LtNirvana

Its base speed i havent touched I just wanted it to have some consequences to darting around the map with afterburners. Also, I want to give players ways to manage their energy and have to fight intuitively instead of just waiting to be shot and spraying around. Bullets and bombs will cost a more substantial amount of energy than previously so people who just spray around will be at a disadvantage, much as a person driving a tank will be at a disadvantage if they just dart around with afterburners and burn themselves dry, but if they get in a jam the afterburners should give them enough space to survive an attack if necessary and used properly.

Thank you Michio, some very good suggestions here. Just to note, the zone will be going back to turf/powerball so there will be no bases. The turrets are combined to be one ship (. It will have pretty low health, l3 bombs that fly fast with slow reload speed. L1 bullets that fire very fast single fire (no multi or double barrel (I wanted double barrel but unfortunately I can't disable multifire in subgame and didn't want it to have the ability to be triple barrel)). The tank is the only attachable ship so in powerball it makes for a great transport vehicle. It doesn't move too fast by default but I'm giving it the ability to burn energy and kick its afterburners on. It's energy will be high, as always, about 250. It's not a crazy amount of energy and can be picked off pretty easily with no turrets attached. I'm still up in the air about all this since I haven't had anyone to playtest these settings with.

If anyone has any input on how to improve DS in any specific ways I'm all ears.

Grow up Cheese.

Awesome guys. I'm glad to see our infantry zones making an effort to come back online. Hope things go well for you!

I request this thread be closed due to the initial topic being resolved.

UPDATE: DS is online at SSCL Desert Storm in a beta state while I continue to do more work. The zone is fully functional and playable and on SSC. Enjoy. UPDATE: Okay so the directory server issue is apparently not resolved. If you can't find the zone in the directory list just use the IP 69.164.209.244 and port 13000 to add the zone manually to your list while we try to sort out this nightmare. Yeah, I'm bringing DS back online. I'll keep you hippies updated on my progress on here. Hopefully it won't take me more than another week or 2 but who knows. I'm lazy. My plan so far has been to bring DS back up and running as a subgame zone in a similar but improved form that it took at it's peak in 2003-2004. This means first of all and most importantly Turfspawn-Powerball type gameplay (where you spawn forward on the battlefield based on what turf bases your team controls, giving you a scoring advantage being closer to the nme goal.) Screw CTF, it never worked in DS really and the settings are really more suited for open environment dogfighting and powerball. The second part of the plan has been to optimize the gameplay taking the population of ss into consideration, improve graphics and sfx wherever possible, optimize a classic map for improved play, optimize a settings a bit to try and balance things, and potentially rework the scoring/buying system so that winning games actually matters. What have I done so far? -Well most importantly, after finding it impossible to secure a server that would host subgame for me, I bought a VPS yesterday and am in the process of configuring it. I'll just host the damn game myself instead of getting more people involved who could possibly destroy the zone for no reason again. I'm in the process of securing an SSC slot (how long this will take is up to the council and ultimately priitk I guess). I've never hosted a zone before, so I'm hoping I don't run into many issues with this. -In 2009 I led yet another dev project to do essentially what I'm doing now, rejuvenate DS. It included a major upgrade of anything visual or audio in the zone and some other stuff that I've already mentioned. Luckily I found (most) of the files from that project and others that I'm fairly certain were never really used in the zone when it was live. This includes a new shipset (better looking, but more importantly better for AIMING, all guns center fire and the soldiers look much better) which I think was loaded by Cre before we finished it but I can't remember, all I remember is there were problems. I personally think this shipset is a huge improvement so I touched it up and recompiled the lvz.. should be a good change. -As mentioned previously I took my favorite powerball DS map and edited it to include some elements from other favorite maps of the past, retiled it with a new tileset and fixed some things to make it optimal for the powerball style game, and also made it 6 turf bases instead of the 8 we used in the past. I thought about using 4, but I think 6 will be fine considering their position. -Another part of that 2009 project was making the background not look like garbage and compliment our tileset better. Again not sure if it was ever used in the zone, but part of this new project will include a simpler, more aesthetically pleasing background image. To compliment the background, it will be paired with an overlay LVZ that adds craters, bodies, gore, scorch marks, crashed ships, and other nonsense to make it less dull. -I'm terrible with photoshop so I spent an assload of time transforming the turf possession board from 4 spawns to 6, and redoing lost graphics for the board LVZ. I couldn't change it in the way I had envisioned due to my own ineptitude and since my old graphics guy wanted 68 bucks an hour to do work for me. (this board is the thing on your screen that lights up which turf bases you control by number left (1) to right (6). -Spent a lot of time finding SFX to replace all the spacey bullshit that defaults in SS and also update some crappy ones. What do I plan (or hope) to do? A shitload. -I have a lot of graphics shit I'd like to do but at this point it's probably going to become either optional or post-launch since I don't know what I'm going to be capable of changing due to my limited graphics ability. (special/weapon disps, bomb/bullet gfx, rep gfx, mines) -I plan on replacing a shitload of SFX in game. -minor settings changes I could really use help with the graphics work. If anyone wants to help me out with that god bless you, it's really not that much anymore since almost everything is done. If anyone wants to help out with anything else, of if you have any brilliant ideas for the project, I'm all ears!

