More Damage Notification

Who hit me?!

There's now a cg_drawattacker option that displays the head and name of the player that's attacking you in the top right corner of the screen. If you hurt yourself, your own head will be displayed in the top right corner. So far, this option seems more academic than useful, but I can imagine it being a big aid in team games, as you'll be able to tell and convey to your teammates who just hit you (and in essence, who's escaped with a good weapon or artifact).

I knew it was him...er..me...doh.

On a realism note, players now emit pain sounds and show torso movement when you hit them. The pain screams were sorely missed from the previous test version. We learned to adjust to the "ping" sound for successful hits, but it's always nice to hear your prey grunt when you land a solid hit, especially if you don't hear the ping due to a cry of "impressive!"

New Crosshair

The old ambiguous crosshair

and the sleek, new 2000 model!

The old crosshair was decent, but there was an empty gap right in the middle of the image, making it damned hard to line up a distant shot. We're too used to a cross or dot crosshair that has something in the middle to help aim the rail, and many players even hacked their .pak files just to change the crosshair (which is approaching the grey area of modified files, but almost universally accepted as harmless).

Now there's a new crosshair with a dot in the center and some spiffy side wings. It'll help out that rail aim, but you tend to lose it in the smoke when you're in the middle of a rocket fight. I would suggest a darker border around the crosshair image for more contrast in rocket smoke or light backgrounds. It might even be interesting to see the sidewings tick off current health and ammo count, preferably using the iconized weapons color!

Jumping

Q3test 1.05 allowed for the same fast "strafe-jumping" trick that Quake 2 allowed. This apparently wasn't something id liked, so they modified it a bit. You can still do two quick jumps in a row, but now you'll have to wait 250 msec before being able to jump again (at all). Here's Carmack's reasoning from his 6/3/99 plan,

Strafe jumping is an exploitable bug. Just because people have practiced hard to allow themselves to take advantage of it does not justify it's existance. When I tried fixing the code so that it just didn't work, I thought it changed the normal running movement in an unfortunate way.

In the absense of powerups or level features (wind tunnels, jump pads, etc), the game characters are supposed to be badasses with big guns. Arnold Schwartzenegger and Sigourney Weaver don't get down a hallway by hopping like a bunny rabbit.

This is personal preference, but when I play online, I enjoy it more when people are running around dodging, rather than hopping.

The two jump limit doesn't bother us much. We'll still be able to do one or two quick strafe jumps, but we won't be able to do any crazy high speed jumps like the jump from upper RL to the lower armor shards in q2dm1. However, with two quick jumps, we'll still be strafe-jumping like crazy, and in general it won't stop the bunny-hopping epidemic. I would suggest simply fixing the code that allows for such behavior rather than implementing an artificial 250ms delay between jumps. Either allow it completely,or completely take it away. In my experience, going half-way hasn't solved the problem.