Inconsistent capture bar resets

Discussion in 'Bug Reports' started by D.D.D. Destroyer, Feb 18, 2014.

  1. D.D.D. Destroyer

    D.D.D. Destroyer Member Staff Member Moderator

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    That's bad or intentional map design. On nuclear, this encourages ticket drain. On castle, it'll be utterly broken and would almost make recapping impossible.
     
  2. flasche

    flasche Member Staff Member Moderator

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    i think just resetting from 99% capture is bad.
     
  3. D.D.D. Destroyer

    D.D.D. Destroyer Member Staff Member Moderator

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    I think it can be logically explained. Also, it means 10 seconds of delay at most, and let's be honest you let someone slip by your defence.
     
  4. Z100000M

    Z100000M Vithered Weteran

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    Well, obviously the maps are balanced around the broken feature thats been in since forever. the maps that would suffer from it are

    1)escort
    2) castle

    Does someone actually give a shit about those? Doubly so for castle, since its design and gameplay are plain bad already.
     
  5. D.D.D. Destroyer

    D.D.D. Destroyer Member Staff Member Moderator

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    Then nothing of value will be lost. And on escort, you can't capture if people are around anyways because they keep running into the capture zone.
     
  6. ViroMan

    ViroMan Black Hole (*sniff*) Bully

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    Well the point was having that as an option the mappers could enable... not something on by default.
     
  7. ImSpartacus

    ImSpartacus nerf spec plz

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    There's no way to effectively communicate to players which control points use which scheme.

    So it has to be consistent.
     
  8. ViroMan

    ViroMan Black Hole (*sniff*) Bully

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    Well you could have the flag progress bar/timer show how many are on the flag to indicate it is keeping track.
     
  9. Candles

    Candles CAPTAIN CANDLES, DUN DUN DUN, DUN DUN DUN DUN.

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    Notice that the more dynamic you make it, the harder it gets. If you want tug-of-war mechanics, then that's more code work. But that would break some gameplay, so need more code to let the mapper set it. Now we need some more entity coding on top of that. But now we need some way to differentiate between tug-of-war style points and standard control points. Now we need GUI code to fix the original problem of inconsistent control points.

    Or, we could simply change the rules of control points slightly. A friendly on the point caps it, an enemy resets it and having both or neither pauses it. Or having a friendly on the point caps it, not having one resets it. There's some complexity we can add in there without making it ridiculously complex and hard to implement.
     
  10. D.D.D. Destroyer

    D.D.D. Destroyer Member Staff Member Moderator

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    You'd need to include cap time as well as the amount of people on the flag. Not every flag requires just one person.

    This seems like much more work than just allowing only the non-reducting capturing.
     
  11. LordDz_2

    LordDz_2 Strange things happens here

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    I know we don't touch the minimap code, but it would be nice if the flags would flash when being captured.
     
  12. ImSpartacus

    ImSpartacus nerf spec plz

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    That still doesn't communicate whether a flag is TF2-style or something else. It's literally impossible to communicate that difference without distracting a player's attention away from some other communication about a more important mechanic.

    We have a finite attention span to work with. What do you want to spend it on?

    While I'm in bitch&complain mode, does anyone else get a little salty about flags that require a minimum number of players to cap?

    I'm totally cool with some flags capping slower (and therefore requiring more players to cap at the same rate), but it's fucking sloppy design to outright reject a group of players if they don't meet some arbitrary number.
     
    Last edited: Feb 20, 2014
  13. Sgt.Security

    Sgt.Security Member

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    Speaking of minimap, in LoL they have the similar minimap bug as Empires, and it’s worse than ours. :D

    But I remember Candles said that our current minimap is really resources-consuming and probably can be optimized to boost the performance significantly?
     
  14. LordDz_2

    LordDz_2 Strange things happens here

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    Yup, using the nodraw command, my fps increased by around 20.
     
  15. ViroMan

    ViroMan Black Hole (*sniff*) Bully

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    You can change the visible flag appearance for different cap types. There are many ways the mapper can make things like that apparent without needing code too.

    The ground area that the flag is cappable with can have an overlay on it that has what ever symbols we designate for the capture types on it border. The overlay can have a lod on it that only shows up real close so there is not much fps hit.

    The flag pedestal can be different depending on the cap type.

    You could have two flags in a V for tug of war type flags that cap faster.

    Obviously those things require modeling but, guess what... they are easy and we have two aspiring modelers here to practice on them.

    Open your horizons.
     
  16. Candles

    Candles CAPTAIN CANDLES, DUN DUN DUN, DUN DUN DUN DUN.

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    This entire thread has gone from, "I can do that, it's not hard" to "Fuck that". Simple suggestions are more likely to get implemented than complex ones. That's like the golden rule of development right there.
     
