SiN and USK (Part 5)

Well, here we go again. Previous installments are indexed over at Ritualistic.

Since the science fiction movies of the 1950's, everyone has wanted their own personal jetpack. In the "SiN Episodes" universe, some SiNTEK soldiers are lucky enough to have some of their very own.

A few notes about the jetpack grunts for you. First off, the jetpacks are physics objects. The grunts are tied to them via some funky constraints. This, in part, led to a bug in Arena Mode where if you added jetpack grunts to your maps, they would T-pose during demo playback.

The jetpack grunts have many different types of death animations. The server tells the client, "Hey, this dude is dead," the client randomly picks one of the animations, and plays it. I think everyone remembers the classic twirl-around-screaming-pack-explode-fall-with-a-crunch animation from the last trailer before release. Well, that animation is what directly led to this change.

The USK had an issue with several of the death animations for jetpack grunts because it seemed like they were being made to suffer prior to death solely for the amusement of the player. That's probably because their digital forms were being made to seem like they were suffering prior to death solely for the amusement of the player. Come on, a dude's jetpack malfuntioning prior to his death is funny...

We tried negotiating, but this was one item on which the USK would not budge. As a result, in USK-rated copies of the game, there is a single jetpack death present: the jetpack explodes, and the ragdoll falls straight down. Again, this was a client-side effect only, so if Ritual ever manages to get cooperative play of any sort going, while the result may appear slightly different when a US player plays with a USK player, the server will still be seeing the two as idential.

This is one of the changes that I'm not particularly fond of. The jetpack deaths were one of the items that Ritual received a lot of positive feedback for, and having to remove it just seemed...excessive.

Hopefully, I'll have part 6 up this weekend assuming the next 48 hours don't turn me into a drooling zombie.