GC6

To elaborate a touch.. It's got nothing to do with the game clients themselves , Axe, that error is coming from (I'm assuming) SSME 8.1? when you try to open a newer map... SSME can't read the new tiles (as Cheese correctly pointed out) so you get that error. Any game client can see either tile set type ; I run multiple types on my own home server : Ie; I have maps completely edited in SSME and maps completely edited with Drake.. ...and there are no visible differences in game. As well, Most of what you see graphics wise in zones are driven by the .lvz files. Eg:, the writing @ A1 in Chaos, and the Leader board below wobits house are .lvz entities, and not part of the tileset. Drake is really nice the more I use it.. it does some cool things. But, if you fancy using SSME and just want to basically hack things up, it will still work, you just cant really use it again in SSME if you open said map in Drakes and save it.

I now also have a 'More eviler' version. No corner safes, (Only safes @ G8, M9, and J12) and only one gate on the whole map.. now tucked nicely into J12... Even perma-walled the gates at center around the diagonal tube too.. (and created a pass-through or two.) wheee.....

The only corner safe without a gate is the D4 (Top Left) safe zone. Gates have been added to the other perimeter safe zones. The gates are all adjacent to the the safe tiles, Like the Spiral was before it. It's kinda hard to see them on this screenshot - but they are there. They may not end up making the final final cut though, it depends on how they are received by players and what Hallu thinks of them and of course, what their actual affect is on game play is if any. Ie: it may make it easy to slip chasers - but then again, given that all these are at pinch points on the map, if they get to one, I'd say 'that says more about ones ability to finish a kill than the targets lack of skills for running to such a safe zone in order to use the warp gates to avoid chasers.' Either way, the chasers 'should' return towards center, instead of setting up shop and stalking, and hopefully, those that park in the safes use the gate to return to the action (warping them into center were hopefully more action is) instead of taking long flights to get back in... even even if they don't, the map is so much smaller now, again, they're going to run out of room faster anyway. I remember flying around looking for people last night a few times - and thinking "I'd be at the edge of my map already" - instead I still can't see the edge, and have no idea if someone is even down here (usually no - lol) Either way.. I think the theory is sound, but practice and theory are always two different things. I tried to make it so the flow leads back to center and make it easier to filter back through center.. I hope it works..

Final map has been posted everyone : To see it ; look here... (also downloadable!) http://www.subspace.co/topic/27421-new-map-bdhardar-v2/ And 'Thank You' for the support! I re-posted a thread for it, so all discussion could now center around that map - and not be lost under my other projects listed here.

Download link : https://www.dropbox.com/s/4ltcn76j85ruzrp/bdhadar-v2.zip Screen shot: http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j242/sokuraama/MISC/bdhadarv2.jpg Stats, theory craft, and whatnot.. Map now runs from Coord Box D4 diagonal to P16 and is perfectly square as far as the game engine cares. In some places this has removed 11/2 to 2 full 'coordinate boxes' in size from the perimeter of the current map. The core elements comprising the center of the map have been retained, unedited for structure, but with some minor visual elements added in for flavor, consistent with current visual themes already on the map. Where edits were made, and I chose to create new structure arrangements ; it was largely because the old structure was cut in such a way that it broke it's function entirely, and was so drastically different, that players would need to 'relearn' it anyway, and, with perilous dead ends and corners left in many of them, I felt it was better to opt for something entirely different, but somewhat familiar to those that regularly play both CZ and 4v4. Most added bits are pulled from either the Original Dev's Apprentice Map, or the common 4v4 map (AKA: Alpha-Bits.... lulz). New Original Bits : D4 safe zone. O4 safe zone. (w/ warp gates) Pass through structure at D12. Famous bits making a return, or debut: The old B-17 Safe Zone returns @ E-16 (with warp gate) (lower left corner) Alpha-Bit T-20 Makes its CZ Debut @ P-16 (with warp gate) This is pretty much it... pull it down, test it out... let me know if you find anything out of place, or otherwise. Thanks! All credit to those that made this map, and bits, before me. Nearly everything used was pulled from existing maps in the current zone. Tileset is the same as the current map. I seek no 'credit' for it.. If you like it , and use it, or even if we don't, the honor was to contribute it. Thank You.

