Server Help

[Animate Dreams]

Okay, I've come up with a few ideas, but I'm not even sure if it can be done, or how it could be done. If it can, I really don't know where to start. If it's possible for any of you to point me in the right direction, that'd be great. I'm not asking anyone to do any work for me. But don't get me wrong, if any of you thought something like this looked like a big enough challenge that it would be fun, and wanted to do it yourself, I wouldn't be upset. Anyway, here are my questions:

1. Can certain ships be affected less by reps than other ships, or affected not at all?

2. Can you set a delay to a repel going off?
This would work like: A player rockets past a group of enemies, presses Ctrl+Shift right as he goes by, and 3 seconds later it pushes all the players. I may also want to do damage to the enemies, so I was thinking I'd possibly spawn a fake player, have it lay a mine with prox and then repel before leaving. Could this be set to trigger when a certain type of ship hit a certain key combination, or would it have to be a command that the player set on macro? Basically, the end result should look to the player as if they drop a timed mine/grenade that has a blast strong enough to throw other ships. Possibly, instead of just sitting there, maybe the fake player could scoot forward a bit, as if the player were throwing a grenade. I've heard of someone that was able to spawn a fake player for a bomb shot that would go towards the players, a heat seeking rocket. I should look into that.

3. Can some system be set up to allow a player to create teleporters? The ideal situation would be where a player, probably only one ship, would be able to set an entry point and an exit point. I'm pretty sure this would be really hard, but maybe having pre-set teleporter regions that had to be activated by a player would be possible? I haven't read very much on ASSS regions, maybe they can help out somehow. I guess I should go read more.

These are also the ideas I currently have on how to these things. If what I'm talking about is impossible, that's what I'd like to know, and if you have any other ideas on how to do these things.

[Mr Ekted]

1. The server could be setup to filter out reps to certain players, but the client cannot do a different effect per ship type.

2. The delay part could be done by the server, but this create a strange and undesireable jump of the source ship when the repel packet was sent.

3. The server can warp ships to arbitrary locations any time it wants, but they would lose their momentum and orientation.
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4,691 irradiated haggis!

[Muskrat]

Don't listen to Ekted, you can hack up ASSS to preserve the velocity and orientation, though there was the weirdness with the weapons being a little off that I don't think was ever solved.

Also, I think #1 is possible but I'm not sure how to do it.

[Animate Dreams]

Filtering out reps? Would that be done in a module, or something in the source itself?

I don't mind the ships losing their momentum and orientation, and I know I could write a module to just ?warpto players as they entered a certain place, but the problem is getting these sections activated by a certain player. If it comes to it, it should be simple enough for me to just have regions set up before hand, and the player could enter them and type ?activate, or something, to activate them. But, I'd like for players to decide where they wanted the portals. Then again, that may not be such a good idea.

[Smong]

To make different ships feel different repel strengths you have to send them per player settings. This is not something you should send all the time, for example you do not want to change the repel strength depending on how far you are from it. What is more sensible is different ships react differently to repels, but a specific ships will always in the same way. For example, warbird told normal repel speed/time, javelin told double repel speed, spider told half repel time. It's probably easier to set the repel time and distance to 1, than to filter out reps since that means modifying one of the core modules (read: not pluggable).

You may already know how you want the warping to work, but I suggest preset stationary entry points. A certain player would be given the ability to plant an exit point. Otherwise the special player will have to plant both the start and end, meaning they will have to travel the map and will probably get bored or killed doing so.

[Animate Dreams]

Good idea, Smong. But do you know of a way where the player would be able to set the exit anywhere they wanted? That's what I originally intended to do, and I suppose I still want to try it, but I'm pretty sure that given the chance players will find as many cheap things as they possibly can to do with it, and instead of having to keep modifying the map and adding safeguards to keep the cheapness down, it might be a better idea to just limit where the player can set their exit points. I'd prefer to not have to do that, though.

[Smong]

You would set the exit point with a command, and to limit it to certain areas you can use a region and check to see if the player is within the region before allowing the exit to be planted.

[Bak]

all 3 are possible, though for #2 you'd have to disable the repel graphic and create a custom lvz animation which you could move to where the player is and turn on, so the player firing the repel would see it at the right time (have to do it with the sound too)

[Mr Ekted]

[Smong]

Yeah the warp packet is only xy, muskrat is talking about forcing a position packet onto a player.

[Animate Dreams]

Well, I probably won't have a repel graphic. Since it's supposed to just be the force from the explosion of the mine, grenade, or whatever, I don't feel like I need one, though I'm sure it would look cool to have a tiny shockwave graphic with the blast... like when Alderaan blows up on the special version of A New Hope. O_o

[Animate Dreams]

Idea 4: One of the ships, in place of bombs, gets a fake player spawned that immediately uses a rocket and starts shooting forward. As the player turns left and right, the fake player will too, but because of the force of the rocket controlling will be hard. As it gets to a player, or wall, I suppose, it will bomb, probably repel, and disappear.

I keep talking about using fake players. I don't suppose there's any way of getting around it using one of my ship slots?

[Bak]

well fake players don't have to obey any settings, although firing a ship might look weird.

You already have the repel graphic in your graphics/ folder, just need to put it appropriately into a lvz.

