[Script] [V4.1] Wipezones 4.1

[Lat']

Slip tide through maps at dizzying speeds in Wipzones, a game mode inspired by Wipeout HD.
The rules are simple: You begin the race with a speed boost and can't stop going faster and faster. Each time you hit a wall (or a hazard or fall off), you will lose some shield energy. If you get hit with no energy, the game's over.

The Multiplayer only mode, Zone Battle is also avaiable! Be the fastest to reach the target Zone with spicy additions to the normal singleplayer Zone gameplay! (Check spoilers below for details)

Finally, if you want a map to experience the highest speeds Zone has to offer, Syncopia is made for you, allowing to swiftly break the 100th zone!

Here's a little sample video of a pretty decent run on Sunbeam Paradise.

Spoiler: HOW TO PLAY: SinglePlayer

Heads-Up Display:

You auto accelerate
No need to hold the accelerator, the game does it for you. Focus on avoiding the damage.
You will keep going faster and faster as you build up more Zones over time.

You are in a constant boost state, use that to your advantage!
Because you are constantly under the effect of an infinite sneaker, you can slip tide at will! To slip tide, start drifting, then release your drift and keep turning inwards. This will allow you to take very sharp turns.

It matters not who you are
All karts are normalized to Sonic's stats. This gives you a high top speed and tight turn arc for maximum enjoyment.

Shield Energy:
To avoid our drivers dying from a single collision, we put a shield around your karts! For each wall/hazard collision, you'll lose 5% of that energy. If you fall off the track, it'll be 10%. The shield will break when it reaches 0%. Taking any damage without it will prove to be fatal at such speeds.

Recovering Energy:
It's possible to recover energy after losing some; clearing a full zone without getting hit (Called a "Perfect Zone") will award you with 2 Shield, completing a full lap without taking damage ("Perfect Lap") will award you with 20 Shield.

You CAN slow down!
You can hold brake to signigicantly slow down. This will drain your HP however, and you can't brake if you have 1 HP or less.

Air brake
We equipped karts with air brakes to allow them to slow down in mid air. You can brake in mid-air for no cost at all. So use ramps to slow down on strategic spots.

Deja Vu, I've just been in this place before!
Drifting will make your Zones charge faster! It's really easy to perform at low Zones but probably too high risk in higher ends, so consider your options carefully!

Boost Pads
Rolling on a Boost Pad will increase your Zone meter by half a zone and award you points, but will also drastically increase your speed for a bit. Consider whether rolling on one is worth it, especially at high speeds where the increase is even more significant!

Score
You get score by just driving around. After the round is over, you will get to see your total score. These factors are taken into account for your score:

• Base score
• Zone number
• Perfect Zone combo
• Top speed (in kmph)
• Laps
• Perfect Laps

Spoiler: HOW TO PLAY: Zone Battle

Heads-Up Display: the sequel

Zone, except now you can play with """friends"""
All of the singleplayer tips apply to Zone Battle with the exception of the scoring system and perfect lap shield regeneration, be sure to check those out!

Reach the target zone!
The first player to reach the target zone to win!

Slower zone buildup...
In Zone battle, you build up zones three times as slow as you do when you play by yourself.

Zone gauge; the instruction book!
Exclusive to Zone Battle is the Zone gauge at the bottom of the screen. It fills up as you collect item boxes and clear laps. The more you have, the more you get! Once both bars are at least green, you can press Fire item to execute a Zone Boost, or Custom 1 or Item + Down to execute a Shield Asborb. Be aware that no matter which one you perform, both actions will be lost until you build up enough Zone gauge again.
At maximum, you can get 8 Zones or 100 Shield Energy. The gauge does not fill past those.

Zone Boost!!
When you Zone Boost, the amount indicated next to the gauge is added to your Zone total, simple as that. This is your best way to catch up.
It will also leave a dangerous Zone barrier behind you. Perhaps you have been wondering why not just fill the entire gauge before using it, well, hitting a barrier will cut your Zone gauge in half AND eat away 20 Shield Energy! Be careful, you are not immuned to your own Zone Barriers!!

Shield Absorb
Using Shield Absorb is your only way to recover Shield in Zone Battle. The amount of energy recovered is indicated next to the Absorb gauge. Doing so will also grant you a short invincibility during which hitting walls does no damage, and can phase through Zone barriers, but does NOT destroy them, so someone will eventually have to ram into em!

WAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! *car crash noises*
Should you die in Zone Battle, you'll instantly respawn with all your Shield Energy at the cost of 5 Zones lost, so stay safe and try to keep your energy above 20 at all times.

Everyone sucks at this game!
If the Zone target is too high and that no one has reached it in 4 minutes, it will start lowering by 1 every 5 seconds. Moreover, the same will happen 20 seconds after one player reaches the target to avoid matches dragging for too long.