  17. Lazybum

    Lazybum :D Staff Member Moderator

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    With empire's player counts and the way some maps are made I think it would be a bad idea to make it so the more players on a flag the faster it caps. I honestly thought the flag cap was 1 value, so after you have the conditional statements check who is on flag it would either decrease or increase the number accordingly. That is why I thought tf2 style's tug-of-war thing would be somewhat easy to implement.

    If code doesn't work like that then you should just do what you originally suggest you'd do in the first place Candles. Fixes current problem just fine.
     
  18. D.D.D. Destroyer

    D.D.D. Destroyer Member Staff Member Moderator

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    I agree with Lazybum. Just deploy a simple fix and malcontents will deal with it after a while. Maps can be readjusted if necessary, I'm sure.
     
  19. Candles

    Candles CAPTAIN CANDLES, DUN DUN DUN, DUN DUN DUN DUN.

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    Bringing this shit back from the dead because Haschte mentioned the problem to me during a round of Escort. Then while thinking about it, I realized it's a good bit harder than there being two teams and each team either has players there or doesn't have players there.

    First, there are three states for a flag. Owned by NF, owned by BE and neutral. Thankfully, we can simplify that to either owned or not owned, because NF and BE are the same and can be wrapped up together, and then just use symmetry to split it back up.

    Second, there are actually three states for a team having players on the flag. The first is the team has no players, and the second is the team has players. But the third is that the team has players on the flag, but not enough to actually cap the flag, which is the problem Escort suffers from to some degree; BE can keep throwing players at the flag and as long as NF doesn't have 4 players on the flag at the same time, the progress bar never recedes.

    So, with there being two teams and each team can be in one of three states on a flag, there are 3*3 = 9 possible combinations of players on a flag. But we can simplify this by keeping in mind that some of those combinations are reflections of each other! If you describe the state of a team on a flag by three binary digits, then you have 001, 010, and 100 for having no players, some players and enough players respectively. And so you can describe any combination by concatenating the two teams states, so you get, for example, 001|010 for one team having none and the other team having some but not enough. But, because of the magic of SYMMETRY!, that's the same as 010|001 with the teams flipped! Meaning all the relevant combinations are 001|001, 001|010, 001|100, 010|010, 010|100 and 100|100 = 6 combinations! Is dat some (3 + 1 choose 2) I see? Sum of the first 3 natural numbers, the third triangular number? Combinatorics is love, combinatorics is life.

    Anyway, then the flag can be in one of two states, so you double that for 12 possible combinations for deciding what the progress bar should be doing at any given point in time. Without any simplifications due to SYMMETRY FUCK YEAH!, we'd have to deal with 27 slightly distinct cases instead of 12 fairly distinct cases.

    I'm too tired now; I'll finish this post tomorrow and establish the logic for each of the cases.

    EDIT: For the math nerds (I know you're there) who are wondering why the state selection ends up nicely as (n + 1 choose 2), the simplest way of looking at it is as a four digit binary number. The latter three digits are the same as stated, but if the first digit is 1, then it indicates that both teams have the same state. From this, you can describe the possible combinations of two teams having a unique state as (4 choose 2). This can then be generalized as for having n states and 2 teams as (n + 1 choose 2). For the fun of it, it can then be further generalized for k teams by noting that each additional team adds (where k is the number of the team) k - 1 more digits to the base state representation to show all the possible combinations of teams sharing the same state; for example, adding one more team to get three teams adds two more digits, the first digit then represents A and B having the same state, the second digit represents A and C having the same state and the third digit represents B and C having the same state. Further note that if any two of those first three digits are the same, the final digit doesn't matter, i.e, 111 is the same as 110, 101 and 011 by transitivity ( if A = B and B = C then A = C), allowing us to disregard that particular combination. This is important because then any combination that would involve 111 (which would mean having to choose 4 because you still need to select a state) can be reduced down to two digits (so you'd only have to choose 3, against because you still need to select a state). Then because each team adds k - 1 bits, it sums to k( k - 1 )/2 additional bits, which is equal to ( k + 1 choose 2 ) - k more bits. From here, we can see that the entire things can be beautifully written as (( n + ( k + 1 choose 2 ) - k) choose k ) which equals (( n + k( k + 1)/2 - k) choose k ) which in turn equals ( n + k(k + 1)/2 - k)!/(k!( n + k(k + 1)/2-2k)!)

    I fuckin' love combinatorics,
     
    Last edited: Jul 3, 2014
  20. D.D.D. Destroyer

    D.D.D. Destroyer Member Staff Member Moderator

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    But how does this help us get a solution, aside from having a better understanding of the situation?
     

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