InsideQC Forums

What is your stance on melee weapons in games and specifically Quake? The only time I use the axe really is whacking a bmodel with health that I can reach, taking out a lone grunt or enforcer (other enemies have a melee attack which seems to have more range and harm me more).

In Doom you had the excellent berserker powerup, or the risky but fun and fairly resulting chainsaw.

Q3A has the gauntlet which looks and sounds dumb, but at least did a fair amount of damage - and UT had the unique impact hammer.

So what ideas have you had in modifying or replacing the Quake axe? I once did a small mod and one of the minor changes was having the axe do 80 damage, so it is a threat in dm, which made for interesting fights. How about a slower swing with a broader range doing a distribution of damage across frames like ogres and knights do? What of the throwing axe?

One thing is that the axe does at least LOOK brutal, but is also simple, not a huge cleaver of a thing. It works with the Quake guy asthetic - the type of man who considers a shotgun and an axe to be solid armaments - even if they are underpowered for the sake of a linear difficulty slider in singleplayer.

mighty foot

Mighty Foot Engaged

yes, it did have some satisfaction, particularly against the choking troopers, and was a fun way to flip switches - woulda been cool if it triggered revolving doors like the bathrooms though.

Blood's pitchfork was decent as a weapon, though it only worked well against other melee enemies just because those with guns did so much damage...
Shadow Warrior as well has good melee weapons - maybe its a Build engine thing?

heh, q2 and q3 games always had awful melee weapons for some reason, it didn't give quite the same tactile feedback

The knives in SoF were useful actually, though I mostly threw them while leaning around a corner... but they worked well enough if you got up behind someone and could get a single slash to the head or neck.

Heretic2 comes to mind, but that was a third person game... also there was FAKK2 which I never actually did play...

Load up the final versions of DotF for my take on melee weapons- to make them more interesting I made varying moves and counter moves you can do.

scar3crow wrote:So what ideas have you had in modifying or replacing the Quake axe? I once did a small mod and one of the minor changes was having the axe do 80 damage, so it is a threat in dm, which made for interesting fights. How about a slower swing with a broader range doing a distribution of damage across frames like ogres and knights do? What of the throwing axe?

My Hellsmash mod has the Sonic Knuckle. It's a cross between Hexen \ Hexen 2's Gauntlets and an airfist.

Generally, in any mod except medival types, you only really need one to two good balanced melee weapons. It's one thing that I really hated about quake2.

The Doom3's berserker powerup was every bit as awesome as the Doom one...

I never got much satisfaction from the Quake axe because there was no axhitme for monsters. It could have added so much...

I agree with the Build engine games having great melee weapons. I mean, Duke kicking with both feet at once? Or how about the combat knife in Damage Inc? It sounded like a plane taking off when you swung the thing.

A rather simple idea I have done is to bring the berzerker power-up into Quake (I really just hacked the quad damage and v_weapon), but use the Hellknight sword as the basic attack weapon for it instead of a fist.

It bothers me that this forum now has more posts than the Bot/AI board.

FrikaC wrote:It bothers me that this forum now has more posts than the Bot/AI board.

You're not helping :p

Good ol' fists are fun.

Sajt - I enjoyed Doom3 berserker, but not as much as Doom's form, where it lasts across the map and makes mincemeat of lower level enemies. Whereas it just feels kind of silly killing a Mancubus (highest hitpoint nonboss enemy in Doom3) with a single punch.

The player axehitme is VERY satisfying... but it would be a problem to get such sounds for monsters, only because they use a lot of stock sounds (Ogre anyone?) and yeah... sound manipulation problems.

Maybe if it followed the Hexen gauntlet convention of every third strike moving slower at first but doing more damage ?

20-20-35, but the 35 hesitates for a moment and then crashes down. The question is, do you put in a timer or a check for target? Cause you could just thwack a wall twice and then walk up to an enemy... I like the idea of it being dependant on quick successive hits upon something with flesh, as the marine works himself into a fervor to make his mark upon the foe.

...I just got images of a player carving a tunnel into Shub to penetrate the heart.

scar3crow wrote:...I just got images of a player carving a tunnel into Shub to penetrate the heart.

Who needs that friggin wimpy teleporter stuff anyway?

scar3crow wrote: Maybe if it followed the Hexen gauntlet convention of every third strike moving slower at first but doing more damage ?

20-20-35, but the 35 hesitates for a moment and then crashes down. The question is, do you put in a timer or a check for target? Cause you could just thwack a wall twice and then walk up to an enemy...

Just simply check if you're hitting an FL_MONSTER with a simple health check and then proceed with the additional animations if so. You could also check if the player hits a wall they have a little punch angle and some semi reeling backwards (since an axe can't slice through a brick/cement/steel/rock/whatever wall); that'd be neat.

The problem with Quake mods is that a lot of them lack new animations which allows way more freedom, however nobody feels like doing additional animation ... except me.

Ren - Oh I dont think itd be hard to code, its just touches like that are nice in the game is all.

We need bones for all the models... then we could have frames galore on anything we needed. Why hasnt this been done?