Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => The Babylon Project => Topic started by: IPAndrews on February 21, 2008, 04:58:38 pm
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Ok first Thursday multiplayer session has finished. Special thanks go to Fubar and Vidmaster who wrote most of the missions you played. I think that session went fairly well. I'm not sure what was causing some games to be invisible to some players but I found that quitting pxo and going back in usually solved the problem. Eventually we had 9 players in-game which was a real experience.
All of the missions were well put together with beautiful backgrounds. The Shadow dogfight was particularly pretty, and also particularly insane. Frequently degenerating into Shadow ships standing nose to nose firing beams into one another's faces. Best missions of the night in terms of playability were the Narn/Centauri team battle and the excellent Drazi/Brakiri team battle.
The Nova vs Nova team battle also showed real promise as a mission style and reminded me in some ways of Team Fortress. Perhaps if the Novas were put side by side allowing them to bring more guns to bare? The aim of a team would then be to destroy the enemy ship's turrets to reduce the amount of damage being inflicted on it's own capital ship.
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The Nova vs Nova team battle also showed real promise as a mission style and reminded me in some ways of Team Fortress. Perhaps if the Novas were put side by side allowing them to bring more guns to bare? The aim of a team would then be to destroy the enemy ship's turrets to reduce the amount of damage being inflicted on it's own capital ship.
I was going to recommend that to Vid. Have the ships do waypoints so the go along side each other allowing more of the turrets to fire on the other cap. Maybe even some heavier weapons in the rear. Does show promise and I know I have a few more like that planned both with stationary caps and attacking caps.
Session was quite fun. Just a little early for me. Just doesn't feel right reaching for the beer mug and it's the empty one from last night. I need to fix the starting positions on that heavy Shadow dogfight. Not used to working with player ships that big. I'm sure the same thing will happen in another mission or two. Think Vid also had a starting ship position problem in the Minbari dogfight.
Wish we would have tried an asteroid one. I need to figure out what a good density and number of asteroids is. I want it dense enough to provide cover and obstacles but not so dense that it causes "ghost guns".
Any ideas on what is causing the client side secondaries glitch when the game starts? I don't remember seeing it during testing but I didn't really look for it either. There is still that weird targeting problem when engines get knocked out too. Don't know why engines getting disabled would knock out most, but not all, of the targeting functions.
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just to say had a great time , the shadow vs shadow was very insane , and as usual i practised my respawning ........ dunno how every one felt but even on the games with low ping (120 ish) i felt like i had a lot of lag, maybe its me and not used to ships though, i also had secondary weapons problems, not the didnt work until you respawned one that every one had but weapons not locking on ( no triangle even at 700 klicks) but this mite be due to my 3.6.9 issue,
is the vp we loaded before hand a forever thing or was it really just for ( looks at clock) last night, do i need to hide it to play single player?
congrats to all you guys who made this possible ..........
now we just need to kick wingcommander into life and well have a full house,
just hope that all those talented fredders out there can make some big co ops and maybe a multi campaign .........
;) :D ;) :D ;) :D
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Loved it myself, even if I did get my butt kicked :p. One thing that might be interesting would be to either recreate historical battles from the Babylon 5 show. Just think of how awesome a multiplayer version of "The Battle of Euphrates" would be, or even the skirmish between the Whitestar fleet and Drakh from Lines of Communication. Of course, I'm not sure how long this would take seeing how they're more story-driven coop missions with events and goals popping up left and right.
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is the vp we loaded before hand a forever thing or was it really just for ( looks at clock) last night
Yes delete it. The clue is in the title. If I could have made it self destruct I would have.
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I need to fix the starting positions on that heavy Shadow dogfight. Not used to working with player ships that big.
Keep that version but make another one which is more sensible. That one was actually a lot of fun with a large number of players in a kind of "You won't last more than 30 seconds between respawns" way. It's sort of like playing an FPS multi game in a small arena when everyone has rocket launchers. :D
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is the vp we loaded before hand a forever thing or was it really just for ( looks at clock) last night
Yes delete it. The clue is in the title. If I could have made it self destruct I would have.
so the blue smoke coming from my hard disc wasnt you .......;;
just joking
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Any ideas on what is causing the client side secondaries glitch when the game starts? I don't remember seeing it during testing but I didn't really look for it either. There is still that weird targeting problem when engines get knocked out too.
