Puh, yesterday I just discovered how to access the router that is used in our home. Then I really fought with myself, but the curious side in me thought "let's try to open some ports, so that I can host coop-servers for Loki, Splinter Cell and UT3".
I just pressed the button to open the first port, when the router immediately threw me out of my WLAN and didn't want to let me get back in.

So I walked with lowered head to the other residents of my home and told them that I build major crap. And then we spent night and day from yesterday till now to set up a new connection and to find out what went wrong.
Nobody wanted to listen to me, but in the end I found out that my computer never like WPA2 (the other person here stated that it was enabled all the time) and with WPA-PSK it was just a matter of time to find the other necessary properties and so I'm glad to be back online.

You really should be grateful for every second with Internet because you see it's true value only when it's suddenly missing.
I need to frag some guys now to celebrate my return after a day of distressful absence.


And with the knowledge of the web on my side, I hope that I can soon finish the UltimateONSTools-V2, which have some really nice additions (and changes) to the features of the first release.

Some teasers:
-RandomEventGate will only let an event pass by a certain chance, so you shouldn't be too sure that your team will always get a tank when it's in trouble.

-ScoreContainer will store a score for each team. Points can be added to a team's score by triggering a ScoreAdd. Triggering a ScoreSubtract will trigger another Event and subtract the score, if the team's score doesn't fall below 0 then. Notice something? This can be used as a simple resource-system in ONS, allowing a team to "buy" their vehicles and more things…

-UltimateVehicleFactory got some improvements, you can now set for each Vehicle individually whether it should be SpawnProtected (can not be damage before it has been possesed), unlocked on entering (so you could exit a tank to capture a node; the enemy could only attack the tank, but not steal it) and eject the driver when it gets destroyed instead of killing him.
And you can also change the default health of a Vehicle, to make it more suitable in compare to other Vehicles on that map.

A feature that is still planned to be done in this version, although I am not sure if I can make it, is to display a Vehicle constantly on the RadarMap. This costs much performance (the performance cost is determined by #Players * #TrackedVehicles; so in worst case you would increase the load by 32+ players per Vehicle), so it should be only used for the real important ones.
But it's nice in UT3 to always know where the big and dangerous Levi is (because it's more like the Kraken than the default UT2k4-Levi).


And some bugfixes on the old things. There weren't really bugs, but some thing were not as functional as I expected them to be and that is fixed now.

What do you see in this picture?

Six blue numbers.

Six blue numbers that could also be red (only visible to their team), visible together with the HUD (because they are a custom HUDOverlay), placed somewhere else in the player's HUD, contain additional text and the most important: They display the team's score (in terms of money!)

And guess what, it's possible to add money to that account for holding nodes (or whatever the mapper rewards) and to remove money in order to buy things. It's a community account, so the team needs to work together somehow. Spent money for many small vehicles or wait until you can get the big ones?
Or don't spent it for vehicles but for something even bigger and more helpful, but even more expensive?

Sounds good =)

My biggest worry is, that some stupid people could try sabotaging their team by just buying as buying as many stuff as possible without using it, maybe I'll put a time limit in for that so that a player can only buy things all 20 seconds or something like that

i have some doubts to be honest.... who decides which player has the "right" to buy the big things and use it? where is it placed? base? in front of the player who bought it? maybe even someone that didnt help to get the score/money at all?

wouldn't it be better to have a personal money-account so that you can afford nice things (DoubleDamage, JumpBoots, EMP-Mines, SuperShock or maybe even vehicles) because you accomplished stuff? like building nodes, destroying enemy ones blah blah blah... u know the deal...

i just don't see how there could be a "fair" buy-action when people already fight over respawning vehicles....



hence all this stuff would slow down the server performance even money...

don't get me wrong i like the idea... i just don't see any way this can get implemented in techcom in a way the majority would appreciate it...

Don't worry, I won't put this randomly in an ONS map. There is a special map type that hasn't been introduced into ONS yet because it's mechanics wouldn't have worked there, but this thing can change that now.

I know that it's bad to have a shared account, but having individual accounts wouldn't be bad on the other hand too. Besides that it would really impacts the server, while shouldn't do that much, you could also hardly balance the "value" of a player to his team. If someone didn't help taking a node but doing something else useful, like stopping the incoming tank a few miles away or defending the base in a turret, then he should get rewarded too.
But I don't want to make this a simple "get resources for kills"-thing, it should increase the importance of nodes as source for supplies.

I won't make vehicles so expensive that they could ruin the main purpose of this resources (yeah, there is something, but I'll keep that as a surprise - also because I don't know if I can do that right away), it was just a thought of a tactical option.
And maybe you can once get into a decent team that says "let's save for the Levi". It's all about the players…

Don't take "buy" like having a menu to choose something. It's more like triggering something that will trigger something else when the team has enough resources to pay this action.
You could also "buy" yourself a ride across a bridge, although that doesn't make much sense.

I have no pics for evidence, but I think I got the realtime-radar working now. At least in theory, didn't test yet. I am afraid of clicking on the Compile-button just to get a shitload of errors because I didn't compile anymore for a long time now.


However, the next thing in my mind is a certain Trigger to be placed by mappers. It comes with a Whitelist and a Blacklist, so the mapper can set the Trigger to work only for certain players (or players that have a certain thing in their name).
I know that this sounds pretty unfair, but it's not supposed to be used to give certain players an advantage over others, more for the purpose to allow trusted players (from the mapper's view, so probably only the mapper himself ) to trigger special events in the map.
For example could I give Foibos the power to trigger a firework on New Years Eve, or to give me and him the ability to enable an additional set of VehicleFactories for BOTH teams if we think that this round has the right skilled players for such a match. Or doing the opposite and making it a NV-round.

It's basically a button for admins to change some settings of the map ingame and they are supposed to be used only by trusted people.
This also works well for members of a certain clan, so if the Titans would have their own mapper, then he could allow everyone with the .T32-tag to trigger something special.



Another thing from which I hope that it's doable is the UltimatePlayerStart, which allows to modify a player's health that joins at it's location and to equip him with the weapons from the nearest locker.

again this sound really exciting and interesting!!! especially with this trigger stuff... but keep in mind that not the NAME is distinctive here, otherwise people just change their names to "Foibos" or something with .T32 or the mappers name so they can trigger stuff, ya know? ^^
i'm just saying =)

anyways, i am really looking forward to it! =)