Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => Multiplayer => Topic started by: karajorma on February 18, 2008, 04:56:25 pm
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To keep this to the point and easy for coders to browse, off-topic posts have been moved to http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,58051.0.html - Shade
For the points bonus thing all that would be required would be a SEXP to check whether you have a certain medal and how many of them you have.
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It would also require fixing all the existing medal missions, fixing the code so coop points can be awarded for completing goals (to my knowledge only TvT and single player awards points for goals), making it possible for goals to apply individually to players instead of to everyone equally, and to edit all existing scores to add points for already-earned medals.
Such a SEXP might still be nice to have though, for unrelated reasons.
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-The ability for players to assign themselves to wings, as opposed to the host.
-In-lobby team chat.
-Working rearm/repair system, even after you've respawned (though it could cancel the current rearm/repair request).
-Client response improvements to accurately show missile hits and primary weapon damage registered, as opposed to the current system where you can pound the shields of an enemy vessel and see hits, but in reality you're missing on every shot.
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-In-lobby team chat.
Oh god yes, how could I forget that one? Team chat during briefings is an absolute must for the future, so you can work out strategies without the other team hearing.
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an "In hud" scroll bar to see all your teams ships and status
the same for enemies
so u dont have to cycle through them all
;) :D :D ;) :D
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Does the stand-alone server support "off-site" hosting for files needed on the server?
For example, I'm running a server with a rather large mission pack/model pack. I want to host the files on my website. Can I put a URL somewhere and have the client get the needed files from there?
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an "In hud" scroll bar to see all your teams ships and status
the same for enemies
so u dont have to cycle through them all
I love this idea! Enough that I'd try it myself if I wasn't already working on a bunch of stuff. Who knows, I might anyway. :D But this sort of thing still sounds like it might be just above my experience level... :blah:
So let's brainstorm. The way I imagine it is something like the Independence War 2 contact list:
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/image_viewer/frame_lead.php?pid=913828&img=28
Basically a mini-escort list, which shows a scrollable list in the same order as you get from pressing the T / shift-T keys, and the currently selected target highlighted.
Perhaps have the option of changing the list to hostiles only when H is pressed (or friendlies only with F).
The main problem I can think of with this is when missions have lots of targets, you're not much better off than before... the list can only take up so much of the screen before it's in the way.
Plus there's all the stats -- what do we want to show and what do we have room for? Name and health, sure... how about speed? distance? class?
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The main problem I can think of with this is when missions have lots of targets, you're not much better off than before... the list can only take up so much of the screen before it's in the way.
Plus there's all the stats -- what do we want to show and what do we have room for? Name and health, sure... how about speed? distance? class?
i see it as a simple scroll bar, with the nearest ship first on the list,i like the ctrl h =hostile , ctrl f =freindly that works for me , i think as regards to the info for each ship, 1 letter f=fighter b=bomber etc and its health would be enough.
if i needed more info i could select vessel and return to normal hud box with full info , so would need some command to choose between the two huds, that way it wouldnt take up any more space on screen,
then again its just a wish
;) :D ;) :D ;) :D
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id also like an independent secondary weapon targeting system so i can defend against one ship and blow the **** out of another with my rockets, this way i wouldnt have to respawn so often ..........
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So hang on, which ship would you be pointing at?
Oooh! Do you mean, you'd have one ship targeted and waiting for a missile lock, meanwhile firing primaries at another ship visible on the screen? so you'd want a lead indicator for the second ship? 'cos I'm working on that :D
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So hang on, which ship would you be pointing at?
Oooh! Do you mean, you'd have one ship targeted and waiting for a missile lock, meanwhile firing primaries at another ship visible on the screen? so you'd want a lead indicator for the second ship? 'cos I'm working on that :D
im pointing at the ship with my primaries,
im hopefuly at the same time using the pov on my joystick to target my secondaries,
which is a different ship or the same,(would just like the choice)
this of course is done while rolling a cigarette,
answering the telephone and playing on insane level with no respawns ,
thanks
;) :D ;) :D ;) :D
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Speaking of targeting, I think the lead indicator estimation thing I described here (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,49789.0.html) should be made a high priority. This should considerably improve aiming for non-hosts without requiring any netcode changes. An experienced player can make a pretty good guess of where to shoot based on how fast his target is and his current ping, but the game should really be doing that automatically.
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How about a better way of handling mission files. Something that manages what the newest version of a mission is and gives a warning to the host if he has an old version and to the client if his version is newer and going to be overwritten. As it is now even if the files are packed in a vp an old version floating around in someones mission directory can start overriding the newer ones.
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Fubar, that's a superb idea.
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One thing I noticed (or overlooked) was that you can't host a game without playing in it. A feature like that would help people with older PC's wanting to host a game and play on a second computer. I tried a few quick LAN games on my old P2 400, just running retail (neither launcher nor game would open--it couldn't find a new DirectX version).
So...
Free-standing server option
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That's called a stand alone server. Expect them back in 3.6.10.
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Im not sure if this was said already, but someone should either get mid-game joining working or comment it out so it doesnt appear to be there. When I first started playing last week I didnt know that it wasnt supposed to work and contiually tried to connect until I finally decided it wasnt working.