This would be when you start a mission and you have X amount of secondaries but those secondaries have no name and appear to do nothing when you fire them? That's what I saw at my end. I really haven't got a clue what was causing it. Whenever I have played TBP multiplayer before I haven't seen it. We could do with firing up a game and trying with, and without the 1-night-only.vp I gave out last night. As it may, or may not, have something to do with the Nothing secondary.
We need to assertain if it's something I've done. If it's not then it'll be fixed as a game engine bug. But it'll be fixed as part of 3.6.10 so that puts it beyond the scope of TBP and something we have to live with (remembering the player always has the option of downloading and installing a 3.6.10 game engine at their own risk).
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The Nova vs Nova team battle also showed real promise as a mission style and reminded me in some ways of Team Fortress. Perhaps if the Novas were put side by side allowing them to bring more guns to bare? The aim of a team would then be to destroy the enemy ship's turrets to reduce the amount of damage being inflicted on it's own capital ship.
thought of that too. Will try what happens if I give both Nova's the order to attack each other (they should start circeling each other and fireing broadsides). Problem is it was a TvT so I never was able to test it before.
If I get it right, I'll do more of that missions.
Session was really fun, although I could not see any games for some reason (neither IP's nor FUBAR's). Suprisingly, when FUBAR hosted another one later on, everything worked.
EDIT: Made changes and an additional gauntlet (for 6 players this time). Send everything to FUBAR
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It was fun :) Even that crazy insane shadow dogfight... though I think dogfight is the wrong word. It was a slugfest :p
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Guess there will be 2 versions of that dogfight now then. One with the close starting points and one with the distances pretty much doubled.
@Vid: You may want to go with waypoints instead of just attack orders. 2 caps trying to circle each other usually doesn't work too well. They tend to jump instead of turn especially in multi on the client side. Of course that may have been fixed somewhere along the line but I don't think so.
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I would ditch the Shadow mission with the close starting points. It was amusing yes but the novelty of being instantly blasted by three Shadow beams half a second after respawn wore off within a matter of... seconds? As for the Nova mission. I agree you should use paths instead of attack orders. Maybe give both ships paths where they move towards one another, passing (to give one another full broadsides) before carrying on in a straight line only to turn around a distance from the other ship and repeat the process again. If you switch Novas for Omegas you could make use of both the forward beams on the ships approach, and rear beams when the ships have passed and are moving away from one another. And also give the mission an EA Civil War flavour? With different briefings for each team?
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Multiplayer mission idea:
Babylon 5 Quiddich.
2 teams consisting of an Aurora and a Maintbot each. In each team one player is an Aurora and one is a Maintobt. The Aurora pilot is the seeker and hunts down the other team's golden snitch, their Maintbot. Meaning Maintbot pilot's have the job of running away and hiding ;7. Suddent maps with lots of nice hiding places. B5 with an explorer vessel parked outside. That kind of thing.
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Just might work since there are only 4 players total. Don't have to worry about lag from lots of large objects as much. Could even have lots of dummy maintbots as decoys. Make them all hidden (even the player) until say within a distance of 100 or something. Could set them as traitor too so they all target hostile to both sides. Have to remember this one. Going to start concentrating on some coops.
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Multiplayer mission idea:
Babylon 5 Quiddich.
2 teams consisting of an Aurora and a Maintbot each. In each team one player is an Aurora and one is a Maintobt. The Aurora pilot is the seeker and hunts down the other team's golden snitch, their Maintbot. Meaning Maintbot pilot's have the job of running away and hiding ;7. Suddent maps with lots of nice hiding places. B5 with an explorer vessel parked outside. That kind of thing.
u could add a few shadows with no weapons to act as bludgers if you want
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Any ideas on what is causing the client side secondaries glitch when the game starts? I don't remember seeing it during testing but I didn't really look for it either. There is still that weird targeting problem when engines get knocked out too.
