Arolte, in case you didn't notice (cos your too busy running away!) i have not exploited much at all recently.... However it seems i have two paths to choose from right now; 1) Leave until the game is back to a playable state, 2) Join the lamers and show them how exploiting is really done...

If i choose 2) at least the problem will get fixed quicker, bcos it seems that whenever i start exploiting the ^&%^£% devs fix it...


I think it sounds lame having weapons just magically dissappear when someone docks or jumps... even mines should stay when you jump sectors really...

Well, I really think a proximity fuse-block should be enabled. It would be something that keeps the weapon from going off when it's too close to you - ALL WARHEADS SHOULD HAVE THIS (you should have to be at least one blast radius from it for it to be able to go off). The Avalon should be extra special and require manual arming too.

If you think about it, in a RPG, you'd almost WANT something like this so you didn't inadvertently kill yourself...in a FPS, you don't care as much about a self-kill.

This would instantly eliminate all the warhead issues that have come up - they all seem to deal with the launcher being too close to the target at firing time.

For people who decide to kamikaze, there could be some sort of override...but it would be costly, complicated, and time-consuming to do.

Cmdr. Freeman,
It wouldn't deal with turboing at 200m/s firing them off and hitting the breaks. The issue isn't the distance but the time.

I agree with Eldrad. Having a time-delay fuse would solve all forms of station nuking regardless of LOS, "no fire zone enforced by God", or whatever. If a nuke hit a solid object before it was armed, (~8 seconds) it would fizzle, just like in "Hunt for the Red October."

I also agree with Commander Freeman that it doesn't make sense to have just one weapon have friendly fire, and I also think that friendly fire in general is a very bad idea.

ATM nukes are a very good bomber weapon that happen to have one way in which they can be exploited. Setting a time delay fuse on the nukes would be the simplest, least convoluted way of solving this problem.

LOS checking should be done for all things not just avalons (lmines being the other big one). Though it would have an effect on station nuking I think it's a seperate issue.

I think the avalon should just have a timed detonation that deactivates when you dock. Fire it, in ten seconds or so it goes off, everything blows up. But you have to stay alive, in the sector, and out of the station for that ten seconds. (Actual times may vary.)

And yes, I think proximity weapons should do friendly damage. Sunflares, Avalons, Mines and what-have-you shouldn't be triggerred by friendlies, but if a friendly is too close when they go off, they take the damage too. Think about it, if it happens to you, why not to your teammates as well?

As for station mining, I see no problem with it. Although I do think there should be some way to prevent players from laying down a massive mine cloud. Like a mine limit. Or, if splash damage from an avalon or rocket (again, the mines don't trigger it, but they are affected by the damage) destroyed mines, then people would be discouraged from mining too close to the station since people can just use it as a trigger to set the mines off. Naturally this won't work if my avalon fuse idea is implemented though. So a limit on the number of mines one person can lay might be the way to go. Limit it to somewhere along the lines of 15-20 per person. That way, if a team needs to lay down a mine-cloud, they can cooperate.

Eldrad: If you were going to make a list of the biggest holes in Vendetta, the lack of los calculation would be right up at the top. Think of all the things that lack of los calculations changes:

1) No one can ever hide from anyone because you can see through everything. This greatly limits the diversity of game play.
2) Explosions travel through solid objects, leading as we know to cheesy tactics.
3) The client side engine is (as best as I can tell) rendering every object in your los because it never stops to consider whether you will actually be able to see it.
4) When you clip through a solid object whose boundary uses a variable number of polygons (certain types of roids for instance) it becomes translucent.
5) The AI isn't aware (or is only now just becoming aware) that objects can intervene between its target and itself because after all it can (and we can) see through anything and see our target.

PJ: Proximity weapons doing friendly damage opens up griefers to attacking newbies in thier home zones, and at this level of implementation completely destroys the concept of teams. Maybe once the universe has the ability to protect itself from anti-social types (via a reputation system of some sort) we can dispense with friendly fire immunity, but at present it's a necessary gamism.