Change dynamic freqs to be either 2 or 4 players pending the amount of players in the zone. Freq size perma-capped at 4. No more freq size of 1 1 to 6 players : freq size = 2 7+ players : freq size = 4 The opinions expressed below are mine and mine alone.. they are meant to outline my thoughts on the issue, and encourage discussion, not serve as an ultimatum or expectation. I'd be curious to see if something like this would generate more play in pub. From some recent observations I get the impression that some people that go to 2v2 or sit in spec for 4v4 (waiting to be picked - but seemingly never are) might hang out in pub if the freq sizes were more 'team oriented' and or, static enough that you know right off the bat what you have to work with. As well, a hope would be that when there are already 4 players, and a 5th joins, this would encourage a 6th to join. Instead of being 2v1v1 or 2v2v1v1 go immediately to 2v2 or 2v2v2. The same with the larger freq size.. We hit 7 players, and they all team up, an arriving player sees an open spot on a team of 3 fighting a team of 4 - they join - because they know the odds are better for a good time, than being stuck on a freq of 1 against more powerful teams formed at a population spike that has since subsided. I also feel that at the very least, the current settings, along with the fluctuating population leave the zone languishing in the '1 per freq' mode far too often.. leading to instances where one freq will outnumber another, but two more players won't increase the freq size at all, they'll still be alone against a more powerful teams. What are *Your* thoughts about Freq size? ...I'd like to hear them! Thanks for participating!

turned this out tonight... let me know what you think.. (it is the same size in cordinate area as my map above - and roughly the same size of the current league map) I tried to incorporate some placement of different objects to fill areas that were left gutted by reduction of the map area, as well as some new safe zones to balance out the map a touch more.. http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j242/sokuraama/MISC/SoKBDHadar.jpg In light of this, and other feedback (adn thinking about it more) I might shelf my earlier project... I hope to have this ready for the next reset..

Dislodge the corn cob from your asses, log in, hit esc+ 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, and go fly... HELP THE GAME , don't sit around and fucking TALK about what it needs... GIVE it what it needs... ....YOU.

Thanks BB! Next steps: Removing and re-placing/spacing all the objects.. (too many X'es and other objects about etc) Cleaning up areas and adjusting gaps etc ; to be more consistent. Mini-me treatment for Wobits Haus... Then tilesets and tiling... which, I'll have to get some feedback on tilesets... because I'm quite conflicted on it atm... My tiles are old school, and 'dark' - the new CZ tiles though, a little too bright, too disruptive for my taste.. but I'm not really a huge graphics type so hand creating a new tileset prolly won't happen ..but lets cross that wormhole when we come to it..

Lone Outlaw ; nothing you have said thus far justifies a dos attack on a 20 year old online pew pew game.. (I get that we are likely 'collateral damage' here, but you raise a good point) I refuse to think that we should suffer egotist, and abusive players simply because they might turn out to be "more powerful at the intertubes than we're able to deal with" ... The rule is ; Don't be a dick. Zone ops have every right to ban abusive people, or people that cause disruption via their actions. This just so happens to include cheating but is not expressly limited to it. I for one am tired of the 'come lately' or 'part timers' that can't play in a zone for 30 seconds before they start trashing it, or its players that are just playing. Or people that appear to have no other life than being in zone 24/7 and act like everyone should kiss their ass and take a knee for their patronage, and they abuse others through it. Those aren't whitehats, redhats, or blackhats, they're asshats... and they can leave if they don't like it.. ...LIKE AN ADULT... Not 'be a child' and have to ruin it for everyone.

We spent sooooooo much time worried that a few good players with stocked ships would make it impossible as a new ship to do anything - instead we sorta have the opposite... newly spawned ships 'have' to be capable, and they are - so much so they don't really need to green (most the time) at all. The Risk/Reward is out of skew.

The number of people left in this game that rather sit in spec 24/7 then dare play a game type outside their comfort zone astounds me... It's pretty sad actually.. TW has created so many players ill equipped to play any zone other than TW. The classic SVS players are the only ones I saw that really jumped in the zone and learn the games and actually play... I figured we get some TW players in Omega since it's mostly one-shot-kill - but even that wasn't enough I guess.. GG.

