Can’t believe I forgot about F.E.A.R (just downloaded the free multiplayer version), yep they did it via Option 1 - all players slow down regardless of their distance while the activator moves/fires slightly faster.

Some good ideas have been raised by this thread, I might just have to try ‘em all.

One of my favorite solutions, from a thread on this board, was to have everyone slow down, and have the activator's bullets retain "instant hit" properties while everyone else's either move dlowly or project a "hunch line" simulating the time master's intuition about where the bullets will be and allowing him to dodge the attacks while his adversaries have no such opportunity.

The only solution that seems fair is to slow down everybody. The bubble thing just wouldn't work unless it was a really huge bubble, at which point you're almost at solution 1 anyway. The best way to alleviate annoyance would be to just keep the bullet-time sessions very short.

Instead of full blown Matrix-inspired slo-mo scenes, limit it to 2 or 3 seconds. Thats just long enough for the activator to line up a couple of head-shots and then resume the game.

How do you plan on limiting the slo-mo ability? Is it an item you have to pick up? Everybody allowed to use it once per match? Fixed regeneration time after each use?

It'd probably be much easier on the CPU to slow down everything, and it eliminates problems with people spraying at a bubble, too. If you have a bubble that slows everything down, you'll have to do some sort of "collision" detection to check what's in the bubble and what's not, and it could add a hefty amount of work if the game is already pretty tough on a pc. And I see that there are a lot of problems implementing a bubble that aren't there if you just slow everyone down. No one can stay moving at normal speed/spray bullets at slow movers and just the implementation would be worse (having to check if anything's in the bubble). I'd go with #1.

Why not just let the other players activate their bullet-time when someone else uses his bullet-time to match up.

Example:

1) Player 1 starts bullet-time. Everybody slow down while Player 1 keeps his normal speed. (The below players are all stuck in Player 1’s bullet-time)
2) Player 2 activates his bullet-time to match Player 1’s speed. Now 2 players are in bullet-time. The player with the longest bullet-time gauge will have the advantage because whoever runs out of bullet-time will get caught in the other player’s bullet-time.
3) (just for balance) Player 3 decided that he doesn’t want to join Players 1 and 2 and prefer to save his bullet-time for later, so he turns on his shield and wait the bullet-time out.
4) Player 4 thinks it’s better to activate his bullet-time momentarily from time to time to get away from shots. Save up on bullet-time.

Also there was something like this in Jade Empire. The player can enter bullet-time by activating his “Focus”. Everything slow down except fro the player. When the player *spoiler* fights his master in the end the master starts the fight with activating his “Focus” and slowing down the player while he keeps his speed. The player has about a few seconds to figure out that he also must activate his “Focus” to match his master’s speed.

I hope this helps.