[ut3] Issues, Ideas, and Hopeful Thoughts

[Majic]

Hello,
I was just playing UT3 on Vista (sadly), and was wondering if this mailing
list was low on it's rant for the day...  Anyway, I wasn't sure where I
should post about an issue I found or some ideas that might help improve the
game, so I thought I'd just post that here. :3

One of the things that saddens me is that there are only a handful of maps
for each gametype.  So after the first month or two you find yourself
wanting something new...  I wish there were some gametype-agnostic maps.  I
think it'd be very fun to just play deathmatch on SandStorm, or at least
have some new maps where multiple gametypes is possible.  Key being more
content, or a new play on things. :)

Another thing that is mildly frustrating is that everyone I know who plays
UT3 is playing over a link at or below 6Mbps.  So receiving a 40MB+ map from
a server with a slew of creative 3rd party maps, makes wait times a bit
unbearable...  perhaps something could be done to send the files in a
compressed form and automatically decompress to their .upk archives once
received?  I hear great things about lzma utils for Debian Linux or 7zip.  I
know at least that 7zip is available on both Windows and Linux (not sure
about Mac OS X).

The Hellbender is frustrating.  I love that you can hit people in the main
gunner with a sniper, but the shots from that are just not powerful enough
and don't fire quickly enough.  I sorely miss the behavior from Unreal
Tournament 3.  If you could spend a short time charging up the shot and then
firing something moderately devastating, that would be lovely.  Otherwise,
it is practically useless against airborne vehicles and takes much more
skill to fire with than something like the Goliath gunner.

I wish, I wish, I wish there were equivalent vehicles between the Necris and
Axon.  I love the Axon vehicles, they provide a good baseline of firepower
and variance.  The problem, imo, is that the Necris vehicles are much too
powerful in maps like Suspense Necris.  If you compare the vehicles, the
Necris side has two tanks (Nemesis), and then the Darkwalker.  I wish there
were an Axon equivalent of the Darkwalker.  I wish there were also Necris
equivalents of the Scorpion and Hellbender.  There's no need to match
vehicles perfectly, but I just wish for a bit more content. :)

I recently replied to a message on this mailinglist about being able to
search for servers of all gametypes or of a certain mutator type.  While I
missed the little button on the server page to search by mutator, I did not
have the "All Game Types" button.  I can only assume that this has something
to do with how I patched...  I had downloaded and installed patches 1 - 5 in
ascending order with the Titan pack before patch 5, so it might be possible
that something affected the server UI for me...  On another note, it's
pretty odd that the "All Game Types" button is a button rather than being
the first selectable option in the drop-down menu for gametypes.  I'm fairly
new to GUI design, but imo that should be merged in... (not really a
problem, though).

In the map Suspense Necris, you can get outside of it with a Nemesis simply
by driving straight through the "elastic barrier" at either end of the
riverbed, with other vehicles this proves impossible.  Another oddity in
both that map and regular Suspense, is that you can get on top of both
towers with a Raptor and possibly a Fury by driving straight up and then
banking over the lip onto the top of the tower.  This gives you a great
sniping spot or base for avril barrages.  You can also drive past the
barrier in Sandstorm with the Nemesis (doing this on the upper level has let
a few players avoid my DarkWalker by temporarily taking refuge outside the
barrier).

The final issue is just a simple thing on the map called Kargo.  When I hit
the jump in a Scorpion I managed to flip it over and land it on it's roof in
the low area around the ship.  The vehicle usually destroys itself when it
touches this area, but having been flipped up-side down, it just skidded to
a halt.  Upon flipping it over to mindlessly drive around the ship, it
exploded in my face and I died. :(  Aside from a humiliating death, one
would think there is some sort of error here being that it doesn't always
explode at that level.

Please don't take this as me saying I hate the game.  I *LOVE* the game.  I
can't get enough of this game.  I read the post a few days ago saying that
Steam managed to increase the UT3 community by 2000% with one of the free
weekends in March, so I must not be the only one...  I just think it has a
few kinks, and that it is starting to grow into it's fame like Vista (I did
not like it when I beta tested Vista in....2005? in Cupertino).  I think the
graphics are spectacular, the physics keep you immersed in the atmosphere of
the game, and the overall weapon chemistry is something to be proud of. :)
 Keep up the good work, and I hope this is well-received
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