Balance enhancement for gameplay about opentyrian HOT 15 CLOSED

Yes, Tyrian's weapon balance is WAYYYYYY off. That'll be fixed eventually. I 
hope.

Nice, I expect that because we can play a more elegant game.
Thank =D

I gotta agree that balance is really bad in Tyrian. Out of a two dozen (or so)
weapons there are only three or four that worth buying, everything else is 
pretty
much crap (especially when you bought laser).

Not just weapons either... at the very beginning of Tyrian, there were five or 
six 
each of generators and shields that are, for all intents and purposes, useless.

I also suggest to the programmers, a modular system might be in order. One or 
more 
table files could be used to define the attributes of weapons, as opposed to 
hard-coded values. This would also allow for a much more mod-able game.

These "table files" already exist. Well, it. It's tyrian.hdt

tyrian.hdt isn't readable by a text editor, it appears to be hexadecimal. I was
thinking more along the lines of a text file that contains the names and damage
values of the various weapons.

I tried a text file once (well, XML, actually), and the resulting file was 
several mb
in size and took about a minute to parse, so I don't think text files are a 
feasible
option.

Text files first, then compile it to some like .hdt file. Then the game loads 
the
.hdt faster. I guess that is how actually works tyrian. Or... what about 
compressing it?

Compressing make parse times go up, not down. =P

About compiling, that's a good option, and I think that would be something to 
look
into. Would be probably be best used with a new file format, though.

Just because its not a text file now doesn't mean that it can't be programmed 
as one.
There are obvious hurdles for the programmers, and I don't pretend to know the
difficulty of such a modification. On the other hand, it would allow for mods 
and new
full games to be produced much more easily. Right now it appears to be something
that's compiled along with the game.

on a related note, the rear weapon guided microbombs also seem to target 
indestructible objects. and for being the last non-secret weapon, they're 
pretty 
weak. 

Moved to bitbucket:

http://bitbucket.org/yuriks/opentyrian-enhanced/issue/13/balance-fixes-in-the-ga
me-data

Please continue the discussion there.