Tips:
Since Zones build up way slower on their own, Speed Pads and Drifts are very valuable, try to nab as much increases as you can without putting yourself at risk. Also remember that using the Zone Boost counts as using a Speed Pad, so your speed will increase for a bit, so consider where you use it. Zone Boost can also allow you to get multiple Perfect Zones which can make for some small healing to get yourself up to a more reasonable health pool without having to use the Shield.

Spoiler: Some commands

z_startzone: Set the zone you'll start at. (default is 1)
z_starthp: Set how much HP you start with. (default is 100)
NOTE: if you set either of those values to anything ABOVE their default value, score will NOT be calculated

z_zonemode on/off: Enables or disables zone mode for the next map. Defaults to on, obviously.
z_zonebattle on/off: In Multiplayer, enables or disables Zone Battle for the next map, reverting to 1.X behavior if off. Default is on.
z_zonebattletarget: Sets the target to reach in Zone Battle for the next map. Default is 35.
z_forcezonebattle on / off: Forces Zone Battle on even if you're alone. Was mostly used for testing on my end but was left in for convenience, defaults to off.
z_hudshake on / off: Toggles the HUD shaking after landing / taking a hit. If you have performance issues when the HUD shakes, disable this. Default is on

Special Thanks
LazyMK for the base idea. Somehow I followed it through.
LatiusAuro for scripting assistance and some ideas
LJ Sonik for pseudorandom number lib

Supporters / Co-Authors:

• Latius
• LJ Sonik
• MK.exe

 

[Sryder]

Works amazingly. Really brought me back to me and my brother trying to get the highest zone in WipEout HD!

My only minor issues are that you can't literally start on 0% shield (1 hit ANYWHERE kills you) and that holding brake still slows you down but doesn't really have any big drawbacks to score. I know it drains your shield but for the amount of advantage it gives, I feel holding the brake while on the ground should stop both the score gain AND zone progress.
It would also be cool to one day have the voice line sound effects announcing things as you play.

Regardless, that's definitely minor enough to not hold it back, welcome to releases!

 

[MK.exe]

A perfect representation of how Zone works
Totally a pro at this

This is sooo much fun to play and I'm glad it's in releases, Mainly to see everyone's hiscores!

 

[LuigiMario79]

So...... F-Zero mode in Kart?

 

[Lat']

v1.1

What would be a release without a quick day one patch!

V1.1 Major changes include:

• Hacked something together so that Blue Mountain Zone is now playable.
• Braking with no HP left will now stop Zone progress and SWIFTLY decrease your score.
• Added voice sound effects from Wipeout HD each time a major Zone is reached.
• Removed some leveltime dependant stuff in the HUD to have it be more consistent
• It is now possible to start with 0 HP, or 99999 if that's your thing.
• Fixed some cvar exploit

 

[Latius]

The Zone Kart. Considered to be a Kart with 8 Speed and 2 weight, all who wish to take on the Zone Challenge has to exchange their kart (or car) for a Zone Kart (or Zone Car).
One of the defining features of the Zone Kart is the lack of the accelerator. This is because the Zone Kart is equipped with the top of the line Rocket Sneaker Tech, (pattant pending) which automatically kicks into gear when the green light shows.
Also included in the Zone Kart is a Zone Shield Generator. The standard spec has enough charge to last for 20 hits, 10 bottomless pits or 14.25s worth of braking before being depleted.
Speaking of brakes, due to the intense speeds, the Zone Kart is equipped with both Air Brakes and Zone Brakes. The former can be used at no harm to the shield, but the latter will drain the shield, and if there's not enough energy for it to do that, it'll then drain energy from the Rocket Sneaker Tech, preventing it from speeding you up. However, this is frowned upon by the ZRC (the Zone Racing Committee) and penality points will be given for draining from the Rocket Sneaker Tech.
Due to the space requirements of the Rocket Sneaker Tech, Zone Karts are unable to obtain or use Items. However, the Zone Shield Generator does charge up over time, and if you manage to complete a whole lap or section without hitting the wall once, the Generator will restore up to 20 units of Shield Energy to the Kart.
Finally... I must warn you that due to the speeds the Zone Kart can reach, the shield is needed for it to survive any kind of hit against a wall. Without it, it will blow up within about a second or two. Thankfully, the Zone Kart can be replaced easily. The driver, not so much.

 

[PrismaticAngel]

This + Deton = AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

 

[Lat']

What would be a day one patch if it actually fixed stuff properly?
Unless the release of 1.0.2 breaks anything, this should be the last update period.

V1.2

• Fixed airbraking removing points at 0 HP (oops)
• Fixed being able to build up points and zone while dead
• Added sounds and visual effects to braking and airbraking.
• I forgot to add LJ Sonik to the credits for his RNG I used because I keep using it in unfinished projects for HUD stuff. So now that's done...!

