Author Topic: Feature wishlist - Requests & Comments  (Read 68236 times)

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Offline FUBAR-BDHR

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Feature wishlist for multiplayer
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. 
No-one ever listens to Zathras. Quite mad, they say. It is good that Zathras does not mind. He's even grown to like it. Oh yes. -Zathras

 

Offline feltoar

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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.

 

Offline taylor

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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.

 

Offline feltoar

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Is there an ETA on that?

 

Offline taylor

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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.

 

Offline feltoar

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Awesome

 

Offline Shade

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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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<Cobra|> You play this mission too intelligently.

 

Offline karajorma

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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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Offline Shade

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In debriefing actually, the ones you get when you fail.
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"Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh ****ing great. 2200 references to entry->index and no idea which is the one that ****ed up" - Karajorma
"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct." - Niels Bohr
<Cobra|> You play this mission too intelligently.

 

Offline Backslash

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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.

 

Offline karajorma

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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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Offline FUBAR-BDHR

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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? 
No-one ever listens to Zathras. Quite mad, they say. It is good that Zathras does not mind. He's even grown to like it. Oh yes. -Zathras

 

Offline karajorma

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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.
Karajorma's Freespace FAQ. It's almost like asking me yourself.

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Offline Shade

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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.
Report FS_Open bugs with Mantis  |  Find the latest FS_Open builds Here  |  Interested in FRED? Check out the Wiki's FRED Portal | Diaspora: Website / Forums
"Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh ****ing great. 2200 references to entry->index and no idea which is the one that ****ed up" - Karajorma
"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct." - Niels Bohr
<Cobra|> You play this mission too intelligently.

 

Offline FUBAR-BDHR

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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. 
No-one ever listens to Zathras. Quite mad, they say. It is good that Zathras does not mind. He's even grown to like it. Oh yes. -Zathras

 

Offline karajorma

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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.
Karajorma's Freespace FAQ. It's almost like asking me yourself.

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Offline FUBAR-BDHR

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Here's another one.  The ability to take over a player's position if they drop and your an observer.
No-one ever listens to Zathras. Quite mad, they say. It is good that Zathras does not mind. He's even grown to like it. Oh yes. -Zathras

 

Offline Shade

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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.
Report FS_Open bugs with Mantis  |  Find the latest FS_Open builds Here  |  Interested in FRED? Check out the Wiki's FRED Portal | Diaspora: Website / Forums
"Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh ****ing great. 2200 references to entry->index and no idea which is the one that ****ed up" - Karajorma
"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct." - Niels Bohr
<Cobra|> You play this mission too intelligently.

 

Offline FUBAR-BDHR

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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.
No-one ever listens to Zathras. Quite mad, they say. It is good that Zathras does not mind. He's even grown to like it. Oh yes. -Zathras

 

Offline karajorma

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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.
Karajorma's Freespace FAQ. It's almost like asking me yourself.

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