For them? ...maybe. no risk, ultimate rewards, and spend little to no time actually playing.. just show up between speccing pracs, cycle wzl till rockets and pummel the F3 key. People that stick around, play for rating and ave dare not engage or ruin their work for the 15 minutes these people will be rubbing off their F3 keys like their tiny peesticks. To be honest, I've always thought it was rather funny that anyone complains about specials when the zone shits greens (I can close my eyes, fall asleep and float around the zone and come up with 200 bty via greens..) ..add flags rewards... NO ONE EFFING GREENS IN THIS ZONE ANYMORE because starting ships are so newb-tasticlly loaded with fun @ every spawn. I might also add, it was HILARIOUS to watch these mavens of the rocket try lasting their 15 minutes in Axe's 0 bty zone.. No patience AT ALL .. which just goes to show, they do this here because ITS EASIEST to do. In CZ, if you're flying around with sub 100 bty it's because YOU ARE PURPOSELY NOT GREENING... They give nothing back to the zone at all.. as the second they get their target, they're gone again. They won't play enough to rack up bonuses like regular players, so eventually, even though they can buy rockets, I have a feeling their bonuses will run out long before a regular players... hell increase the cost x2 or x3 if you want.. Or hell, start all ships with NO SPECIALS AT ALL, 100% stats - but make everything purchasable in units of 1.. but inscrease cost across the board. Reps / Bursts / Rockets / Thors : 3 bonus.. all other specials : 2 bonus. All ship tools (Stealth / X / Anti etc) : 1 bonus. If we don't want to expand the bonus system - then I say ditch the whole thing, and strip the ships down to 100% stats and top level guns and bombs, and everything else you get via greening or not at all... GG At this point, not really caring if some 'plays 15 min at a time and only cycles and rockets' player decides playing CZ would take too much of their precious time between pracs or whatever else they do because they might actually have to green up before taking another swipe at rubbing the letters off their F3 keys. Boo frikety Hoo. Havent these types shit up the zone enough already?? Isn't that pretty much why we are where we are today? Constantly pampering these Egotist players that spend no time here... Yeah.. GG

I am of course always in favor of any transparency in charting the course of the game, and changes however permanent or temporary.

Sure would be nice to always have a rep for those lamers that never green, have shiney F3 keys, but never seem to show up on the leaderboard at the end of the resets...

Thanks!! My goals were.. Center the map ; Allow us to better utilize the radius settings with less need for 'mapping voodoo.' Reduce the size of the map slightly. Retain the look, feel & flow of the original map. I agree with assesments of past 'reductions', and to explain a bit of my thinking on this topic. Past reductions have been tricky, primarily becuase ; We tend to want to retain total familiarity with the map.. Ie: you know what J12 is, and how to get to it form anywhere on the map.. also for instance, "The Spiral"... ) However, Maps also have some physical constraints that must always be considered. For instance, it's 1024x1024 'tiles' (think a single square tile, or small asteroid in size..) Center is of course tiles 512/511x512/511 (4 square tiles) Physical Settings correspond to these 'tiles', those settings being : Radius settings: How far out objects spawn from the center per number of players (usually) 1: Green Spawn Radius 2: Player Spawn Radius 3: Flag Spawn Radius. & 4: LVZ Object placement (The leaderboard in Wobits House for example.) Simply put : We want to make sure that Players and objects aren't spawning outside the playable area of the map. Obviously not a concern with a full size map as the radius are limited by the 1024x1024 size of the given playable area. As we start cutting into the map, we create issues.... The struggle then becomes balancing the familiar with the needs of the game engine. We end up with an oddly shaped map, that is not really centered, limiting the spawn radius so it gets to be more static, than random. (Ie; at some point, we won't spawn any farther out no matter how many people are in the zone / greens never spawn in area X etc..) I believe that we are firmly at the epoch of using the 'original map' in any capacity without hacking it so much that the flow is completely destroyed, or, having to better center it - which causes another re-hack, and coord familiarity is lost.. Ie: J12 is now J6 or other such oddities. Which is why I think my several attempts to re-hack the map to reduce it's size simple did not inspire me.. it gave up too much, and couldn't be done without drastically leaving the playable areas off center, and causing more spawn radius issues than we already face, and or destroying the natural flow of the areas, killing running in certain places, and or leaving abrupt dead ends where escapes used to be. Naturally, I had to conceed something, and I choose the coordinate familiarity , and balanced that by reproducing as closely as possible, all of the orignal map. I feel that is what is most familiar to most people, and with %coord and %area it's not that big of a deal.. I'm positive you can say "I'm at J12", and everyone would end up at the same place, even though it's now at J11 on my map, Plus, we get to actually use original areas that haven't been in play for a decade or more... and at reduced scale, it will be new enough to level the playing field a bit in terms or learning the map again... of course, I expect that Lancasters, Terriers, and Levys will be a lot more dangerous in these tighter spaces of the map, but will still have enough room to stretch the legs of the Jav, and lots of spots to lay in wait for cloakers, and lots of tight gaps to lace with the sharks razor wire bullet streams. The Warbids manuverability will come in handy in the tight spaces as well. I think it will increase the aggregate "chaos" in the zone, and hopefully help bring back some of that feeling from days when we still have 80 people in zone - so avoidance and conservation become an active skill, and not a byproduct of not seeing anyone on screen for 5 minutes because you're hanging out way on the edge, where greens don't even spawn. I didn't take this lightly... I've been thinking about this for a while now, and still am, as you can see... I just wanted people to know my process, if you understand it, you can suport it better, get excited about it's goals, and you'll know what you expect going in instead of being blindsided by it... I think many of us have found recently, that we're to the point that we're going to need to abandon certain constraints to keep things fresh and working for the population we have. I think a good start is to stop trying to make a map made for 200 people work for 50 people... and making life harder in managing settings to make it work that way.. and shorting other opportunities in the process. The map is brilliant, so I get why we've done all we can to keep it as much intact as possible.. Hopefully, this project is the next step for the zone... I really do hope so... This map is the map I always wanted to make for CZ.. So thank you for your reception of it thus far.. please spread this thread around to more regulars so they too can see, and offer feedback.. Thanks!