This would be when you start a mission and you have X amount of secondaries but those secondaries have no name and appear to do nothing when you fire them? That's what I saw at my end. I really haven't got a clue what was causing it. Whenever I have played TBP multiplayer before I haven't seen it. We could do with firing up a game and trying with, and without the 1-night-only.vp I gave out last night. As it may, or may not, have something to do with the Nothing secondary.
We need to assertain if it's something I've done. If it's not then it'll be fixed as a game engine bug. But it'll be fixed as part of 3.6.10 so that puts it beyond the scope of TBP and something we have to live with (remembering the player always has the option of downloading and installing a 3.6.10 game engine at their own risk).
Well I just tested one of Vid's missions. The host computer has the one day vp on it the client doesn't and the client started with proper secondaries. One major difference here is that it's over a LAN. I will try it with that .vp to see what happens as soon as I run through the rest of the missions I need to test.
Tried 2 more tests. First host without the vp and client with. Got the bug. Then I changed missions and didn't get the bug. Seems like it's mission related but I don't know why.
Couple of more tests and EA ships seem to work just fine but every other race seems to have the problem. It's not related to multi race missions either as a Minbari only mission does it. So so far the only thing ruled out is yesterdays vp.
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if you ever need a hand testing just contact me....
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Multiplayer mission idea:
Babylon 5 Quiddich.
2 teams consisting of an Aurora and a Maintbot each. In each team one player is an Aurora and one is a Maintobt. The Aurora pilot is the seeker and hunts down the other team's golden snitch, their Maintbot. Meaning Maintbot pilot's have the job of running away and hiding . Suddent maps with lots of nice hiding places. B5 with an explorer vessel parked outside. That kind of thing.
That sounds like it could be really fun :)
Might want to have more than one Aurora on each side though, as otherwise it might just end up with those two dogfighting to keep eachother off their maintbot's back. With 2+ Auroras, it would become a strategic decision how much you want to concentrate on hunting the maintbot versus protecting your own. Well actually I guess you could just have different sizes to support anything up to 8 players, and people could pick what they prefer.
Probably won't be very hard to FRED either, all one has to do is place the big ships to lay out some terain for hiding in, probably define a box inside which the snitches have to stay (otherwise just running off into space would be too easy a way to stay hidden) or perhaps requiring them to stay within 500m of a ship or be self destructed, set it up so you get massive points for killing the snitch and only few for killing Auroras (but still some, so you can 'score' your way to a victory if you're insanely much better than the other team and can keep the match going for long enough - Just like 'real' quidditch), and that would be about it. Hell, I'm tempted to try FREDding it right now :p
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otherwise it might just end up with those two dogfighting to keep eachother off their maintbot's back. With 2+ Auroras, it would become a strategic decision how much you want to concentrate on hunting the maintbot versus protecting your own.
Good point. Two options off the top of my head to prevent it turning into a standard team on team dogfight. This is supposed to be a sport afterall.
1) Make all Auroras invincible. Only maintbots can be damaged and killed.
2) Everyone can be killed but only maintbot kills score.
Probably won't be very hard to FRED either, all one has to do is place the big ships to lay out some terain for hiding in, probably define a box inside which the snitches have to stay
Well the players have radars at the end of the day. Even making the snitches radar invisible doesn't actually make them completely invisible. They still appear on the radar as ghost dots. Which means running into deep space is probably a bad idea. Especially since the mainbots I would imagine are slower than the Auroras. Not sure how much though haven't checked. If running away becomes viable then yes you need a smaller play area as you suggest. Too far from the centre and boom you explode.
Hell, I'm tempted to try FREDding it right now :p
Me too but I'm off away for the weekend which is why I shared it. If nobody else has picked it up I will try to have a go next week but I don't mind if someone else knocks it up either. I'm not protective of my ideas.
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Any ideas on what is causing the client side secondaries glitch when the game starts? I don't remember seeing it during testing but I didn't really look for it either. There is still that weird targeting problem when engines get knocked out too.
This would be when you start a mission and you have X amount of secondaries but those secondaries have no name and appear to do nothing when you fire them? That's what I saw at my end. I really haven't got a clue what was causing it. Whenever I have played TBP multiplayer before I haven't seen it. We could do with firing up a game and trying with, and without the 1-night-only.vp I gave out last night. As it may, or may not, have something to do with the Nothing secondary.
