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That's an interesting point of view on the matter. What makes you say that? Personally, I'm inclined to believe the opposite (or perhaps that there are more variables that aren't being taken into account).

It's a Java-based client. There's really no such thing as "closed source." Java decompiles very nicely, even after being run through enterprise-level obfuscators. The best I've seen is one that purposefully generates class names that conflict on Windows and other such case-insensitive file systems (ie: aaa.class and Aaa.class), and even that is defeated by doing any modification in a linux vm (which are trivial to setup these days). You're better off implementing actual security techniques.

You guys are getting ahead of yourselves. I'm not even going to think about planning/designing the item system until the game type is done. Let's try to focus on that first.

Wrong forum? Feels like you made an event for Starcraft.

Thing is, there's not much reason to keep the current system around. Many players (myself included) are bored with it, as much of the gameplay boils down to spamming guns, repels and suiciding to push the opposing teams around. Additionally, the fact private teams were removed in favor of the only-two-public-teams system makes it virtually impossible to play with people of your choosing. So, there's really no point in starting a squad, since whether or not you get to play with them is a crapshoot anyway. Additionally, the existing major problems require exceedingly complex systems to fix (hopping, balance) and, to date, no one has even come up with a plan to solve either that doesn't itself introduce a number of other, equally large, problems. That said, I ask you this: What is the advantage in spending time repeatedly patching up the current system (which is quite dated in itself), when a new system could potentially fix the problems while providing something new in the process? As far as stacking goes: a given team will be able to be "stacked" and hold a single point no problem, but that still leaves five control points uncontested. If a team is proving to be too difficult, your team could opt to simple hold another point (or two) elsewhere and build up resources to take them out later. I want to start designing this next week, so unless you think I'll be making a major system overhaul by seeing this zone, I'm not terribly concerned with seeing what other zones have done (nor am I interested in dealing with the almost-definite politics/drama that would come along with that). If this picks up, I will work on the new item system to go with it. Though, if this doesn't take off, there's no item set. You're doing exactly what annoyed me in game: not reading. I don't care that you copy/pasted my text, I care that you're hand picking lines and taking them out of context. It's a silly manipulation tactic used to make your point stronger while omitting any point my statements -- not matter how vulgar/snobby -- would have made. To reiterate, again, a conversation requires you to both listen as well as talk. My frustration comes from repeatedly expecting you guys to have an adult conversation despite perpetual degeneration into childish whining about problems that don't even exist. Also: In my experience, people that blindly attack ideas for changing what they like about the zone are going to be impossible to please anyway -- and that's exactly what Ray was doing.

I have no problem with doing such a thing. However, with the way some modules are designed, I see this being a fair amount of work in itself just to get the modules required for both gametypes to play nicely together. Lives isn't a bad idea, but you need to remember that this is intended to replace pub. If it's setup in such a way that prevents players from playing for any length of time, they're more likely to leave than to hang around for the next game. This is even more likely when we take into account the item system and the fact newbies are outclassed by that alone. Additionally, we don't want to punish a team for having new people who may or may not realize that lives are important. In short, for a league version of this, lives would be great to prevent teams from suiciding as a primary tactic. For pub, probs not.

That's exactly what I said would happen (and Brain reiterated in his post). :/ Around three weeks, maybe slightly longer. Preferably before the next semester starts. Yes. Take a long hard look at what the current flag games actually entail. There is no squad activity, no true sense of teammates or even working together. Not to mention, it's several years old now. Time for something new. I've never even heard of Tri-Sector until now. Is that another zone? Again, I already stated that this is only a change to the gameplay for now, not the ships. I find it quite insulting that you've spent the time to copy/paste only my lines, removing their context. Discussion in-game or this forum are fine so long as you guys actually read/listen to what other people are saying. The bit of the conversation you're leaving out is that Ray kept repeatedly asking about the ships, despite me telling him several times over that this is only in regards to the game play. Again: participating in a conversation rather than just repeating the same thing over and over is the key -- not the medium. What? I don't even understand the question fully. Are you suggesting that this be developed completely in secret and then suddenly swapped out? The point is to get input now before I get a week into the design/development and realize that something doesn't work or that something else works better. And, as I said, I'm not even entirely sure on the rules myself yet, so I want to discuss it with people to see if it can be fleshed out more.

