Feature Request: Server-side global damage modifier

[krogothe]

Words alone cannot describe how much that would rule, please do add soft mutators!

[AF]

See my above post for existing mechanism that does the same job.

[Caydr]

The existing mechanism which takes dozens of hours and must be carefully balanced, verus a new and easy-to-implement mechanism which would require next to no work on anyone's part except the lobby programmer. Eat poopy and die.

[AF]

Hmmm are you referring to takign hours and hours to make the techforge modfile or the hours and hours actually doing the whole of AA for spring?

[Caydr]

Techforge. It really DID take a pretty long time to plan all the unit menu positions and such. To do something like halved damage would require manual dividing of every damage value, of which AA has about 245.

[jellyman]

moron, nobody ever made x10 mutators for TA, they usually went only double or half. there were other mutators too, like the all transports now shoot stuff, the universal hide-damage mutator, adv. radar for commander mutator, and other things that some people actually liked. oh yeah, and trippy colors too =D

Why am I a moron for thinking that x10 damage and killing everything with hawks would be fun??j

If that was all I wanted to play, instead of just once or twice as a spot of silliness, then you could call me a moron.

[Neuralize]

Yeah, this is needed. In the lobby. As an option. We don't need to go as far as to add a whole line of soft mutators though. As that would take a considerable amount of time which isn't immediately feasible.

And, it must go in both ways, a la.. 25% of normal damage, up to say like 300% normal damage.

[AF]

Wait I've gotten a little befuddled there. Changign weapon strengths I've already said would be very easy to implement in the engine, i was referring to thigns like warpgates etc.... If I remember correctly you'd have to do that for techforge wether it was a mutator or what it is now and they'd ahev the same effect ingame.

Warpgates could be as simple as adding a warpgate unit and supplying a modified SideData.tdf then packaging ti in the same way the techforge mod is packaged using the mod dependencies.

[FizWizz]

actually, soft mutators are absurdly easy to make (with TA:M) considering how sweeping their effects are. Check out these examples, showing soft mutator files in their entirety. making more complex mutators, or making hard mutators would not be difficult at all to anyone who has already been making units and mods.

Double LOS:

Code: Select all

[*all*]
	{
	SightDistance=*2;
	RadarDistance=*1.5;
	}

full blast effect:

Code: Select all

folder=weapons;
extension=tdf;

[*All*]
	{
	edgeeffectiveness=1;
	}

double metal storage (sorta integrated into XTA):

Code: Select all

[*Group*]
{
	[Needs]
	{	//change all units that store metal
		MetalStorage=300,10000000;
	}
	[Changes]
	{	// by doubling their capacity
		MetalStorage=*2;
	}
}
[*Group*]
{
	[Needs]
	{	//change all units that store energy
		EnergyStorage=300,10000000;
	}
	[Changes]
	{	// by doubling their capacity
		EnergyStorage=*2;
	}
}

shootall! you don't even have to type it in for every game if you use this mutator!:

Code: Select all

[*All*]
{
	Shootme ="1";
}

autotargetting, an idea the SY's thought was good, so they integrated it into the Spring engine:

Code: Select all

[*Group*]
{
	[Needs]
	{	//change all commanders
		Commander	=1,1;
		BMcode  	=1,1;//just to make sure Warpgates etc. don't get mutated for no reason
	}
	[Changes]
	{	
		istargetingupgrade="1";
		
	}
}

it's so simple that even I had made one (which I kept for myself), can you guess what it does?

Code: Select all

[*All*]
{
	HealTime ="20";
}

one more thing: supporting soft mutators is not the same as forcing them on others. Letting those of us who want mutators have mutators will not have some funny invisible effect that somehow causes everyone else's Sprng experience to go sour. That's the kind of nonsense argument you would hear opposing gay marriage, but that's another ball of wax.

[Dragon45]

I love autotargetting... personally, I mostly play Epic TA games, and evne before you have L2 or l3 up, there's hudrends of defenses and units scattered about a map. If I didn't have my own Commander auto-targetting mutator in such situatoins, I would spend all my time just clicking on radar dots. Having autotargetting with commander eliminates so much micro.

