Climbing abilities have inconsistent behaviors

[ghost]

The game currently have several mechanics allowing one to climb:

• ladder-users
• wallwalking
• wallrunning (humans not in BS)
• walljumping (marauders)

Ladders can be consistently used by all classes with at least one climbing ability. Buildings (both aliens and humans) can be climbed by walljumpers and wallrunners (see #6) but not by wallwalkers (see #20). I am pretty sure this actually affects all entities, including doors.

If I summarize the agreements on aforementioned issues, only aliens should be able climb on alien stuff, either wallwalking or walljumping. Humans should not be able to wallrun on big alien buildables. But then:

• what about human buildables?
• what about movers?
• what about other players?

Disclaimer

All problems issues are treated as opinions until agree upon

[Viech]

Wallwalking not working on movers likely is just a technical problem with no gameplay intentions behind the current logic so I think it is readily-agreed-upon to make this possible but it could be diffcult to program. Wallwalking on buildables might be an aesthetic limitation due to how much larger buildable bounding boxes are. Dretches could end up walking the air in front of buildables.

I agree that humans being able to wallrun and -jump on and off alien buildings is a at least an immersion problem; also a gameplay one in the sense of #6.

[necessarily-equal]

I think we agree that walwalking should work on movers, but I disagree that it should work on buildings because then it would feel quite broken due to the large square bbox. I think it's a good idea once we have precise bbox though.

As to how to implement it, I think the game handles it just fine when you are standing ON TOP OF a moving entity. So I think it could be extended for wallwalking instead of regular walking. (Of course we could discover more issue once this works, like prediction errors creeping, weird edge cases when standing on doors, etc — but the basic idea seems much easier.)

[ghost]

Dretches could end up walking the air in front of buildables.

but I disagree that it should work on buildings because then it would feel quite broken due to the large square bbox.

Humans already do that anyway. It's not rare to see a human floating in air above a RC or armory or turret. Maybe the problem is that the RC/Armory models do not match the technical limitations of the game, here. On that regard, old armoury was much better. Also, I think those buildings could see their BBox reduced, to reduce that problem. If minor features are outside of it, it's not a problem as aliens don't have real ranged weapons anyway.