I'll donate on Tuesday when I get my unemployment check. In the meantime, can I get a new subforum for DS?

I'd be happy with a month. That's giving SS more credit than it's due lol.

Not sure I understand the purpose of this question, but I've always found server 2k3 easiest to use... even though 2k8 is virtually the same architecture. Per-player arena settings. Can you elaborate? Not sure I understand the implementation of this.

^this

First of all, I'd love to hear one instance of any zone in SS actually benefiting in a way tangible to it's players (the only thing that matters) from ASSS conversion. I have yet to see anything done in ASSS that can't be done easily in subgame or with a simple bot plugin in any zone that people actually play... and it's been public for years. Secondly, your assumption that I'm not developing DS in any way is unfounded, presumptuous and frankly annoying. The zone was great in 2003, and all I have to do is load up that copy and people would enjoy it. Instead, I've updated most of the graphics and am continuing to do so, improving and adding to much of the SFX and ambiance, working on improving the turfspawn functionality (just by making the way the map and the module and LVZ interact more intuitive, not by coding some unnecessary, asinine module), and improving the settings and in-game play experience and the map itself. I really don't appreciate the attitude of your post at all either. I'm posting to ask for help from the community. Pointing me to a conversion assistant for something that will probably just waste my time isn't helpful. If you're so boned up about ASSS, convince me that it will benefit the PLAYERS of my zone. That's what matters, and I haven't heard any specific way in which ASSS will benefit the player experience in DS. All I've heard is idle chatter about "durr ASSS is better then subgame cuz you can make modules. It's just better... cuz it is." God damnit subspace. Our community goes out of its way to make itself progressively worse every year.

I'm doing both but asss conversion takes time and I have subgame ready. PS I will gain nothing by running DS on ASSS it will make absolutely no difference unless I plan to make large changes. ASSS cannot be the future of SS if SS has no future. I'm just doing this for the community while it lasts.

Anyone know a subgame windows host? Lynx only hosts ASSS on Linux it looks like.

Thanks ghost. It's amazing that you or Priit are still involved with the game in any fashion, so I think we should be grateful you're still around.

Thanks all. I seem to have secured a host and an SSC slot and we are going to begin ASSS conversion probably tomorrow. If anyone has any more input on what should be different about the zone I'm all ears. I'm always open to creativity. Thanks for your suggestions spider.

What's your alias in game?

Desert Storm

I'm working on it right now. Just finished retiling a new map. I plan on reloading it as a 6 base Turfspawn powerball style. I have most of the graphics and sound polished up I just need to do some settings work and rework the point reward system. Trying to take the best aspects of the zone when it was at it's peak in like 2003 and polish it all up. I wouldn't put it back online in the state it was taken to from 7 years of poor direction, no offense to cre or dav1 who did a fine job all things considered.

