Freon bugs and issues to look at....

[Krellsan]

none, except those, that, in just mine humble opinion you run ahead of the train. We have some issues with the equalizer, issues with suicides, issues with obstruction of flakery or rocket damage, but you fix some things, and make only those fixes that seems necessary to you, no offense, but somehow strange. fixes for fixes and wrap unnecessary whistlers

In case you don't know what i am talking about - Issues with EQ: yesterday, when we played with teams, people began to leave the winning team, and equalizer was pushed people with a high rate from losing team to winning team, making the game useless and hopeless, Justice[ReZq] was there, I pointed him on that, but i don’t know if he said about it to you.

Issues with suicide: this situation is happening to me twice, after fixing mechanics of friendly fire and the ribbons. If i have low health, and shoot at the enemy, and at this very moment a fuckingly quick player flies into my sight - the following situation occurs: I am hitting the teammate, killing him, and get a penalty for teamkill, and a ribbon of a down - suicidal. But! Idiot was not me, that one, the quicky, who got into my scope. And killed teammate thawed normally, and i am stand and wait for the penalty time. Punished for nothing.
 
And the third one, in my opinion, bug from very beginning - Flak and Rockets sometimes do not hit. Just today, three rockets from alternate rocket fiering flew right in my face and yesterday, a couple of times twas flakery, but i get no damage at all. And it's kind of weird.
I understand that i have no any proof of that, exept equalizer, and i should demorec that things, but i never guess when it suppose to be happened.

No offense, no pretend, just a private opinion of what it would be worth fixing.

[Piglet]

This is the sort of very useful information I'm looking for. Thank you.

Let's take each in turn.

1. The equaliser. This is something that isn't part of the game type, and wasn't written by me. It sits outside as an add on to keep the player numbers from being more than one person different. It swaps the latest player who joined the game from the bigger team to the team with 2 players fewer. The only change I've made to the code is to freeze the player who is moved rather than them just dying to 'dead'.

You are saying that this is a problem, and I'm listening. What functionality can you think of which is better if one team has 2 more players than the other?

[Piglet]

2. The suicide. I agree with you, there are times when reverse friendly fire gets you...and it's annoying. There are two ways of addressing this.

The first is to change to the other RFF setting. With this on the damage is shared between the two teammates involved. If your teammates shoot you, you are damaged and so are they. This is a problem in a public server as there is always one teammate who spams rockets at you all map long. Actually I'm not sure how this helps!

The other option is to look at the code to see if/how RFF can be seen as not being a suicide.

Unfortunately doing that leaves the game open to abuse as not having a suicide penalty. You can just shoot teammates to get frozen, and they can thaw you in 5.5 seconds to full health.

Note: the current settings for suicide death is that thawing with one player takes 11 seconds, with two it's 5.5 seconds, with three it's 3.6 seconds...so not a massive problem...

[Piglet]

3. Dud flak and rockets. This is netcode in the engine. There's nothing that can be done about this by any modding.

[Krellsan]

If you dont mind, I will not split my post into three.
1. The equalizer itself implies equalization, tuning, adjusting, and it sorts the players by rating or some other reason at the start of the game, so your sarcasm

You are saying that this is a problem, and I'm listening. What functionality can you think of which is better if one team has 2 more players than the other?

is inappropriate.
 Perhaps the rating is bolted for a reason and the equalizer can use its data to make the teams equal?
2. Teamkill should be punished, yes. But, shooting in teammates? it's kinda odd. They get reduce hp, to help me get full? it's really weird. Suicide? Not by that much. Lava selfthaw is not cheating, it is a trick, a dangerous trick, on the verge of suicide and that can fail whole team. Selfkill by overtime if you almost last player is not cheating, this is a trick. You have issues with losing for a smart team, or trcky team? I just do not understand the goal, we are all here to have fun, and not for showing each other the length of our ... aim. Or do we?
3. As far as I know, on CORE, freon does not have a zero ping mutator, and, as far as I know, there are no problems with registering damage from flak or rockets. Can it be relative to this problem?

[Piglet]

It wasn't sarcasm. You misunderstood.

The current equaliser is exactly as I specified. It moves the latest joining player from the team with 2 more players to the team with 2 fewer.

There is an option which we are not using 'Auto Balance When New Players Join' which would re-do the teams every time a player joins (and potentially when one leaves). This appears to be what you are suggesting.

Think what would happen... Each time someone joins the entire teams would be shuffled. You'd be moved from team to team ... Is that better than what we have at the moment? This isn't sarcasm, it's a question.

