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[Entropy-Soldier]

We played a few rounds tonight and people seemed to have a great time.  I think the mode didn't really behave at all as intended, but pretty much everyone on the server wanted to keep playing it and it got an encore twice so clearly there's something to how it works right now that people really enjoyed.

I think the biggest reason it doesn't play as intended is that even with enemy teams set to not show on the radar people would call out where the 007 was and very quickly the mode would devolve into a giant horde following 007 around.  Enemies still have normal health so 007 can't kill them very quickly, and 007 has 16 times normal health so the giant horde of enemies can't kill him very quickly either.  This makes getting the objective tokens pretty hard as enemies usually come back faster than 007 can kill them and almost always pick up the dropped tokens before he can.

Also the armor provides a -ton- of health to 007 and generally he can just stay alive forever unless the guards actively try and eat up armor spawns.


I think the biggest question after having played it is if you want it to be a stealth-based sneaking mode, or a juggernaut mode.  The current health values make it into more of a juggernaut mode where 007 is nearly invincible and can take on a lot of enemies at once, but the current objective setup makes it pointless for him to do so as his chance of picking up the token from slain enemies is very low when their friends are around to instantly pick them back up.  Conversely, for a sneaking mode everyone just has way too much health and allowing players to carry around the objectives means the optimal strategy is for Janus to just ball up into one giant group so 007 can't get a chance to pick up the tokens and they can all fight him at once.

I'd say for a juggernaut style mode, just give points to bond for kills and points to Janus for doing damage to him.  Also do the damage scaling in CalculateCustomDamage instead of using the SetDamageMultiplier() function as that function also scales the damage caps meaning 15 players shooting at bond isn't much better than 3-4.  Also turn off armor so bond can't just keep picking it up for infinite life.

For the sneaking mode, I'd say just turn the objectives into capture points that Janus has to spread out and defend.  Maybe even have multiple objective types such as one player being a VIP that bond needs to kill instead of just having X capture points he needs to capture.  Maybe use the StagnateArmorSpawns function and stop Janus from picking it up to turn armor into a single-use resource for bond like it was in GE64 singleplayer.  The biggest thing though would be to only give bond at most 3 times the normal health, and give the guards perhaps 1/4th the normal health.  This would make guards much more threatening to bond in groups while making it much easier for him to take out key guards and stop them from massing into one giant army.  Give both bond and the guards a 4x damage multiplier, to bring all the damage caps above the max health, and then scale the guard's damage manually in CalculateCustomDamage so they do 12 times less damage (3x4 to give bond effectively 3 times the health.  Would probably need to be scaled based on playercount but that's the general math behind this damage scaling method).


Anyway, it was a blast to play so I'm sure with some refinement it will be quite popular!  I'll try to let you know the next time we play and on what server so you can get a chance to join us.  Thanks for making this fun mode!

[John Doom]

Thanks, guys

papel, I'll see if I can add some kind of warming up so the game doesn't start until there are enough players.

Thanks for your detailed reply, Entropy-Soldier.
I definitely don't want the agent to be invincible (unless he's Boris ).

I think stealth is a useful strategy, but I doubt it would work against 15 players all around the map. I wonder if there's a way to actually prevent players to give away the agent's position. I also think armors are necessary, so that if someone makes a mistake, has still a slim chance to retry without dying and getting frustrated.
So I'll definitely use "CalculateCustomDamage" as you suggested and, for now, I'll just double Janus team's damage, so that the agent is less likely to pick up another armor on time.

[papel]

John, this latest update does not allow anyone to be MI6. All players are being forced into the janus team.

[John Doom]

Actually I haven't updated the attachment yet. It probably happens in a specific situation, could you describe what happened? If it happens again, I'd suggest rematching, changing map or recreating the server. Meanwhile I'll work on fixing this issue as the first priority.

[papel]

The date of the 00agent.py file is 08/12/2018. I thought you updated. It was working until when I downloaded the version of that date.

[John Doom]

You're correct, it was last updated in 12/08/2018 at 2:20 UTC+01:00 (time to go to sleep ), but this means it should be the same script you tested (https://forums.geshl2.com/index.php/topic,8900.msg87011.html#msg87011).
I'm sorry it didn't work last time, I'll do my best to fix this issue.

[papel]

Thank you my friend. I'll wait for the changes.

