Personally, I think you ought to have both Super speed and Wall Crawling, if those are both power, to be able to Wall Run, maybe that's just me. I mean, if SS alone let's you go vertical, then nobody has a reason to take normal-speed Wall Crawling, because it's strictly worse than fast wall running, right? So you could just get rid of Wall Crawling entirely at that point.

In the event that you have a reason to want to go halfway up a wall or cliff then pause and do stuff (fights, interact with a glowwie, etc) then I could see a need for Wall Crawling that the Wall Run ability doesn't really satisfy. I personally was thinking there would most likely be nothing to do when you pause halfway up a vertical surface, though, so that makes the Run Up Wall ability good enough to get you to the top, which is probably the only reason for being on the wall in the first place.

While we're on the subject, CoX had a whole pool of Super speed themed powers with Hasten and the one melee Flurry attack. Those are also applications of Super Speed that you might expect to be able to do with just Super speed as a power, but they were separate powers. Then you had those Procs you could put in travel powers that gave you Stealth while moving, etc. So Wall Run could be acomplished in other ways beyond just "it comes free with Super Speed" if they wanted to do that, and I wouldn't complain that it was an unnecessary division of skills among the powers and enhancers.

The design of the travel powers can include or not include this type of stuff as the designers want to include it, but when one power totally trumps another, for the most part, then the lesser power will likely wither on the vine and die. If you want to avoid making regular-speed Wallcrawling totally obsolete, then you need to let it have it's own niche and not let other powers muscle into that. If you'd rather just not do Wallcrawling at all, then that's fine too.

Separate to this is the issue of which surfaces are designed to be traversed vertically and which are not. If there's a large overhang where you'd be updside-down trying to superspeed run up a cliff, do we allow that or not? Do all vertical surfaces have to be designed to be traversable vie superspeed wall running? If yes, does that cause problems? I don't really know.

Enemy NPC's in our game will have line of sight and stuff. So if you want to sneak around the game, wall crawling will be where its at, as you have perfect control while staying out of detection range. So you could think of wall crawling as the stealth character travel power.

It's also a Natural travel power that climbs walls, so for the many players with a character not supposed to have travel superpowers and care enough to take whatever else is available to keep their theme together (I've heard many state to having done as much in CoH), this is great for them as well.

Grimfox wrote:

While we have your attention Shadow. How far does wall crawling take you? Say I'm a character with wall crawling, and I'm standing in a large pipe. If I start walking up the side of the pipe at what angle does WC kick in and is there an angle that would result in the character falling or would I be able to WC to the other side? If there isn't a limit, I'm playing the entire game from the ceiling.

Both superspeed and wallcrawling are very well on display in DCUO. I recommend anyone interested in how this could work go create a free character on DCUO and try it out for a while.

The biggest problems I have with existing wallcrawling as it has been implemented is controller frame of reference.Does your controller frame of reference change based on the perspective of the camera or the perspective of the character?

Here's what I mean:
When you are pressing the "move forward" button your character runs up to a wall and commences to scale the wall in the upward direction. So now your control orientation has shifted (intuitively I might add) so that forward is now up from your camera's perspective. Left is still left and right is still right and back is down back. So far so good.
Your character climbs the wall and gets to the ceiling and naturally continues onto the ceiling so long as you continue pressing the 'move forward' key. But now things start getting confusing, because your'move forward' now moves you towards the camera not away from the camera. Is right still right and is left still left? So long as your character is climbing back towards you it is, but as soon as you rotate your camera around to see where he or she is crawling, left becomes right and right becomes left. It get's better?
Let's suppose you are cllimbing a big pipe or a bridge support and you crawl around to the other side, so you are now facing the camera. Which way is left now?

After playing DCUO for years, I still can't figure out when the controls hand over from one orientation to another.

I have an idea that might eliminate a large portion of this, and would enable Grimfox to play from the ceiling.

here is the idea
Whenever your control scheme shifts right and left or front and back, the camera should automatically invert. This way controls would be intuitive to a ceiling crawling character. On the screen it would look like the character is crawling on the ground and the rest of the people in the world are walking on the ceiling. A character with dangly bits and long hair would look cool as her bits would be falling up, and so would the shell casings from her submachine guns. Left would be left for both the character and the player, and forward would be forward and back back for both as well. And if the character jumped while upside down on the ceiling, she would end up right side up on the ground below. The camera would rotate (preferably with the character just like something from The Matrix) and follow the character to the ground.

Huckleberry wrote:

After playing DCUO for years, I still can't figure out when the controls hand over from one orientation to another.

