Author Topic: Feature wishlist - Requests & Comments  (Read 68234 times)

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Offline FUBAR-BDHR

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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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Offline Shade

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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.
« Last Edit: March 18, 2008, 01:54:38 pm by Shade »
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Offline FUBAR-BDHR

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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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Offline Shade

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Quote
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.
« Last Edit: March 18, 2008, 04:59:06 pm by Shade »
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Offline FUBAR-BDHR

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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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Offline Shade

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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.

Quote
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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Offline karajorma

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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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Offline FUBAR-BDHR

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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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Offline FUBAR-BDHR

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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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Offline taylor

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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. ;)

 

Offline FUBAR-BDHR

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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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Offline chief1983

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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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Offline FUBAR-BDHR

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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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Offline karajorma

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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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Offline FUBAR-BDHR

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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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Offline Shade

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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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Offline chief1983

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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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Offline FUBAR-BDHR

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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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Offline chief1983

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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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Offline Colonol Dekker

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Animated squad logo possible? I've got some re-hashed LOA ones.
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