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In-game joining will only work if the server has decided to turn it on. So commenting out the code would be an enormous waste of time.
Having the game respond to attempts to join when it isn't accepting in-game joining would be a much more sensible way of handling it.
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So its actually a working feature? And yes, having it respond would be better. I just thought it you could easily comment out the comment out the action when someone clicks join on a running game.
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It's experimental. That's why it's only turned on for the server by a flag in the experimental section of the launcher.
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Here's another idea. What about host side default for each mission. How many time have you hosted a game only to realize that you forgot to change difficulty or spawns? It would be nice to be able to save the settings as the default. Lets say you play a TvT and you want it on 15 spawns every time you play it and medium difficulty (which I think is set automatically for TvT) Then you play a coop that only allows 6 spawns and you want it on insane all the time. Then you play another coop that allows 15 respawns with 10 recommended but you always want 12. You need to go into options ever time with the current setup. With a per mission config you could just hop from mission to mission without worrying. If you have never done a default config for the mission then it would default to 10 respawns for TvT or whatever the max is for coop and medium difficulty. Same type of thing for dogfights but with time.
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How about the ability to see the ready status of players while you are still selecting loadout?
Is it possible to get an RSS/XML feed of all active games for each version the and TCs? Ive been wondering about the possabilites of active game lists on all the official websites for each TCs and a desktop widget.
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Is it possible to get an RSS/XML feed of all active games for each version the and TCs? Ive been wondering about the possabilites of active game lists on all the official websites for each TCs and a desktop widget.
I'm working on a new monitor daemon which would provide such information. The server daemon has already been rewritten to allow better interoperability with something like that, and a new helper app is on the way to manage the daemons on the server a lot better (to keep them up and running and avoid downtime). The monitor daemon would be solely for the purposes of providing info to outside sources.
I haven't figured out exactly how to provide such info through the monitor just yet though. I might setup several access paths: plain text file, XML file, and/or just storing that info in the database itself for use by the FS2NetD website. Going with XML for external sources, and the database for the website, is most likely what is going to end up happening. The main thing is just to make it super easy for others to tell what mods are running, the status of all the server daemons, and the connected users/games on each daemon, for things like the FS2NetD website or the FS2Net Games Viewer.
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Is there an ETA on that?
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It's my primary coding project at the moment (actually, everything FS2NetD related is my focus right now), so it shouldn't be long. I don't want to give an exact date when it will be available (or even a sub-accurate guess), but it should be up and running before the month is over, going by the progress that I've had so far. I've still got a few things to get done first, like porting over the older FS2NetD v.1 daemon to much of the new setup that FS2NetD v.2 uses and completing the daemon helper app, but the monitor will follow soon after.
FS2NetD v.2 is still in the process of a major code rewrite/upgrade, with lots of bug fixes and new features. And FS2NetD v.1 is in the middle of a considerable rewrite as well so that it works better with FS2NetD v.2 (since v.2 is the present/future but we still need v.1 available for the time being). Most of that should be done this week, then I can complete the helper app. After that I'll be able to change out and upgrade the database and then code up the monitor daemon, but all of the groundwork for the monitor daemon will already be in place at that point and make that a lot easier to get done.
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Awesome
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Another bit of wishful thinking: The ability to offer different/individualised recommendations to players depending on which type of ship they're flying (mainly fighter or bomber, but some mods expand on that). A player in an Ursa whose job was to pound a Ravana into dust probably doesn't need to be told to intercept bombs before they hit, while an interceptor probably doesn't need to be told to use the Ravana's blind spots to his advantage when bombing.
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In the briefing or in the in-game speech?
Cause I suspect SEXP processing for briefings is done on the client. So all you'd need is a SEXP that returns the name of the current Player_ship so that could be fed into a ship-type SEXP.
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In debriefing actually, the ones you get when you fail.
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So all you'd need is a SEXP that returns the name of the current Player_ship so that could be fed into a ship-type SEXP.
:yes: Such a SEXP would be quite useful, for quite a few other purposes as well. Fringespace in particular would love it, and I've got a couple ideas for WCSaga that might benefit from it.
I'd implement it myself but I'm not familiar with that section yet, and it sounds easy (or at least similar to others that have been done) so I'm hoping someone else can do it without much effort... but I'll be glad to try tackling it in a month or to if it isn't done.
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To be honest I'm not entirely sure how useful it would be outside briefings and debriefs given that it would always return the host in multiplayer mission (except for those on a stand-alone server where it would return null).
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Would it be possible for the host end to make the debriefing and have the recommendations something like this:
Alpha 1: Good job
Alpha 2: Learn to shoot better
Alpha 3: <AI Ship>
Beta 1: Way to take out the weapons subsystem
Beta 2: Try to avoid the flak so you don't die so much
Beta 3: <AI Ship>
Everyone could see the recommendations for everyone but who cares?
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Probably not (or not easily at least).
Briefings are processed client side. This means that if you can figure out how to get a different answer from a SEXP on the client and the server you can tailor briefings to the player.