Are you doing all this in 1st person or 3rd person or would that even matter to what you're talking about? I tend to play games like this in 3rd person so I would expect all my "lefts" and "rights" to stay fixed to my body (on the screen) regardless if I'm standing on a floor or a ceiling (technically "upside-down"). Basically I'd expect my body to remain with the feet towards the bottom of the screen and the head towards the top (with camera view "over the shoulder") regardless of what the world is doing around me if that makes sense. The only time I'd need my body to "auto-reorient" itself is if let's say I was standing on the ceiling and I turn off my wall-climbing power - at that point I'd expect my feet to re-orient to the ground as I fell to the floor (like your Matrix reference).

This brings up an interesting point you alluded to: If I'm standing on the ceiling (via my Wall Crawling power) should I be able to "jump" like I can on the ground and expect to land back on the ceiling or should I expect to fall to the ground? I would think if you're hanging on the ceiling maybe the act of jumping (i.e. pressing your spacebar) should function more like a "manual toggle Wall Crawling power off" button. Would that switch in spacebar functionality only apply if you're completely upside-down or would it apply anytime you're technically "wall-clinging" to anything? This kind of stuff needs to be accounted for.

In any event it seems very weird to have any of your axes get inverted just because of your body's orientation to the ground changes. It sounds like what you're saying is that DCUO is making things a lot more complicated than they need to be regarding all this.

A lot of games have a snap-to camera. In fact, I think most do. What I mean when I say a snap-to camera is that as soon as you press a movement key, or let go of the camera pan key, the camera automatically snaps back to its default position pointing forwards at whatever zoom level you currently have. The snap-to is not instantaneos, its a bit of an elastic motion so that it doesn't disorient you but rather brings you along for the ride. That elasticity is how I picture an inverted camera working for someone who is crawling on the ceiling.

Someone crawling on a wall would still have the camera pointing up as long as their head was pointing up. But as soon as they start crawling on a downwards direction rather than just backing down the wall, camera would invert. I think it would be intuitive. I would not recommend more than two camera positions: right-side up and upside down. Any more than that would probably get confusing as to which way is actually up, not to mention it could cause people to get motion sickness or vertigo playing the game.

Shadow Elusive wrote:

We have indeed studied the DCUO wallcrawling (in fact I love that travel power to death I do). But the kinds of details you're asking about simply don't exist yet. We've proven we have the tech. We have not attempted to perfect application yet. Those prototypes were important but done in early rough infrastructures. We are moving towards a better time to return to them.

By details, are you referring ot the control schema or are you referring to hair, clothing and shell casings being subject to gravity?

Lothic wrote:

Are you doing all this in 1st person or 3rd person or would that even matter to what you're talking about? I tend to play games like this in 3rd person so I would expect all my "lefts" and "rights" to stay fixed to my body (on the screen) regardless if I'm standing on a floor or a ceiling (technically "upside-down"). Basically I'd expect my body to remain with the feet towards the bottom of the screen and the head towards the top (with camera view "over the shoulder") regardless of what the world is doing around me if that makes sense. The only time I'd need my body to "auto-reorient" itself is if let's say I was standing on the ceiling and I turn off my wall-climbing power - at that point I'd expect my feet to re-orient to the ground as I fell to the floor (like your Matrix reference).

I was referring to 3rd person, and I think it does matter. In my opinion, 1st person is more than just a zoom level. The Elder Scrolls Online knows what 1st person is supposed to be, as just about every FPS out there. 1st person means seeing your hands in a very particular way so you can see what they are doing and what they are holding within your field of vision. In such a 1st person view I would actually expect the camera to be oriented with and move the same as your character's head, complete with bobbing while you run and flipping around when you reel from an explosion.

Lothic wrote:

This brings up an interesting point you alluded to: If I'm standing on the ceiling (via my Wall Crawling power) should I be able to "jump" like I can on the ground and expect to land back on the ceiling or should I expect to fall to the ground? I would think if you're hanging on the ceiling maybe the act of jumping (i.e. pressing your spacebar) should function more like a "manual toggle Wall Crawling power off" button. Would that switch in spacebar functionality only apply if you're completely upside-down or would it apply anytime you're technically "wall-clinging" to anything? This kind of stuff needs to be accounted for.
>

In my example I just naturally assumed that using the 'jump' command was merely just a toggle like you say. However, if we have a game in which players can actually WALK on the ceilings and walls as if they are bending gravity itself, then that would be another assumption entirely. If you have bent gravity so it points up for you, then when you jump, you should fall in the direction gravity pulls you, which is up in your case. While that would be a pretty damn cool power, I doubt it would make it into opening day. Gravity movement would be a kick-ass travel power. It would work a lot like teleport, as you create miniature wormholes by manipulating gravity to travel from point to point. The visuals of compression and stretching from point A to point B could be sick!