[John Doom]

Download in the first post updated.
I worked on the bug, but I can't test if it has been fixed, since I don't know what happened and what caused it. Hopefully it's been fixed for good.
I also did some tweaking to the gameplay: I disabled autoswitching (it was useless), let everyone start with armor and doubled damage multiplier (so it doesn't take too long to kill an opponent).
btw, Entropy-Soldier, I was going to use "CalculateCustomDamage" instead of "SetDamageMultiplier", as you suggested, but I don't know how to use it properly to adjust damage . Could you give me an example?

[Entropy-Soldier]

Code: [Select]

    def CalculateCustomDamage( self, victim, info, health, armor ):
        killer = GEPlayer.ToMPPlayer(info.GetAttacker())
        killerid = GEEntity.GetUniqueId(GEPlayer.ToMPPlayer(info.GetAttacker()))
        target = GEEntity.GetUniqueId(victim)
        damage = health + armor
        damageMultiplier = 2
        damage = damage * damageMultiplier

        armor = damage # Can go way over the actual amount of armor the victim has but that's fine
        health = max(damage - victim.GetArmor(), 0) # Make sure we don't add health if the victim's armor is enough to absorb the attack

        # Return the adjusted damage values to the victim's health and armor gauges.
        return health, armor

This should more or less be what you need, it's a little unintuitive to use for raw damage scaling since you control the health and armor damages separately instead of just modifying damage, but once you have the basic structure it's not too hard to make adjustments.  I might make a utility function for 5.1 to make this a bit easier in the future, but for now you should be able to just modify this code however you need.

Regardless, I'm looking forward to trying out the new version of your mode tonight!  We'll start playing in around 5-6 or so hours between 8:00 PM or 9:00 PM EST on Entropy-Server, so if you get a chance to stop by let me know and we'll play a few rounds together.  Hope to see you there!

[Entropy-Soldier]

Well, we played 3 matches again tonight and while people had a lot of fun with it a lot of the same issues I mentioned previously were still present, though now even the best players couldn't win as 007 most of the time.  Being able to carry the objectives around as Janus means the optimal strategy is pretty much always to just form into the giant death swarm and the MI6 player usually has no real way of dealing with that.

I would say making the objectives stationary, and just not letting bond capture them with guards around, is probably the easiest fix for this.  Guards will have to spread out to cover all the objectives and bond can then carefully strike at the weakest ones, to which the guards will have to shift their forces around to compensate.  It also probably wouldn't hurt to give bond some sort of bonus damage or something for capturing the objectives so that the guards can't just give up 4/5 of them in order to form the giant death ball on the last one.


Regardless, I still had lots of fun with the mode.  Thanks for all your work on it so far!

[John Doom]

Thanks for the help. Sorry I couldn't play with you.
I think you're right, I'm going to disable picking up tokens. I also think there are balance problems with respawns, so I'm going to disable them for team janus too, so the agent won't be constantly chased by the giant death ball (I didn't want to before, because I thought it would've been too punishing for the janus' players, but now that all players can pick up armors, I think it could be fair).

[Entropy-Soldier]

Hmmmm, honestly I think elimination isn't the way to go here.  It's really easy to die on Janus even with full health, so with elimination the MI6 player just needs to armor camp until he kills enough people that there aren't enough left to stop him.

If you don't let Janus pick up armor, have the objectives spread out as you're doing, and don't let armor respawn, that should solve the giant ball of death problem and the armor camping issues as well.  Give some sort of bonus to MI6 for capturing objectives, like bonus damage scaling up to double damage at 4 tokens, so that Janus is forced to spread out to defend them.


I mean there's always going to be different ways to approach a problem and you can probably balance the mode around elimination but generally it should be avoided if at all possible.  People really dislike getting eliminated in ways they see as unfair, and I think part of the appeal of playing on Janus is to try and swarm bond with no fear of consequences if you die.

If you still want to give elimination a shot I have no problem giving it another test run on my server, just wanted to give you my thoughts before you went through the trouble of setting it up.  Looking forward to playing this again next Saturday regardless!

[Captain George]

Looks like a solid mode, and can't wait to play it. How do I get access to this? I do really like capture the key, and I feel this is somewhat similar to it, which is a good thing.

[WNxSpectra]

Played this mode a few times and I really like it. Good job

[John Doom]

Thanks, guys.
I updated the download in the first post, mainly with damage bonuses for each target recovered and new sound effects, I kept Team Janus' respawns intact.

Question time:
-"player/playerdeath.wav"'s volume seems too low to me, is it possible to play it louder?
-is it possible to play "alarms/ge_alarm01.wav" without making it loop? I'd like to use it for Team Janus whenever the agent picks up a target.