spidernl

petrol

The reason nobody in HS' staff is particularly motivated to create new events, I assume, is the fact that the ones that we have (that are fun) like ?go race/?go events, kill the population. By moving people away from pub, you somehow guarantee the population will be lower after you're done than when you started. That's not much of a stimulus to start developing, really.

Or if some random guy takes them out of center. Which happens often enough. It just doesn't work. Having random clueless people who don't read team chat on your team doesn't really help anyone, either. If they can't ?attach because that's "too hard", they won't ?flag. Be glad they don't. I can understand making the place beginner friendly, but it's fine for it to require more than 1/2 a brain cell to play Hyperspace.

//Lock lockArenaData(adata); //Check if our fake player is ready to be warped if (!adata->fake || !adata->ready) return; Might just be the above.

Before I go into detail replying to your post - most itemset changes I'm not going to bother with for the simple reason that the itemset will be replaced (hopefully) by a new one sometime soon. Possible, but I believe HSCore currently doesn't play nice with the buyprice = $0 system in place for this. Would need to make some changes and get Dr Brain for a recompile. I'm not convinced this is that good an idea either - being able to play is all fine and dandy, but they'll have to learn eventually anyways. Bad idea. That'd only work well during fairly high population spikes, during flaggames. Do you really want newcomers to repeatedly get specced for not flagging on a flagging frequency? That also re-enables lag attaching, and it can only be fixed with more packet hacks that I don't want to spend time on right now. And again: they'll have to learn anyway. Being useless in a zone because you attach with less energy than everyone else will make the zone seem "even more unfair". I would have done that if it didn't mean that warbirds would suddenly have to cost several tens of thousands of hyperspace dollaz to compensate for the combined selling price of the items. Such items will not exist in any item set I design. Note that Reinforcement was changed quite a bit. No, it's not super duper good at anything, but it does protect against all kinds of stuff. Fission/Alpha are obviously useless, though. I didn't do that because I already had people complaining about the size of categories before. In other words, I split them to make sure people don't have to search through a billion items to find that one armor or shield. Also: this will be changed should the next item set reach completion. The big examples that make some sense - Arcfire and Gauss - also change the compatibilities on ships in a way that's not exactly preferable. Only Javelins really use Arcfire, and they don't get Disruptor. That leaves Gauss, and just changing one of them doesn't make that much sense either Weapons are also being changed for the next item set. Probably. Don't know exactly how exp/money will work in the future. Note in general: my item set might not ever get done, don't get your hopes up too much. Just be pleasantly surprised when it's done and it's a nice change.

Please be nice and make it sometime fairly early for you USA guys. That lets me be there. After all, you're replacing the existing name with whoever wins this league, so I'd like to get a proper chance to 'defend my title'. Edit: 3 PM EST seems to be winning. I think that's 9 PM for me, which gives me 2 hours. If you roll with that, please do make sure to have the very first duel actually start at that time, and not have the whole organizational bull start then, making the actual dueling start at like 11 PM Edit2: 1 PM and 2PM EST have more votes combined, take the average!!!11one!!!eleven!

PointDefense originally did not account for velocity whatsoever. It had some code that pretended to do this, but it didn't actually do anything. I fixed it (honestly I just grabbed some code by JoWie and put it in there, but hey). That caused PointDefense to be horribly overpowered. For that reason, I put in the pdaim property & Calibration Chip so that you have to 'give up' a little more in order to get that kind of aim on PointDefense. Anyways, I'm not really changing a lot about this item set. There's a new one in development, and I'd rather get that one done faster than spend time on the current one.

I'm willing to help with some modules. Just let me know what you need done and I'll tell you whether I have time for it

Post already replied to in post above:

It's not much work to let a bot do what esc+a does now, though. You'd just PM it and it could report population of "linked" arenas. You could sort it by highest population and all that, too. Same (or better) functionality for the most part, temporary fix for the population issue. But, as I said before, the reason the alternatives aren't being researched is that the population inflation is, or at least was at the time of introduction, considered an advantage for the zone.

I do. GG.

Probably. If anything I would do it with extraweapon and a burst of random weapon levels, where the first is always the same. That way it looks the way it should. However, it'd still be random damage which is just annoying. Both for the user when he shoots 4 l1's in a row and for people who randomly die to a burst of insane damage caused by 4 l4's they didn't expect.

That would look quite inconsistent for the user. Or well, it'd be consistent for the user but it would cause a lot of "mysterious" deaths that appear to happen seemingly randomly. At least, if you "implement" this using some packet hax. Also, I don't like random elements in damage done by weapons. At all.