..Thank You! Allow me to illustrate (as the original screen shot doesn't give a good idea of the scale.. ) All of these pics are screenshots from Drakes SSME 'radar' view (which shows the entire playable area that a map takes up) Thus, a "Full" map, the original Battle Drone from the CD. http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j242/sokuraama/MISC/originaldrone.jpg The Current Map up in Chaos... http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j242/sokuraama/MISC/hackdrone.jpg My Map.. http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j242/sokuraama/MISC/ALC.jpg As you can see, it's more compact than even the reduced size CZ map.. the idea was to reduce the size , but keep all the original compontents of the Drone that we all know. (for the most part..) As you examine these, you'll see where and how they differ.. mostly at the exclusion of walls, compontents of enclosed areas, and lessening the width of tunnels. It's tighter in the tight paces, but still open and familiar enough to 'run-n-gun' - as I said, flying around on it is kinda uncanny even for it's size.. I have some alterations I want to make still, so it's still a WIP.. Thanks for the interest!

Erm... Sure... I'll take a stab at it..

A 'little' something I've been slaving away at.. A scale reproduction of the original Battle Drone map.. Slightly smaller than the current Map we're using... and, as you can see, a very faithful reproduction of the original. Spaces are tighter / smaller - tunnles have less width, open areas are also more compact, some areas have structures that have had to be omitted to make them fit better... but for the most part everything is there. Of course - the coords don't quite line up the farther out from center you get (map is centered on usable area - not based on 'coords'..) so for instance, J12 is actually between J11/J12 on this map... as you get to the corners of course... obviously what we know as A1 isn't at A1.. Anywho - look it over, let me know what ya think... changes / suggestions... etc... I'm not big on LVZ or graphics, so if someone has or wants to contribute art, that'd be cool.. http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j242/sokuraama/ScaleChaos.jpg Also - I'm not worried about the 'in zone leader board' to be quite honest... so I won't be editing the map to include that.. because it really breaks the feel of the map. I have done some limited flight testing on this... it's pretty uncanny feeling - can almost fly it by memory in most places, of course some of the restructured areas will take some practice.. Oh, almost forgot, this map is about a square coord box smaller all the way around compared to the current Map, just to give you an idea of it's scale.. Enjoy!

yeah, Axe, you're really screwing the pooch here with this dumbass restriction you have on the main zone .. golden opportunity to get some players in your zone, andd most people aren't going to be bothered to figure out how long they need to sit in another empty zone to get into the one that 'appers' to have population. FAIL.

Just FYI Axey, new nics can't get into your zone.. getting a message that they don't have enough playing time... ....and if you think Im going to use my actual SSC password in your zone, you're mad.

Might explain why the zone was acting so strange lately.. eh? What is the prevailing theory right now? Anyone know?

Nothing has changed, except you're not there... Just come back Axe.. take the inevitable ribbing like Man, And use your new found prespective on running a server to maybe temper your ego a bit... Or I dunno.. whatever.. GL.

I have a %red macro too.. If you tend to 'play by radar' , and don't fancy wasting your nrg or specials on low bty targets, and there are multiple reds present, it can be annoying. As someone said the other night in the zone regarding red on radar : it's annoying to not see the bty so you can target it. ..then again, as a flagger, the same is true if red on radar were off.. Much as I don't like it , it is what it is.. ... speaking of flags.. Is it just me, or have green rewards for caps been reduced some what or at least leveled off.. ?? If so, I like it..uh, thanks.

LOL .. well, that is exactly what I expected.