Distension Beta Suggestions/Bugfix thread

[gdugwyler]

Vaguely important announcement

As some of you may have heard, I've been pretty busy lately, and have had to cut back pretty severely the development on Distension. However, after a week or so a couple of fine people have stepped up to continue running the beta. alinea <ER> and Left_Eye are now beta coordinators. Please report any bugs you find during betas to them, and they'll be passed on to me.

Fortunately this comes at a time when Distension is getting close to being out the door. I'll still continue to develop the game, though in a limited capacity, and may participate in tests here and there, at which point you can still report bugs directly to me. For the next few weeks I'll focus on things like creating an introduction (!intro commands), F1 help, and so on. If I get frisky, I might even include some kind of tutorial, though that's doubtful. (milo, maybe this is up your alley, considering you were working on that pub tutorial? It would probably be far more simple for Dist, as people would already know how to play.)

I'm unsure how ali and Left_Eye will schedule the tests, so you'll have to check with them, and/or they may post here when they plan to do it. For those that have normally been unable to play due to the odd times, you might find you can now give Dist a whirl.

--

A couple of questions: anyone have Ops, and if so, how is it? I'm not sure if it's fast-paced enough to be worthwhile to include. I did put in a lot of work on it, but if it doesn't work with the game it can be dropped, or at the very least made a super-secret option.

I've also considered making a large selection of ships available at the start, rather than unlocking at ranks. Any opinions on this? Would probably still keep what I've planned as the "special" unlocks to unlock in a particular way (Weasel, Lanc), while allowing the other 6 to start straight off. This might be a better way of figuring out whether or not the ships are balanced, as well.

--

Continued thanks to all the testers. Discussion is still very welcome here. Shooting for getting the game out sometime in mid-April with your help and continued input.

[roxxkatt]

i could throw together a F1 rather rapidly...

want me to? :O

[roxxkatt]

also,

at the beginning of the round, -immediately- before all players are warped out, they need to be warped back into a safety. this is to prevent players with mines to mine the small bot spawn point. (cough aqua cough)

additionally, the bot spawn points need to be 175% more spread out, and about 10 tiles down/up


additionally,
today my comp was being an asshole, and had hangs of about 2s.
the dist arena has no spike protection, and all participation was lost, because lagout cant handle d/cs.

increase the no data spike limit to 2500ms, to kick the player into spec, not kill.

[Epic li]

So, I found out that if you don't upgrade bullets in the jav, and upgrades shrap, they come in level 3, nice eh? isn't there a way to change that? i mean, i was lvl 15 getting 1hitko with my shraps a lot

[Fluffz]

imho with few people playing the comparison of ship powers is unfair towards a high level team. i dont think someone can win a 9vs14 game.

also i was hoping you could play a ship while being ops.

finaly id like to say that games last to long for my understanding. i wouldnt change the timer tho, maybe remove some blocks to make defending a little bit easier?

[2kill]

finaly id like to say that games last to long for my understanding. i wouldnt change the timer tho, maybe remove some blocks to make defending a little bit easier?

you mean harder? I find that I enjoy the longer rounds the only time I didn't was when I really needed to be doing something else but couldn't bring myself to leave. (so I guess I was enjoying it then too just more stress ful) also when its released who's going to care? you will most likely have time when you play and if you don't you can always play later.

[alinea]

Cheese and Mjoll both have Tactical Ops, but Cheese has reported being unable to level because at the starting level (0), there is no way to earn RP -- seems no RP sharing is issued either (because it's not upgraded?). Mjoll said that he levelled his Tact Ops due to a bug so he was able to make it past level 0. !ui 4 and 10 also give 'Can not find information! Notify a mod'.

And vice versa pointed out a slight grammar issue at the start of the round: Capture both flags for 1 consecutive minute to win the battle.


As for opinions, I dig the tactical ops. Haven't seen much of it yet as far as whether or not it's balanced, what happens when (if?) a dozen people are fighting for the seat.. and I don't have it myself, but it does seem to stir up a lot of chatter and excitement. It's just one more thing that sets Distension apart from anything else. But I also have seen how much code is required to have that in the game and if it's too much work to get it balanced/tested/complete for the release, that's understandable as well.

And I do need to agree with Fluffz in that the numbers vs strength could use some minor tweaking. I must have been there for the same 9v15 game (or similar games which seems to be happening frequently -- perhaps due to the current mix of players), and the 9 player team, regardless of strength, hasn't stood a chance.

[roxxkatt]

#1:
i would like to play ops while piloting a ship, that would be nice...
ops has to get profit sharing or rp from using skills...
or something...