I managed to do this very simply by simply setting a campaign persistent variable in a test mission. By default variables are not updated on the client so the client had the value from the mission file while the server had the updated version. Using this I could get the client and server to play different briefing stages as I expected would happen.
However I got the same debriefing stage on both even though I was also testing the value of the variable there. Obviously the game notifies the clients which debriefing stages to use.
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More (and yes, I know this will never happen, but it's a wishlist so shut up :p): A way to have a selection of different team loadout profiles for a single MP mission. Currently, there are a lot of missions that are identical except for the loadout (which is generally seperated into light, medium and heavy fighters), and it would be nice if instead the mission designer could specify a number of loadout profiles which could be selected in-game by the host through the host options screen.
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I was thinking of another loadout option last night. Some way to force different wings to have different ships. Like Alpha has to fly NR Frazi ships and Beta has to fly 109's but gamma can pick either (this was in TBP). Figure this would be useful for FS2 as well. Make Alpha wing have to fly interceptors while Beta has to fly bombers but still have choices of which ships. Prevent that load up 30 trebs for anti-fighter mentality.
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More (and yes, I know this will never happen, but it's a wishlist so shut up :p): A way to have a selection of different team loadout profiles for a single MP mission. Currently, there are a lot of missions that are identical except for the loadout (which is generally seperated into light, medium and heavy fighters), and it would be nice if instead the mission designer could specify a number of loadout profiles which could be selected in-game by the host through the host options screen.
I've not tried the new loadout code in mp yet but if it works all you'd need to do would be to set a bunch of variables on the host and I'm pretty sure scripting could handle that fairly easily.
As for Fubar's suggestion, I plan to let loadout do that too one day.
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Here's another one. The ability to take over a player's position if they drop and your an observer.
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Agreed, that would be good. In fact, it would be nice to have the ability for an observer to jump into any unoccupied player ship in the mission, even if they started under AI control.
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It might also be useful for the in-game joining. If the server is full they can still join as an observer then get first shot at the next open position when someone drops.
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Here's another one. The ability to take over a player's position if they drop and your an observer.
The biggest problem with that would be figuring out what to do with stats. If FS2NetD kept track of Kills/Death it wouldn't be too bad but otherwise this gives the player a second chance to score kills after his allotted number of respawns are gone.
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Here's a crazy question for discussion:
Which would be better on the Team Select screen:
A way to show 4 wings at once (of up to 4 ships each)
OR
A way to show 3 wings of up to 6 ships each
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I'm not promising anything yet, but I MIGHT be able to do one of these (not both!) while preserving backwards compatibility, interface-wise at least. (I'd have to learn more from another coder about if/how that would affect actual data packets sent/received.)
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Funnily enough I've actually been thinking about changing that myself today.
I think having more ships in the wings the game will allow is the better solution. Both for single player and multi. Adding another wing would have no effect on TvT. TvT currently only allows 8 players. Alpha and Zeta wing would still be limited to 4 players so no net effect there. It would however require a bump in the number of max players the game supports in order to have any effect in the other modes.
Allowing 6 players in Alpha and Zeta wing would probably allow you to move up to 12 player TvT. This wouldn't require a bump. In fact if we're lucky it's possible that the interface rather than any back-end code is actually what limits us to only 8 players in TvT and only minor changes would be needed for the rest of the code.
We'd still have problems if someone tried to make a 18 player Coop or Dogfight mission though.
SP would also be the one that benefited more from the change. If you allow a 4th wing the question becomes "Which wing?" Many missions have been built based on the assumption that Delta and Epsilon wing are NOT visible to the player in loadout. Very few missions have been built with more than 4 players in Alpha, Beta or Gamma wing precisely because of the interface limits and it probably wouldn't break them even if we did add the extra ships.
And that's before we get to the simple fact that (3x6) > (4x4) :D
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Good points.
The 12 player max limit -- is there anything tying this to packet size or anything like that? I mean, obviously there's bandwidth problems if we have 64 players :p but how about 16?
TvT... well one reason I thought of 4 wings was the idea of TvT with 2 wings each, depending on what the engine permits. Worst case, 3 ships per wing if the player limit just can't be bumped. Some coding required of course. Either way, I love the idea of a more complicated TvT where each wing of a team has a different role. Long term goal!
Single player -- valid concern, but what we could do is leave things as they are for missions that don't support them, and tie the support to the "$Starting wing names:" line in FRED.
In fact for single player I could easily do BOTH features and then some: there's room for 4 wings of 8+ ships. It's just the multiplayer interface that lacks room.
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he 12 player max limit -- is there anything tying this to packet size or anything like that? I mean, obviously there's bandwidth problems if we have 64 players :p but how about 16?
The game can currently deal with 16 people connected. 12 players + 4 observers (or 3 and the standalone). I'm not sure what would happen if I tried to bump it to 16 players and to be honest I don't really consider it worth trying for such a small change. If we're going to bump MULTI_MAX_PLAYERS we should be looking at much larger bump so that we don't have to bother with it again. i.e 32 or 64 players.
