I'm the dev of a new MMOFPS looking to start a conversation with PlanetSide vets :)

[cpudreams]

Hello I'm the solo developer of Hunternet a new MMOFPS. I just released my first alpha trailer.

I've been playing multiplayer shooters since the days of Doom deathmatch over a null modem cable . With Hunternet I've revisited all the fundamentals. It is neither a military shooter nor an arena shooter, but a unique take on the competitive FPS, that I believe is challenging and deep .

I think there are not enough MMOFPSs on the market and PlanetSide is so different from Hunternet that I don't see it as a competitor, but as another game exploring what kind of experiences an MMOFPS can provide.

This teaser and the website I just launched http://www.cpudreams.com are just the begining. I plan to release many more videos and write articles each covering different aspects of the game. At some point, I also plan on inviting players for alpha/beta access.

Since you guys are players of the most important (and arguably only) MMOFPS on the market I would really love to begin a conversation . I know Hunternet is not for everyone but after devoting years of my life to get it to this point I really want to start a conversation with other players

I hope posting this is cool with you guys ?

Thanks,
Fernando

[Ghost Runner]

Well hi there,
I hope you get the game going to a point you can start doing proof of concept by having 700+ players in your servers. Massive First person shooters are always fun, be sure to have a solid clan system (<-this is a must for success) and tight shooter mechcanics as well as freedom of choice in charater selection and open sided transports you can shoot out of just a personal preferance there. I wish I could see your video right now but I am at a place were that website is blocked so I will check it out later hope others chime in for you.

[cpudreams]

Howdy Ghost Runner

I want to build up the community very carefully and get to know and play with as many members of the community as possible. Up till now I've been playtesting with friends and family and scalability testing with simulated player clients, but the next big step is to open up the game and start building the initial core community The design of the game needs a community to help shape it. The game is fully playable but nothing is set in stone.

I've been a member and founder of various clans/squads over the years so that is very important for me as well. I'm a proud member of the Fighting Irish (an IL-2 sim and Battlefield/shooter outfit) due to devoting myself fulltime to making indie games these past five years I haven't had as much time for gaming outside of my own playtesting .

Shooting is hard in Hunternet, there are no hitscan weapons, all projectiles are fully simulated and inherit full momentum, can be affected by gravity, and you will need to learn deflection shooting to hit at longer distances . The game is designed to be 100% skill based, there are no luck based mechanics and no leveling system all players are on an equal footing. There are currently 15 player abilities (not counting movement abilities). Each ability has as little overlap as possible with every other ability, so there is much more variety than usual.

There are transports in the game, but because the game does not have a military theme they do not look like what you would expect. The idea of the game was to define a shooter purely around the mechanics there has been no attempt to fit any particular theme. The trailer mainly shows of the results of alpha network tests, but it does include little teasers of some of the game mechanics. No one has pointed them out yet, but when you watch it see if you can see the transport.

In the trailer there are 150 different avatar skins. All the art in the trailer is either licensed or my own programmer art. It's the closest I could get to the feel I am currently going for. But in the long term I would like to commision new art made specifically and exclusively for Hunternet. What I want to do with the player avatar is to have a very flexible but easy to use avatar editor (like Miis or XBox avatars) and an art style where your model is one big head with small extremities (and not limited to human models). I want to focus on the players faces as it is the most expressive and unique part of the human body I want you to recognize and remember those you meet on the battlefield from as far away as possible. I also plan on custom accessories that would be clan specific. So for example all members of the Fighting Irish clan might wear a pilots cap, while another outfit might all have matching boxing gloves. The theme is friendly but the gameplay is IMO more challenging than any other shooter I've played.

Be sure to also check out the website as it has information not covered in the trailer. I'm also happy to answer any questions you may have .

[BeatCrazed]

So I saw what appeared to be a telepad in the video, is that the transport you're talking about? Other than that I also saw a grappling hook, but that seems more like an ability to me.