Don't know where this should be posted so ill post it here. I'm looking for a host to get DS back online. I miss playing it and I know others do too so I want to get it back up. I have all the files I just need to get it all reorganized. If anyone can point me in the right direction that would be great. I've been disconnected from the community for a bit so I'm not sure who is doing reliable hosting now. Thanks guys.

I'll throw my 2 cents in if anyone gives a piss. I just came back to SS this week to see if it was dead yet, and noticed how bananas everything seemed. Someone told me you could hop to other zones through subarenas now and I naturally thought "Oh they must have set up bots in subs that just sendto, thats nice of everyone" but then realized all the subs were showing pops from different zones and totally fudging up the population counters for any involved. What the crap is the point of this if not to just put a population facade up for SS as a community? We're really going to make ourselves seem like a bunch of asshats like this. Seriously... each one of these zones could just create a sub with the destination zone name and pop a high level bang bot in there to sendto the destination. Same desired effect without totally decimating the games built in population statistics. Only a few bots, big woop. The problem here is not so much effecting players trying to get an accurate gauge on what zones have people in so they can ACTUALLY PLAY A GAME, even though thats definitely a friggin pain in the ass now, but moreso in us as a COMMUNITY looking like a bunch of jerks who are ashamed of what our game has become hiding behind bullshit trying to TRICK PEOPLE into playing SS. We are better than this. The last thing we need right now is to look like a bunch of jerks. Tricking potential new players is not going to do us any good, it will only serve to infuriate people and they will just leave instantly after they feel like our elitist community has just taken a dump on them with fake population stats. We need to embrace our community, embrace the state of our game, and just enjoy it while it lasts. Either fix this bug (which will never happen) or just replace this goofball function with bots that sendto. Also, that argument that this is a voluntary thing doesn't really fly, since the participants make up 3/4 of the population of SS at current. Makes it kind of mandatory to not isolate yourself from the community no?

I would want it just because I was with DS for nearly a decade and hate to see it go. For the reason alone I would be willing to help facilitate getting it back online. While I don't see the point in moving to ASSS without a team of people willing to put a large amount of work towards dev, I wouldn't fight it. If there were to be a project to bring the zone back I would probably only come on board if we made the move back to turfspawn (which would involved either coding new plugins for merv since the ones we have are incomplete/missing... or coding new asss modules). The graphics are all done and we have maps and I would be willing to work on the turfspawn map revamp I had started (a mashup of the best parts of the old turfspawn maps with fewer spawn points). I still have all my old dev files... and like 90% of the files from the zones history including most of the files from SSZ. The things that seemed to go missing were plugins and settings files when the dutch decided to go out of their way to destroy the zone. If a project were to spring up I would reccomend dev'ing to completion before the zone is even brought back online. Of course none of this will probably happen but ya never know.

Ya where is that jerk LT? The thought of hosting it on a home server has crossed my mind but that really is a pain in the ass and I'm flat broke. And I know how it would go. I would find some dev team that would work for a solid month and we'd make some great progress, then they'd get bored and quit dev then I'd get frustrated with another incomplete project and quit. It happens every time I start a project at DS after the only successful dev project I helmed there, which was the original shift to turfspawn that brought the zone to ssc. I hate to say it but it probably is just beating a dead horse unless I could get at the helm of a large dev team that could bang out everything that would need to be done in like a month. I'd say it's probably 90% plugin coding for a mervbot that would make another turf shift possible... but unless we had a team of motivated vets... I would have trouble getting motivated myself. I think Dav and CRe would agree. Fart. Lt

A) What the fuck kind of subspace player has never seen Star Wars? That movie has nothing to do with George Lucas it was made by some random jamoke.

Fileplanet is a good idea too because they have billions of games on there for free. The first step with any of these companies really should be asking them what kind of deals they work out with games to have them hosted free in the first place so we can see if any of those methods is workable for us at all. Also while you seem capable you also seem very overly ambitious and you make me nervous. I really think if you are doing this for the SS community you should set your ego aside and open the door for us having a point person that we appoint like Polix or MM etc. Someone with no ego, who's all business, and who knows the community inside and out.