Now we can tell people not to actually try 64 players or even artificially keep the number in release builds low but I don't see much point in combing through the code looking for numerous bugs when bumping it to 16 only to have to do it all over again a year or two from now when someone decides to bump it to 24 or 32.
TvT... well one reason I thought of 4 wings was the idea of TvT with 2 wings each, depending on what the engine permits. Worst case, 3 ships per wing if the player limit just can't be bumped. Some coding required of course. Either way, I love the idea of a more complicated TvT where each wing of a team has a different role. Long term goal!
I'd love that as a long term goal but unlike the above we might be able to get 12 player TvT with only a few minor changes since as far as I know all the packets in the game are already built to deal with 12 players anyway. That's definitely worth trying as a short term goal (Let's at least see how much needs fixing!). It's only a small change but I know that I've seen several posts from players saying that enough people turned up for a game that they couldn't play TvT and had to play dogfight all night cause there are no coop missions fit for 12 players and Coops takes a long time to FRED.
And if we're doing long term TvT changes we might as well think big again. :D
Single player -- valid concern, but what we could do is leave things as they are for missions that don't support them, and tie the support to the "$Starting wing names:" line in FRED.
In fact for single player I could easily do BOTH features and then some: there's room for 4 wings of 8+ ships. It's just the multiplayer interface that lacks room.
The problem is that tying it into $Starting wing names would remove the same functionality from there, we'd need another option related to it but that's not hard.
There are a whole bunch of changes that the existing interface has forced me to abandon. (off the top of my head the biggest one is allowing the mission file to specify that certain ships in loadout can only be flown by certain pilots). To be honest I'm about a gnat's breath away from saying I should simply pull the old loadout interface and re-write the whole damn thing anyway. :nervous:
Anyway, I've added you on ICQ, if you want to bounce ideas around send me a message.
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Here's another one. The ability to take over a player's position if they drop and your an observer.
The biggest problem with that would be figuring out what to do with stats. If FS2NetD kept track of Kills/Death it wouldn't be too bad but otherwise this gives the player a second chance to score kills after his allotted number of respawns are gone.
Well the idea is to have them take over the current loadout and status of the existing player. So if the player they are taking over has already used up all his respawns then the player taking over would still be in observer mode but in a player slot for the next game. As far as stats go. Right now if a player drops during the mission his stats are gone. I say just have the joining player start from 0 kills and 0 points. Team points and kills would still be cumulative.
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Suppose I play a game, use all my respawns and go back to observer mode. Then another player drops, If I choose to take over his remaining respawns what happens to the score I built up earlier in the game? Does it get wiped? Does it add on to what I get in these extra respawns?
Going back to 0,0 could be a really bad idea if the player I'm taking over only had one respawn left.
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Suppose I play a game, use all my respawns and go back to observer mode. Then another player drops, If I choose to take over his remaining respawns what happens to the score I built up earlier in the game? Does it get wiped? Does it add on to what I get in these extra respawns?
Going back to 0,0 could be a really bad idea if the player I'm taking over only had one respawn left.
OK we are talking about 2 different observer modes. First is the join as observer and second is dead observer mode.
Join Observer takes over dropped player playing = player stats start at 0 and only has remaining respawns for player that dropped.
Dead Observer can't take over another dropped player since he is technically already a player.
Join Observer takes over dropped player in dead observer mode results in dead observer mode and no individual stats. Only benefit is you get to start in the next game.
I don't know how team scores (points for things like mission goals and events) are handled in the code so that may be a different scenario. This may effect TvT missions as well. Since they are normally shot missions you may want to just disallow it for TvT after mission start.
Or course dogfights don't have a respawn limit so there is no dead observer mode. Kills would just start at 0.
Now the one that would be tricky is a player drops and comes back taking over his own spot. This is more of an ingame joining issue though. Same with total kills for other players in dogfights with ingame joining enabled.
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Ooh boy, so much to catch up on.
Which would be better on the Team Select screen:
A way to show 4 wings at once (of up to 4 ships each)
OR
A way to show 3 wings of up to 6 ships each
3x6, for pretty much all the reasons that have been mentioned above. Plus it would simply be nice to be able to have player wings the same size as AI wings. And it's 2 more players, which counts for, well, 2 more :p
If we're going to bump MULTI_MAX_PLAYERS we should be looking at much larger bump so that we don't have to bother with it again.
100% agreed. Bumping it to 16 would seem a waste on time since we're eventually gonna want more anyway, particularly for TvT. I've always wanted to try playing in an epic battle with 12+ players on each side just going at it with fleet support and everything - 4 players per side is good and fun, but in this particular game type higher player numbers truely would take it to another level entirely. Since 3x6 is 18, the bump should probably support at least two sides with that many players, which in practise would probably mean 64.
Suppose I play a game, use all my respawns and go back to observer mode. Then another player drops, If I choose to take over his remaining respawns what happens to the score I built up earlier in the game? Does it get wiped? Does it add on to what I get in these extra respawns?
Going back to 0,0 could be a really bad idea if the player I'm taking over only had one respawn left.
I'd say track respawns on a per-ship basis and kills on a per-player basis, but don't allow players who have run out of respawns to jump into another ship - Only people who started as observers or joined as observers during the game. It wouldn't do much good anyway to rejoin after running out, as once you run out, other ships are bound to be close anyway, and the AIs are generally wiped out well before the players.