We need to assertain if it's something I've done. If it's not then it'll be fixed as a game engine bug. But it'll be fixed as part of 3.6.10 so that puts it beyond the scope of TBP and something we have to live with (remembering the player always has the option of downloading and installing a 3.6.10 game engine at their own risk).
Well I just tested one of Vid's missions. The host computer has the one day vp on it the client doesn't and the client started with proper secondaries. One major difference here is that it's over a LAN. I will try it with that .vp to see what happens as soon as I run through the rest of the missions I need to test.
Tried 2 more tests. First host without the vp and client with. Got the bug. Then I changed missions and didn't get the bug. Seems like it's mission related but I don't know why.
Couple of more tests and EA ships seem to work just fine but every other race seems to have the problem. It's not related to multi race missions either as a Minbari only mission does it. So so far the only thing ruled out is yesterdays vp.
OK I've tried everything I can think of besides creating a mission for each ship type until it doesn't work to see if there is something in the tables. I even removed all the files from the tables directory to rule out anything with the "nothing" weapon and still the same problem. I should go with my gut feeling that for some strange reason it's going to have something to do with that maintbot. I've got stuff to do right now but when I come back I'm going to try taking that out of the table and see what happens.
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Stick an exact description of the problem in Mantis and which missions cause it and I'll look at it this weekend. I'm planning to spend the whole weekend looking at multiplayer bugs.
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Stick an exact description of the problem in Mantis and which missions cause it and I'll look at it this weekend. I'm planning to spend the whole weekend looking at multiplayer bugs.
can u fix mantis login bug , cant create an account it sends no confirmation mail , and im not alone
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Stick an exact description of the problem in Mantis and which missions cause it and I'll look at it this weekend. I'm planning to spend the whole weekend looking at multiplayer bugs.
Will do. Just trying to narrow it down a little more first.
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can u fix mantis login bug , cant create an account it sends no confirmation mail , and im not alone
I'm not in charge of Mantis so I can't fix the problem. If you post on the Mantis thread in SCP forum it should hopefully be fixed for you.
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can u fix mantis login bug , cant create an account it sends no confirmation mail , and im not alone
I'm not in charge of Mantis so I can't fix the problem. If you post on the Mantis thread in SCP forum it should hopefully be fixed for you.
thanks
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Coincidence can be a real ***** at times. I was thinking it was some sort of species bug since EA ships were fine and everyone else was screwed. Once I found the cause of the bug though I checked the weapons tables and found out that the last EA weapon is also the 128th weapon in the table. I'll bet any programmers reading that are starting to get a hunch what the cause was. If I say that instead of registering the nial's secondary as number 131 the client was looking for number -125 they'll probably be certain. :)
I suspect that this is another case of TBP's very size biting it on the arse again as with the Vorlon fighter's bug. I doubt any other multiplayer mod every had 128+ weapons so no one ever noticed the problem.
I'll post a build tomorrow as there are some other multiplayer bugs I'd like to fix and I might as well add them to the BtRL build too.
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*looking forward to play B5 Quidditch*
although we should rename it and explain the rules in the briefing to be sure
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This build (http://www.freespacefaq.com/Misc-Downloads/Builds/BtRLBuilds-MinorMultiplayerFixes.7z) should fix the weapons not showing up as well as the forced-jump problem.
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I'll give it a try tonight.
BTW: That EA explorer class ship has a ton of hiding places.
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but also tons of glitches. Better disable any turrets because it looks absolutely silly :doubt:
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OK anyone have any feedback or bugs from todays session (or any other sessions for that matter)? So far I have:
Spelling and grammar which I already knew about. That's usually the last thing I do. Of course 90% of the briefing and debriefings are from the V MT06 and MT07 or MD07 so they should be fine. Will be working on this tonight. DONE
Nova debriefing is backwards. Easy fix. DONE
Whitestar hulls which was already in the readme. Special hits in multi dogfight now there is a can of worms waiting to be opened. DONE Hull strength reduced by just over 60%
Spawn points for the heavy shadow missions. Not sure what I can do about this one.
Shadow base dogfights have self-destructing caps. Easy fix just need to flag them as unknown. Or so I thought they are flagged as unknown and I have no idea why they are self destructing.