Hmmm... Well, because I don't want the forum moderator locking this thread, I won't go on about what Arolte spent an hour doing today... Instead I'll just say that station-nuking is an annoyance that better not be there in 3.3.

Funny how an exploit isn't acceptable when more than two people know about it. Very funny indeed.

You mean this was acceptable when only 2 ppl knew about it?

I'm using Icarus logic.

What's that :::jingly::: sound???

Celebrim I'm 100% behind on the LOS thing. It was one of my biggest shocks finding that the game didn't pay any attention to LOS... I was saying that it should be a different thread, and probably under suggestions instead of general. That's all.

The "plan", as it were, is to institute defenses for many neutral stations. This would include a "no fire" zone which would be enforced by defense bots, who would have to be smart enough to remember abusers and react with relative intelligence. Unfortunately, bots are still relatively stupid, and we're right in the middle of completely ripping apart and rewriting the "sector daemon" back-end that powers the bots, so this will have to wait. This may, in fact, have to wait until the faction system is implemented, to be done properly. Hopefully that won't be much further beyond getting the new sector / event backend working.

As Celebrim points out, making things invulnerable is a dumb kludge that creates a rats nest of new exploits. Obviously, we've been known to use this when deemed necessary (wormhole invuln, station emergence invuln), but we're moving away from that whereever possible. We could institute a "safe zone" around stations. I am not going to. It will just continue to Suck for the moment, until we fix it the Right Way. I have a great dislike of cheesy gameplay hacks that has only increased over the past year, mostly from having to implement them so often.

We could yank the Avalon from the game, temporarily, or make some other change, but I don't want to add any more invulnerability.

LoS stuff has been considered. We've been talking about doing occlusion culling and detection for ages. It's not a simple thing to do, especially with the progressive meshes we use, and would have only a limited performance impact in our current sectors (for the most part, things are very open, which means little would get culled anyhow). This is something we want to add, however, and I would certainly be in favor of creating environments that could take advantage of it (like a sector filled with chunks on the scale of the sector 17 rocks or sector 14 large ice crystals).

The game would definitely benefit from a more intelligent damage model that permits occlusion.

The game will become more FF-oriented in the long run. Some things need to happen before this is feasable, however. (Again, the need for Faction and Grouping as people have noted, etc etc).

incarnate will people who violate a "no-fire-zone" be allowed to dock in that station after the infraction? Or would the dock hands be like "no way we're not letting you in here"

i love how he calls it "the Right Way"

Thank you Incarnate for clarifying the situation... Its good to know that you looking to fix these kinda minor but annoying problems...

Icarus:

I hope you chose the third option in stead of 1 or 2:

1) Leave until the game is back to a playable state
2) Join the lamers and show them how exploiting is really done...
3) play like before and dont stoop to exploiting, by setting the example.

Eldrad - Ideally, I'd like to do something like this: People who violate the safe zone would become "kill on sight" targets. This status would probably time out over a period of time (an hour? a couple of hours? longer? not sure). After the timeout, the user's KoS status would be returned to normal. Multiple infractions could result in a change in Faction status with all NPCs / stations governed by that faction.

Plus, there's a lot of other faction-oriented possibilities. But, most of this requires testing to demonstrate all the problems I haven't considered. Hopefully a good balance will emerge.

Urza/Sam - I don't know if it's the best way, but it's a lot better than the "crappy gameplay hack" way. In any event, we'll have a lot more possibilities to choose from once this back-end work is completed, so however this gets solved, it'll be better than the options we have right now.

Icarus - Yes, the solutions to most of the common complaints are designed into our intended gameplay. Unfortunately, we're still in the midst of waiting for the game development to catch up. Things are less than ideal in the meantime, and it's nice that people are relatively patient and still seem to have fun playing.

Incarnate, instead of the bots having to remember who is KOS, why not just have that be somehting saved along with other character information? If some one is deemed KOS the bots would just notice.

And would it be 1 hour game time, or 1 hour play time.

Sloppy fixes to shut us up until the Right Way is implemented are always nice.