The reason this request actually came about is that yesterday we had too many players for a mission and Fubar volunteered to go ops, only to see a player drop out within the first 5 minutes of the game. It's those situations that this should cover, not those where a pilot has already spent his all respawns and has to wait 2 minutes for the match to end.
Whew. Onwards. Assuming the suggestions here come through in some form, dogfights would be a lot more limited than TvT due to the fact that all players can see all other ships, effectively limiting it to 18 players. But why is this the case? Why show opposing players the loadout of all other ships? Shouldn't it really just display a 1-ship wing for each player regardless of how they're actually organized so you can keep your loadout choices secret from other players? Currently, the last player to commit actually has a fair advantage over the rest, as he knows what they're packing and they haven't a clue about him, which seems unfair to me. And changing it thus would also do away with the art limitations and allow you an arbitrary number of ships up to whatever number is supported by the game.
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OK we are talking about 2 different observer modes. First is the join as observer and second is dead observer mode.
Join Observer takes over dropped player playing = player stats start at 0 and only has remaining respawns for player that dropped.
Dead Observer can't take over another dropped player since he is technically already a player.
Join Observer takes over dropped player in dead observer mode results in dead observer mode and no individual stats. Only benefit is you get to start in the next game.
I don't know how team scores (points for things like mission goals and events) are handled in the code so that may be a different scenario. This may effect TvT missions as well. Since they are normally shot missions you may want to just disallow it for TvT after mission start.
Or course dogfights don't have a respawn limit so there is no dead observer mode. Kills would just start at 0.
Now the one that would be tricky is a player drops and comes back taking over his own spot. This is more of an ingame joining issue though. Same with total kills for other players in dogfights with ingame joining enabled.
Yes but unless you allow any observer to take over dropped player slots you face the issue of dead observers quitting the game and then rejoining in the hope of getting the now vacant slot. That's going to increase the server load for no good reason. And there is no easy way to stop this. All player data is flushed as soon as a player drops. There's no where to keep it either IIRC unless you want to prevent new players from joining.
The most sensible course of action is to allow people who joined as observers first shot at new respawn slots followed by anyone who died. Which gets us right back to the issue of what to do with their previous score. :D
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Actually dead observers quitting and rejoining to play on would be fine with me. They'd sacrifice their kills in doing so just like anyone else who drops out, so it's a tradeoff, and if they want to do that then it's fine with me.
[Edit] Oh, and:
It's only a small change but I know that I've seen several posts from players saying that enough people turned up for a game that they couldn't play TvT and had to play dogfight all night cause there are no coop missions fit for 12 players and Coops takes a long time to FRED.
We actually fixed that by taking a bunch of the toughest 8 player missions and making 12 player versions of them (minus any medals they might have). One is already validated and several others are on the brink of being tested enough for it. The trouble is, we've started to occasionally see over 12 players too now... and there's no way we can fix that :p
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If your getting more then 10 players split into two games. Gives people more options and since the more servers there are the better the chance one will be in forming stage people won't have to wait as long for a game. I'd much rather see 5 servers with 4 people then 2 servers with 10.
I don't see coops with more than 12 players being much fun with the current game limitations. Just doing things like increasing number of fighter wings doesn't seem like a solution that will be much fun. Doing things that require plot for 12 players is hard enough. 16 maybe doable but that only leaves you with 84 other ships/objects to work with. Not to mention trying to figure out how 16 people can mess up a mission buy doing everything they aren't suppose to at once.
I'm with Shade on the observer thing. I don't think people will drop and loose their stats just to take over another ship that might only have a few respawns left. With ingame joining they could do that anyway. Server option flag for dead take over AI? I definitely wouldn't want that enabled for a TvT where in a coop it wouldn't hurt.
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Yeah, coops don't need more than 12. Dogfights and TvTs would definitely benefit, though.
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I can't think of any good reason to limit the code for Coop games though. In general if we can do more than 12 players in dogfight and TvT, coop will automatically get the benefits.
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No reason it shouldn't be possible, it'll just be bloody rare for any decent missions to be made. I don't think any of us were saying it should be artificially limited, just that jumping through extra hoops to get there wouldn't be worth it.
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Not saying it should be limited at all. Just saying with the current engine limits it's not a major priority. Now if the ship and object limits get raised then yea you probably could make a good 24 player coop. Could you imagine a 24 player gauntlet? :lol:
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You know... that would be impossibly awesome. It'd be a true battle of endor mission, except it would actually work. First fight through 10 waves of 50 fighters each, then come the star destroyers, more fighter waves, SSD (remember to task a few bombers to drop the bridge shields!), then finally throw everyone you have left at the death star :p It's just crazy enough that it could actually be a spectacularly cool mission to fly. Of course we'd have to wait for the SWC to get released, but if we can get this, then I'm willing to wait a few years.
[Edit] And actually, I think we can already use over a hundred ships in a mission. I know I've saved missions with higher numbers by accident because I left in a few unintended ones, and FRED didn't complain nor did I get a corrupt file out of it.
