[Cetanu]

I sometimes feel like the messenger who gets blamed for a bad message... does that count? So far nothing bruised my ego but I am surprized what some read between my lines

I simply care for this game - like most HLP users - and I want maximum of fun for everyone: and since not to many multiplayer pilots post here, I feel the need to post in their name

...and if I see my once fluidly working missions defunctioned by something ment as improvement I will post that too, because I know it will also defunction other missions from other Fredders, some of them no longer around to correct or update their missions.

Cheers!

[Moonsword]

Cetanu, you're not, at least not to me.  Part of this was response to another poster (*glances at Svizel*) who was rather offensive, and partially because I was rather... annoyed that you didn't read the edited version and missed Trivial Psychic's post.  I'm not bothered because you reported a bug.  I've reported the things myself occaisonally.

If the Pegasus is not behaving correctly in multiplayer, while the table entries are right, that's a problem, and should be fixed.  And they are right, the entry for it's right over the Score entry in the table.  Again, my apologies for missing that the first time.

And I can definitely understand your final point and sympathize with it.

I think it was just a combination of... misinterpratations from what was meant on both sides of this one.  My apolgies for my part of it.

[Svizel]

It's my turn to appology as well. I kinda got really hot-headed after you'r first post and i'm sorry.

As for game ballance, truth is that all multiplayer pilots who just came from vanilla FS2 on SCP feels the diferences and most of our old thousand times played missions are buggy and some not even working. All the stuff like stronger shock waves and hits from ship-to-ship crashes are real blows to game ballance in most of old missions and completly changes balance in team vs team missions.

Well... i'll be away for next 2 weeks so i won't be able to contribute on this discussion more to make detail reports for all those issues etc but i'm sure you will somehow work it out with Cet. He's the best mission designer we even had on multiplayer atfer all so he knows the game best of us.

[Moonsword]

Something tells me that I'll be asking him some questions, then.

And yeah, some of those shockwaves are really, really ugly.

[Kosh]

Sort of on topic, but not:

One AI behavior I have noticed that is EXTREMELY irritating is its use of Trebuchets against science vessels, AWACS, and other lightly armored ships. It's irritating because it makes them almost impossible to defend. When I treid replaying Warzone in FSO, the first mission was practicly impossible to beat because of that.


EDIT: Crap, Centanu beat me to it and I didn't see it. But seriously, does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this "little" issue?


But except for that problem, I like enhancements that make the game more challenging. This way I won't have the "easy is way too easy, but medium is almost impossible" problem.

[karajorma]

Open the mission in wordpad and search and replace Trebuchet with something else

[Cetanu]

This is exactly the Trebuchets problem I was talking about some posts earlier - I just noticed it in multiplayer first, but its clear that cover missions in singelplayer are troubled with it too...

hehe @kara

[StratComm]

But like I have said before, sometimes you want it.  I really think you could just delete them from the secondary bank in a mission file (not replace) and it should work just like it did.

[Cetanu]

Yes, but if one wants it now that would make the mission an after-the-SCP version, no? I for sure don't want or need it for all the others - if there has to be anything edited, then best any new mission

In the last 5 years there was no necessity to win the standard FS2 singleplayer campaign with AI in Alpha or Beta using Trebs... neither for hostiles to use them against your ships... we learned here that some didn't even notice that Trebs didn't get used by AI

So maybe - Trebs not actively used by AI - should be seen as a feature and not as a bug. Maybe Volition figured out the devasting results Trebuchets caused by AI and disabled them?

Alpha1 doesn't even have a name, let him have player-only Trebs in old missions at least...

[kv1at3485]

Is there a sexp in FRED2_Open saying something like:

AI will not use [weapon type] on [ships in mission].

I like the ability of the AI to use Trebuchets, it would make defending warships a bit more challenging.  But as pointed out above, it could be a bit overwhelming if the AI starts lobbing Trebuchets at Faustus' and other slow and low hitpoint objects.

[phreak]

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,19985.0.html

about half way down or so, but i have the forums to show 50 posts/page

[StratComm]

Phreak, just how hard would it be to have all of the AI changes turn off from a mission flag?  And I mean everything, back to the hapless FS2 AI.  Seems to me that it would kill about 10 birds with one stone and still be easy to leave on.

[phreak]

depends on how much we've changed

it has to be a mission flag though.

use new AI
use old AI

your choice

edit:
there have been 66 changes to AI.cpp which covers fighter AI.
here are some critical changes:

-ships intelligently choose primaries. for example they won't fire maxims at a shielded ship or a circe at an unshielded ship.  this will up refire rate as well

-destroyed fighterbays won't launch fighters

-huge weapons will not shoot at bombs.  we were getting complaints of people getting killed when they shoot a stiletto and they get killed by a anti-capital beam about a second later.

-bomber+ fix.

-if a missile shoots more than twice a second (IIRC) the AI will shoot as many as possible if a hostile is in range and in view.

-10% damage limit not a hard limit anymore

-turrets won't shoot cargo

-AI won't use guided missiles on asteroids

[StratComm]

Use old AI, it needs to be retroactive about 50% of the time.  And a mission flag is actually advantageous; it can be batched quite simply to take care of balance-sensitive missions never intended for the new AI.