Vorlon base missions cause crash. Happens when played over internet but I can't reproduce over LAN. Don't know what to do about this one either.
People seemed to like the Shadow dogfight asteroid field density so I will be going with that one.
Bases in the dogfight missions will be hidden. I'll keep the other versions just in case something is ever changed with the targeting. So basically I'll be renaming the a versions to the regular versions and vice versa.
Also fixed a couple of minor loadout imbalances; all are now balanced, 1 mission with a missing weapon, and a couple of dogfights with not enough of a weapon to go around.
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Major problem for me is too many variants on the same mission. I can imagine a mission having upto three. You've got the standard variant, the fixed to get around unknown targetable as hostile bug variant, and often now a CQ (close quarters) variant. Personally I think it's too much and there should be one version of each mission.
With regards to the unknown targetable as hostile bug. Does setting the ships as Neutral solve this problem? If not I can easily create a new IFF class for "Non-com". In other words non-combatant. Which will never be considered hostile be anyone.
Mission playability seems to have improved leaps and bounds since the last time. The gauntlet missions and nova encounter mission are especially fun. Spawn points still too close for my liking in many cases. Reappearing 200m from the nearest enemy and instantly being zapped is frustrating. But there seems little we can do about that.
I would like to see a complete weapons and ships free dogfight mission where you can choose any ship you like. I think this is an essential in the mission pack. Sure there is scope for everyone choosing a Vorlon fighter but you can set the ground rules in gentlemen's agreements in the chat room before hand.
Unfortunately I'm not 100% convinced these missions are completely ready after last night. This is a shame because with a couple of tweaks I will make later I believe the core is now 100% ready. Certainly the nothing weapon behaved itself last night.
The game engine is seems will never work flawlessly in multiplayer. That appears to be a feature of 3.6.9. Maybe it will improve in 3.6.10 but that's irrelevant for the purposes of TBP. It has improved substancially from where we were a few weeks ago thanks to the fine work done by Fubar, Vid, and Karajorma. But we're just going to have to bite the bullet at some point and admit that perfection is not on the cards.
Fubar, Vid, we need to get together and have a chat and select some missions we are completely happy with to include in the core. You can then override those in updated vps later, but we should provide something out of the box.
Thanks to everyone who turned up and helped us test last night.
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To be honest I tend to think you should release as a single player mod and work on 3.6.10 for a multiplayer release. But if that's not on the cards we can just work on getting 3.6.9 as stable as possible. The next thing I really want to fix is the double respawn bug. I thought I'd killed it before but it's apparently still occurring so now I'm taking it personally. :D
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This release is focused on single player. Multi player support is very much second cousin twice removed. Remember I will not be working on this when 3.6.10 is released. So having some multi player support, however much a token gesture, is a must for me. Even if we decide just to release what we have now with the B5 dogfight scenario I would be happy with that. But hopefully we can do better than that. Single player is paramount though and we must be careful our multi player aspirations don't end up trashing the single player game. :shaking:
Getting missions to actually finish did seem to be a problem last night. So if you can nail that one I guess it would be a good thing. But if it proves too much to fix, or looks like it'll take a while, or looks like it'll risk the single player experience. Then we will go with what we have.
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Did you have problems ending the matches after I left? Cause before that the code was working well, it was just that the kill/time limits were set too high or not set at all.
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There's really no need to have a metric ton of MP missions before you release. A small core of good ones, like the ones that are being tested now, is more than enough. After release, 3rd party missions will eventually start to crop up to fill out any gaps. Sure, they won't be validated, but then you can do like it was done for the FS2 missions: Pick the worthy ones, get them validated, and pack them up in a VP as a mission pack release.
Basically, as long as the core is there, the rest will follow on its own as long as people stay interested in B5 multi.
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Major problem for me is too many variants on the same mission. I can imagine a mission having upto three. You've got the standard variant, the fixed to get around unknown targetable as hostile bug variant, and often now a CQ (close quarters) variant. Personally I think it's too much and there should be one version of each mission.
