Cube Soccer Update coming soon

I received a nice PM the other day from one of the admins on The Escapist servers saying that he couldn’t find a decent TF2 Cube Soccer server out there.  The goals either never materialized or the Cube never appeared.

So I quickly threw up a TF2 Cube Soccer server for him to play on and it went squirly for him too.  So it left me pondering what the hell was wrong with the plugin.

Going through the code, which I had last updated on November 2008, it was simply awful.  Timers not being handled properly, inefficient code and loads of cvars.  People know my feelings, these days, on multiple settings for people to screw up…
The biggest issue was with weapons.  The Cube would replenish The Scout Force-a-Nature with the same amount as the Scattergun…which would mean an endless supply of ammo.

Last night, I ripped through the code, pragma semicoloned it (!) and changed the way weapons and the Cube work.
Now, instead of constantly refilling to max ammo, the Cube gives only a quarter ammo refill.

Why, you ask?  Surely it is way more fun with endless ammo and just shooting the crap out of anything and anything…
Players need a challenge.  They need to run out of ammo to make them run closer to the Cube and get more involved in the action.  Running around deathmatching, for some, is enjoyable, but when you don’t have a lot of ammo to do it, it becomes a problem and makes you play closer to the Cube.

I’m also changing the way damage is dealt.  No more mirror damage (whose bloody idea was that anyway?).
To put it simply, the further you are from the Cube, the less damage your weapons do.
Now this has an interesting side effect.
It means we can re-include all those classes that were left out, like the Sniper or the Spy.
I was never happy about making Cube Soccer a Scout only game…that’s not the point of TF2 and anyone who wants to make this into a Tribes style Soccer game is not thinking straight.  There are all these classes and they all do awesome things to counteract each other.  So why can’t they be included?  Why can’t we include Snipers?  They can be picked off by Spies.  Why can’t we include Engineers who can be picked off by Soldiers? Besides it’s tough building sentries with limited metal.

So I’m going to be messing with this over the next few nights and maybe try to reinvigorate this plugin and some of the awesome maps that comes with it.

New content

I added two new items for players this weekend:

Pills
The player who picks these up, gets faster speed for a brief period of time.  I’ve actually noticed a bug in it, while playing last…it is supposed to give them full health for a brief period of time and so that needs to be fixed!  You try to think of everything…lol

Zombie Blood
VALVe could use this one in L4D/2 …A player picks up Zombie Blood and it makes him invisible to the Zombies – they don’t target him.
In Left4DoD, players have found this incredibly useful for capping those difficult last flags like in Avalanche or Anzio.

The items are Zombie drops.
The Pills drop 1 in every 10 while the Zombie Blood drops with a 1 in 50 chance.  You pick them up, you use them.
Now I hear some of you saying, why can’t I keep them,  to use whenever I want?

Well there’s a reason for that.
In DoD:S, I am unable to add extra weapons/items, draw a hand holding it, give it a slot, add it to the next item on the mousewheel.  It’s just not do-able with SourceMod.  I would need to completely re-write the game and add my own stuff in C++.

Ah, you say, why not create a command like use_blood or something?
I learned from my experience with DoDS:RPG, 3 years ago, that multiple binds for players drive them crazy.  Servers can’t create the binds since the server has no access to the client’s config.  So players have to create the binds themselves.  Binding a key to use_blood or use_pills would be simply off-putting and not user-friendly.  The whole point of the game is to keep it as simple as possible – so that anyone can walk in, shoot Zombies with no binding.

How many times in a Left4DoD game do you hear people say “How can I get the German weapons?”.  I mean it’s plastered everywhere – when you die, the motd, the faq, the server ads – to use !equip to get the weapons yet people still ask.  So now add several more commands….you get the idea?

So the current method is far simpler and a more rewarding experience.
Besides, the added randomness makes it so much more fun!

Still to do this week:
Achievements: heading for the bath to have a good think about that one
Voices specifically for helping players identify the Emo coming

Tidying up a few bugs

There are a couple of bugs that I have been neglecting for the past few weeks while I’ve been updating TheVille.Org’s web server and stats.

One of these is the gas glitch.  The Gasman dies, the gas cloud dissipates and yet in certain areas on the map, players still experience the gas effect, usually because the Gasman’s timer has not killed itself. So I rewrote the way it happens.
Now it should be much more reliable and it also means less resources are being used by the server.
At one point, during testing, I also made the gas choke the player, causing damage.  Maybe this might be preferable to just having your vision buggered up, but I left it out simply because players wouldn’t know why they were getting damage.

