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Agent

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Posts posted by Agent

  1. We already have a model for the miniature Communications Center (about the size of a bunker) which will act as a tech building; someone just needs to implement the functionality. This is easy to fit into any map. Those other things are not easy to fit into existing maps, and are honestly kinda gimmicky. We're also not really making any levels that would make use of additional structures such as that. Realistically you might see City and kenz's BeachHead included in the game eventually, but I'm not expecting much more than that from members of the development team.

    Feel free to implement those though, and if they end up getting used for more than 1 or 2 maps we'll totally package it with the game so that mappers don't have to keep packaging it with their levels.

  2. I have nothing against advertising. I'm just saying to try to keep the best for last, since the game is relatively near completion.

    The only reason I can foresee us not at least being in a release-candidate state by the end of the year would be that we lack a dedicated UI programmer.

  3. This project will never be fully done, and there will never be that golden moment. Its been 2+ years since beta came out.

    The game will be finished eventually. Here is a post about what we're actively working on and what needs to be finished at some point -- once this list is completed, the game will be much closer to finished: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=76285

    Ideally we would do a large campaign when 1.0 eventually gets done and pushed. Many game reviewers will not review the same game twice, and many gamers will not play betas. Keep those 2 things in mind when doing any advertising.

  4. Someone mentioned that it might be useful to move this post into a public forum, so here it is! This is more of a feature/progress list, and generally doesn't include bug fixes. This post is cut/pasted/edited from another section:

    Figured it'd be nice to have a full list of what's being (or will be) worked on, and who's doing what. Any devs should feel free to input/update their own things in this thread. This also serves as my personal to-do list, because I keep forgetting what still needs to be done.

     

    Agent:

    • (Planned) Game database for the leaderboard
    • (Planned) Various fixes to Soft Level Boundaries
    • Add optional Target parameter to "SpectateMode" RCON command to spectate a specific player
    • (Maybe) Server-side player access system (moderator system)

    Yosh56:

    • (In progress) Commander Mod

    Schmitzenbergh:

    • (Planned) Add country flags for servers on the launcher
    • (In Progress) Resolve permissions issues

     

    Unassigned/back-burner:

    • Replace Steam IDs with forum registration (after forum conversion to IPB4)
    • HUD for spectator mode
    • Replace most hard-coded strings with localized strings
    • City
    • Tutorial level
    • Server join queue, and possibly queue servers.
    • Taunts
    • Like 1
  5. For those who were wondering: There will not be any Steam or Origin release. Renegade X will continue to be operated and developed as it has been (albeit we're far closer to completion, so development has definitely slowed a bit).

  6. Yeah I was just talking to that about someone else as well. I do feel like player counts need to be somehow incorporated, but we should also make a conscious effort to ensure that we don't discourage players from populating additional servers. Perhaps some sort of logarithmic operation could be used: log(server.player_count). Maybe a base of 10 or 20 would be good for that logarithm.

    Maybe a small multiplier against the losing team for surrendering could be used to prevent these same ladder points from encouraging surrenders as well. I'll think on that. We do however want to make sure that players aren't encouraged to leave more than they are to surrender, though.

  7. I may implement some sort of "Ladder Points" independent from the Score statistic, and switch to using ladder points for ranking. I've been considering that already, but haven't actually decided on a specific algorithm to use yet. That said, I do not under any circumstance wish to discourage surrenders. Surrender is a perfectly valid way to end a game and often preferred in not only Renegade X, but strategy games such as C&C and StarCraft. It's generally considered a waste of time and poor sport to force your opponent to destroy the rest of your base, when you've already lost by a wide margin.

    As far as an algorithm for points goes, something based on your in-game score, time in-game, win/loss status, and each team's cumulative ladder points should be used.

