i agree that pieces should touch bottom in the rotation box all the time (except maybe the horizontal I) but i think S and Z can be handled better than they are in ARS. it would make sense to me to have 3 rotational states: http://kitsune-zeta.com/Tools/TetrisFie ... dDJ2BAAHsb the S always rotates towards the left in ARS, so placements in the right-center of the field are going to be slower, and this is why most low gravity sprint players use SRS (in addition to the I behavior). the problem? if you have a right-then-left kick order as in ARS, 20G is broken: http://kitsune-zeta.com/Tools/TetrisFie ... FbcpDhNKDA all you have to do is not allow S to kick right, and not allow Z to kick left, and that problem is solved. and then a twist like this can still work: http://kitsune-zeta.com/Tools/TetrisFie ... bH5j7eAvAd it's unintuitive to me that this works with Z but not S in ARS. it would be complicated to make J and L's kick orders symmetrical to allow mirrored twists to work, because you'd be sacrificing maneuverability. there was a good discussion about that here (it's harder to follow because Amnesia's image is gone): viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1023 but with S and Z i think very-limited-but-symmetrical kicks are better. as far as deciding on an axis of rotation, i don't think it's possible to make it completely intuitive when pieces always touch bottom. what happens when you rotate S left twice in ARS? the second rotation goes clockwise around the axis. if it didn't work that way, the piece would waddle all the way to the left wall if you kept rotating left. so when it comes to S and Z i think we need to throw visual sensibility out the window and only focus on potential benefits for players, while keeping 20G challenging.
In games with smooth rotation, SRS looks very intuitive at low gravity. When it just jumps from one state to the other, it looks rather unintuitive.
well my point is, if i'm watching a player like Maserati i don't want to slow the game down to see what the S is doing but i guess the difference between smooth and blocky movement wouldn't really impact players. it seems like nobody uses smooth rotation in Lockjaw, but maybe they just never turned it on.
Lockjaw has smooth gravity, not smooth rotation. If I did add smooth rotation, there would be only one intermediate frame.
Also on the subject of rotation, see this. Scoring: First off, I would like to second all of jujube's suggestions. Combos are exceedingly worthless, and the tips on TetrisFriends.Com like to suggest otherwise. The rewards for back-to-back along with the drop points you get for keeping your stack short in the meantime are definitely more valuable. Things need to be rebalanced in some way or another in that regard; either back-to-back needs to be weaker or combos need to be stronger. The only instance where this is not the case is versus. If anything combos might be a mite too strong there. They're very interesting in TOJ though, so those should either stay how they are or be weakened slightly. I also agree that t-spins should be brought back to be in line with or weaker than tetrises. They're interesting, but they've turned out to be a dominating strategy when they should probably be a supplement. Also, their dominance means that the soft drop speed has to be balanced in order to prevent them from becoming even _more_ powerful. If you limit their power, you no longer have to unduly limit the speed of the soft drop. I think it would be for the best to tweak the soft drop speed up a little bit to make it worth using for fixing mistakes, so t-spins probably need to get a little weaker to balance everything out. I've also felt that t-spins are too exclusive, as well as occasionally inconsistent. Why just the T? There are many interesting twists that can be performed with the other pieces as well. And why just 3-corner? Why sometimes only those without wall kicks? My suggestion is that things be a little bit more open when it comes to rewarding twists. With the twist bonus weakened a bit, it would be safe to open things up to twists done with _all_ of the pieces. For detection, use a simple immobile algorithm -- check if the piece would collide when shifted left, right, or up one cell and award a twist bonus if all collision checks return true. Twists would become interesting supplements for recovery or defense, while still maintaining the scoring power of the powerful back-to-back tetris. I imagine it could lead to a lot of dynamic recoveries -- I think it'd be a mechanic worth checking out. As for back-to-back, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. With the Bag randomizer, you can certainly maintain it. However, it doesn't seem entirely right to penalize the player for making a good stacking decision by skimming or taking away such a significant portion of their score for one single mistake in the game. The useless soft drop makes things hurt even more; you might be faced with the choice of eating a delay while you wait for the piece to drop or continuing to play at top speed and lose your back-to-back. Should back-to-back be as strong as it is? Should it exist at all? I'm not entirely sure myself.