Redlynne wrote:

I'd imagine that any Wall Crawling Power would be utterly unconcerned with "angle" of surfaces relative to ambient gravity. In other words, you could "stand" (and run) upside down on the bottom of a bridge if you wanted to. However(!) ... if you come "unstuck" from the surface you're in contact with, then ambient gravity takes priority.
Easiest way to illustrate the difference is running (upright) on a street, versus running (sideways) on a wall, versus running (upside down) under a bridge/arch ... and then "jumping" to get past an obstacle.
On the street, you jump "up" while running and speed and the ambient gravity pulls you in a parabola back down onto the street where you keep your stride and keep running.
On the wall, you jump "sideways" away from the wall and stop clinging to it, at which point you start falling to the ground "below" you.
On the underside of the bridge/arch, you jump "down" away from the bridge/arch, at which point you keep falling down away from the bridge/arch towards the ground (water?) below.
I'm thinking that the coolest thing to do for Wall Crawling would be to have the camera automatically reorient such that the surface you are clinging to is considered "down" for the camera, and is thus placed at the bottom of the screen. So if you're clinging to a vertical wall, the world might be sideways, and if you're hanging under a bridge, the world is upside down, in the camera view (barring Mouse Look turning modifications).
Now, that would be the case for ACTUAL "Wall Crawling" type Power stuff, where the important thing is having contact with the surface.
A subset corollary possibility of that sort of thing would be a Gravity Manipulation Power which can override the direction of local gravity in a VoE region (often, but not exclusively centered on the Player) which can then change which way the Gravity Vector is "pointing" for affected $Targets. This could then cause PCs and NPCs to "fall into the sky" or do something similar to Wall Crawling by "pointing" the Gravity Nadir towards an available surface. Fall "far enough" to hit a surface and you'll inflict Falling Damage. With this you could Toggle On to "throw" stuff into the air, and then Toggle Off to let it "drop" onto the ground and the like, as a simple example, or you could use it as a Personal (and Friends?) Travel Power that lets you "fall" through the sky in a way akin to Flight and/or Jumping or even "Wall Crawl" by pointing local gravity "sideways" at the wall instead of "down" like usual.

As your post highlighted there are multiple "variations" of what a Wall Crawling power could actually be. How it will work in CoT could range all the way from some kind of "gravity manipulation" power to simply a normal guy using suction cup technology.

Ideally it would be great if the folks at MWM could implement all the various versions of this so that we could choose exactly how we wanted this to work. But I suspect what will happen is that they'll focus (at least initially) on ONE specific design concept for this and it'll be up to us to accept it and/or "shoehorn" how it works into our specific character concepts.

Halae wrote:

On the topic of gravity involved in wall climbing, one trick that'd keep people from getting lost in regards to where the ground is and what direction they were traveling (and trust me, that will happen) is simply to have gravity still be Down in terms of where things flow. Clothing pieces and hair still hanging towards the ground would easily tell the player where the floor is in spite of camera reorientation.
That said, that implementation does sort of fly in the face of gravity manipulation, but every other form of sticking to walls? Sure, it works as a quick way to figure out where you need to go to reorient

I'm sure it's possible to make a game where different parts of a character's body react to multiple "gravitational focal points" thus allowing a player to walk around upside-down on a ceiling as if the ceiling was the ground but still have secondary bits like hair and clothing "hang" down toward the actual ground. The question is does UE4 allow for that kind of thing intrinsically or would the Devs have to somehow trick the game into doing that with some super-clever software sorcery. This could easily become one of those things that would require far too much effort for far too little return.

Again I'll point out that there are still too many open-ended questions about this at this point. The Devs of this game might decide that the whole "walking upside-down" thing might simply have too many problems associated with it and limit their version of "Walk Crawling" to surfaces of 90 degrees or less relative to the ground making "hanging from the ceiling" an absolute impossibility.

While the mechanics of wall crawling are an academic exercise of implementation. As pointed out earlier, anyone interested in how a game can make wall crawling work should check out DCUO, make a free character and give it a whirl.

However, what about using powers while crawling walls? Here's where things get tricky.

Is wall crawling a 'travel power' such that when we enter combat, we drop to the ground?

How many hands will we need, if any, to cling to a wall? What difference do the points of emanation of our powers have on our ability to use them while climbing a wall?

I can see a couple ways to make the animations for wall crawling (and ceiling crawling) work with powers, but it would be complicated and would have to be multiplied by the different points of emanation of our powers.

