: I think his idea for having a 'recharge' station for the fusion pistol makes
: a lot of sense, especially if you consider how the fusion pistol works.
: First off, the ammo thingy reads as a fraction of total 'power' left in
: there, not as a group of bullets that haven't been shot left, just like
: your suit charge. Then there's the reload. Instead of stuffing another mag
: into it like you do with the AR, it just sinks offscreen while you...
: what? You might be stuffing a battery into some slot somewhere, but I
: always though of it as plugging it into the batteries you find lying about
: and charging it off of that, a process complex enough that, like the SPNKR
: reload, it cannot be fit into a few frames of animation.
The fusion charge station idea is indeed intriguing. I've been experimenting with a similar idea, writing a solo script that implements infravision-on-demand that is recharged along with your shields. When you have the ability to turn it on or off at will, infravision is a lot of fun, rather than a curse! And it's useful right from the get-go, Arrival and Never Burn Money have some great spots for it.
However, as I've started writing invisibility into the script via a similar mechanism, I've noticed it really changes my gameplay to where I'm hogging the recharge stations too much. I'd be concerned that would be the case with fusion recharge as well.
A possible solution would be to limit recharge capabilities of a station by level - say, red only recharges IR, yellow also recharges fusion, and purple recharges invisibility. However, the way the Lua hooks in it doesn't differentiate between even an O2 charge station and energy recharge, never mind 1x-2x-3x, and my current way to deal with that is comparing the player's beginning health to ending health, which eliminates 02 stations but gets clunky with 1x-2x-3x.
