Introduction

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The Monsterball game mode originally comes from Descent 3. It is a team based game mode, and the rules are straight forward: Push a giant ball into the your goal area by ramming and shooting it.

Settings

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D2X-XL allows to adjust the impact every weapon has on the ball. You need to keep in mind however that the resulting force of an impact on the ball is determined both by mass and speed of the impacting entity. That means for example that Mercury missiles have a strong effect on the ball compared to Mega missiles even if their impact force modifier is significantly lower.

D2X-XL tries to provide useful defaults, but you can experiment with the values until you are fully satisfied.

Limitations

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Due to limitations of the game engine, the ball will always move away from the player firing at it in a straight line from the player ship to the ball. You cannot hit the ball at its side and make it move away in an angle. The reason for this is rooted very deeply in the game, and I found no easy way to improve this. The question is whether this really matters in the heat of battle.

Notes To Level Designers

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DLE-XP offers an additional powerup type aptly named 'Monsterball'. You can place it anywhere in the level. If D2X-XL finds a monsterball powerup when starting the game, it will always respawn the ball at that location when a team has scored. If not, D2X-XL will randomly place a ball in the level and respawn it at some random location when a team has scored. D2X-XL will only use the first monsterball powerup it finds and permanently remove all others for the time of the match.

Resources

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To distinguish Monsterball from the other game modes, I am providing a red hoard orb which you can download here. Extract the texture and place it in the textures subfolder.