#2:
since when is levi not a support ship? thats lame, you cant get kills in a levi.
i switched into levi today, and at the end of the round, instead of getting 10,000 rp, i only got 2000... wtf.
the levi -has- to be a support ship, maybe profit sharing is too much, but removing it is lame.

#3:
consecutive would be proper if round time could be adjusted to 2+ mins, just have to edit it for 1min grammerz :sorcerer:

#4:
9v15 would be ez if you could somehow manage to convince 4 ppl to switch to terrs and sharks :fear:

[Mjollnir]

#1:
i would like to play ops while piloting a ship, that would be nice...
ops has to get profit sharing or rp from using skills...
or something...

#2:
since when is levi not a support ship? thats lame, you cant get kills in a levi.
i switched into levi today, and at the end of the round, instead of getting 10,000 rp, i only got 2000... wtf.
the levi -has- to be a support ship, maybe profit sharing is too much, but removing it is lame.

#3:
consecutive would be proper if round time could be adjusted to 2+ mins, just have to edit it for 1min grammerz :sorcerer:

#4:
9v15 would be ez if you could somehow manage to convince 4 ppl to switch to terrs and sharks :fear:

I also felt that ops was too slow paced to be very enjoyable. Playing a ship at the same time could work. That or another way of getting RP (from using different skills or whatever). If you could play a ship while using ops the RP could be divided 20/80 ops/ship or something. Is it too powerful though? It is going to be so hard to get ops when Distension goes public that it would probably not be an issue. It is only my opinion that it is slow paced and I guess some people will enjoy it more. Oh.. and the commands seemed a little hard to use in a swift manner since searching for the right command from the ops help was a bit of a pain. Also, some commands had #'s for home base and enemy base but what happens when our team has both? There is no mention of that in the help I think.

Levi does get kills. It was made a lot stronger by adding a lot more recharge. After that the support ship status was removed. You were just used to the huge RP bonuses at the end of the round so now it feels annoying.

The deciding factor in matches is too often the fact that there isn't enough people willing to play Terriers and Sharks. I am not sure how to fix this. Since forcing people to play certain ships isn't cool I guess the only way is to try to balance the teams as well as possible.

[Fluffz]

if i assist the colours of the gif which indicates what base is owned by what freq do not switch which is irritating. also i do note a lack of sharks lately.

[meddi]

also i do note a lack of sharks lately.

Because I can't attend the sessions! Arrrgh.

[Bobyz]

I also felt that ops was too slow paced to be very enjoyable. Playing a ship at the same time could work. That or another way of getting RP (from using different skills or whatever). If you could play a ship while using ops the RP could be divided 20/80 ops/ship or something. Is it too powerful though? It is going to be so hard to get ops when Distension goes public that it would probably not be an issue. It is only my opinion that it is slow paced and I guess some people will enjoy it more. Oh.. and the commands seemed a little hard to use in a swift manner since searching for the right command from the ops help was a bit of a pain. Also, some commands had #'s for home base and enemy base but what happens when our team has both? There is no mention of that in the help I think.

Levi does get kills. It was made a lot stronger by adding a lot more recharge. After that the support ship status was removed. You were just used to the huge RP bonuses at the end of the round so now it feels annoying.

The deciding factor in matches is too often the fact that there isn't enough people willing to play Terriers and Sharks. I am not sure how to fix this. Since forcing people to play certain ships isn't cool I guess the only way is to try to balance the teams as well as possible.

yeah its a bitch getting people to terr, on our team at least. but i bet the problem will be solved once it goes public.

also how bout having an a annual ship reset like every 3 months to keep things balanced a bit for newer players?

imo terrs get too many ports. at one point i had 4 extra ports in stock. and i don't particularly think the terr upgrade increasing the chance of spawning in the same place is a good idea. having to kill flibb 5 times within 2 minutes to make him go away isn't fun at all.

I dont know if this this is already an upgrade, but what about having an armor upgrade? like reduction of bullet damage, or reduction of bomb damage? or what about upgrading bullet/bomb speed? or maybe even number of shraps? just suggestions.

note to dug: excellent game! really fun and i hope this will keep people playing in tw!

[Fluffz]

i have just been in eg and they have sidewing bots there. lets introduce one in dist, maybe as ops feature or something?