And once Spring supports uber-maps, I know i'll be equally happy :D

[SwiftSpear]

The existing mechanism which takes dozens of hours and must be carefully balanced, verus a new and easy-to-implement mechanism which would require next to no work on anyone's part except the lobby programmer. Eat poopy and die.

Well, the latter idea is absolutly terrible, so I think stick with the former.

[Caydr]

The existing mechanism which takes dozens of hours and must be carefully balanced, verus a new and easy-to-implement mechanism which would require next to no work on anyone's part except the lobby programmer. Eat poopy and die.

Well, the latter idea is absolutly terrible, so I think stick with the former.

What? I think you have your formers and latters confused...

[SwiftSpear]

Ok, you might be able to balance AA against every possible damage calculation on a server side slider, but I don't even want to try balancing some of the other mods around. How many shots X unit takes to kill Y unit is a HUGE balancing factor. Slow units that take less shots to kill fast units still can be deadly against them, Guns that have long reload times and rely on doing alot of damage the first time they strike suddenly become useless. As a gaming rule of thumb you don't give people server side control of balance modifiers unless you force them to change something that clearly forces them to understand that it isn't the developers fault if thier game is unbalanced for them.

[krogothe]

Of course the game would have its balance completely changed, but that doesnt mean it wont be fun now and then!

Last i checked, we play games to have fun, do we not?

[FizWizz]

Of course the game would have its balance completely changed, but that doesnt mean it wont be fun now and then!

hear hear!

[SwiftSpear]

Of course the game would have its balance completely changed, but that doesnt mean it wont be fun now and then!

Last i checked, we play games to have fun, do we not?

I make games for fun too, and it's not fun to have everyone blaming you for being unable to balance for every possible scenario. If I make a mod and then someone makes a mutator that changes the damage figures it's not my fault that the mutator makes the mod unbalanced, it's whoever made the mutator's fault. If there is a hard coded slider availible to all server admins then I need to at least try to balance around that slider, not doing so would be bad design tecnique, and in the long run that SERIOUSLY limits the kinds of games that can be made in spring. Only games that can't be seriously destroyed by damage modifying sliders can be used in spring. Thus my conclusion: Damage sliders can be mod side, mutator side, but never server side.

[FizWizz]

it's not the mutator maker's fault either, he or she does not control which mods and which games the mutator is applied to. I have enough faith in people that they will not intentionally activate mutators when they KNOW the effect they will have on the game numbers, and then blame anyone but themselves for the mutator doing exactly what it was made to do.

[Doomweaver]

I'm against anything that would make it take longer to find a game. I mean, if you choose mod and damage, and scale, that's already like 50 possible set ups, and imagine if you found the one you were looking for the host was a wanker and set the resources to something stupid. Then you'd have to wait another half hour for the right game to pop up.

I personally will not play XTA, which means that I'm restricted to about a third of the games being played, and I feel that this would only make it worse. Sure, it would be fun to try the variations, but eventually everyone will find their favourites, and no one will ever be able to find a game they want to play.

Anyway, if you do implement something like this, make sure the mod can choose whether to allow it or not, and which values to allow; for some, anything but the default values would be retarded .

[CrowJuice]

Anyway, if you do implement something like this, make sure the mod can choose whether to allow it or not, and which values to allow; for some, anything but the default values would be retarded .

Why in the world should we limit this and that? If somebody wants to host a game with 10x dmg then let him/her. If you don't like it then just don't join that game. We can't have restrictions on mutators just cuz' you don't like more then half of the hosted games.

[CrowJuice]

I make games for fun too, and it's not fun to have everyone blaming you for being unable to balance for every possible scenario. If I make a mod and then someone makes a mutator that changes the damage figures it's not my fault that the mutator makes the mod unbalanced, it's whoever made the mutator's fault.

It's the person hosting the game with game play breaking mutators who is at fault. Not the Mod maker and not the Mutation maker. The same reason why Techno sounds all wrong when you turn down the base all the way down. You can't blame the musician. Nor can you blame the manufacturer of the equipment. It is the user who is at fault here.

BUT if somebody wants to listen to his/her music like that the by all mean let him/her. We don├óÔé¼Ôäót have to listen to it.

*edit*

Oops! That was suposed to be an edit of my last post