So, do I get a prize for trying? :P

[cpudreams]

Thanks for trying BeatCrazed , you get a gold star for effort !

Yes, there are teleport pads, they work like the portal gun you get two of them. There are also editor placed portals that you can see through, one of them is in the trailer with some AI creeps circling it. There is also the grappling hook like ability that also lets you grab players and has some other nice "features".

The entire trailer takes place in a single world, but that world is connected by various portals, that is why you see different art styles in the trailer. There is portal above the town and that is also the initial spawn point in this map.

The transport is a feature of the teleport gun. If you shoot an enemy with it you would swap places. But if you shoot a friendly you will become shrink in size and become a 360 degree turret within the friendlies shields. You can also combine your tracer ability with the portal gun and then travel through an open portal and teleport to the nearest friendly on your team. This is just one example of the way the 15 player abilities mix and match to open all sorts of strategic options.

The integrated positional voice chat is also a great tool for communicating with your turrets. The UI will also show you the relative position of your attached turrets along with their mugshots when they are within your view.

Let me know if there is anything you are curious about

I setup Twitch streaming today and I hope to use it in the future to help show of some of the gameplay. There are some more details and hints on the site http://www.cpudreams.com/ If you are intersted click on "Be a newb again" to sign up for the newsletter and receive all future updates.

[cpudreams]

One of the cool things about Hunternet's server is that there are no server side visibility limits. So for example you could have 700 players separated by many kilometers and as long as you did not limit your graphics settings you will be able to track them. I researched some the problems PlanetSide players had while developing the server, and being a flight sim fanatic (IL-2) I understand the value of visibility

I've read a lot about problems with varying visibility (infantry vs. vehicles vs. aircraft) and also visibility shortening and pop in/out when too many players are in the same area. Are those things still an issue in PlanetSide 1 or 2?

[BeatCrazed]

Very interesting, I had thought the mini players were some ability that granted extra firepower. I do have a question about them: What happens if the transport is killed? Do the riding players eject (perhaps at high velocity if there were lots of them) or are they killed too?

In Planetside 1 rendering distance was handled by an obscuring fog at 400m. Anything inside this distnace was rendered without fail, and anything outside was partially or fully concealed, depending on how much further outside 400m they were. It made sense, and since the only weapon that could fire further than 400m was an indirect fire weapon by design, it worked.

In Planetside 2 rendering distance is split. There is an obscuring fog that is at a distance the player sets, to be used for performance reasons. The player rendering distance, however, is determined based on how many people are in the area, and whether the player is infantry, vehicle or aircraft. In an intense infantry battle, the player render distance can get as bad as 20m. Naturally that's a big problem. This variability effects weapon balance, since longer range weapons are useless when you can't see enemies more than 20m away, and it effects vehicle balance. There was a time when infantry could see aircraft from quite a distance, but aircraft had to get quite close to see the infantry. This made it easy for infantry based AA to reach out and touch aircraft with no fear of retribution from the aircraft who couldn't see or retaliate.

I am interested, and I've signed up for the newsletter. Put out a wave of invitations? :P

[cpudreams]

If the transport is destroyed an surviving players are ejected . When a transport is hit all transported players suffer the same damage as the transport. But each player has their own total health so it is possible for a riding player to die while the transporting player is still alive and vice versa.

You can also merge transports, so if a transport carrying five players teleports to a friendly transport carrying five players, you will end up with a single transport carrying 11 players.

Transported players can shoot teleportation projectiles to leave the transport. Their teleportation projectile must come in contact with the terrain for them to disembark.

Whenever a player dies they leave behind a wreckage. Any player can pick up the wreckage to gain health/energy. There is a short period of time after a player dies during which they or their teammates cannot reclaim their comrades wreckage (otherwise it would be to easy for a transport to pick up wreckage from destroyed turrets).

The PlanetSide 1 system sounds *much* better than that in PlanetSide 2! Am I missing something? Why did they change it?

