Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => Multiplayer => Topic started by: captain-custard on July 15, 2009, 11:51:49 am
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after spending a lot of time testing and playing through the multiplayer missions , campaigns etc , with a few oters it was mentioned that it would be a good idea to get a multiplayer restoration team together..
i know zacam is looking at some of the missions atm , but i would like to see if at all possible a team to get all the buggy missions and other missions cleaned up and up to date and if at all possible create some new ones ...
so if you are at all interested in this idea or think its a worth while idea ( as i may be talking into the void here , as this may not be neccesary or wanted)
please post below
thanks
cc
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PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE make some of the missions flow better. Not wave after wave after wave after wave after wave after wave after wave [remove by mod] of bloody fighters.
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I believe there were plans to get to this at some point.
You have to understand those missions were written for retail and that's pretty much all you had to work with to make them more difficult. People played the missions so much that everyone was playing on insane and still the missions were too easy. Coming up with innovative ways to make missions hard often met with severe bugs and crashes. Plus if you followed :v: rules for getting missions validated you had to stay with basic simple mission goals. Pretty much if you had more then 2 goals and a bonus you were considered crazy and you mission probably would never work.
Anyway if there is going to be some sort of project like this the primary goal should be to preserve the existing missions and make sure they work. If they aren't finished and a finished version can't be located finish them. This should especially hold true for any of the originally validated mission packs. Now if people want to make advanced and pretty versions then give them a new name so the originals are still playable the way they were.
Also there are some missions that are validated that should probably not be. So those should either be fixed or removed from the validation pool until they can be.
So basically we need to come up with a valid mission set at some point as well as fix not working missions so they can join that set. There will also need to be a subset of valid TvT missions for squadwar.
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i seem to be making thread after thread at the moment , based on the same premis ie getting multiplayer to be the best it can be .;;
fixing and validating all existing missions should be the primary goal ( and where possible and appropriate exteding these to 8 or 12 players)
after this working on tvt /squad war is a good idea and to create a group of fredders to work on new and more difficult and interesting multimissions ;;; to take advantage of the new stuff within 3.6.11
anyway i hope more ppl discuss this here and hopefully from this a concensus of what the plan should be to move forward
and hopefuly some volunteers
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One thing I don't really like about expanding missions from 8 to 12 in coop is that it makes them easier. Now if that is going to be done then the 12 player should be given a new name and made harder to match the original difficulty with 8 players.
I really won't have much time to work on anything else until at least fall but I'm all up for working on some especially finishing some of my own. Got a whole campaign's worth waiting to be finished.
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thanks fubar , i dont see this as lets get it finished tomorrow sort of project, i think the primary part of fixing missions and getting them validated could be done reasonably quickly ...as for extendingthe mission i agree they should get harder if we use more non ai players ....is 12 a hard coded limit or could there be more players ?
other than that i know you have quite a few old multimissions that were never validated or presented , can you link those and make them availible ?
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I think the place to start is with the original validated missions. Make sure they work and check them off the list. Hopefully the main campaign conversion will get some further refinement so we shouldn't have to worry too much about those. Then the big task of sorting through the rest of what's already been validated would be the next step. And finally testing and finishing up the ones that shouldn't have been validated and other old missions that are lying around.
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ive taken a slightly different approach atm , iam testing the already validated missions etc , but spending as much time when playing in the wednesday / saturday night session testing the unvalidated missions
the main questions are :-
does it work
what are the bugs
does it need rebalancing
is it fun / challenging
when all of these have been done , i pose the question is it worth fixing it and validating it
so little by little we are working are way through the non validated missions and there are a few that are well worth validating some with some small changes and some are good to go as they are ..
so if your interested in multiplayer , have some free time please join the wednesday and saturday games to help us get through these misions
if you have fred experiennce and want to help that would be great ( as my fredding skills arent that great ( having failed 5 times to get the fred walkthrough mission to work))
anyway if your interested in anyway id love to here your feedback ,opinions etc
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So is there anyone else interested in helping out with this? I mean really interested not just I like to play interested.
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Yep.
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You can set variables in a mission based of the playing difficulty level.
Why not implement the same thing to stage variables based on Number of Players as well?
Or is that even possible?
FSU standpoint (at least, what I am working on) are all the Multi missions found in Root_fs2.vp. Bug fixing and bringing up to the same MediaVP usage in them as the Campaign missions.
The Multi-Missions vp is a much lower priority to that, but I'm willing to assist in cosmetically bringing those up to MVP standard (Nameplates, Backgrounds, $Alt and $Callsign) standards.
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Yes I have successfully implimented dynamic difficulty using number of players. Used to be hard to do but now with the ship mission limit at 400 it gives you the option of changing out a lot of stuff.
As for the FSU stuff that's what I pretty much figured you were doing. Concentrating on the retail stuff and the coop version of the main campaign.
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I'd be interested, we'd need to sort out the missions, a portion to each tester so as not to get the same mission twice fixed two different ways. So far there's The E and Andi, who else?
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I'm happy to help FRED-wise. Are you lead here Custard? If you want me to test missions, it's going to have to be before 6am GMT. But if you test missions as a team, come up with some criticisms and improvements, then I'll be happy to fix them up in FRED. Hell, you can fix up a lot of these recurring waves without even playing it and just by looking at it in FRED. But yeah, I'm happy to help here.
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thanks dilmah and cole , hopefully in a few days things will be a little more organised with an action plan as such .......i will post here and pm you
once again thanks
cc
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Player count-dependent difficulty would be AWESOMESAUCE.
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ok i spent today looking at the multi missions and thinking about this a lot
id really like to go ahead with this and start fairly soon, so if you are interested and want to be apart of this please say so , so far it looks like we have the support of
The E
Dilmah
Cole
Fubar
if im missing any one please shout
Any way i will talk to fubar tonight when he comes on line and hopefully start the process of getting this going...
if you have any problems with me being apart of this please say so as my main role will be testing and motivating other than that i will try my best to learn a little more FRED during this process but wont promise anything
anyway thanks
cc
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You have my verbal support, I don't know how much assistance I can offer though other than being a liaison. Multi is important to me though, in a general sense.
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What VP file are the multi missions located in?
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I have some FRED knowledge, I figure looking at how other missions are made and modifying them will give me a lot of insight into design and balance.
multi-missions.vp
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they are in the multimission.vp and also they are in the mvps assets/data/missions
hope that helps
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they are in the multimission.vp and also they are in the mvps assets/data/missions
hope that helps
Thanks. I may be able to help in the future, but I'm recovering from a bad case of the flu :ick: and am busy with several other projects plus RL. If I manage the time though, then I'll let you know. :)
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I'll do whatever I can to help this one!
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Hmmmmm. I strongly advise testing with 3.6.11 as well as 3.6.10. Remember that SEXPs have been fixed to work in multiplayer in 3.6.11 which may result in differences from the same mission in 3.6.10.
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So how much of the multiplayer is broken and what works? Is it just the coop missions?
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There's not much "Broken", it's just that some of the missions are little fun, have annoying bugs and have skewed difficulty, among other things.
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Right. So, we now have a team of people working on finding and correcting the issues we have been seeing with the multiplayer missions. If you find any, please post about them here so that we can take a look at them. This includes things like events not firing, or outright crashes. When reporting these errors, please tell us what mission you were playing (obviously) and whether or not you were using a standalone server at the time. Thank you all.
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Important things to help with diagnosis;
Time in mission.
Events before crash (read; did anything unusual happen?)
Your Multi.log is useful too (it's in freespace\data).
This will help us track down if it's a multi/mission problem that caused your crash.
The more detail you can provide the better chances we have of finding it.