pegasus_ wrote:
[…]

Peg, I think I love you…


I am also against omnifying maps and Battlefront was the only exception because I wanted to make once a map with weapons that are just impressive.

The warp-zones ("portals") are very tricky and get even more bugs in UT2004 than in UT99, so that might be a reason why many mappers haven't included them yet.
Also a problem with them is, that vehicles can't use them as also no instant-hit-weapons can fire through them.
They work only with projectiles, so that they can set the projectiles coordinates on the OUT-portal depending on the angle and position on which they entered the IN-portal.

But believe me, I already played with the thought to use them anyways, but only with restrictions to the weapons and in a room where vehicles can't go.
You can do a lot with them if used correctly. Endless hamster-wheels or even a room, where you can achieve by using the warp-zones that players can walk on the floor and on the ceiling.
If you would only allow weapons like Flak, Bio and Rocketlauncher, or the prim. fire of the link-gun or the alt. fire of the Shockrifle, then it should be possible to have good fights this way.

It's not easy to do, but it's possible.



Making totally new vehicles (or even modding the existing ones) is a huge work and requires many skill in UnrealScript, but I don't think that there are so many people left who would code new vehicles today.

Confexia doesn't work for me in the Beta2-version.

When it was voted on the server and the game tried to load it up, I got this eror again:

[img][IMG]http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/7667/confexiaerror.jpg[/IMG][/img]


It probably doesn't affect all players, but if it's about me, then I'd prefer to keep the Beta 1 for now.


EDIT:
May I ask you, Destroyer, if you have added more than the radarmap in Beta2?

If you added custom vehicles for example, from where did you get the files? From our server, or from a download-source?
Maybe these files are different from the ones we have and so this result in a version-mismatch if you have the files installed on your harddrive like me…


EDIT2:
Could fix the problem by taking the texture-package from the Beta1, the Beta2-rar is corrupted.

http://www.filefront.com/14193059/ONS-Confexia-beta3.rar

Uploaded beta 3, if the texture file is still a problem, just use the one from beta 1.

2 more nodes, changed linksetup, and other stuff.

Beta 4, minor changes, improved access to a few areas, changed fog distance, and linksetup.

http://www.filefront.com/14299771/ONS-Confexia-beta4.rar

Bugfix for that blocking volume, with that wall.

http://www.filefront.com/14317843/ONS-Confexia-beta5.rar

Some things about which I have to complain:

This BlockingVolume:
http://i32.tinypic.com/25f7mfb.jpg
Is it necessary? It makes the players float and you can even get stuck there with a scorpion. Maybe making it smaller would be enough.


CullDistance:
http://i30.tinypic.com/11rvm6u.jpg
These small decorative objects has just a too small value for the culling distance. They pop up too late and disappear too early in relation to the maximum viewdistance. That looks ugly and might be irritating.


FogDistance:
http://i30.tinypic.com/hvb85c.jpg
The new fog-distance is poison for the performance. Even on my high-end machine are the frames dropping down to around 30 fps, what is too less for UT and when it comes to fights, then they may shrink even more.
It's also harder for the server to handle, if the players see each other earlier. That results in the need of serving more coordinates to the players about the other peoples position.
The maximum is too much, 10000 should be enough, or even less.
On the other hand you have a huge gap to the minimum distance.
So if a player plays on mimimum distance against someone with maximum distance, then he has a big disadvantage. Also it is nearly impossible to aim in the SPMA with the minimum distance.
7500 is a good value for the minimum, I tested that yesterday by setting my distance to 0.50. It let you see enough to play and keeps the FPS high. Also 2500 is a nice gap to give not a too big advantage to players with more modern hardware.
You could also set the fogStart to 1000 to have a bit more clear view right infront of you. Higher values would result in a sharper plopping up of objects in the distance.

Also I noticed, that you set the minimum fog-distance only in the one ZoneInfo shown, which leads to the problem, that the distance inside buildings is always on the max, no matter what settings the players use.
Inside buildings it's especially bad, as you see only a few part of the things, that are actually rendered far away.
Set them to the same value as the outside ZoneInfo, maybe you can even reduce it by 1000 or 500 (not too much, you would see a difference when walking from inside to outside else).

I also have something to complain about: couldn't you have made those urls into hyperlinks so ppl could see the pics easier?

crusha_k_rool wrote:
[...]It's also harder for the server to handle, if the players see each other earlier. That results in the need of serving more coordinates to the players about the other peoples position.[...]Heh, yeah, I wish that consideration applied to all maps when being evaluated for inclusion in the server's roster (Spambox anyone?).

Uhm, isn't it hyperlinked already?
For me it looks like this:
[img=http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/8966/hyperlink.th.jpg]

Or did you mean with IMG-tag?

The imagehoster I used didn't offer thumbnail-previews, using the IMG-tag on the directlinks would make them too big for the forum and my try to make the thumbnail-view by myself with mix of URL and IMG resulted in the problem that the image-link was covering the buttons of the forum, so I couldn't edit it anymore and had to ask Foibos to delete my post. This one was the second try and so I was too afraid of using IMG or URL again.

SPAMBOX is quite friendly in using the server-resources, as the most often used weapon there is the rocket-launcher. It creates only a single object per shot about which the server has to care and that object destroys itself very fast again (before it does that, it tells the object it hits "this might hurt you" and spawns the smoke-effect", then it destroys itself).

It's actually more critical in Bridge of Fate, where the most often used weapons are flak cannon and linkgun.
Both spawn many, many projectiles in a short time, so this might need even more servercapacity than all players on one place.


But anyways you get the idea, that it's much easier for the server, if those things far away are occluded by the fog earlier, so that the server doesn't need to send the players informations about what's happening over there.

crusha_k_rool wrote:
Uhm, isn't it hyperlinked already?
For me it looks like this:
[img=http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/8966/hyperlink.th.jpg]

Or did you mean with IMG-tag?[...]Nah, I was implying you use the [url] tag, since without it they're just plaintext urls. Nothing to do with thumbnails, full size pics or anything.


crusha_k_rool wrote:
[...]SPAMBOX is quite friendly in using the server-resources, as the most often used weapon there is the rocket-launcher. It creates only a single object per shot about which the server has to care and that object destroys itself very fast again (before it does that, it tells the object it hits "this might hurt you" and spawns the smoke-effect", then it destroys itself).[...]Yes, I know about the rockets' spawned entities and dam type sequence of events too, certainly less strain on the server than the multiple flak shards indeed. Still, spambox IS a map where all 32 players exist within anyone's "bubble" of need-to-know location info, therefore that must amount to bigger/more packets from the server, so it's not a free ride by any means. I don't have any net transmission data from the server to back up this claim, but I'm very confident it's true.


crusha_k_rool wrote:
[...]But anyways you get the idea, that it's much easier for the server, if those things far away are occluded by the fog earlier, so that the server doesn't need to send the players informations about what's happening over there.Yes, that has always been a very important truth in videogames' resource management, both for visual calc matters, as well as for netcode planning.

PS: German comma usage in english, lulz :p.

pegasus_ wrote:


PS: German comma usage in english, lulz :p.

Yeah, damn… I am never sure where to place them and where not in english. In german it's no problem for me (though for other Germans sometimes), but I am so unsure about the correct placement here.

Please tell me where they shouldn't have been, or otherwise I should start using ALT 0 1 3 3 more often…