[IPAndrews]

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.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

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.

[captain-custard]

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 .........


 

[maje]

Loved it myself, even if I did get my butt kicked  .  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.

[IPAndrews]

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.

[karajorma]

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.

[captain-custard]

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

[IPAndrews]

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).

[Vidmaster]

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

[Shade]

It was fun Even that crazy insane shadow dogfight... though I think dogfight is the wrong word. It was a slugfest

[FUBAR-BDHR]

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.

[IPAndrews]

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?

[IPAndrews]

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.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

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. 

[captain-custard]

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.

u could add a few shadows with no weapons to act as bludgers if you want

[FUBAR-BDHR]

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. 

[captain-custard]

if you ever need a hand testing just contact me....

[Shade]

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

[IPAndrews]

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

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.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

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.