Great thanks for signing up! Yes please invite your gaming buddies . I'm up to almost 200 subscribers on the newsletter and will email the newsletter when the next Youtube video or article is done.

My plan is to start an alpha/beta test as soon as possible after the Holidays (after New Years). I'm really looking forward to playing with everyone who is interested, it is going to be a blast

[BeatCrazed]

Originally Posted by cpudreams

Whenever a player dies they leave behind a wreckage. Any player can pick up the wreckage to gain health/energy. There is a short period of time after a player dies during which they or their teammates cannot reclaim their comrades wreckage (otherwise it would be to easy for a transport to pick up wreckage from destroyed turrets).

Cool. So how is the health and/or energy system set up in Hunternet? What kinds of weapon are there? Are there any restrictions to the kinds of weapon that you can use while being transported by another player?

(time to get one player transporting fifty or so, all of which are armed with the least accurate, fastest firing and/or least accurate, most pellets fired in a single shot weapon. Bullet hell in 3D everybody)

Originally Posted by cpudreams

The PlanetSide 1 system sounds *much* better than that in PlanetSide 2! Am I missing something? Why did they change it?

The system in Planetside 1 was absolutely better than in Planetside 2. They had no real reason to change it, but I'm guessing they did it anyway because they looked at the system in Planetside 1 and thought "We can do better!" That attitude has caused nothing but trouble, let me tell you. It wouldn't be so bad if the developers could actually improve on the systems in Planetside 1, but so far there have been small advances and major regressions.

Originally Posted by cpudreams

Great thanks for signing up! Yes please invite your gaming buddies . I'm up to almost 200 subscribers on the newsletter and will email the newsletter when the next Youtube video or article is done.

My plan is to start an alpha/beta test as soon as possible after the Holidays (after New Years). I'm really looking forward to playing with everyone who is interested, it is going to be a blast

I'm excited to play too! That bullet point on your site stating that the game has "Unexpected gameplay, that will leave you feeling like a newbie" is just making me eager to play it and prove that I've played a wide range of interesting games, and that even if none of them map well to this one, I've gone through the learning process enough times to do it quicker than most.

[Ghost Runner]

Well I got to see the Video and I must confess it looks like strait up silly fun. I think you will do really well with that product as many will like the social aspect. I my self like the more serious games but this reminds of when I started gaming it was just for the fun of some thing different and because of that I think it will sell very well.

[cpudreams]

I plan on writing up each ability in detail but here is a quick overview.
Weapons from long to short range: Charger, Ricochet, Explosive, Smash, Traps

Charger: Fits the role of a sniper rifle, but works completely different.

Ricochet: The yellow projectiles you saw in the trailer. 100% bounce, highest rate of fire in the game (4 shots a second).

Explosive: Mix between shotgun and explosives. Unlike ricochet it is affected by gravity. Can hit multiple targets and causes vision problems.

Smash: Melee attack, causes blackouts, can lance multiple opponents, also useful for mobility.

Traps: Will float mid-air can be used defensively or offensively. Traps do not damage their target unless that target first suffers damage which will set the traps off. Traps can be transmitted to other players before they are set off by damage.

Out of 15 abilities these are the direct combat abilities. There are more details and nuances to how they work. Other abilities also allow you to damage your opponents but in more indirect ways. For example the grappling hook (aka bungee) can be used to grab opponents and slam them into the ground for crash damage.

All five of these direct combat abilities can be used by turreted players. There are two defensive abilities I had to disable for turrets as they would break the balance of the game. Everything else is fair game. My design motto is to give players as much flexibility as possible

Energy is the single explicit resource in Hunternet. Energy serves the role that health, ammo, and score have in a traditional FPS. Energy ties everything together and touches many aspects of the game. This is just a brief view at the primary energy mechanics. Each player has 1 bar of onboard energy and an energy bank with many bars of stored energy. All abilities and movement mechanics consume onboard energy. As onboard energy is expended players draw from their energy banks to replenish it. Any damage to a player drops onboard energy, if it drops below zero you are destroyed but can respawn if you still have energy left in your energy banks. Collecting the wreckages of destroyed players adds to your energy bank and is how you score.

time to get one player transporting fifty or so, all of which are armed with the least accurate, fastest firing and/or least accurate, most pellets fired in a single shot weapon. Bullet hell in 3D everybody

That's what I'm talking about !

