Tuchola Forest Beta2 Feedback, Mon Apr 17th Options

[logik]

honestly if you ask me 3 beta's is enough... it's very stable and playable and it seems like you only want to add aesthetic changes after that.

i'd say 4 at the max, but it is YOUR map.

the reason i'm hesistant to load all those beta's is simply because i'll get charged an arm and a leg for the bandwidth of 50-100 (or more) people randomly downloading it from our http redirect

[ScrapyardBob]

Vehicles: If someone wants to spend a few months developing more accurate vehicles for that period, feel free. The primary reason I'm using the AHz vehicles is so that there is a wide vehicle variety which adds to enjoyability of the map. Except for the Jagdpanther, I could've said it was taking place in 41/42 somewhere in western Russia.

Betas: Betas are a fine balance act. I don't want to go too long between betas because all of the little tweaks do add up and I need to ensure game balance is still even. OTOH, at 8MB per map, each new beta is about 4-6GB of traffic for the {MOB}'s web server. (Maybe as much as 8GB, VSPstats shows over 1100 players in the stats database since early April.)

I do have a Beta3 planned, I keep pushing the date off for completion. I already know it won't be final and there will be a Beta4 about 2 weeks after that. (The original schedule was weekly betas, but finalizing a beta takes a full day of internal testing.)

...

My first idea of how to do the random rustling of snow didn't pan out. I would've had to convert all of the trees to script_models and that blows out numerous internal limits in CoD:UO. I have another idea, but it will require a large amount of repetitive code (a hand-coded list of the coordinates of the pine trees).

[ScrapyardBob]

(evil evil laugh)

Okay, I got the random foliage rustling working. That is going to prove interesting as players chase ghost rustles. Just to give you an idea... there are ~1050 trees on the map. The SFX engine picks of them each time to "rustle". The odds of you hearing one rustle near you is pretty low, but it should happen every 2-4 minutes.

I also purchased a pair of snow sound effects today to represent show falling off of branches. I'm working on getting them into the PK3 file.

This post has been edited by ScrapyardBob: 04/24/06 7:34pm

[ScrapyardBob]

Okay, reworked it even more... there are now (5) threads that generate noises. Four of them handle the tall pine trees (split roughly according to map quadrant) and the fifth thread handles the short white spruce trees. That increases the odds that you'll hear a random rustling noise to about once every minute or two.

Let the chasing-your-own-tail games begin! (evil laugh)

For the stealthy folks, this is gonna be interesting...

Seems to have zero effect on gamestate and is very low server load (unnoticable on my test system).

[)--S@B0T-->]

Nature sound effects too. What will the Master think of next?

[ScrapyardBob]

I went through the stock sound effects again, nothing else that really caught my fancy.

Guess I'll go price a few more sound effects from SoundDogs. They do have a decent babbling brook sound that I think I can loop and play along the riverline. Plus a few tree groans and snaps/pops to simulate the weight of the snow on the pine trees.

[Druid]

honestly if you ask me 3 beta's is enough... it's very stable and playable and it seems like you only want to add aesthetic changes after that.

i'd say 4 at the max, but it is YOUR map.

the reason i'm hesistant to load all those beta's is simply because i'll get charged an arm and a leg for the bandwidth of 50-100 (or more) people randomly downloading it from our http redirect

So far for the moth of April we've had
1315 downloads of beta2
1100 downloads of beta1
This equals out to 17 GB between the two maps.

There is no reason why you should pay hardly anything for an http redirect.
Bandwidth overages cost a fortune.
Easy way around that is to get a cheapo account at another host.
One I would reccomend is
http://www.1and1.com/
They have a cheapo account for $3/month with plenty of bandwidth to cover your needs.
1and1 isn't a host I would recommend for actual hosting as they lack several important features most people would want, but they don't tell you that unless you read the fine print.
For your needs, it doesn't matter as you are only looking for cheap bandwidth for file downloads.
BTW 1and1 make a lot of there money selling extra crap people don't need.
Don't get any extra's as you don't need them anyway.

I'm not sure if they still offer a free or cheap domain name with new accounts.
If not, that would only equal out to another $8/year

[ScrapyardBob]

Been mucking with the river sounds this evening. I have something that sounds decent, but has a few drawbacks.