    Maybe some pseudo-code for a possible implementation:

    // Assuming not a tie
    
    float cumulative_winner_ladder_points;
    float cumulative_loser_ladder_points;
    
    // Implement: assign 'cumulative_winner__ladder_points', 'cumulative_loser_ladder_points', 'player'
    
    float ladder_points_change = 0.0;
    float win_loss_multiplier = cumulative_loser_ladder_points / cumulative_winner_ladder_points;
    
    #define WINNER_CONSTANT 1.0
    #define LOSER_CONSTANT -0.01
    
    if (is_winner(player))
     win_loss_multiplier *= WINNER_CONSTANT;
    else
     win_loss_multipler *= LOSER_CONSTANT;
    
    float game_time_multiplier = player.game_time / server.game_time;
    
    float team_total_score;
    
    // Implement: assign 'team_total_score'
    
    float score_multiplier;
    if (is_winner(player))
     float score_multiplier = player.score / team_total_score; // Reward more for contributing
    else
     float score_multiplier = team_total_score / player.score * (enemy_team_total_score / team_total_score); // Punish less for contributing
    
    #define BASE_POINTS 10
    
    ladder_points_change = BASE_POINTS * score_multiplier * game_time_multiplier * win_loss_multiplier;
    

    You'll always gain for winning and always lose for losing, but the gains/losses will be less depending on who wins/loses. You'll always gain more / lose fewer points for playing well.

    Quitting mid-game will automatically subtract some constant number of points. Joining mid-game will automatically add the same constant number of points. Being in a game when it starts will also add this constant number of points. This means that crashing mid-game will not hurt you, and players will generally net more points than they lose.

    Example game:

    30 minutes long

    GDI (Winner): 6000 points

    • * Bob: 3000 - 30 mins: 10 * 0.5 * 1.0 * X = 5X
      * Jimmy: 2000 - 30 mins: 10 * 0.3333 * 1.0 * X = 3.33X
      * John: 900 - 20 mins: 10 * 0.1 * 0.66 * X = 0.66X
      * Newbie: 50 - 2 mins: 10 * 0.01 * 0.06666* X = 0.0066X
      * AFK Pro: 50 - 30 mins: 10 * 0.01 * 1.0 * X = 0.1X

    Nod (Loser): 4000 points

    • * Bober: 2000 - 30 mins: 10 * 3 * 1.0 * -.01X = -0.3X
      * Jimmyer: 1200 - 30 mins: 10 * 5 * 1.0 * -.01X = -0.5X
      * Johner: 600 - 20 mins: 10 * 10 * 0.66 * -.01X = -0.66X
      * Newbier: 100 - 2 mins: 10 * 60 * 0.0666 * -.01X = -0.34X
      * AFK Proer: 100 - 30 mins: 10 * 60 * 1.0 * -.01X = -6.0X

    Issues:

    * The AFK player on the winning team still earns more points than a player with the same points who recently joined.

    * Too much emphasis on score -- this should be solved by rebalancing score and:

    * Some multiplier constants need to be adjusted

    Obviously the above is a super duper rough draft.

  8. The leaderboard uses a player's Steam ID as their unique ID, not their IP address.

    It's already totally possible to do this, since the leaderboard server already informs the UDK server of the player's rank and the UDK server stores it (though this feature is currently unused). Players would have to be placed into the spectator team before the game starts, and then the teams would be assigned when the level starts. Since not everybody uses Steam however, non-steam players would have to be split into teams randomly unless we replace Steam IDs with something else in the future (something I actually hope to implement, but not in the immediate future).

    It'd be trivial however to add players to a list, quick sort the list based on their global_rank, and assign players to teams in an alternating fashion.

  9. I guess we could always implement something like this, though I think ".blameYosh" would be much better than ".here"

    There's already an AFK kicker, though servers often disable it.

  10. So it turns out that the class that does a version check in-game, Rx_VersionCheck, pulls the version number from a location that hasn't been updated since Open Beta 3. We should probably check if this is still functional, and update the value to the current version.

  11. It looks like the 'RenX_Game' package you have is not the same version as the server you tried to join. Did you run the game through the launcher, or did you directly run UDK.exe? Only the launcher performs automated updates (though I may look into generating a warning of some sort when the game version is out of date).

  12. It sounds like your display driver may have crashed (since that's the only time I've gotten that error). That could be caused by a hardware fault, overheating, a faulty driver, or maybe just not having the performance necessary to run the game. In my case, under-clocking my GPU's memory clock resolved some crashing issues in a number of games for me (including Renegade X).

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