So, I've been slowly planning this game type for a few months. I plan to fire this out over the next few weeks in an effort to replace the aging public arenas. It's similar to Domination from UT and Brain's Conquest idea (and apparently also Dominion from LoL), but with my own spin aimed at making pub more perpetual. My current rough draft of the game type is as follows: Gameplay The game will consist of players in a team free-for-all environment with a number of control points. The object is to own the control points and collect power. The first team to acquire a targeted amount of power will win. Control Points Control points are the backbone of this game type. The map will have a number of control points spread around the map. Teams will battle for control of these points, as each control point generates power -- a resource required for victory. Controlling more points earns the team more power. Anatomy of a Control Point Control points consist of an inner radius and an outer radius. They can be contested by entering the outer radius and controlled by entering the inner radius. Control points have an ownership level represented by a percentage from 0-100% and can have one of three states: Unowned, Contested and Owned. Taking a Control Point Control points begin the game unowned. To take control of a control point, a team must have at least one player within the inner radius while no opposing players reside within the outer radius. Control points will gain ownership at a rate of n%/tick, where n is the number of allied players within the inner radius. When the control point reaches an ownership level of 100%, it becomes owned by the controlling team. If the team vacates the inner radius before fully controlling the point, its ownership level will decay to 0 at a rate of 6.5%/tick. When a player enters the inner radius of a control point owned by another team, it becomes contested. A contested control point produces no power and does not contribute to the power capacity. A contested control point's ownership level decays at a rate of (n+1.5)%/tick, where n is equal to the number of opposing players within the inner radius. A contested control point that reaches an ownership level of 0 will become unowned. Power Power is a team resource as well as a requirement for victory. Power can be used for special abilities to help defend or attack other control points and for crafting items (when the item set supports it). Teams earn power at a rate of n power/tick, up to a maximum of c, where n is the number of control points owned by the team and c is the sum of the capacity of all controlled points. A team with power that exceeds their capacity will lose power at a rate of n power/tick, down to their capacity of c, where n is equal to the difference in team-owned and opposing control points. Examples: A team controlling three points will earn 3 power/tick, up to the capacity of 150. A team with 200 power and two control points will lose 4 power/tick, down to the capacity of 100. Planned Public Settings Teams Size of 5 Private teams allowed Respawn at most recently controlled point (or center if team controls no points). Control Points 6 Control points Power Capacity: 50/ea. Rewards Every 300 seconds Upon controlling a new point Upon reaching 150 power Upon reaching 300 power Victory Conditions Victory @ 300 Power Misc Tick: 1 second This is still a rough draft, so feel free to suggest improvements or changes. The full plan involves a new item system as well, but that will come later.

Edit: Argh.

You can send player-specific arena settings to each player. Hyperspace uses this to allow players to have different values for certain things, such as speed, weapon cost, etc. Player 1 can have a wb that moves slower than a slug but fires bullets for free, while player 2 has a super fast warbird that can only fire three bullets per minute and each costs 500 energy. Not to mention, a lot of the game types are easy to implement on ASSS, which are complete hacks with Subgame bots (CTF is a perfect example of that). Admittedly this has very little to do with you and DS, as you can probably just revive the old Subgame version and make some people happy. But it's going to make further development a bit... weak. Either way, I wish you the best of luck.

Per-player arena settings.

IPs aren't unique.

I really like what you've done with the parts for collision and animation and stuff. Very extendable. Though I'm not a huge fan of the per-part z-ordering. I've got a similar project coming along (at a much much slower pace), and what I've opted to do is instead have layers on the map which can have any map element on it. That allows everything to be fly over/under depending on the layer the player is on (as well as multi-layering the playing field for some neat effects like transitioning from the foreground into the background during a fight). Anyway, keep it up. Looks like it's coming along nicely.

Yes, what I suggested is pretty hack as well -- I won't deny that. However, my hack doesn't have the nasty side effect of breaking a fucking core metric used to gauge the population of a zone (or any other side-effects, for that matter). Not bad for something I thought up in the thirty seconds it took me to write it. Perhaps you should try putting it into perspective before you go making excuses and passive-aggressive attacks like a bad politician. This is my favorite part. So you subtly admit that you're purposefully implementing the arena bridge improperly because -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- if you don't, the other zones that do have an edge on you with their inflated population numbers. I'm no English major, but I'm pretty damn sure that's the definition of malicious (And, would you look at that, my dictionary agrees). To spell it out for you: You're purposefully doing something you know is dishonest. Yeah, you can come up a number of excuses and backwards justification for it, but it's all bullshit and you know it. You (both as a collective and you as super-important PB dude) have options to do this correctly and you're choosing not to do it. Period. It's a pretty obvious to anyone who's used to dealing with this type of double-speak that you guys know what you're doing, have ulterior motives for doing it and, for whatever dumbass reason, simply aren't willing to accept/admit it. So yeah. We're basically stuck at an impasse. You guys continue doing the jackass things you've been doing for years and the rest of who aren't part of your cool-kids-club will sit back and take it up the ass. All I ask is that you leave some cab fair for the ride home this time. Douche.