The system in Planetside 1 was absolutely better than in Planetside 2. They had no real reason to change it, but I'm guessing they did it anyway because they looked at the system in Planetside 1 and thought "We can do better!" That attitude has caused nothing but trouble, let me tell you. It wouldn't be so bad if the developers could actually improve on the systems in Planetside 1, but so far there have been small advances and major regressions.

This is why I want to involve a community from the alpha stage. I wanted to have the game fully playable so that the community could have some fun from day one, but have players play the game early enough so that *everything* is on the table.

I'm excited to play too! That bullet point on your site stating that the game has "Unexpected gameplay, that will leave you feeling like a newbie" is just making me eager to play it and prove that I've played a wide range of interesting games, and that even if none of them map well to this one, I've gone through the learning process enough times to do it quicker than most.

You remind me of myself . I've played all sorts of online games starting in the days of BBSs and all sorts of genres and platforms including old Unix games like Nettrek! I think all that experience has helped me climb the learning curve faster in my own game, but I haven't come even close to mastering it yet . I get my ass handed to me by a good gamer friend of mine most of the time during testing But that is what has got me so excited, I have so much room for improvement and once we have hundreds of players the variety of tactics is going to be crazy (The game is designed so that in large battles the largest team does not have an automatic advantage, if you are good enough there a lone wolf should be able to win a match)

[cpudreams]

Thanks Ghost Runner ! Beware that the gameplay is quite challenging to master despite of its friendly silly appearance

[BeatCrazed]

So cpudreams, from what I understand, this means that if somebody were to receive a K.O. right at the start of the match (when they'd have little to no backup energy) they'd be out for up to 7 minutes plus an amount depending on just how quickly the energy drain becomes harsh. As a (filthy) casual Counter-Strike player I know that getting knocked out right at the start and then having to wait for the rest of the match is quite boring. Do you have any plans on how to alleviate that? Perhaps you could allow players who are doing well and therefore have a lot of energy to spend some of that on resurrecting former opponents to fight on their side. Perhaps there could be an alternate game mode, where dead players are distributed evenly among the remaining living players as turrets, until there are only a few players left, but each player has an enormous amount of firepower orbiting them. For a team match, the dead players would be evenly distributed among their remaining team members, rather than just anybody.

I think those ideas would make it more interesting for living and dead alike. What do you think?

Also, about teams: Are we limited to a specific number of teams, or can we have as many as we like? Can the teams be formed mid-match? A while ago on Zdoom, there was a bug with team assignment which occasionally left people without a team in a team match. It did make things harder, since anybody could kill you including other teamless people, but at least you had enough targets to climb the scoreboard in a hurry ;D It was awesome, too bad it was fixed.

[cpudreams]

if somebody were to receive a K.O. right at the start of the match (when they'd have little to no backup energy)

All players will start with many lives worth of energy in their energy bank. So most players would have to be destroyed multiple times before finally running out completely and turning into a ghost. On the other hand if you are really good at surviving your first spawn might last all the way to the end of the match and your first KO might be the one right before the match ends to a slightly better player. Keep in mind you are destroyed when your onboard energy goes below, and most of the time you would still have banked energy which would then be spent in respawning you. Only when you die and have no banked energy will you be completely out of the match.

Perhaps you could allow players who are doing well and therefore have a lot of energy to spend some of that on resurrecting former opponents to fight on their side.

One of the defensive abilities is Absorb. When active a player absorbs all damage and converts that damage into onboard energy (any spillover would go to the energy bank). A natural side effect of absorb is that you can coordinate with a teammate and have them absorb your projectiles to transfer energy and "heal" them.

