Shot oddities/errors

[The Purple Panzer]

I jumped the other day and fired a laser while jumping up, trying to nail
a tank on a ledge. Much to my surprise, the laser beam angled up quite a bit, missing him. On the way down I fired again, and now the beam angled down into the ground.

I can understand bullets taking on the vertical component of tank motion, and indeed laser should too, but laser should propagate at either the speed of light, or the advertised "instantaneously", meaning it should pretty much go horizontally straight. It is silly and has no meaning for the laser to take on a significant angle - if it's propagating slowly enough to do that, it shouldn't arrive at the destination(s) as quickly as it does. It feels like my barrel lags and waves, pointing down when I jump up, and up as I fall down, wet-spaghetti-like; not the way a proper tank should act.

One final minor point - while on a good map waiting for somebody (anybody!) else to join, I started shooting at the corner of a block, trying hard to hit the vertical edge. I ended up hitting either one face or the other, and getting the appropriate ricochet. But this isn't quite right - when hitting the edge directly on, the shot ought to come back at me, and slightly off ought to give me a ricochet somewhere between what the edge would give and what the wall would give (this can be computed exactly, but could also be random within limits, walls being what they are, ). Anybody who's played bouncing a ball off of a wall with edges will have some intuition about this.

[the enemy]

So to rephrase it, should bzflag be more realistic or is the gameplay more important?

Personally I think the gameplay is more important provided it doesn't mean it's so unrealistic as to confuse newbies.

[The Purple Panzer]

I agree, and I see no problem with putting playability ahead of realism, but I think that you're missing the point - this behavior is *new* with version 2.0, so even if you'd like to emphasize playability, you'd be doing so at the expense of everyone's expectations to date.

I can see the vertical components affecting bullets - it does change the play a little, more equally balancing an attacker on the ground vs. someone on a ledge; and there is some physical basis for making the change. But Laser should not have been changed - it is now less predictable, for no discernable reason.

I don't mind physical simplifications for the purpose of optimizing play, but this seems to approach a random, perhaps erroneous or unintended, change. I *thought* that the simplification with Laser was that it travels instantaneously, not at the speed of light - so even given physics as modified for BZFlag, this doesn't make sense.

It reminds me of what Microsoft does with Windows with each release - seemingly randomly moves functionality, menu choices, and screen layouts around for existing functions. It may feel more 'modern', but the entire experience base of users is ignored, extra work relearning is requierd, and all to no real advantage.

[the enemy]

You're right that it's new, although it's a server specific setting that IIRC defaults to off.