Any projects going on right now?

[Meatsack]

Anyone working on anything where I can lend assistance?
I have more evenings and weekends free for the time being until my kids get released for summer break.

[TRON.dll]

I lack the necessary knowledge to map for most games, but if I may lend a suggestion:

I don't know if this is possible, but here's an idea for a unique TRON 2.0 DM map. You have virus enemies spawn every 30 seconds or so at a few specified spawnpoints that are inaccessible to the player. You could also have resource hogs spawn every 2 minutes or so. The actual playing area could be like a square arena, but themed with LDSO or TRON-Sector stuff to make it feel like the player is defending the said website against a massive horde of traffic when TR2N comes out.

Is that possible? If it is, I think we could coin it as a new Gamemode. "Virus Survival" or something...

In a nutshell, gameplay would be like Call of Duty World at War's "Nazi Zombies" mode or Left 4 Dead's upcoming Survival mode.

I'm kinda wondering if that's possible to do with TRON 2.0 without the source code.

[data_ghost]

I have no knowledge of such things, but i think the main problem with that is that if you die you would just spawn straight back in. In nazi zombies you have to try and stay alive because you can't just spawn back in. It really would be awesome if it could happen though...

[Daddyo]

I was working on a light cycle race map and got through Tronfaq's tutorials and was getting the hang of it, then got distracted. Here's a few random notes, but not sure if i'll ever finish, had more ideas than products:
- drag-race, no interaction between players. Maze-like course with moving obstacles, doors opening/shutting like minature golf, etc.
- Put people at finish line w/flashing like camera effect
- Digital waterfall, middle on track right side next to red slow zone on everything map. Have multiple planes in front that animate TR2n window animation, better to use animated sprite
- Add specialFx, ma3a_complile_bouncing_sphere – a cool guy pop out for winner, from ball & light.
- Upper siderails for spectator cycles. I was going to have elevated side-rails also where people can follow the race in their LC when they drive off to the side and up a ramp just for the purposes of watching the race or checking out the map when no-ones around. Observers die when you get near the finish line, and there are fast/slow zones side by side so you can stay with the race. Put normal plane at start of observer ramps, you cant turn around since 1 way collision. Put no u-turn sign on texture for it or just after it.
- Tanks resting on top of walkway that crosses over top of track. Shooting at players. Set turn rate to 200, rate of fire to 50. Maybe have them chase you, change sound? See bridge in prefab I swiped.
- Put people on track you have to dodge?
- Recognizer drop from dark center of sky, drop bombs. It will kill even when between feet… Have it stomp only one foot on grid. May need to place recognizer right under a light at design time to render lighting evenly on sides.
- Recognizer fly down/around shooting at players with cannon turret (finished)
- I figured on doing a two lane drag race by having a staging area where everyone spawns and they fight over two lane entry points down the road. When a lane is entered, it is closed off from other entries. The guy who entered is in a trapped slow zone, until the other lane is entered. Once both entered the trapped slow zones are returned to normal tracks and the doors open up to start the real race. Theoretically possible...
- Also putting people along the track taking pictures
- Red zone at start with tons of obstacles to mix up. Red zone helps with spawn lag at start from ping.

I made a rough document that's mainly notes from the video tutorials also, if anyone wants. Great for reference for me.

[xistence]

Code: Select all

protected final class Reply{
  public void intro() {
    sys.print( "wb Meatsack, long time no see..." );
  }

  public void comment () {
    String[] twoCentsOfMine = new String[2];

    twoCentsOfMine[0] = "I think something comparable was done already in the past, tho it was a DA-Map and in each arena you had several types of enemies. Wasn't it you, Meatsack, who made that map?";
    twoCentsOfMine[1] = "Spawning lots of enemies might result in bad lags, as the handling of AI-Instances in the Jupiter-engine is quite not the best i have seen so far. But maybe, as Meatsack alreadymade something in that direction, he might find a solution.";

    // debug ...
    for(String s:twoCentsOfMine){
      sys.println(s);
    }
  }
}

Reply replyTest = new Reply();
replyTest.intro();
replyTest.comment();

(yeah, i was bored...)

[TRON.dll]

I have no knowledge of such things, but i think the main problem with that is that if you die you would just spawn straight back in. In nazi zombies you have to try and stay alive because you can't just spawn back in. It really would be awesome if it could happen though...

Idea:

All players spawn in a small square room. There is a door that they can go through that will take them to the main arena so they can start fighting. However, the door closes after, say, one minute. That way, when players respawn in that room, they can't get out and help their friends, assuming the door has already shut.