The Molotovs had been annoying me for a while.  One of those “Damn I must fix that” things!
I rewrote the whole routine so that now players get credited with a Molotov kill.  I also shortened the time it takes to burn a Zombie.
I have had one or two requests to do something about the Molotov in spawn, where a griefer burns his team.  Immature and not in the spirit of co-op.  So to counteract this, any Molotov in spawn does not burst into flames.  I may look at hooking it into the TK system.
The fact is that this is a friendly fire game, much like L4D is.  I want it to remain friendly fire so that we can keep ‘The Infected One’.

Another issue has been a small problem with waypointing.
I had it that if a bot jumped twice, and couldn’t reach the target, it would forget the target and go to the next point.  But for some inexplicable reason, they would suddenly appear in the middle of the map and drop down.  It happened in Avalanche and Donner, specifically.
So I removed that part of the code and now they just forget the target, look for the next waypoint and keep moving.

The code is stable and running well and soon, I’ll move it up from Beta.

Achievements

VALVe started it and they are pretty much the gods of gaming, as far as I’m concerned.  Their development in the past couple of years has been well thought out and at times, I’m left speechless by the humor and genius that they put into their games.
Achievements are a clever way of keeping people in servers.  They need to be achievable yet not something you can do right away.

So I was thinking of a bunch of Left4DoD achievements that I’d like to start incorporating into the game:

• Win a knife fight with The Infected One
• Kill 100,000 Zombies
• Kill a Tank with a pistol
• Kill 3 Witches in the same life
• Get an Emo to kill 6 of his own team while killing you
• Kill 3 Gasmen with a Thompson

I’ll think of more later!

Stevo’s new Video

Stevo, as talented as ever, has put together a short trailer for Left4DoD!
What can I say, the guy is great at this stuff and the video is just awesome!

Voices and Sounds

Sound is an excellent way of reinforcing visual clues that something is going on in the game.  Left4Dead does this amazingly with the four characters each having their own way of dealing with the events around them, indirectly providing the player with clues to what is happening, like

“Pills here”
“There’s a Boomer around here”

Left4DoD needs the same thing to reduce the WTF moments.  The experienced players know about the Emo and the Grey Dude but they need audio cues as well.  The Emo surprise bombs people so much that he is probably the most hated Zombie!  So to counter that, I’m looking for voice actors (from the venerated ranks of TheVille of course) who will provide the necessary dialog…such as “Watch out! I see an Emo coming” or “Emoooooooooo”!!
The Witch and the Infected One provide small audio clues when they teleport behind someone but maybe nearby players will be able to add commentary…

This Mod has become much bigger than I originally thought.
It started purely as a concept to see if I could make bots work in DoDS.

Now it has evolved into something else.

“He puzzled and puzzled till his puzzler was sore…”

Merry Christmas, everyone!

So while Santa was visiting, last night, I was puzzling over code changes I had made that seemed to cause server lock ups and player time outs.  The thing is, I didn’t change very much so I’m very puzzled why it happens at all.
Today, for example, not a single lock up.  So weird.
So I’m guessing it was  NORAD and their Santa radar causing issues in Chicago and California…

I introduced a new difficulty weighting system.
The problem is this: on some maps like Anzio, the Allies kick Zombie butt, often reaching round scores of 8-0.
On others like Donner, Flash and Avalanche, it is very even.
On Argentan, the Zombies are very tricky to control.

So I devised a cunning system that allows me to weight certain maps to better control the balance.  I can set, via a map cfg, the difficulty for each individual map.  So Anzio now gets a slightly heavier weighting than the others, making it more of a challenge for Allies to win.  Coupled with the !votelevel system, players can vote the difficulty up or down so that if it gets boring you can push the level up or if it gets tedious just trying to survive, you can vote the level down.

The system also reports back to me the level of difficulty and the number of wins per team, so I can decide whether to push up or down, the default level of difficulty.

It is a hell of a lot easier than tweaking Zombie health or weapon strength.

“I Hate Him So Much”

Ah, what better way to start a blog post than to refer to some of the comments about the Emo.
Universally hated by his surprise detonations, catching experienced players just as much as the new ones.  Will he stay in the game?  Yes for several reasons.  I need the unpredictability and I also like Stevo’s Elmo jokes!  Where else would you get “Watch out, the Elmo is coming!” or “Tickle me Emo”.

