 development
> snapshot. I hope it works with the CVS-version too...

Thanks! I'll apply it ASAP. I'm thinking of making respawn time a
config option, but it is still not decided how respawning should
happen in the final games.  If the player jumps with the parachute and
reaches the ground unharmed he should be given a new plane, and the
opponent should not get any points (or maybe one half point for just
destroying the plane?). An alternative is that the parachute jumper
has to run to the edge of the screen (or to a hangar) to be able to
get a new plane.  But this requires an animation of a running man,
which is not so simple to do..

> Btw, one thing that you should consider changing is the scoring
> time. I think the players should score at the moment the plane dies,
> but the game should check the scores only after a player
> respawns. That would allow ties, which would make it more fair,
> since you couldn't do a kamikaze at 4-4 hoping to win.  

I agree, but as above it is not clear what exactly should give a point:
Killing the opponent or just destroying his plane. Of course at the moment
these are the same (until the parachute is implemented). Please give suggestions,
and I'll try to fix this as you suggest in the meanwhile.

--Ulf