[gdugwyler]

Changes:

• Ops should now receive profitsharing from rank 0. Small bug from making the PS multiplier based off of rank w/o checking for 0 rank.
• Increased default "strength" counter of a rank 0 player from 10 to 25. This should help with keeping games such as 9v15 from happening. I forgot to adjust this amount when starting players were given L2 and such. It may still need to be increased more. Essentially what this does is -- for the purposes of team balancing -- weigh a rank 0 player as 25, rank 1 as 26, rank 10 as 35, rank 25 as 50, and so on. For purposes of balance a rank 25 player is now worth 2 rank 0 players, rather than 3.5. This may need more adjustment, but this should be close.
• Consecutive msg fixed. I'm also thinking of an easy way to implement a single-flagroom game. It will require a lot of changes.

Discussion:

• Ops: it won't be possible to play a ship and work as Ops at the same time. I was actually finding that as an effective Ops player you're kept pretty busy, but only in a particular way. The whole intention behind Ops is having someone at a station where they can observe the battle from a wider scope than a person at a ship; putting them in a ship takes away a large part of this. For example they should be switching between terrs and observing each base carefully to see where the assault should be mounted next. For this reason, people may begin to trust their Ops for purposes of direction. As for home base versus enemy base, regardless of whether or not you have a flag, you spawn closer to one base than the other, and your safe appears above/below one particular base. This base is considered your home base throughout the round, something that Ops in particular relies on. Due to the way the commands are structured, protecting this base with Ops is much easier and less costly. Finally, regarding Ops and earning RP for using abilities, I'd like to see this done. If someone is killed after an Ops ability has been used on them, they should get an assist bonus for that -- fortunately this is one of the few situations where such an assist bonus can be tracked. The code is already in for this. May implement it soon.
• Ops levelling bug: Mjoll ranked up his Ops past rank 0 due to a bug. What was the bug, and why wasn't it reported?
• Ops commands: Might make them easier, such as a certain prefix, maybe -, that gives you all ops commands. At present the shortcuts are something like !od, which is still a bit long for trying to rapidly enter a command.
• Weasel vengeful bastard assist bonus: have any Weasels ever received an RP bonus for Vengeful Bastard firing on someone that kills them, and someone then killing the person immediately after? Would like to know if this is working. Note that it shouldn't (at least from now on) display if kill messages are disabled.
• Fluffz: the colors on the bases do not switch based on which freq you're on due to it requiring a huge amount of bandwidth to update for each player. For example, it takes 1 "unit" of bandwidth to update for all players when a flag changes, but if there are 50 players and we want to update for each individually based on their team affiliation, it will take 50 "units" of bandwidth. This is why I didn't choose blue or red or yellow for the colors, as it would make people think "friend" or "foe" rather than a specific team. Purple is always freq 0: their home base is a reddish purple. Green is always freq 1: their home base is mostly green. Hope that clears it up.
• Levi: it'll remain assault for now. It's a borderline ship, so it's hard to say exactly where it lies. Might consider putting it back in support, as that would give 4 support and 4 assault ships. More discussion welcome.
• Ship resets: there will probably be periodic ship resets. I'll leave this up to staff and the community to schedule and decide.
• Terrs: it's hard to get people to play them, yet they have too many ports? Hard to balance there. They were given more ports (and fewer bursts) so that they could have more leeway with the ports, using them more liberally -- for example, to make kills. If anyone has suggestions on ways to get people to play Shark or Terr, would be good to hear. I don't think making them level faster will necessarily do it.
• Bobyz re: special upgrades: unfortunately due to the way the game is implemented, you can't upgrade bullet speed or reduce damage for certain bullet types. HyperSpace has an advantage in that they're able to do this sort of thing; we have more limitations. However, there are shrap upgrades.
• Sidewing bots: not sure what you're talking about. If it involves running more client bots than one, which is what it's sounding like, I'm not presently interested in developing in that direction. Balancing and fixing up bugs are the main priorities at present.

Future:

• In case anyone is interested, I've been looking into using the Source SDK to mod Half-Life 2. It's really not too hard from the look of it. VC++ has a pretty barebones interface for walking through code, so it's making it difficult to explore as fast as I would like, but a lot of it is pretty straightforward. While it would hardly be a replacement for Subspace, a modernized version of Continuum using the Source engine appears quite possible. It would mean the playing style would be a bit more particular -- no ?go for example for a variety of games -- but still holds some interesting possibilities, to at the very least keep top-down spaceship-style gaming alive in the modern age. One nice thing about trying it as a mod is that 95% of the code is already written ... including reasonably-reliable netcode, the ability to implement 3D models without difficulty, etc., etc... Not saying it will ever necessarily blossom into anything, but I'm looking into the possibility at the very least.

[Aquatiq]

The only way to get people to play terr is to have them suffer countless more battle losses before finally realizing instead of screaming at teammates to change to terr, they should just do it themselves.