You also have to be honest and admit that you're gaining at most 5 seconds over esc+q, [down arrow], [enter]. I'm sure people find this arena sharing useful, but it's also very obvious that it's being done to boost population. I believe ways to get around the issue that don't need subgame binary "access" have already been proposed, so why haven't the "people in charge" in TW/EG/etc done anything? Maybe because they're rather happy with the inflated population?

Doing what you want is not being close-minded. Doing what the general population wants wouldn't be a particularly good idea, considering people like kevinz are part of that. Also, I believe you've been using several posts to throw "insults" at me (or at least you're trying to make my development decisions look bad) in an attempt to convince me to do what you want. Funny how that turned out, eh. Stop flaming in this thread. Thanks. Also, if you want things to be developed that you want, try doing it yourself. Code the module. Design the item. I'll be happy to have a look and put it in if it has no gamebreaking potential, can be balanced properly, etc. But I guess just flaming developers 'into submission' sounds like a less close-minded approach. Sigh.

This topic does make me giggle. I wonder if the OP is aware that: TW/EG/Friends' population-faking-business is much more believable because it's not just a flat +1000. This means it's much "worse" if you think population inflation is bad (which you seem to think). Hyperspace's population inflation is our way of showing how ridiculous it is to inflate population. So, Static, did you also post this when TW and EG decided to start inflating their pop to at least 2-3x the true value using bots*, and now inter-zone-arenas? Doesn't look like you did. Get out, please. *) Several years ago

I don't think calling me "close minded" is the way to go if you're the one asking me to write a new module to create the functionality required for your requested item that I don't see the necessity for and feel would be too easy to abuse. What's against, early on in a day dying/killing in a base (in case the module checks for you being in a base) to "charge up" the "berserker gauge" with some friends, causing several people to have it filled up before any real flaggame starts. Then, they all hop to the same team the way you do and then switch to their boosted ship at the same time. Unstoppable force. And if you're going to say they wouldn't be an unstoppable force, you're suggesting the item be useless for individual users in order to make this kind of abuse non-effective. Useless item successfully created. Funny how you try to convince me by mentioning Nanomite as well. There's nothing forcing players with that to use it continuously and be as useless to their team as possible. In fact, with AW and X-Radar they'd probably be quite useful if the rest of the team weren't gunners doing the same thing the Nanomite guy is doing, without a good reason to. Guess what.. most people gun and hide behind their lanc without having Nanomite. Go complain about them, not about the ~5 Nanomite users in HS history. Even funnier when you start crying about cloak no longer being detectable by rapidly toggling on/off X-Radar, making whatever costs a dev attaches to that item completely pointless as people won't notice the recharge reduction for that millisecond anyways. Not to mention the fact that it's going to be changed anyways. But toggling still won't work. tl;dr: you're an idiot if you think trying to make my previous changes look bad is going to make me do you a favor. Edit: Fixed.

Not really. Terrans in Starcraft II only use Marines*, so you don't have to bother implementing other units. *) That's what it looks like for a Zerg like me

In this case, the game type would influence large portions of the item set by indicating item costs and whatnot Even before it's done, you'd have to plan for it at least. Also, Cheese, I think it's kind of silly to use the weapons tracking module for this. Why work with tile damage when you can just work with proximity and one or two LVZs for capturing points? Or even them good ol' flags. I also have JoWie's "version" of the damage module, which would probably do the trick for most things. Not a fan of team purchases.

Just think about it a bit harder will you. How hard is it to get yourself killed very quickly without being useful at all? Oh, you just have to attach to a lanc and either bomb yourself or afterburn (with some +AB energy, use Carnot for all I care) into an enemy gun/bombline. Repeat, say, 100 times. Sync it up with your equally abusive friends. Steamroll enemy.

I've made stuff like the blink/shield animation(s) with particleillusion, we'll be fine. But I do see potential for combining this node system with a "crafting"-based item set. You'd have a large number of "basic resource" (call it ore or something, I don't care) nodes, and say one of the "ultimate resource" nodes. Maybe leave the best/rarest resource "locked away" until population hits at least 10 (playing) to ensure the stuff really is rare.

At least use Starcraft II units like a man.

Rewarding people for dying a lot is a bad idea. There's plenty of ways to quickly rack up deaths and thereby getting your imbalanced ship ready for a flaggame.

Yay for new game types. This looks interesting. As far as item systems go, I'm personally not often a fan of MMORPG's item systems. Whatever you do, you'll end up with items that are distinctly better than other items, and you'll get less variety than with a fine-tuned, 'hand-crafted' item set (generally, anyways). Also, grinding to get items is not something I enjoy doing. What I think would be interesting instead is to use the map to spread some 'resources' as well. Then, you could have items require a certain combination of resources and/or money. Some items might require very rare resources, giving players a reason to trade. Basically, this would be more EvE-like. I've been personally developing a new item set for quite a while now, and I'm considering using a resource & trading system for it.

Who knows.