RPG207 Engineer bugs

TheDruidXpawX wrote:

The CVS fu is in reference to Szlat. I messed some things up.

Oh ... then bad Dru! No cookie!

Nahh, that's too cruel. Have a cookie anyway.

I have updated the UT2004RPG.ini in cvs.

LoadedEngineer entries are now in the correct format. I have put my first guesses at what the cost of each one should be, but it may need balancing. Depends which ones we want.
As an aside, I ran a test using the configuration that is currently live, and I experienced problems with turrets going negative on armor and crashing the game, and sentinels having long green bars and not working. The correct configuration seems to fix this.

Added the other team artifacts back in as well. However, I leave it to Dru to decide if he has got enough happening at the moment already, and wants to leave these until later.

EDIT: remember to pick up the EngineerAwareness class as well.

So, the main bugs I know still outstanding are:

Spawn countdown not always working. Haven't worked out why yet

Blocks have perhaps too much health - this is configurable in the ini file

Blocks physics perhaps needs updating - sometimes they slide, and sometimes you can walk through them - although this needs re-checking after the configuration changes go live.

Sometimes when you spawn with the Engineer Link, pressing the alt-fire doesn't seem to do anything. Have to switch weapons and back for it to work.

New one:

Engineers cannot pick up link ammo for their non-Engineer link gun.

I could have sworn we decided engineers did not receive an additional link gun. Or was that just the voices in my head?

I would agree that they don't need to, but they currently can pick one up at a spawn point.

We just had a moment of really low FPS (everyone had massive pings, and I was getting 12 max fps, with 3 avg). And then crash. Could be just me but everyone was saying something about it.

By the way, when someone summons a Hellbender, it does tend to cause a stutter. Other stuff seems okay.

Folks are managing to summon tanks in places where the tank can't fit - some are purposefully doing it as a "tank block". This has the follow up bug of allowing a player into the tank but then not out. The player is stuck until counted out.

Somehow the game knows if it can summon a monster in a given location, and if not, it looks for another one (IE: Titans wont spawn in tiny spaces)

Maybe that logic could be piggy-backed on?

TheDruidXpawX wrote:

Somehow the game knows if it can summon a monster in a given location, and if not, it looks for another one (IE: Titans wont spawn in tiny spaces)

Maybe that logic could be piggy-backed on?

I certainly hope it can be fixed. I was getting quite peeved about the situation and until I logged off for a bit couldn't quite put my finger on it. Now I'm of the opinion that the person was abusing a bug that could also adversely impact other players.

Someone may want to let people know, should the administrators come to the same conclusion.

Maybe we stop summoning tanks for now...

In a way, it is down to Engineers working as part of a team, and not doing things that will upset other players. This is still new, and we need to find out what works, and what doesn't. It might be that we have to drop the concept of blocks, and not have large vehicles, to stop people being tempted.

What we do not want to do is introduce something that will get people annoyed with each other, or that requires admins having to spend large amounts of time resolving in-game issues.

I could look into checking that when something is spawned, it has a certain amount of free space around it. But this will limit what you can do with blocks.

Is there an issue with doing it with vehicles but not blocks? I don't want to limit blocks (well, a player who wanted to could do the same thing with blocks that they might have been doing with vehicles, but I think it's less offensive if they do - that's just an opinion though).

I must say that one of my issues with the concept of vehicles on non-vehicle maps is that vehicles tend to be really powerful and a lot of maps just don't have the room for them. A tank shot (which it seems it doesn't take much to be able to summon a tank) instakills a lot of monsters. If I'm on as a 160th level WM and it takes me a couple of shots with a flak to kill something, but only one shot (and probably not even a direct hit) for someone at, say, 20th to kill something, that's a bit irksome. Even if you cripple the xp gain, until I take the time to figure out how to make the xp gained over a map the score rather than the monster score the score, xp gain can be a rather ethereal concept over a certain period of time (sure, you'll notice you're not leveling as fast in the long long term, maybe, but it's like a vorp - you're just happy to have the thing dead over the short term, most of the time).

Further, vehicles can run over monsters from the warlords on down and pretty much instakill them. This too is an issue I think could use some adjustment, if vehicle summoning is going to be a key skill for engineers on non-vehicle maps.

Mind you I seem to die just as quickly with my newbie engineer as I died as any other newbie character. It just seems like, if I wanted to, I could kill individual monsters faster. The only other way I can explain it is, before Beam was modified, I'd purposefully not use it as much since I likened it to having a vorp 22 instantly every map, and after a few map runs with it, it became very clear how unfair to my fellow players the use of the artifact could be.

I wonder how things will balance out when some of the Engineers start getting decent DB/DR, WS, and some healthy engineer skills ...

The turrets haven't bothered me. Monsters appear to be targeting mine and they do take some care and feeding, especially after they're summoned; and they're a lot like M/MM summons that way.

Shantara wrote:

I could have sworn we decided engineers did not receive an additional link gun. Or was that just the voices in my head?

I can't remember such a decision, but that doesn't mean a lot. Memory like a sieve.
If they can't pick up ammo for a normal link, then there isn't a lot of point having one.
However, I am not sure how easy it will be to stop. Could probably override the OverridePickupQuery function in the AbilityLoadedEngineer and bounce if it is a child of RPGLinkGun/RPGLinkGunPickup. That might work. Just say if you want me to try.

BotFodder wrote:

I wonder how things will balance out when some of the Engineers start getting decent DB/DR, WS, and some healthy engineer skills ...

My level 39 engineer has maxed WS, and a DB of 50. It does alright. I very rarely use anything but the link now, whereas before I was always on the flak.

EDIT: When I put the berserk on, it does some serious damage. However, I have no idea how much, but it seems to fire at a faster rate
I love infinite weapons, but the increased number of them will start putting a load on the server.

Ok, change made so that Engineers with the EngineerLink cannot pick up the normal link gun.

Tested picking up dropped link guns, link guns from normal spawn points and link guns from weapon lockers, and no pick up allowed. Have not been able yet to test thrown link guns yet, where the engineer touches them before they hit the ground, but that is a very minority case. I'll test for that this weekend when I can network two PCs. In the meantime, it is still better than the existing version.

In cvs.