One way: When climbing a wall or ceiling, you have to stop moving in order to use powers and abilities. I think that's a fair trade for the added flexibility of using any surface as your battleground. This also makes it far simpler for the developers. When you are stopped, the developers can make it work with any combination of powers and emanation points of those powers. For instance, a wall crawler can sit on his haunches like spiderman and use both hands to fire a pair of Colt .45's. Likewise, a person with a kick ranged attack can hold on to the wall with both hands and one foot while kicking a fireball with the other foot. It would be some effort, but it would be a finite effort.

Some powers like ultimates, that require a full-body effort may dislodge you if you attempt them from your perch. Or they may be just deemed not possible while climbing.

What about being hit with kb powers while wall climbing, clinging, running? I can see the wall crawler having a chance to recover once losing contact with the surface, but I don't see the speedster being able to do the same thing. Getting knocked off five stories short of the top of a 100 story high rise sounds like an ouch moment for the speedster and a 'whew' for the climber. Maybe the store will let us buy deployable parachutes for those moments when we go "OH ****! THAT was Stupid!"

Lothic wrote:

Nyxz wrote:
What about being hit with kb powers while wall climbing, clinging, running? I can see the wall crawler having a chance to recover once losing contact with the surface, but I don't see the speedster being able to do the same thing. Getting knocked off five stories short of the top of a 100 story high rise sounds like an ouch moment for the speedster and a 'whew' for the climber. Maybe the store will let us buy deployable parachutes for those moments when we go "OH ****! THAT was Stupid!"
The only thing that would be keeping a speedster on the side of a building is his/her forward motion. Anything that would physically change his/her vector of motion would also likely allow natural gravity to take over as well.
But here's another interesting wrinkle to this: What happens if someone uses a solid Hold power against this same speedster? If the Hold would normally involve a physical rooting to the ground (like maybe how a plant-based Hold would work) would that mean the speedster gets locked down on the side of the building? It might be a little more clear for a Hold that doesn't include a ground-based feature (like Char) because in that case the speedster ought to become paralyzed AND start to fall to the ground.
As we can see all sorts of things change once you start introducing new travel scenarios into the mix...

My power design descriptions for the basis of the travel powers such as well crawling and super speed are purpossefully open-ended for implementation depending on a number of variables. That being said, the most basic scenario is that we will leverage the physics engine and keep things simple. Gravity is gravity. Wall crawling allows the user to climb vertical and horizontal surfaces while remaining in contact (this doesn't necessitate the requirement of multiple points of contact). Which means that techinically, we could animate wall-crawling as actual crawling or even walking. Once contact is lost due to any reason, gravity takes effect. If the user is crawling up a wall and jumps up, there will be some additional vertical movement, failure to make contact at the end of the jump will result in falling. Being knocked off a surface will also cause gravity to take effect due to contact with said surface is lost.

Super speeding up walls may be possible (right now we haven't bothered to test speeding up surfaces but it is possible to code) can also leverage physics - any vertical movement goes against gravity vs the speed of the runner. Eventually, causing speed to be lost and well - falling to begin. But then, it may be possible to keep a modicum of acceleration going by speed-hopping and running off any possible structures of the veritcal plane - like windowsills We can also have super speed not be able to run up walls any higher than the player can jump, but keep some velocity for horizontal wall running for a time. If the player wants to simulate total possible super-speed structure-running, well then they combine two travel powers, super speed and wall crawling.

Much of this bears testing to determine the best results prior to implementing a final design of course.

It's UE4.

'nuff said.

Still want to be able to "override Gravity" as a Gravity Powerset so as to "fall through the sky" and stuff. Easiest way I can think of to do that sort of thing would be to use the old Teleport Rings system we knew from City of Heroes. Wherever you point the Rings is the direction Gravity "works" in your case(s), so that you can "point" it in useful directions at will. Rig it as a Toggle, so as to turn ON/OFF at will, and you're pretty much set. Basically amounts to (mechanically) overriding the Gravity vector for specified $Target and/or Volume of Effect.

Redlynne wrote:

It's UE4.
'nuff said.
Still want to be able to "override Gravity" as a Gravity Powerset so as to "fall through the sky" and stuff. Easiest way I can think of to do that sort of thing would be to use the old Teleport Rings system we knew from City of Heroes. Wherever you point the Rings is the direction Gravity "works" in your case(s), so that you can "point" it in useful directions at will. Rig it as a Toggle, so as to turn ON/OFF at will, and you're pretty much set. Basically amounts to (mechanically) overriding the Gravity vector for specified $Target and/or Volume of Effect.

That'd be badass!

All of this discussion is awesome.

Slight derail: As has been brought up in other threads, while CoH didn't and CoT won't be using "action" or "twitch" combat, CoH's combat was still fun and thrilling due to the movement powers, physics, and animations--and from what I'm seeing, CoT has the ability to take that latency-friendly philosophy yet Superhero action-packed combat to the next level.

Now THAT is freaking exciting.