Older Darts maps had a major issue - Rolls, this is something we took into account when designing new maps, however most of the earliest maps still have this problem.
What is a roll? This is what happens when your worm is travelling with enough speed that when touching down on top of a spike(
The term used for the walls between target points), physics completely takes over and your worm is hurled forwards, causing your worm to drill, roll or skip over/past multiple scores due to poor map design.
An example of a roll:
In the example above, did you notice the worms first touch was on the spike between 12/9? However instead of landing on the spike itself, or falling into 9, the worm drills over the 2nd spike and ends up in 6.
This is important, as it is not unusual for a competitive game to be decided by the score of 1 worm, every point counts! To be robbed of victory due to poor map design instead of a players own competency can be rather frustrating.
After fixing the map, this is what happens when you drill the top of a spike:
Why all the fuss? Darts was at one point quite a popular and active scheme, it is an official TUS Free League scheme, was very successful in TRL, as well as being used in official TUS Challenges and Tournaments, which count towards the official TUS standings.
The dS community also run various recorded competitive events both single player and co-op in the spirit of fair competition.
With that in mind, we want this scheme to be fair, balanced and for competitive games to be based on skill not luck.
Although it took us a while to figure out how to efficiently design Darts maps, we have the knowledge and experience now to go back and fix earlier map design issues.
What has been altered to fix the maps?- Replacing the target board entirely as the design made landing accurately too difficult and/or random.
- Changing the points system to be spread more evenly, eg. Changing highest to lowest from 50-25-10-5-3-2-1 to 50-30-35-20-15-10.
- Moving the target board closer to the start platform due to a sufficient fix for the target board itself making it impossible to reach all the points on the target board.
- Enlarging the size of the target board completely to increase the distance between spikes, meaning that worms will now have enough distance when rolling on a spike to prevent them completely rolling past entire sections.
- Raising the height of each spike individually going diagonally upwards in the direction the worm will fly towards the target board so that worms which roll will now hit the wall of the next spike and fall inside instead of rolling over it completely.
These fixes prevent rolls which rewards players for accuracy and consistency, which in turn makes the scheme completely skill based as far as our competence as a player goes.
The following maps have been fixed:[eNFoRcER] Darts
[Hurz] Darts for Hurz (Edit)
[Komito] Angels of Death
[Komito] Graffiti
[Komito] Hands of Fire
[Komito] Scorpus Rainbow Remix
[Komito] Son of Sunshine
[Komito] Trippin
[Komito] Twilight Twin
[Scorpus] DartsMania-Made By Scorpus
[spleen17] Seinfeld
[tita, Hurz] Weedcat Darts
[tita] Darts Bands
[tita] Darts No Name
[tita] Darts On Fire
[Worm_gamer, Xrayez] Garfield Darts
[xUCxKiller] First_Dart
I have personally tested each of these newly edited maps and haven't found any issues yet, however want to make sure they completely eliminate issues before replacing the existing versions on TUS as it is entirely possible I may have missed something simple, so give it about a month leaving plenty of time to test and potentially find any further issues.
It may also turn out that the original authors don't appreciate their maps being "fixed", however I hope the original authors can understand why these adjustments have been made.
Thanks for your time!
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Topic: Early Darts maps/rolls fixed. (Read 664 times)