And if they super absolutely needed the population of the other zone in the arena listing, what they could do is implement the population ping packet into their *sendto bot, and have the bot periodically change arenas to match the population. IE: EG_26 -> EG_35 and so on. Now the bot is doing exactly what they want it to do (sending them between arenas), they get their precious population listing in ?arena, and it's not completely fucking up the function. Seriously. The current implementation is a terrible and short-sighted hack and it's sole purpose is to try to pull in people with fake population. As Brain already said, if that wasn't the case, then why is PB (which is running ASSS) also suffering from this "bug"?

Question: What good is that population display if it's broken? Also: The bot nonsense is what it is. So long as you guys continue to run subgame, those bots are a necessity. Yes, there are people abusing them for population tricks, but that's a different problem entirely. Don't cloud the issue.

The real problem here is that the people who implemented it aren't willing to admit that it's a ploy to bring in new people. As I've said before, there are options which provide the same "convenience" feature that is saving "over two minutes" (lulz, right) of time without completely destroying a core function of the game's protocol. The fact that these options aren't explored and people are, instead, looking for excuses as to why it can't be done speaks volumes for the actual reason behind it. To spell it out for everyone: The people who can fix this are dragging their feet because the inflated pop numbers makes them look better off than they are. Nothing more. Those responsible need to take a step back and realize the damage they're doing. But, naturally, they won't because making excuses is easier than doing it right the first time.

If someone _really_ wants to go see what's happening in another zone only based on population, they can just esc+q and look at the zone list -- which will do exactly what ?arena does, except better (since you won't have super-inflated population counts). Providing the ?go EG or ?go CZ is a convenience feature and by quadruple counting your population (and bots), you're only going to make the game look far worse off than it is. Think about it: A player enters Chaos because the zone list says there are 100 people. They enter and see 15. Five of which are bots and another five are spectators (with the remainder of the population consisting of the plethora of bots in the other arenas). They see the number of actual players as 1/20th of what the population reports. Now look at a zone like HS or HZ that isn't part of this cute little numbers game. Those zones typically will have a population of 20-40. According to the scale you guys have provided, that's roughly 1-2 actual players. Any player who has adjusted to this scale will assume the zone is dead, even though the population is actually larger than what the other zones are reporting. All this is going to do is confuse players and make the player counters absolutely useless and, likely, serve to further reduce population. And for what? A feature so people can ?go EG rather than ESC, DOWN ARROW, DOWN ARROW, ENTER? If you're going to provide such a feature, at least do it in a way that doesn't completely break another -- important -- feature (*sendto). Edit: Forgot a word. Oops.

Bots can use *sendto to operate identically to what you have now, except it'll only count as one extra player instead of 20-50.

If someone -- anyone -- can explain to me why it was absolutely necessary for Cheese (and his team), to win a $700 jackpot less than ten minutes after the previous flag game while being up 10v3, I'll accept full responsibility for his outburst. Until then, maybe you guys should ponder why a flag game requires moderation to prevent it from being an absolute joke.

log 2 this 1, the abusing faggot decides to take me off the winning team, but only because im the only summoner, and was dropping the last flag, i get back on my team, so be bans me because he is a faggot more logs to follow Quoted to prevent more edits.

Zone is down, probably bad module config.

You're both whiners. The teams were balanced just fine. Though, if you want to get super technical about it, I would argue the attacking team (that lost, for those of you at home), was stronger, as they were constantly pushing the defending team back. However, a few clutch fields and some bad communication on the attacking team ("Who should be back lanc?" "Nobody! CHAAAAARRRRRGE!") allowed the defenders to clear the attackers three times. When you get cleared three times, it gives the defenders more than enough time to drop flags and win. Lanc count wasn't a problem, as there were five at one point. Fields weren't being spammed like you two seem to be implying (As an underpowered warbird, I died twice to fields throughout the course of the game. Think about that for a second). It was simply a matter of the attackers screwing up enough and the defenders trying to win as soon as possible. It happens. Stop crying. You guys want to cry about something, try crying about the fact that people are greedy and hop (yourselves included). Cry about the fact that people abuse items that are clearly unbalanced/overpowered to win (yourselves included). Cry about the fact that instead of mentioning it to anyone or doing anything about it, people wait until they've lost an event or are otherwise on the receiving end of the afore mentioned situations before crying about how broken is and how shitty is (again, yourselves included). In short: Grow up. Both of you.

The UB prefix means "User bot". It's a bot written by a user that his no affiliation with the zone. From time to time a bot will temporarily take the place of a module for the sake of testing something/running an event, but generally speaking, the zone does not use bots. The few times it does, they will be prefixed with a ZB. Edit: There's another page. Awesome. I guess my posts belongs at the top of page 2. :/

If you pay someone else who's running an unmodified version of what I posted here, it's 1k for life. If you use this to run your own, it's free.