Shields don't stack

I purchased "shields up" a little while ago, and was disappointed that it was hard on many maps to max my shield.

Would it be very hard to have shields stack on pick-ups?
Or, for super shields to give full shield?
Or, after puchaseing the skill, shield pick-ups are worth more?

I probably wont buy any more levels of this skill.

ty

its just the normal shield that does not stack, super shield or shield gained from booster. or mostly any other way of gaining shield does stack.

but yeh, most people consider it quite a useless ability. and i cant agree less.

usually i buy it only when needed for other abilities, else it's quite low on my priority list.

Sure, the shield does stack to 150 (shield plus super shield), but to gain my now 175 max I need to grab super shield twice or booster.

Frankly the former seems unfair to other players (i dont like to take 2 super pickups in a row, seems like bad karma) or the later which is a waste off some good adren.

No biggy, just a small rant.

I think this is an issue with the shield code - not the pickups, but the actual "add shield to player" code in the core.

You'll notice that if you pick up a 50 shield without shields up, even then walking by another 50 shield doesn't get you to 100.

BotsCombos, when added to the server, should make Booster more practical - but yes, you'll be using adren to get the shield up.

There is really only one way I can think of to handle this, which isn't all that appetizing to me:

Recode the pickups: we'd have to change the value from 50; changing it to 51 or 49 should actually provide sufficient difference in what happens. While not an impossibility, this involves a "CheckReplacement" and another "replacement" function I just don't like using. They seem inefficient and prone to issues. It initially seemed that that's what I was going to have to do for the Combos, but thankfully I avoided all that.

It's not as easy as simply "recoding the shield adding function". This is a function (or two) that's in xPawn, and it's beyond my abilities to extend that particular object.

Basically, the operation of the 50 Shield is by game design, and not a bug.

Thanks for the reply,

A more practical booster will be great.

It sucks too because if I'm reading the code right, any "shield raising" thing you implement that tries to raise the shield exactly 50 points will illicit the same behavior.

Hm.

Well, I could poke around and see what it would take to get the shields to actually be conditional (50 points for everyone, unless you have "Shields Up", in which case it gives you 51), but this requires:

1. Dru to say it's a plan of action worth pursuing.
2. Me to put down Black & White 2 which I've just started playing (that, and the fact that I had company this holiday, is why you haven't been seeing much of me).

And as I've indicated, it relies on functions I don't like messing with. They work for some things (and seem to work in non-dedicated environments very well) but seems to work somewhat differently in a dedicated environment and seems to be a bit unstable (this probably has to do with issues between what the server knows and the client thinks it knows, and might not be such a big deal for this issue - but it was a PITA when I was working on the Combos).

Alternative plans of action are a "51 or 49 shield" that is spawned by lucky weapons rather than the regular 50s. This would make lucky weapons a bit more valuable than they are now, I'd say, "Shields Up" or no (and probably wouldn't require calls to CheckReplacement).

Oh yeah - rereading your original message:

Stacking I've addressed; Super to full is also an issue with coding a new Super Shield and using CheckReplacement in the DruidsRPG core to pop it in to place. Same for shield pickups worth more.

Basically, any time you want any pickup spawned by a standard pickup-spawn-point to work differently, you have to code a new pickup and then use CheckReplacement in the core.

I would suggest recoding the shieldpacks, and instead of using AddShieldStrength, use your own function that doesn't handle 50s weirdly. Sounds like another half-hour-job-that-will-probably-actually-take-a-week...

KohanX wrote:

I would suggest recoding the shieldpacks, and instead of using AddShieldStrength, use your own function that doesn't handle 50s weirdly. Sounds like another half-hour-job-that-will-probably-actually-take-a-week...

Yeah I thought about the fact that we could probably just recode them to add the 50 directly to the shield (as long as we prechecked max strength). But the AddShieldStrength is there for a reason, and it's up to Dru to say that we need to recode them.

It would take a few minutes to come up with the Class and its pickup. However, the whole "CheckReplacement/ReplaceWith" thing might take a couple of hours to debug.

AddShieldStrength is probably there just because it's the default handler that will take care off all the limits and stuff in one function. No need to change it, or so thought Mysterial.

So, on ONS-Road Rage, Shields Stack.

Does this mean coding might be easier then first thought?

In UT2003 there used to be a game flag that would allow shields to stack. I wonder if it's still kicking around in 2004

I think this can be implemented fairly easily.

AbilitySmartHealing uses the OverridePickupQuery function to give the player more health than the pickup normally would.

In the same way, we could add a OverridePickupQuery function to AbilityShieldStrength that handles the 50 shield in a special way.

So, two questions:

Do we want to do this?

Should small shields stack right up to the MaxShield, or to (MaxShield-100)?