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Another addition to the wishlist: Currently, in difficult missions where you die a lot, capital ship kills are often not credited to a player despite them having done practically all of the damage. The damage done on each respawn seems to be counted seperately (or reset on death), and as such it can easily happen that no players are credited with having done enough damage despite in fact having done so - Over a couple of respawns.
So, it would be nice if damage done to capital ships by a player could carry over through respawns, possibly as a setting available to the mission designer (in easier missions, staying alive to get the kill can be part of the challenge, but in some missions you just don't have a prayer no matter how well you fly and would need damage to carry over. So making it the designer's choice seems like the best way to me).
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It seems a little odd that it's not carrying over at the moment. I'll try to remember to take a look.
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Well, to be honest I'm not 100% sure exactly how it works, it just seems like it doesn't carry over. Generally speaking, in multi you won't get kills for anything above a cruiser unless you're using Helios. Cyclops just don't do enough damage on the single pass you get before being obliterated, and repeated bombing runs just don't seem to help any if you die a couple of times during them.
This is especially annoying due to the rearm bug, as self destructing (and thus apparently losing the damage you've done) may be the only way to actually get the ammo you need to kill the thing even if you are otherwise able to stay alive.
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Which rearm bug? This one (http://scp.indiegames.us/mantis/view.php?id=1605)?
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Another addition to the wishlist: Currently, in difficult missions where you die a lot, capital ship kills are often not credited to a player despite them having done practically all of the damage. The damage done on each respawn seems to be counted seperately (or reset on death), and as such it can easily happen that no players are credited with having done enough damage despite in fact having done so - Over a couple of respawns.
So, it would be nice if damage done to capital ships by a player could carry over through respawns, possibly as a setting available to the mission designer (in easier missions, staying alive to get the kill can be part of the challenge, but in some missions you just don't have a prayer no matter how well you fly and would need damage to carry over. So making it the designer's choice seems like the best way to me).
That's the way it has always been. To get credit for a kill you must do a certain percentage (think 40%) in one spawn. Change that and you are going to have quite a few point hog missions out there. RI would become so easy to get 4000+ points per game (not that it isn't now) you would have newbies hitting admiral in weeks.
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Which is another reason why it should a choice for the mission designer. Ideally just as another misc flag that could be checked for ships. I totally agree that any change made should not affect missions retroactively (and why I consider this a feature request rather than a bug report).
Then, we can plan for it for new missions and reduce points for capships accordingly if there are lots of them, so that you can both bomb, be challenged and still get decent points, but not 5000+ of them. Whereas now it's basically challenge or points when bombing, because when a mission is hard you generally won't live to do 40% of the damage unless you have helios - And killing anything short of juggernaughts with helios just isn't challenging.
[Edit] And yes, that rearm bug. And really, it's not that bad, it's just annoying in certain situations. Like the one mentioned earlier ;) Much of the time it would be more expedient to just self destruct even if rearm did work.
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Yea the basic launch all your weapons and blow yourself up strategy. One of the reason's I would be against the kills spanning across respawns. I wouldn't be against a FRED side flag option for that though.
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Yea the basic launch all your weapons and blow yourself up strategy.
Yeah, I'm not a great fan of that strategy either, but regardless of that, some missions are balanced based on it (well, strictly speaking they're balanced for lag bombing, but since that's all but gone with faster connections this is the next nearest thing), but that doesn't mean this should be made a viable strategy through retroactive changes. It's a fair enough tradeoff as it stands, destructing means no points but fresh weapons.
On the other hand though, a mission may just be so hard that surviving to do 40% of the damage on a single respawn just isn't feasible regardless of how good you are, and I don't think bomber pilots should be punished with a 0 point outcome for taking on a tough challenge like that. It's for those missions where having the flag would be good.
As an example, there's a capital-heavy gauntlet I made that we gave a good run through two weeks ago and I just finished up, and which is actually my reason for making this request. It's balanced for decent challenge on normal difficulty, making it very tough on hard and near-impossible on insane. There are 9 cruisers, 3 corvettes and 3 destroyers in the mission plus a ton of fighter escorts, and after playing it through on hard with, i think, 7 players (most of us with 1-3 respawns remaining at the end and one being out entirely), not one of us had any non-cruiser capital ship kills. That despite no AI bombers and no friendly capships being present.
I had initially reduced points for all non-cruiser capital ships to 1/3rd of their normal value due to the sheer number of them to avoid the RI syndrome, but after realizing that we'd be lucky to get the kill for even one of them, I put it back up to full for the release version. Now, assuming the flag was implemented, I'd want to go back to the 1/3rd points and activate the flag on all corvettes and destroyers because, frankly, you don't need self destruct to die in that mission, the enemy takes care of that quite nicely on hard or above. It's for this situation that such a flag would be nice, because without it players are punished for playing (and beating it) on harder difficulties instead of rewarded as the scaled points system is supposed to do.
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Easy solution to that is to set the points for the cap low just in case then use an event or goal to award points to the whole team for the cap being destroyed. The only thing you don't get is a kill in your stats.