There are only 2 variants of the dogfights. One targetable caps and one with the caps hidden. Since I didn't think there was a way around it I just flipped them around with the thinking that only the hidden. So right now as the missions sit anything with an a at the end isn't the release version it's just an alternative version. As far as the CQ missions are concerned They don't need to be included but I don't want to just toss them since some people found them fun.
With regards to the unknown targetable as hostile bug. Does setting the ships as Neutral solve this problem? If not I can easily create a new IFF class for "Non-com". In other words non-combatant. Which will never be considered hostile be anyone.
No neutral is what they are set to now. If you could make that class I could have them all changed to use it in about 10 minutes and do away with the a versions entirely.
Mission playability seems to have improved leaps and bounds since the last time. The gauntlet missions and nova encounter mission are especially fun. Spawn points still too close for my liking in many cases. Reappearing 200m from the nearest enemy and instantly being zapped is frustrating. But there seems little we can do about that.
I agree some are more fun then others. I don't know why the spawn points are doing what they are doing. For now the only thing I can do is make a note of it and hope there is a fix.
I would like to see a complete weapons and ships free dogfight mission where you can choose any ship you like. I think this is an essential in the mission pack. Sure there is scope for everyone choosing a Vorlon fighter but you can set the ground rules in gentlemen's agreements in the chat room before hand.
I actually have 4 levels already planned. One for light fighters only something like the lite EA, Centauri, Narn, Brikiri, and Drazi. Then a medium version with the heavier fighters, from the above classes and the light shadow ships and whatever else fits the hit point / weapon range. Heavy would be something like Minbari, Shadow, Vorlon. Then there is the Pilotable caps one with things like the SH scout, Whitestar, etc. I could just make each level allow the lighter ships as well so that if you pick the Pilotable caps you would get everything.
Unfortunately I'm not 100% convinced these missions are completely ready after last night. This is a shame because with a couple of tweaks I will make later I believe the core is now 100% ready. Certainly the nothing weapon behaved itself last night.
Nothing worked great. Only had one graphic glitch and that was during a major lag spike where I thought I was going to crash at game start. As for the missions they more testing is always better but as they sit right now they are probably lest buggy then what V released with FS2. :D Most of the bugs are engine related not mission related.
The game engine is seems will never work flawlessly in multiplayer. That appears to be a feature of 3.6.9. Maybe it will improve in 3.6.10 but that's irrelevant for the purposes of TBP. It has improved substancially from where we were a few weeks ago thanks to the fine work done by Fubar, Vid, and Karajorma. But we're just going to have to bite the bullet at some point and admit that perfection is not on the cards.
Kind of figured that all along. After all TBP multi is in it's infancy. Hopefully it will grow up some day.
Fubar, Vid, we need to get together and have a chat and select some missions we are completely happy with to include in the core. You can then override those in updated vps later, but we should provide something out of the box.
I was wondering how they would be included. Is part of the core the best way or an add on VP in the root directory? I've got an appointment in a little while but should be available later on. Unfortunately me and Vid seem to work in 12 hour shifts. Good for development bad for communication.
Thanks to everyone who turned up and helped us test last night.
Ditto. And remember you can continue to do testing on your own. It's not like FS2NetD support goes away between sessions.
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I strongly suggest sticking the multi missions in a VP with a name that starts with a letter late in the alphabet. That way if you need to override it later it's easily done.
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Did you have problems ending the matches after I left? Cause before that the code was working well, it was just that the kill/time limits were set too high or not set at all.
I think the whole issue with this was the host setting a respawn limit in a dogfight. Respawn limit does nothing in a dogfight. It has to be a time limit or I think there is a kill limit. The briefings even use the instructions V wrote which is "This exercise will end when the time limit is reached or at the host's discretion". Time limit did work.
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With regards to the unknown targetable as hostile bug. Does setting the ships as Neutral solve this problem? If not I can easily create a new IFF class for "Non-com". In other words non-combatant. Which will never be considered hostile be anyone.
In dogfight mode everyone gets converted to the traitor IFF just before the mission starts. Traitor targets everyone as hostile including other traitors (which allows you target everyone else in a dogfight without needing 12 different teams).
A non com IFF would solve the problem.
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A non com IFF would solve the problem.
Thanks for the info. I'll go ahead and create one of those.