The room could branch off into some spectator hallways with windows, so that you can see the progress of the other players.

The last player standing wins, maybe? You might have to run that map on a TDM server with no autobalancing, and then enforce that all players join the same team.

Xsistence:

There was the Disc Golf DA map (which I would like to see some servers run again, lol), which had a pretty good number of AI instances. I also remember there was a DM map with a solar sailer that had a pretty good number of AI instances, including Z-Lots, ICP's, and Tank Turrets. I think it has been proven that pretty good sized numbers of AI's can be included on DA and DM maps with minimal lag.

I have no experience with mapping in TRON 2.0, however, so I don't know if it's possible to make a continuous spawnpoint for enemies, make the enemies constantly spawn at that point, or make the enemies move towards the players upon spawning.

Maybe I should try to make something like that for HL2 as a Deathmatch map.. I've got a little bit of experience with Hammer..

[TronFAQ]

What Xistence said. Most of the things you guys are talking about, is possible. You just have to be careful about the number of AI you spawn.

It has to be limited, or else the server will crash. VMan's DM Black map allows an unlimited number of AI to spawn, and eventually the game goes crazy and the server crashes. I think V learned from that experience and corrected it in his later maps (like Hub).

You probably want no more than a dozen AI active at one time, maximum. Even that is pushing it.

[TRON.dll]

What Xistence said. Most of the things you guys are talking about, is possible. You just have to be careful about the number of AI you spawn.

It has to be limited, or else the server will crash. VMan's DM Black map allows an unlimited number of AI to spawn, and eventually the game goes crazy and the server crashes. I think V learned from that experience and corrected it in his later maps (like Hub).

You probably want no more than a dozen AI active at one time, maximum. Even that is pushing it.

I've never had any glitches on DM_Black, but I understand what you're saying.

Maybe, on this hypothetical "Virus Survival" map, there could be a limit of 10 NPC's at a time, if that's possible..

So, when there's 10 NPC's, a random NPC could be immediately killed off to make room for the next one. Also, every, say, 7 minutes, you could have a Seeker spawn in, kill all current NPC's beforehand as some kind of a warning, and cease the spawning of NPC's for 2-3 minutes while players fight against the seeker. That way, when the regular NPC waves start up again, the Seeker could be among one of the randomly killed NPC's when the game hits the 10 NPC limit.

How's that?

[Meatsack]

The DA map I made where AI was the main "enemy" was Hydrabattle.
Every AI derezzed spawned 2 AI on the opposing team's side of the arena for them to deal with.
This escalated the AI until one team was beaten.
I used the "Remove all bad AI" command at the end of every round to reset the field.

So yes, I believe it's possible to make a continual enemy respawner, however, I think it would be best to have an original enemy spawn point with a counter to spawn about 10 enemies at the start of the match. Then, have each enemy execute a command on death to trigger a second respawner to replace the downed AI. This will allow for unlimited enemies while managing the number of AI on the map.

As for network lag issues: moving surfaces are bad. Blink on/off surfaces like rings and blocks are ok.
Again, in Hydrabattle, I tried to make a rotating MCP cone for the observation deck. With just 2 people, even on a lan, it gave some pretty bad lag. It got worse lag when I tried it again online.

[TRON.dll]

The DA map I made where AI was the main "enemy" was Hydrabattle.
Every AI derezzed spawned 2 AI on the opposing team's side of the arena for them to deal with.
This escalated the AI until one team was beaten.
I used the "Remove all bad AI" command at the end of every round to reset the field.

So yes, I believe it's possible to make a continual enemy respawner, however, I think it would be best to have an original enemy spawn point with a counter to spawn about 10 enemies at the start of the match. Then, have each enemy execute a command on death to trigger a second respawner to replace the downed AI. This will allow for unlimited enemies while managing the number of AI on the map.

As for network lag issues: moving surfaces are bad. Blink on/off surfaces like rings and blocks are ok.
Again, in Hydrabattle, I tried to make a rotating MCP cone for the observation deck. With just 2 people, even on a lan, it gave some pretty bad lag. It got worse lag when I tried it again online.

That's a pretty good idea. I'll post a pic of what I had in mind for a playfield a little later.