I agree it would be nice to award points in different ways. Like my most requested feature points and stat tracking for shooting down incoming bombs. It would also be nice to be able to award them to the player who destroys a subsystem or turret. Played VA2 many times and all I did was clear the way for the bombers. No points except for the pod kills but a very important role in the mission none the less. It would be nice to have a mission like that where you could award far less points for the kill but say 5 points per blob turret, 7 per beam, 8 per flak, and 10 per subsystem or whatever. Say a particular nasty flak gun is worth 25.
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Using an event would be a solution, but it would still basically penalize bomber players (unless they sat around and did nothing, in which case they'd get free points) and give free points to fighter players (who already have plenty of fighters to kill for score). Plus getting a kill is nice ;) Anyway, the mission is fun regardless of points (unlike RI which is dead boring regardless of points) so it's not a biggy... just one of those things that seem wrong.
I agree it would be nice to award points in different ways. Like my most requested feature points and stat tracking for shooting down incoming bombs. It would also be nice to be able to award them to the player who destroys a subsystem or turret. Played VA2 many times and all I did was clear the way for the bombers. No points except for the pod kills but a very important role in the mission none the less. It would be nice to have a mission like that where you could award far less points for the kill but say 5 points per blob turret, 7 per beam, 8 per flak, and 10 per subsystem or whatever. Say a particular nasty flak gun is worth 25.
You've definitely got my support for that one. All of those things really should be recognized and rewarded since getting them done can make or break a mission. And imo that should even be a retroactive change and affect all missions period.
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You may (or may not) find the new get-damage-caused SEXP (HEAD builds only) helps with that. It does it's damage calculations in a different way than the scoring system does. But I haven't tested it in MP and I suspect that the problem causing respawns to wipe the amount of damage is also going to affect it too.
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This isn't actually a multiplayer request but since I need it for a multiplayer mission I'm trying to finish I figured I'd put it here. Since Event scoring was brought up earlier today this kind of fits into that.
Some way to subtract from a player / teams score. I have a mission that has a set goal. If the players don't do it correctly or go off on a killing spree I want to be able to disallow the score or not allow it to exceed a certain number of points. Possible to do negative scoring based on event. Of course you wouldn't want it to go negative so if the resulting score would be less than 0 have it equal 0.
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Since Taylor fixed the mission list so it doesn't cut off at 200 anymore I've got another request. Sorted mission lists. Either by filename or mission name. I think mission name would be preferable for hosting. On the other hand filename would be good for FREDing.
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Since Taylor fixed the mission list so it doesn't cut off at 200 anymore I've got another request. Sorted mission lists. Either by filename or mission name. I think mission name would be preferable for hosting. On the other hand filename would be good for FREDing.
There is already a sorting function, by mission name, but it really doesn't work very well. Currently it will only sort on a filter (meaning it doesn't sort on "All") and it will only sort if you switch to campaign mode and then back. It also will only sort part of the list and not necessarily all of the elements that it should. In other works, that code is pretty screwed up.
So, technically you can file this in Mantis as a bug, since it should be working better than it does. And if you just happen to mention in the bug report something about a CTRL+SHIFT+S combo that switches sorting between mission name and filename, then I wouldn't make a fuss about that part being a feature request. ;)
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Off to Mantis I go again and mention I will. Oh and there is a third way to fix it sometimes if windows is cooperative. Move all the files out of the folder, sort them in another folder, then put them back in the sorted order. If they are already in alphabetical order in the directory then it will pick them up right. They have to be alphabetical in the normal directory list not using a windows sort.
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*bump*
Seeing Karajorma's Team Chat build made me think, it would be awesome to expand on this, and have cross-context chat with other users. Something like regular IRC, or Warcraft 3's Bnet chat. For instance, talking to a user in a lobby, from within a game. Could be done via '/w <callsign> <message>', would basically send a PM to that user, shown up as from you, highlighted in another color in whatever chat area that user is in. '/r' could then be used to send a reply from the same chat area it was received in, and the in game player would see the reply. A friends system would be nice too. Without GUI support, it could also be command driven, so commands might be:
/f l - list friends and their status (in game, etc, straight from Warcraft actually)
/f a <callsign> - add a friend
/f d <callsign> - delete a friend
Since at least part of the chat system is IRC based, there are probably remnants of support for some of these hanging around. The problem is of course tieing them together in the game, and many of them may be in a broken or unsupported state altogether. Apparently in game chat doesn't use the IRC system at all, so some relays would need to be created, and I'm guessing this wouldn't be a simple task. But I think the payoff would be a huge enhancement to the lobby system now.
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Good idea. I remember back in the PXO days people trying to get :v: to add this.
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Going over to IRC for the chat would be quite a task as the game uses its own message system for passing messages around once you're out of the lobby and I'd have to figure out how to create a room every time a new game started and how to tell players where it is (the chat lobby uses the same room after all but you can't do that for the games themselves unless you want to be able to hear everyone in any game chatting).
More importantly if I were to code it I'd have to learn how the IRC code works since at the moment I don't have a clue. :D
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I'm pretty sure it is possible though. If I haven't scrambled too many brain cells some spammer managed to do it on more than one occasion when PXO was up.
