Allow modders to disable typemaps

[PicassoCT]

nevar again will this depraved mods be forced down upon my holy ground. Release thy!

[Forboding Angel]

Except in my case it's a unique situation because I'm a mod maker AND a very experienced mapper.

[Das Bruce]

That's not unique.

[Neddie]

Not at all.

[Jazcash]

Mods shouldn't have the ability to mess with maps, but maps should come default with a few map options such as typemaps, metal output, wind outputs, tidal outputs, and Smoth's climate options.

[Forboding Angel]

That's not unique.

Name one who has made more than five? I've made more than 130. A stupidly high number and I don;t even know how that's possible, but apparently some time ago I was a busy little beaver. The amount of experience is what i meant by "unique". People tend to forget a lot of what has happened here in the past 6 or 7 years on the mapping scene, but I remember most of it.

Regardless, the statement wasn't an attempt to bolster epeen, it was an attempt to convey that I understand both sides a little more objectively (to some degree) than most modders or mappers seem to.

[zwzsg]

That's not unique.

Name one who has made more than five?

I made more than five maps!

But then even though I consider myself more a modder than a mapper, I didn't make any real mod. :s

[Neddie]

That's not unique.

Name one who has made more than five?

I made more than five maps!

But then even though I consider myself more a modder than a mapper, I didn't make any real mod. :s

I consider myself a moderator more than either, but I've made more than five as well.

[KDR_11k]

One problem with typemaps is already the kbot/tank/hover/ship distinction which won't be appropriate for non-TA mods. What's a hover in the engine may well be infantry that can swim, a floating APC or some completely weird thing. Giving all of those the same terrain behaviour would be wrong. Even worse if non-swimming infantry counts as kbots and regular vehicles as tanks so those swimmers and APCs would get inconsistent penalties compared to other units that appear to be of their type to the player.

[Forboding Angel]

A perfect example of this is the hover factories in evo. The only reason I call them that is because the engine calls them that. On normal land they act exactly like tanks, when over water cob switches them to upright=1, that's the only think that makes them "Hovers".

[PicassoCT]

Except in my case it's a unique situation because I'm a mod maker AND a very experienced mapper.

Swiss is this. We can exchange hostages and spys in Forbs territory. Also, who plays Cuba?

In Addition, Neddie, i demand proof, that you have done maps

[Forboding Angel]

Regardless, the statement wasn't an attempt to bolster epeen, it was an attempt to convey that I understand both sides a little more objectively (to some degree) than most modders or mappers seem to.

[Pxtl]

One problem with typemaps is already the kbot/tank/hover/ship distinction which won't be appropriate for non-TA mods. What's a hover in the engine may well be infantry that can swim, a floating APC or some completely weird thing. Giving all of those the same terrain behaviour would be wrong. Even worse if non-swimming infantry counts as kbots and regular vehicles as tanks so those swimmers and APCs would get inconsistent penalties compared to other units that appear to be of their type to the player.

This. I just wish mappers had gone on a convention for typemap names. I mean, if you're throwing out all the speedboost info and starting from scratch, you can still use the stuff tagged as "Road" in Beheriths map and assume "well, I can give this stuff a speed-boost" and be confident that it will still work within the mapper's intent.

Personally, for the sake of vaguely respecting mappers' designs, without compromising the gameplay I'd take the following approach:
1) If 90% of the map is a speedboost for one specific type (IE Hovers on Geyser Plains), throw the speed info out.
2) Otherwise, take the average of the speed-mod for tank/kbot/ship/hover and apply it to all fields. So the hills on DSD become a moderate universal speedboost. Beherith's roads are still a speed-boost. And so on.

There's more complex ninjitsu you could do if you could figure out that Type X is a Land type and Type Y is a Water type (Seperate the averaging between Hovers and Bots vs. Bots and Tanks if it's a water Type).

[Google_Frog]

Typemaps are too randomly named for name based detection to work (except maybe for road) and gadget detection is a pain. I think the best way would be modoptions. CA will probably go with 3 options for movement types: Disable all, disable all but roads, and keep all.

[Pxtl]

Typemaps are too randomly named for name based detection to work (except maybe for road) and gadget detection is a pain. I think the best way would be modoptions. CA will probably go with 3 options for movement types: Disable all, disable all but roads, and keep all.

Can you read the map's move-type values? After all, a map may legitimately have some kind of "muck" zone that slows up all units equally.

Thinking it over further, it seems to me that analyzing the move-boost numbers would be the best approach for producing good gameplay. If a map provides the speedboost across-the-board and not limiting it to a specific movetype (which, iirc, beherith's roads do) then why not let it persist?

[smoth]

Except in my case it's a unique situation because I'm a mod maker AND a very experienced mapper.

http://web.archive.org/web/200610261910 ... reens.html
I was more experienced in highschool. This was what I released.

Prior to this I had over 200 duke nukem 3d maps.

got hired out of highschool as a freelance guy for the now defunct grimware.

made many more unreleased maps in college.

Done about 5-6 released spring maps

4-5 maps for gundam annihilation..

blah blah

[Das Bruce]

How about we do the sane thing

A) Set a group of standardized terrain types 'Road', 'Grass', 'Sand' etc
B) Make game makers decide what the appropriate response is to these terrain types based on their own games units and setting

Map makers still get to affect map balance without necessarily fucking up game play on half the games.

[Pxtl]

Unfortunately, it's too late to do that except for new maps. Well, I guess the map-mutator system could be used to provide wrappers for old maps that conform to standard TypeMap names... if they can do that.

[JohannesH]

How about adding more movetypes, that games with non-TA like unit categories can use? Then you could do typemapped maps for them, while keeping the current maps untypemapped, or even make a map have different kind of typemaps for different games.

For CA though I see no point in disabling typemaps though, when they use the kbot/vehicle/hover categories that most maps were designed for.

[Das Bruce]

Unfortunately, it's too late to do that except for new maps. Well, I guess the map-mutator system could be used to provide wrappers for old maps that conform to standard TypeMap names... if they can do that.

It may be too late for those maps, but that shouldn't stop us from establishing standards for future maps.

How about adding more movetypes, that games with non-TA like unit categories can use? Then you could do typemapped maps for them, while keeping the current maps untypemapped, or even make a map have different kind of typemaps for different games.

Because it's silly for a map to know about a mods movetypes, for example one mod might have regular walking units that would get bogged down in mud and regular tanks units that could traverse it easily, but another might have walking units like in Earth2150 which had a weak anti-gravity engine allowing them to go faster over mud than their tracked/wheeled compatriots. Any attempt to add every move type would rapidly become unmanageable.

For CA though I see no point in disabling typemaps though, when they use the kbot/vehicle/hover categories that most maps were designed for.

Spring is not *A.