[Mr Ekted]

[Muskrat]

Yes, Brain was doing some experimenting with cloaking.

[Animate Dreams]

If fake players don't have to obey settings, then I can still use them without having to make them, say, take up my Shark slot, right? But... I'm really not sure how to define settings for them, then. Oh, and is it possible to change graphics for the fake players? Like you said, shooting a ship would just look really weird. Maybe if it was a Lance, that thing never looked like a ship anyway.

Oh, and if any of you have any links for me to go to see some of the things where people have done stuff before, like I guess forcing the position packet on the player was hs_ufo, I'd be very appreciative. For example, I'd love to see whoever's work it was that made the "heat seeking rockets" with the fake player... since a lot of what I want to do is similar to that.

[Smong]

[Animate Dreams]

[Animate Dreams]

Oh, and where did all those posts go, like the one telling me another way to change reps....

[Smong]

At this point I'm not sure how much of asss you have actually looked at, it comes with an autoturret module that shows fake players doing stuff. If you don't know C you should put fake players on a back burner for now.

What other way to change reps? Try scrolling up.

[Animate Dreams]

It's true, I haven't looked a ton into asss. And I'm really not so great at programming. Most of this stuff is on a back burner. But, I shouldn't plan to ever be able to implement this stuff if it turns out overly complex, or if it's just impossible. Also, I may not have to do the programming myself, but if someone else is going to do it or help me do it, I'd like to be able to have some stuff to show them. In the case of the fake player, I was really hoping for the specific module someone wrote before (wish I could remember who) that used a fake player for rockets, since it would cover more of what I wanted than the dropturret module would.

Sorry if I ask some dumb questions sometimes, 'cause a lot of times I really don't know what I'm doing.

[Dr Brain]

[Dr Brain]

The problem with changing the repel strength per ship is that each client will calculate the effects of the repel independently. This means that if a player detonates a repel, each ship around it will behave differently.

This is all fine and dandy until you think about what it does to the weapons around it. Each client will think that the weapons are in a different location, which can lead to all sorts of weird things. In cases where the differences between rep strengths are minor and the area of effect of the rep is small, you may find that the differences between clients is acceptable.

Delayed rep is entirely possible, but triggering it would be easier with a command or a different weapon. If you try to use the standard rep key but delay the packet forwarding, then you'll get the same out of sync problems as I described above.

Teleporters are entirely possible. Just a matter of programming a module. The more complex the warping system, the more complex the module, but warping modules tend to be fairly straight forward.

[Animate Dreams]

Brain, on your anti-warp solution, wouldn't it be possible to just de-prize and re-prize anti-warp to those players, instead of shutting it off for them? I know it seems like a pointless thing to do when you can just turn it off, but this would be a plausible solution for people that don't want to permanently de-prize it, and don't wwant the "offness" of the weapons. I know that de-prizing anti-warp won't take away the bounty they get for the anti-warp prize, so players would be tempted to ping it on repeatedly to buff their bounty, but I'm sure something else could be done about that, such as if a player has to have it turned off for them 3 times within one minute, they're shipresetted, or something along those lines....

Anyway, I wasn't going to change the repel strength by ship, but change the degree to which each different ship is affected by repels, so I don't know if what you're talking about still applies. Or, maybe that's what you meant by strength, which is cool too.
So I figure filtering out reps, since the client never got the repel packet, would bypass the problem you're talking about, correct me if I'm wrong. So far, that seems the most plausible way to do things. Not that it really seems incredibly plausible in the first place, it sounds like I'd have to modify current modules, and that doesn't sound very secure to me, given my current skills. Still, plans for the future.

As for the teleporters, I knew it could be done, but I didn't know (still don't) to what extent they can be modified. I guess I'll have a few set entry points, and have ship 8 set the exit points. It will work something like this: Ship 8 finds a good spot to place the turret, uses the command ?setteleport 3, which would use the entry point labeled 3, and set the exit point where the ship is. My module will be set to take the command and store the coords so that anyone who enters the 3rd teleport area and types ?warp will get warped, without storing velocity and direction, to the coords set by ship 8. I'll restrict it so any player that sets 2 warp points gets their first erased, so any given player can only set one, And also, after one is set, it can't be changed (unless the exitpoint is destroyed) until 5 minutes is up. Not sure how I'm going to implement the exit point being able to destroyed. I suppose I'll have the module turn on an lvz graphic as the portal is set, and ship 4 will be able to use a command to destroy the portal, if they're within 5 tiles of it, as long as they can stay within 5 tiles of it for at least 5 seconds. This will hopefully mean that the portals can't be placed anywhere, they should be placed somewhere they can be easily defended, and since they don't keep their velocity, hopefully the warping players will be easy to kill if the portal is placed somewhere cheap, like the enemy's spawn. If any of you can think of any problems, technical or otherwise, with my teleporters, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

[Dr Brain]

The bounty one is too easy to abuse, I think.

It's impossible to change the strength between ships, so yah, I was talking about changing the degree of effect. Any changing of repels between ships will introduce synch error between clients playing different ships.

As for the warping, I would try to make it as transparent as possible. That means no ?warp, just have the module warp them when they enter the correct location. Also, if you want easy to kill, just deprize them energy.