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Moving the in-game chat over to IRC would probably be overkill even for this. If it were to be done, it would probably be easier (well, less hard) to fill the gap between the two systems with some interface that both handles communication between lobby and game, and translates the messages into something the other can understand. It would still require some knowledge of IRC of course, but rather less than implementing an entire IRC chat system for in-game communication.
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Yeah a bridge was more what I was thinking too. Since everyone has to connect to FS2NetD, you might be able to pass them directly to the recipient, although they could end up needing to go through the host (player or standalone server, whichever the case may be).
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Well if it works like retail you shouldn't need to connect to FS2netD to play on FS2netD. There was a nice workaround for when PXO lobby/user validation was screwed up. You could turn off PXO, go to the game list and then F2 to turn PXO back on. It bypassed the lobby and would let you see, create, and connect to servers on PXO. Never tried this on FS2netD though.
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I think we want everyone playing on FS2NetD to have to connect to it first. Whether or not there's any connection between them and the server while you're in game though, I don't know. If so, messages could be relayed directly. If not they'd need to go through the host.
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Animated squad logo possible? I've got some re-hashed LOA ones.
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How about a join alert option for the lobby. Basically if someone enters the lobby it will play a sound so you know from outside of FS2 or across the room. Something like the noise you get when your hosting and someone joins the game.
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That might not be terrible, I remember XvT has a sound whenever someone joins the game that's not too annoying. I can imagine it would be nice to be able to turn it off though somehow.
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This would be a very nice feature! It would help also when one has "alt-tabbed" out of the game while waiting for someone to join (at least on linux, windows version might cut the audio).
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how about a " hosting box " so you can see what other games are being formed when your hosting another game ( at the mission select screen, not ingame as such)
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Some way to tell what players are logged in from what mod/conversion would be nice.
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Like the old Half-Life server list?
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Request: Different colours for text in the lobby, like the ones we get when you are already in a game.
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wow, it's been over a year since this was touched? DAMN! well, i have a new one that might or might not be possible...
Is there a way to change the way the lead indicator behaves for multi? we all know about the lag issues, so, is there a way to make the lead indicator calculate where to shoot considering the lag besides the movement of the ship? Thanks.
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Or maybe just increase the size of the aim "circle" when lag increases?
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The latter behaviour is probably doable but adding further displacement for the lead indicator (it already doesn't mean a damn thing ;P) and trying to predict latency with it would probably be a serious coding challenge...
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I brought this up some time ago (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=49789.0) and it should be doable in principle. You don't need to predict the latency exactly, but just use an approximation based on an average of the last few seconds of ping measurements. That should work well in most cases and would be much better than what the game currently does.
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My wish is an D3d build compatiblile with new FSNET. No graphic enchancements support needed, only for raw multiplayer puroposes. That would be great thing for everyone who want to play multi, but are unable to launch OpenGL FSO on their laptops with ATI cards... like me. :)
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that's not really a multi request and, unfortunately, that probably wont ever happen (as much as I wish it would). :<
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My wish is an D3d build compatiblile with new FSNET. No graphic enchancements support needed, only for raw multiplayer puroposes. That would be great thing for everyone who want to play multi, but are unable to launch OpenGL FSO on their laptops with ATI cards... like me. :)
No way in hell. We do not have a Direct3D programmer on staff, and even if we had, since Direct3D is MS-only, it's not an option.
Anyway, why not head on other to the troubleshooting board? I, or someone else, might be able to get you set up there. Because there are several hundred people who wplay FSO with ATI cards with no difficulty.
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Being Windows only isn't a reason we're not doing it, if we had a coder who was really interested in maintaining D3D support without breaking OpenGL we'd have it, but we don't have that coder and aren't actively seeking one. We do maintain other features only for certain platforms like TTS, so D3D would always be a possibility as far as that's concerned.
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I get an error about hacked and/or invalid table files!
Make sure that you're using the same mod as the server (i.e. FSPort or the 3.6.10 MediaVPs) and that you don't have any table (.TBM and .TBL) files hanging around in \FreeSpace2\data\tables or in \FreeSpace2\<Enabled Mod Folder>\data\tables.
I just set up multi so I haven't actually played in any matches yet. The quoted troubleshoot is leading me to think you can't use cockpits or Swifty's HUD tables with multiplayer. Is this true and if it is can anything be done about it? I looked through the threads and I couldn't find anything.
I realize the HUD code is still being tested and probably won't be in use with multiplayer yet, just curious about the future.
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Stuff /could/ be done about it, but we will probably be enforcing strict rules regarding what huds can be used, which means I doubt we'll allow cockpits any time soon for obvious reasons.
Reason being - that multi is meant to be a 'from the same vantage point' experience.
Any changes for that would simply be reverted when SW finally gets out the door anyway.
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Well if either are breaking multi we need to know about it ASAP. Now stats may not save due to modified tables.
As for QD's comment about enforcing what cockpits/HUDs can be used there has been some discussion on that. The current thinking is that mods will control that and they will either be on or off for everyone. I don't think the HUD part has been discussed too much yet.