 

[LazuliAlter]

Just wanted to say that this mod is amazing to play, and that I love the new visuals and sounds! I feel like the screenshake after you land from a jump could be toned down just a tad bit, but besides that it's a great time!

 

[Xelork]

Umm..... i've found an error ;n;

LUA_ZONE:528: bad argument #1 to 'enable' (invalid option 'freeplay')

That's make Wipezones unplayable for me.

 

[Lat']

Update 2.0

Wipezones got a neat little update that it desperatly needed.

V2.0

• Added Zone Battle as a multiplayer only mode! Go play with some friends. (Check details on the OP for HOW TO PLAY)
• Please read HOW TO PLAY before jumping cluelessly into a Zone netgame if those happen :^)
• Added splitscreen support. With Kart's lacking splitscreen support in Lua, there is a good chance things might break.
• Fixed my idiocy in trying to assume I'd get the freeplay disable in 1.0.2, now the script will actually LAUNCH!!
• Screen shake from hitting the floor has been made less aggressive.

Er, blah blah have fun, report bugs, you know the drill!

 

[Lat']

Some friends tortured me to get this update out.

V3.0

• Added Syncopia, a WipEout map by MK.exe This map was made specifically with Zones in mind, you should be able to reach breakneck speeds without using much brain power!
  
• General gameplay and quality of life improvements:
  • If you hit the same wall too many times, you'll instantly die and respawn at no additional expense of your Shield Energy. This is to prevent these pesky gay baby jails from eating away too much of your Energy unfairly.
  • When invincible, the invincibility timer replaces your health temporarily on the HUD so you know what's up!
• Zone battle changes:
  • Fixed Lua errors that occasionally showed up
  • Zone Speed is now halved. While Zone 1 will feel the same compared to singleplayer, Zone 30 will feel a lot more like Zone 15 from singleplayer. This was done to help netgames being more playable with latency (which I, for one, suffer from a lot)
  • You can now use Shield Absorb by holding down and pressing item
  • Zone Barriers now deplete 20 HP instead of 40.
  • Upon death, the entierety of your shield energy is restored instead of 35%
  • Zone barriers are now player coloured
  • Characters now emit taunts when performing Zone Boosts or Shield Absorbs
  • Fixed being able to hoard item boxes from the same item sets.

As an additional note; there are still errors where the wrong victory/loss music will be played even though the player has clearly won/lost, to my dismay.

In any case, have fun!

 

[fishfish]

This is absolutely amazing! Seriously, I have no words, it's just awesome.

Any possibility you'd release that ground slam effect to a lessened degree as it's own lua? That would work great in the base game.

 

[azumadeline]

honestly this is way too much fun

 

[Lat']

It's been done for a while and needed some testing, and some funny streamer convinced me maybe it was time to release this update

V4.0
Major changes include:

General Changes:

• All commands have been renamed to be more streamlined, please check the OP for their new names, hopefully they're easier to remember. Reminder that you can also type "z_" and press tab repeteadly to cycle through the new Wipezones commands easily.
• Changed the way Zone speed functions, this means that there no longer will be any weird clipping or ramps not launching you when they should.
• Perfect Zones now restore 2 HP, they have a purpose beyond Score and bragging rights now!
• Driving over Speed Pads will now speed you up drastically, leave a cool speed trail behind you, increase your score and also your Zones! Use those to reach speeds beyond what you thought was achievable!
• Drifting now makes your Zones charge faster! That's right, it finally has purpose!

Zone Battle changes:

• Zone Boost speeds you up like a Speed Pad, it can also be used to get multiple Perfect Zones in 1 go, restoring up to 16 HP with a full gauge.
• Zone Barriers now flash their opposite colours to be more easily distinguishable.
• Added support for Hitfeed, everyone can now put you to shame when you hit your own Zone Barrier, nerd!

The OP has been updated with the new mechanics and new Tips for Zone Battle, so go read it especially if you're unfamiliar with Wipezones to begin with!

And there you have it! I deem this to be the definitive version of Zones in the current version of Kart so there probably won't be a new major update until Kart V2 drops where I'll find a way to incorporate Rings in, maybe! Have fun!

 

[Lightsideluc]

So, I love Wipezones. It's my favorite mode in Wipeout, and my preferred single-player experience in SRBKart (with SPB Run a close second). I want to see it be the best it can be, so if it's not too presumptuous of me I'm just going to give my thoughts on the mode and things that could possibly make it even better :)


First, the drifting system. I think getting bonus Zone from drifting is a great idea, but it just being a flat gain for the duration of the drift after X-time has passed isn't the best implementation. Instead, either the bonus Zone would improve as the duration of the drift increases (so if the drift rewards 1.1x Zone after a second of drifting, it would start to reward 1.2x after two seconds, 1.3x after four seconds, so on and so forth), or there would be a threshold like with normal drifting (blue sparks = 0.2 Zone bonus, Red = 0.6, and Rainbow = 1.5).