EDIT: Also, as these things were put in as bugfixes to the main campaign, I think we should treat them as such.  A "use-new" flag would in some ways make more sense, but because it is only messing with mission balance selectively it seems that missions specifically exhibiting skewed balance could have the flag added.  With a "use new AI" flag you'd need to add it to every mission, play test them all, and see what was broken and remove the flag where necessary; else you lose the AI bugfixing that was done to be compatable, at least in part, with the stock campaign.

[Tepa]

phreak i gotta say that few of those AI chances dont work so good
-ships intelligently choose primaries. for example they won't fire maxims at a shielded ship or a circe at an unshielded ship. this will up refire rate as well..this is 1 AIs do bound a living **** outta u with maxims even MAX shields on
-------------------
2nd thing which i hate is this kinda looses 1 valuable tactic i used plenty sacrificin 1 bank for stilettos and draw cap's beam fire on em so bombers can do they stuff oh yeah and i been gettin vaporized by BFreds doing that in SP that sucks cuz no respawns but in multi thats was tactical edge spam 13 still from boa with subsystem targettin off does make em highly powerfull "even mostpowerfull cap is sittin duck with no mainbeams"

-huge weapons will not shoot at bombs. we were getting complaints of people getting killed when they shoot a stiletto and they get killed by a anti-capital beam about a second later.
--------------------------------------
but if u can get this -AI old -AI new tag thing work so it would be needed to add only in mission file that would be great but also then we loose all the good new parts in the AI code they tended to be nonchallengin,retarted time to time on multi while enemy AIs were 150%killin machines specially in games i hosted and thats something i still dont and never did understanded why my games were extra insane while other host it was walkin in park
and i did played quite on PXO so i know what i talk about
Cmdore. DW-Tepanator, 782,084, 44,199, 3,252, 28.14.59.

[CP5670]

The thing with the trebuchets and tempests is basically a bug, but some missions are designed for the AIs to shoot these weapons (I remember spending a lot of time trying to get the AIs to do this somehow, back in the pre-SCP days) while others were made assuming that the AI won't be firing that stuff. I have some missions that rely on the computer ships shooting these things so I would definitely want to keep the new code in, but it's a big problem to have old missions screwing up like that. Same goes for the beams counting towards kills, although this isn't as big of a deal.

I think it would have been a good idea to go through the missions individually and fix these little things if only the official missions were the problem but I bet there are also many fanmade missions designed for 1.2 that would suffer from this and going through all those would take far more work, so the mission flag looks like a good option.

The beam affecting shields thing  is another similar issue. I still think that this should not be a command line but rather a mission or table flag; some missions are simply designed for the old system and others for the new one. Changing that sort of thing for any mission would frequently throw off game balance and would also obviously cause problems in multiplayer.

CP u tryed VA2 with 8 pegasi
just re verified that flyed nicely formed up and didnt took long until thoths started to fire aspectlock missiles and yes they are able to pick stealth only IF u flyed certain cone area tro theyr nose and close enough to smell pilot inside or firing weapons near em but still they were never able to lock&fire harpoons,torns or start trackin ya from over 2k range

hehe, it's been a long time since I played that. Most people used to send the AIs home immediately at the start of any TvT mission, so I never really saw what they did in that mission.

[Tepa]

CP that awacs2 was only a test to see theyr beheaviour in TvT
cant fly tvt alone u know or i can but too lazy mess with lan

[DW-Suzanna]

and I would just like to say I am using the 01082004 build now and apart from the few probs mentioned above, for the most part its fine...and returning to windows is normal now instead of the" slow motion, delayed reaction," we had previously.  So welldone all of you, and thanks for all ur efforts....When are more of you SCP , HLP people going to come fly with us in multi ?!!

Cya in space ))

[Goober5000]

Originally posted by PhReAk
-bomber+ fix.

So that's why the Port missions suddenly got so much harder.

Okay, there have been enough compatibility changes that this needs to be revisited.  Instead of a mission flag, I suggest a command-line: use-old-ai or use-new-ai or something like that.  Or, we could set up new AI entries in ai.tbl.  We'll bring this up in the next SCP developer meeting.

[Inquisitor]

There is also probably a call for some compile time flags for various things. Some things that work excellently in single player, don;t in ultiplayer.

Any one exe can't be everything to everyone. It's not possible. There are competing issues here. There's a reason some games distribute 2 exes one for single, one for multi. It's possible we'll have to maintain more than one build (but only one code base). I have a problem with having too many command line arguments, as well, it becomes difficult to manage, so we might want to consider a configuration file to help with that instead of a bunch of -option stuff.

We should discuss this and the technical implications of these and various approaches very very soon.

As for "shooting the messenger" well, that's human nature. Try not to take it personally and we forum moderators will try to keep it to a dull roar. My apoogies ofr being away most of the weekend and missing these fireworks. Glad to see cooler heads prevailed (it seems).

Cet: I would also ask that you make an effort to use mantis. If you do;t, someoen else will have to type those bugs in, and that someone might be better used to actually fix the bug (please note the smiley)