Third Person Shooter Problems

Raloth · 2005-07-18T10:36:45

I just hit a real snag in my design of a Third Person Shooter (sort of) game. I want it to be top-down style, similar to Infantry Online if anyone has ever heard about that. A slanted camera angle would be fine, but the goal is to avoid first person and the troubles that come from that. Dodging is meant to be an important aspect, and that can only be done from all angles top-down. The problem now is shooting people. I was planning on using a full 3d environment, but the problem comes with minor bumps in the ground. Bullets would collide into them and the player might not have any feedback whatsoever that they are there. Assaulting something uphill would be literally impossible, as would stopping anything from coming up - your bullets would just whiz over heads. Infantry got around this by having bullets ignore the actual height. Terrain was marked as either passable or impassable to projectiles. You could shoot up ramps, and down them, just fine and still hit the other people. It was able to pull this off because it was done in straight 2d. Somehow they managed to disguise the obvious fact that bullets were defying the laws of gravity, and it worked quite well. It won't work at all in 3d. I could pull it off by leaving everything flat except for distinct rises, but there is still the matter of ramps and ways to get up. It would require locking the camera, something that is an absolute no-no in gamers' eyes. I then thought about changing the control mechanism. The old way would be done with the keyboard only, 2d style. I could make it so the camera is placed behind the player and they aim with the mouse. However, now there's no reason to disallow a first person view. In fact, it would probably be expected. It also completely removes the aspect of dodging things, which I wanted the game to center heavily around. Seeing things behind you would be impossible. With the other things I have planned it will be quite overwhelming at first with the controls, but I believe I have it down so it will be very fluid once the player is used to it. This is why I want to avoid at all costs some kind of angle the player can set to shoot. There would be no way to fit it into my control scheme and still have the game play fluidly. Is there anything I can do I haven't thought of?