Spawning enemies at the beginning of a match might work for this. My original idea for spawning consisted of this:

Every 30 seconds, a Zlot spawns
Every minute, a Resource Hog spawns
Every 3 minutes, a Data Wraith spawns
Every 4 minutes, all enemies are wiped from the map and 5 ICP's spawn, with regular enemy spawning halted for 30 seconds
Every 7 minutes, all enemies are wiped from the map and a Seeker spawns, with regular enemy spawning halted for 2 minutes

I really think someone should make some kind of experimental map for this concept, just to see how it works and if it's fun at all. Just make a square arena (like a lightcycle grid), and have some Zlot spawnpoints scattered around the corners and edges of the arena, so we can take on some Zlots that continuously spawn every 30 seconds.

Kinda curious if it'd work out or not.

[win3k]

Morning chaps

I really think someone should make some kind of experimental map for this concept, just to see how it works and if it's fun at all.

Daddyo, Zook and I did exactly this with a custom Derez map way back in 2006, so I can speak from actual experience here.

What we found was:
1. Obviously, the more AI you have, the worse it gets. We found it 3-way playable with between 10-15 concurrent AI; 20 was too many.

2. However, we found that the game became unstable. It's difficult (without access to source code, and debugging tools) to work out exactly what went wrong, but it looked suspiciously like lost data packets between the server and clients caused some kind of failure which resulted in the game taking up ever more memory, and giving increasingly bad pings to the point of crashing. This failure seems to have been triggered by alt-tabbing on one of the clients, but even that wasn't clear-cut.

I am in the process of trying some stuff out as a single-player mod that is related to the work the three of us previously undertook (in particular, a working in-game scoreboard, and a few other bits and bobs). I'll post back once I've taken it through LDSO QA.

win3k

[Daddyo]

we found that the game became unstable

A weird effect was seen when I was running the dedicated server and one of the clients. If I alt-tabbed out, sometimes I could see the memory resources begin to ramp w/o limit by the server application. I looked at window's task manager for this. Remote clients didnt have this problem, they could alt-tab all day. Maybe somehow it's just a problem w/ both client/server running on same machine, who knows. If we had a dedicated server, it'd never be noticed.

There were different versions of the test map that would have the problem, others that didn't. But it seemed more like a probability thing, the more developed the map, the more likely it would go nuts on an alt-tab.

One theory was that dropped data packets from either client/server opens the loop on object creation. I've heard that any dial up types are often unable to play derez too, but they've got that problem anyway and I think it's a different effect.

[TRON.dll]

So I've had two other ideas running around in my head for you mapmakers to pick apart.

First idea is another new type of multiplayer game mode I like to call "Obstacle Course" (creative, eh?). It would be a Disc Arena map with two identical tunnels that run alongside each other. The goal is to get to the other end and hit the switch first (or trigger an event), which derezzes all the other players in that arena. The obstacle course could have a section in the middle where there's some "shoot through but no walk through" walls dividing the two sides where the players could duel if they wish.

Second idea is a singleplayer map. Like a survival map, sort of. In simple terms, a singleplayer version of the Virus survival mode I previously mentioned. The way I came up with this is that today, I wanted to play TRON 2.0 and just kill a bunch of waves of nonstop enemies. Unfortunately, TRON 2.0 doesn't have any levels like that that I know of. I'm thinking one long continuous level that has enemies spawn in at a constant rate. The goal is to try and get a high score. Scoring could be handled through the build points system. Something like 0.0.1 build points per ICP killed, 0.0.2 build points per Z-lot killed. Obviously, the harder an enemy is to kill, the more build points you should get. There should be some doors that are locked and require permissions you can get from archive bins. In these doors we have one weapon. Essentially, you are paying for more weapons, ala Nazi Zombies. And, just like in Nazi Zombies, you kill enemies to get more energy (money). Add that with the already implemented build point upgrades feature (you can upgrade when your build number goes up one full level), and you could potentially have something more fun and deep than Nazi Zombies. Imagine, being able to share your final Build Point scores with everyone. We could even set up a high scores database.

And it would all be one singleplayer map for TRON 2.0.

[TronFAQ]

Sure, both of those types of maps are entirely possible. You just have to be careful again about spawning too many AI. It doesn't matter so much in Single Player, but in Multiplayer too many AI kills performance.

Some nice ideas there.

[zook_one]

First idea is another new type of multiplayer game mode I like to call "Obstacle Course" (creative, eh?). It would be a Disc Arena map with two identical tunnels that run alongside each other. The goal is to get to the other end and hit the switch first (or trigger an event), which derezzes all the other players in that arena. The obstacle course could have a section in the middle where there's some "shoot through but no walk through" walls dividing the two sides where the players could duel if they wish.

This a bit like Disc Golf of TRON that I made. If you haven't downloaded it any played it yet I think you and friends might enjoy it!

-Z