Next, for Zone Battle specifically, I feel the bonus Shields rewarded with Perfect Zones should be removed. It's easy for a high-competency player to just completely ignore the Absorb option unless you're getting trashed by barriers since you gain 16 shields with a boost anyways, plus passive perfect zones. Plus, using your Boost gauge to gain Zone is generally better than consuming it for shield anyways; losing your life only costs five zones, but a 100% restore means giving up 7.9 Zone. You might as well Boost for the extra Zone, kill yourself to get back to 100 shields, and end up with a 2.9 net Zone gain. Shields should reach 100% restoration after maybe 1/2 to 2/3 the item boxes it would take to reach max boost, with extras becoming Overshield perhaps to incentivize their use. Increasing the penalty for dying is too punishing for newer players, which is why I think making shields more efficient for restoration is better.



Moreover, the amount of boost that can be gained should be increased, along with the exponential curve of it. Currently it's most efficient to dump your Boost at 6.8 zone, as going to the maximum (7.9) only rewards 1.1 more Zone, which is only 0.1 more than the first item box would get anyways. Plus, just spamming your Boost as soon as it becomes available is much safer and gets you a comparable amount of Zone progression as holding your Boost to the magic number. The risk doesn't feel like it's rewarding enough. I feel like the maximum boost should be raised to 10, and take the same number of item boxes to achieve that, to incentivize risky (and exciting!) play.


Something that would be more difficult to implement is anti-cheesing. On some maps it's possible to do a loop to collect two separate item sets that are nearby each other (most notably Hill Top Zone). Having a per-track Items-Per-Lap maximum would be nice, although I've rarely seen this facet abused. It should still be important to make sure the maximum items take into account extra item sets that can be gathered by going off the beaten track (such as long routes or singleton items tucked away), since item farming is still a cool feature of the mode that encourages alternate racing lines. I have no idea whether that's possible, and it would most likely require some collaborative playtesting for people to tell you how many items can be gathered on any given track without cheesing.


Cheesing #2: Turning in a circle on wide sections for high-score. It's a single-player thing, but still. Setting a hidden timer for a lap of a race would be nice. If that timer is exceeded, you would start taking damage or not gaining any more Zone/Points.


Hope those are of use to you during your planning sessions for the V5 of Wipezones! If you're interested in discussing things further, you can ping me in the Kart server with Lt. Luc :)

 

[Tyron]

I feel like the maximum boost should be raised to 10, and take the same number of item boxes to achieve that, to incentivize risky (and exciting!) play.

I would be fine with most of the changes mentioned above (though I don't feel strongly about any of them), but don't like the sound of this. "Boost economy" strats don't do much to promote player interaction and are frustratingly fragile—making them far-and-away the best approach would lead to really volatile high-roll gameplay.

In the current state of things, I think about the exponential gain more as "if you don't have a useful place to boost or place a trap, you're not punished for failing to spam". I think that's a fine function for it, and IMO it leads to generally more interesting games.

 

[Lat']

Patch 4.1

Don't get too excited, this is a small patch to fix some long standing issues:

Version 4.1

• Fixed springs still sending you to Brazil if you were going too fast. Diagonal springs now always send you at a proper fixed speed.
• Fixed top speed always counting for 0 points on the final score tally.
• Score tally speed now depends on total score and will always take 4 seconds to count.
• Fixed the tally exiting by itself if it had taken too long.
• Fixed player collision being disabled if z_zonemode was off still.
• Fixed hitfeed support for Zone Battle (requires Hitfeed 2.2)

 

[karlkon]

Now for the ships...

 

[Latius]

Heh, I was looking through my projects, and I remember when I was intending to make Upsurge Survival (based on the modes in BallisticNG) in Kart, but as people have pointed out, it's so similar to WipeZones that in a sense, making it would mostly be a HUD alteration.

True, there are between WipeZones and what I was doing for Upsurge Survival, at least in terms of the multiplayer mode, due to how the Shield/Zone boost system is different there, with more than one way to gain charge for that. In fact, Upsurge Survival, when I was making it, was built with the multiplayer mode, Upsurge, in mind first and foremost, with the Survival mode being added later on.

Obviously, I'm not planning on working on it anymore as of right now, especially not without Lat's permission or blessing, but I thought I would just note down this alternative path I was thinking about doing two years ago for people to know about. Of course, when v2 of Kart (edit: or Ring Racers if that name is indeed the new name for it) comes out, I may discuss with Lat' about maybe working this into WipeZones as an alternative HUD style and/or even as an alternative multiplayer variant. But until then, I'll just leave two images of what it would have looked like.