Trance on 5/7/2011 at 04:04
One thing that saps the fun of co-op with my friends is the fact that there's no punishment for stupid decisions that get you killed. In singleplayer, if you die without activating a local QBRM, or are poor enough not to afford the respawn, the game ends there and you have to reload a save. This minimum level of expectation the game places on your play skills is just enough to make you want to avoid dying to the best of your ability. Of course, in multiplayer, you get to respawn infinitely on any bulkhead for no nanite cost, removing a lot of the immersion factor by removing any consequences for dying.
My idea for rectifying this: since the game auto-saves on switching bulkheads, make it so that the game checks for both A) the presence of an activated QBRM on the map and B) sufficient nanites on a killed player for a respawn. If it finds both, the player spawns as normal on the QBRM. If either one or both are missing, the game automatically causes all players to reload the auto-save at the bulkhead. This needs to be an automated action -- it'd be too easy not to adhere to the spawning rule if it was a manual thing.
But having basically no knowledge about SS2's engine or modding the game, I have to ask those with expertise: is this idea impossible outright?
Nameless Voice on 6/7/2011 at 22:30
There's a script which handles respawning. If you were to disable that part of it (not easy - it would mean rewriting the rest of that script, as it's a very complex one that controls a lot of player functions), then the game would simply exit to the main menu when you die.