P R O B L E M

When playing LW5, the movement seems to be more smooth than LW6. It is hard to point at the difference, but it is like the movement of LW6 seems more jagged somehow.

There could be several different reasons for this:

1) there's a slight lag between the actual move of the cursor and its move on the screen.
2) LW6 calculates moves in on thread and displays in another, the result is that sometimes it moves twice before being displayed and sometimes it can display twice the same position.
3) The movement of the liquid is controlled by the players cursor. There is a radical difference between the arrow key movement in LW5 and the mouse movement in LW6. In LW5, the cursor and the liquid had almost the same speed, which caused them to move along together. In LW6, the cursor can be anywhere on the screen in less than a second. The jumpy movement of the mouse is transfered to the fighters movement.

S O L U T I O N

A solution to this could be to make each fighter behave according to the laws of physic, thus causing the whole army to move in a more natural fashion. So maybe they cannot make a straight U-turn, but will have to slow down, maybe slowly change direction, then speed up.

There could be two different kind of movements - that of a car, which has to slowly turn towards the new direction, or that of a ball which can move in any direction, but will has to slowly stop going north before it can start going south. I would suggest the 2nd, the ball movement.

C R I T I C I S M

1) It is not certain that this hack will fix the problem. It is a theory.
2) It is a serious hack.

B R A I N S T O R M

If each fighter behaved as a physical object instead of pacman-movement, this could be used for cool effects too. Each level could have different physic - for instance the fighters could be extremely heavy, so that they took a bit of time accelerating. Explosions could blow the fighters away from a specific spot. Gravity could push the fighters towards the bottom of the screen. Earth quakes could shake the entire screen, causing the fighters to be pushed in random directions, like when you shake a tray of rice.  Some areas of the level could have greater or smaller resistance. A black hole could drag the fighters towards the center of the screen.

I think it could add some nice variation to the gameplay, and more important, make the the game feel more real. Simulation of physics has impressed me a great deal in games like Scorched Earth. Most other games at the time consisted of sprites moving about in a much more rigid fashion. In modern FPS, ragdolls physics has has added some degree of physics to games which otherwise are as rigid as Wolfenstein. I should probably also mention Toribash.