Perhaps there could be an alternate game mode, where dead players are distributed evenly among the remaining living players as turrets, until there are only a few players left, but each player has an enormous amount of firepower orbiting them.

That's a really cool idea! I hadn't thought of that I've added it to my todo list, it would be make fun variant!

Also, about teams: Are we limited to a specific number of teams, or can we have as many as we like? Can the teams be formed mid-match?

Bingo At the start each player is on their own team. One of your abilities is the Team ability. You can use it to surrender to another team or to kick someone out of your own team. So yes teams are formed mid-match, there can be any number of teams of any size.

My goal with teams was to make multiple team sizes viable, from a lone wolf, to a large outfit. A team's score is their energy bank divided by the number of players. You have to be careful who you have on your team as weaker players will end up wasting your energy and get farmed by stronger individuals to boost their energy bank (each team has a single shared energy bank). A good leader may be able to coordinate weaker players better than an amazing player, so I look forward to seeing how this all plays out in practice. A lone hunter could do very well, going after straggling players when multiple larger teams are fighting over an area.

Teams are also carried over between rounds, so the goal is for the same team (could be a team of one) to win multiple rounds to win the match. If the winning team from the previous round changes their composition in the current round then they are considered a new team and their round winning streak ends.

A while ago on Zdoom, there was a bug with team assignment which occasionally left people without a team in a team match. It did make things harder, since anybody could kill you including other teamless people, but at least you had enough targets to climb the scoreboard in a hurry ;D It was awesome, too bad it was fixed.

That sounds like fun, now imagine something similar but instead of by accident, by design Looks like you are ready to be a lone wolf or maybe a run a small elite group of three and take out the large teams of regulars I used to love playing ZDoom after work back in the late 90s, great fun!

[BeatCrazed]

Originally Posted by cpudreams

All players will start with many lives worth of energy in their energy bank. So most players would have to be destroyed multiple times before finally running out completely and turning into a ghost. Only when you die and have no banked energy will you be completely out of the match.

Okay, that's cool. I must have misunderstood just how much energy you start with.

Originally Posted by cpudreams

One of the defensive abilities is Absorb. When active a player absorbs all damage and converts that damage into onboard energy (any spillover would go to the energy bank). A natural side effect of absorb is that you can coordinate with a teammate and have them absorb your projectiles to transfer energy and "heal" them.

That's neat. Force absorb was the only reason I'd ever pick the light side in Jedi Knight multiplayer. The look on an opponent's face when they realize that their lightning is doing nothing but refilling my force meter was great. Too bad the other light side powers weren't as good.

Originally Posted by cpudreams

That's a really cool idea! I hadn't thought of that I've added it to my todo list, it would be make fun variant!

Coolio, I'm glad you like the idea!

Originally Posted by cpudreams

Bingo I left a hint in the trailer "700 Teams", "700 Players" and you are the first one to figure it out At the start each player is on their own team. One of your abilities is the Team ability. You can use it to surrender to another team or to kick someone out of your own team. So yes teams are formed mid-match, there can be any number of teams of any size.

Huzzah! I thought that "700 teams, 700 players" too complicated for you to simply mean "Deathmatch."

Originally Posted by cpudreams

Teams are also carried over between rounds, so the goal is for the same team (could be a team of one) to win multiple rounds to win the match. If the winning team from the previous round changes their composition in the current round then they are considered a new team and their round winning streak ends.

So is there some kind of requirement for being able to join a team? From what I understand it would be possible to invalidate a winning streak by simply surrendering to a team (changing their composition) and then returning to your previous team.

Originally Posted by cpudreams

That sounds like fun, now imagine something similar but instead of by accident, by design Looks like you are ready to be a lone wolf or maybe a run a small elite group of three and take out the large teams of regulars I used to love playing ZDoom after work back in the late 90s, great fun!

Well first I'll have to get good at the game, but yes. I see myself alternating between lone wolf/elite squad and organizing a larger team.