But more specifically, players need to become more aware in the game.  Unlike TF2, where players are accustomed to watching out for spies or sneaky Demo attacks, DoDS is predictable as bread with butter.  When you clear a flag, you don’t expect anything to come behind you, or kill you as you go around a corner.

So I enjoy reading all the “God I hate that guy” or “No..the f***in’ Emo” comments!

Now the Witch…she’s in the same boat of hatred but for different reasons….she’s overpowered or she’s too fast or she’s too random.  I don’t know, but she isn’t THAT hard to kill.  When she targets you, she is pretty hard to kill, but I find the knife is excellent, or better yet, back up against a wall or sandbags and crouch.

Playing the game overnight is an experience on its own!
The variety of countries playing means that chat becomes a mish-mash of languages and if they want to communicate with others on the server, English is used.  We at the Ville, mostly cater to players from the US and Canada, so having players from abroad is fun!  Also means huge pings…

Starting to come together…finally

I’m happier with the mod than at any other point!
Bots are well balanced healthwise and if players spend too long shooting them, then they reap the benefits..

Weapons do the correct amount of damage.  No weapon is too difficult, although, by increasing the modifiers of other weapons, the pressure is off the MG.  I didn’t like that some players regarded the MG like an AWP and fought to get it.  Now the only weapon that I need to look at is the BAR/MP44.

The teleporting bots.  Probably one of the biggest issues with players.  The funny thing is, if you are new to the game, it’s an issue, but having played it for a while, they don’t pose a problem.  You just have to watch your back more often.  With the witch being the only bot that can get behind you, then the pressure is reduced.  Players have been used to DoDS for too long…everything is predictable in DoDS…unlike Left4DoD!

In fact, L4D is very unpredictable.
Players don’t realize it but bots spawn close by them, behind bushes as they move along.  Next time you play, go in spec mode and watch the zombies….fascinating stuff.  The AI director keeps the zombies near the players.  But then, you say, after you’ve cleared an area, there are no Zombies behind you.
True.
But then you don’t respawn as often in L4D than you do in Left4DoD…

This isn’t Realism.
Realism, to me, is a really bad idea for a computer game.  The only realism is the pecking order and players who enjoy being ordered around by others.  In WW2, they didn’t have crosshairs, respawning, uber-fast mouse reflexes, bodies that remain in one piece upon death…. Realism means you can’t sneak around the map, you have to be wherever your commander tells you and so on…. It’s not what I call ‘Fun’.

Too many of my friends are heading down the Realism road and it’s making me unhappy.

So Left4DoD is a stab at bringing fun back to DoDS

**EDIT**
I had one player tonight, a certain ^9C0^6Chick^5e, argue with me that the bots didn’t get stronger each time you killed them and that they only got stronger every time we won.  I wonder how many people he has been telling this
Didn’t have the heart to tell him I wrote the stupid code so I should know…

Two servers…

TV14 has been sitting quietly doing nothing for the longest time.
Frustrating trying to run any TF2 on it because the server really never takes off.
So I asked Silver if he’d let me run a Left4DoD server on it….I wanted to see if there were issues in Windows because, historically, Windows servers IMHO are much less stable and more likely to crash when any plugins are run on them.  Many might disagree but I’ve been running servers for a while!

The server is located in Chicago so it might have a better ping for East coast Americans and Europeans.

So far things are looking good.  I had one crash, but that was because I updated the plugin while the game was running, and I was waiting for a lull in play to restart the server.  Server crashed on map change as it tried to load the new version of the plugin.  Linux won’t do this.

I have also been dumping handles to make sure there is no leaking.  As far as I can tell, the i’s are dotted and the t’s crossed and there is no leaking.

Game changes.
Noodgevader wrote a long review and had a lot of good points, so I made a few changes.

• Increased the power of bazookas – they should now be more useful against the Zombies
• Increased the power of grenades
• Changed team hurting to that it didn’t slow players down if they were shot by their own team
• Began coding for ‘rewards’ for domination – although Noodge mentioned extra nades and stuff, I’m thinking a little extra health or a little extra speed would also be good.

Anyway, things are working well, and the servers are staying reasonably filled without my advertising them…