2. You have to remember that what you see on your screen is what your client game has calculated as having happened. The server takes all the input from each connected client machine and decides what actually happened. It can sometimes decide that what your client showed was wrong. This is why you see warping players as the server updates your client on the actual player position.

Where the  'New Net' (From utcomp I think) is switched on the calculations made to determine what happened are changed. I've not looked at the code, but I suspect that it biases the decision about what happened more towards what the high ping client machine calculated than using what the server calculated.

However the calculation is done there will always be times when the final decision about what happened isn't what you saw on your screen when taking information from any client at all. As soon as you give any credence to what happened on clients running 200+ later than the server then it's going to result in significantly noticeable updates.

Or as I put it before.. it's netcode problems. Unless you can get instantaneous communication between the client machines and the server then you have to predict on the client and correct all clients based on what the server decides.

[hagis]

the 3spn balancer option isn't that bad,. it rarely moves the players who are doing well - which keeps things fairly consistent, balance on join doesn't need to happen - people can move themselves if they joined the wrong team (so long as the teams are uneven players) - when someone leaves and that team goes two players down I think the 3spn balancer should be run at that point - moving the last player can make things more uneven

I'm thinking of changing the logic to reward based on actual thaw work done.  - SoL did a version like that where they took into account thaw times,. it's on github but I didn't like the way they did it (and it broke the dual thaw distance code)

RFF - ok sure it's annoying when people jump in front but I'd count that as gameplay,. not pointing fingers but on other servers I see ppl complain about this and often they stand behind and in crowds of players shooting crap - so it's partly on them perhaps(!)

on netcode,. it's a fair chunk of work but when void added netcode to 3psn base code he pulling it from utcomp - lock stock and barrel,.. which is fine but the guy who wrote utcomp came back later and said hey I made tons of improvements to netcode in utcomp,.. the 3psn version of netcode is using the previous utcomp version,,

whether it's much better netcode is harder to prove but if you play on a never utcomp server across the pond it feels better than the netcode in 3spn - at least seems fairer

it's a distributed game and whet one player sees is not the same as another - it can't be perfect in a fps because there are network delays - unavoidable

[hagis]

there is a bug that doesn't happen often but it's in all versions of 3psn,.. sometimes you get killed instantly when someone res's you (permadeath) - it seems to be linked to whether you're holding down the fire button when frozen at  the point you're res'd you die,.

bugs like that I'm not sure how easy to fix though(!)

btw - this happens on 3psn TAM servers as well so it's not freon specific but in the base code - and I wonder really if the cause is somewhere in the engine code,. but it probably could be coded round - like by adding a check if the player died within a second or two of being res'd (similar to how the timer works at the start of round to stop ppl from killing themselves at round start)

[Piglet]

How much effort would it be to replace the netcode from the latest utcomp?

I've not seen the death on thaw

In the current version on the server I've added the option for counting 100 health units of thaw as a thaw, with a bigger reward every 50 and a slightly smaller one at each 100. It's not been tried out apart from on my test server - and it's not currently active on the Mia server. I might turn it on at some point over an evening to see how it goes. It counts all the partial thaws...

[hagis]

yeah - it only happens on a res,. think if you try holding down the fire button you might see it - most ppl don't do that - but if you die and are res'd quickly it does happen

utcomp netcode change probably 5-10 hours,. it's just copying the right parts of the utcomp across / over the top of the existing,. 3210cw and onwards the netcode is sort of inside 3spn but in separate files so it's mostly just copying those over the top (and perhaps slight tweaks!)

[Piglet]

Any idea where to get hold of the latest utcomp code?

[hagis]

I'll email it you

[Piglet]

Thanks. Got it.

I've fixed Kop's issue today. Code tested out ok, but hasn't got to the server yet.

1. If you can't use an adrenaline pickup, you can't pick it up. Before you could pick it up but it didn't help you. Health and Sheild pickups already worked this way, but adren was different.

2. Now you get a message when you can't pick up a pickup similar to the one you get when you do pickup.

"You can't pick up more health"
"You can't pick up more sheild"
"You can't pick up more adrenaline"

[kops]

nicely done.

[Piglet]

Well, I tried with the utcomp 1.7a code....and tried with a few helpers. It feels awful.

I may have completely messed up the port - but I don't think anything I did is likely to have made any problematic changes to the logic which weren't already there.

You can try from yourself (from the link in the next post)

I'll leave that server running for a few hours if anyone's interested in seeing how bad it feels!