1. Increased gamestate by 600 bytes (to 26100 for BAS). It also puts me closer to the maximum scriptable entities limit which I'd prefer to stay far and away from.

2. The sound is very local to the riverline (less then a grenade throw away and you won't hear it). I can't get increased range without some other audio errors cropping up.

3. I'm still not thrilled with it.

I'll probably demo it on the test server tomorrow (via v098) but I'm 80% sure I'm going to rip it back out before Beta 3 is released.

[ScrapyardBob]

v098 is up on the test server (70.42.41.170), this is a preview release of Beta3 and includes the river noise that I'm probably going to take back out.

[ScrapyardBob]

Don't think the river sound is working in v098, I'll look at it tomorrow when I'm more awake.

[ScrapyardBob]

Upcoming fixes in v099 (beta 3 preview).

- Fixing the broken flags in DOM, adding descriptions to the flag locations in DOM. The DOM gametype will be working properly in Beta3. Vehicle balance is still a bit off in infantry-centric games like HQ/TDM/BEL/DOM/CTF.

- Added flags by the bases in BAS.

- Working on adding in CTF support.

[Stickman]

Thanks for moving that ladder in the Russian spawn. That was the ONLY thing bugging me about this map! Whenever I climb it, I'll think of you!

[logik]

There is no reason why you should pay hardly anything for an http redirect.
Bandwidth overages cost a fortune.
Easy way around that is to get a cheapo account at another host.
One I would reccomend is
http://www.1and1.com/
They have a cheapo account for $3/month with plenty of bandwidth to cover your needs.
1and1 isn't a host I would recommend for actual hosting as they lack several important features most people would want, but they don't tell you that unless you read the fine print.
For your needs, it doesn't matter as you are only looking for cheap bandwidth for file downloads.
BTW 1and1 make a lot of there money selling extra crap people don't need.
Don't get any extra's as you don't need them anyway.

I'm not sure if they still offer a free or cheap domain name with new accounts.
If not, that would only equal out to another $8/year

the problem comes from us having two highly popular servers on one account. it's a dual opteron box so we have one server on one chip and the other on the other and that adds up to a lot of bandwidth

thankfully we don't have to worry about this anymore... our provider offered us a one time bandwidth increase for $25 that gave us 500GB extra each month... it was a great deal and i took it.

i now plan on running every beta release so you'll have continued anarchic-x support at every step of the way

[logik]

Been mucking with the river sounds this evening. I have something that sounds decent, but has a few drawbacks.

1. Increased gamestate by 600 bytes (to 26100 for BAS). It also puts me closer to the maximum scriptable entities limit which I'd prefer to stay far and away from.

2. The sound is very local to the riverline (less then a grenade throw away and you won't hear it). I can't get increased range without some other audio errors cropping up.

3. I'm still not thrilled with it.

I'll probably demo it on the test server tomorrow (via v098) but I'm 80% sure I'm going to rip it back out before Beta 3 is released.

can you leave cvar's to turn off sounds and extra stuff like that?

believe me i'd LOVE to run all of these but we may run into gamestate issues since we have such a heavily modded server. we'll see what we can afford to use and what we can't

[ScrapyardBob]

Vehicle Balance, 64 total entities, max 48 active:

Static weapons (12):
(7) Pak40/Pak45
(5) Mortars

German - Base Assault (9 tanks)
(2) Jagd
(1) StugIII
(3) Panzer IV
(3) Panzer III
(3) Halftracks (3 spawn)
(6) Horches (2 spawn, S Forest, SW Farm, G1, G3)

Russian - Base Assault (9 tanks)
(2) KV1
(2) T34 stock
(2) T34_76
(3) BT7
(2) milk trucks (spawn, R3)
(7) Jeeps (3 spawn, R1, R2, SE Pak45, NE Farm)

Non-BAS gametypes:
- Adds (6) Jeeps/Horches across map
- Removes 10 tanks from spawns, (1) StugIII, (2) Jagd, (2) PanzerIV (2) KV1, (1) T34 stock, (2) T34_76
- Adds (4) light tanks
- Each team has (5) light tanks and one medium tank