Server improvement suggestions

[Goztow]

I'm fully aware the number of coders for RC is rather thin for the moment. Nevertheless, here's my wish list for quality of life server improvements for the upcoming year. Some things are easy to do, others may never be doable.

This list does not intend to change the play style, it just intends to improve on little things, to make the game experience better for everyone. I will complete it later. Feel free to complete and add ideas.

1. Drastically reduce the amount of messages in F2- and F3-chat. It has become impossible to draw attention of people in F2- and F3-chat because it's overly cluttered. This results in having to spam messages trying to attract people's attention for a rush, which clutters the chat even more! Some ways of doing this:

- reduce detail of kill messages. Alternative: reduce the detail once we have more than 16 players in the server

- increase time between auto announcements

- avoid useless messages like join messages

- only show commands and replies to some commands to the player who used the command. e.g. if I do "!sm" then it only shows !sm to myself and it only shows the moderator list to me

2. Map fixes

- on RAID Dawn I could not place a beacon at the ref drop bay because "you can only place beacons on places it can damage a building"

- Field HON bug: please just remove that spawn

- Get Rekt B8: fix the possibility to shoot between the laser fences

- Complex: the harvester route for Nod is slower than the GDI harvester route. Remake the harvester route so it's more or less the same length

3. Team remix: on BlackIntel and TK2 server, the teams were remixed based on the score of last game. If I simplify it: players 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, ... would be one one team and players 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, ... on the other team. Obviously this logarithm can be improved upon and needs to take squads in account. But it would probably give better results than simply at random?

Suggestion: if there are two or more squads --> place them on opposite teams. Then for the remaining players, group on score: players 1, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, ... and players 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, ...

4. Endless marathon games: while I understand this is somehow part of RC's "history", I think the tools provided to skip these situations should be usable. I have never (or hardly never) seen a vote pass when there are a lot of players, mainly because people simply do not vote. One of the reasons for this is the first point in this post (f2-chat has become too clustered). Please improve the vote system so votes can actually pass

5. Tags: please remember my !tag next time I join. On the CW server this worked perfectly, why does it not work on the main server?

I'll complete this list later, I think. Feel free to add more! Remember: the idea is not to change the gameplay but to improve everyone's experience

[ExEric3]

2 hours ago, Goztow said:

1. Drastically reduce the amount of messages in F2- and F3-chat. It has become impossible to draw attention of people in F2- and F3-chat because it's overly cluttered. This results in having to spam messages trying to attract people's attention for a rush, which clutters the chat even more! Some ways of doing this:

- reduce detail of kill messages. Alternative: reduce the detail once we have more than 16 players in the server

- increase time between auto announcements

- avoid useless messages like join messages

- only show commands and replies to some commands to the player who used the command. e.g. if I do "!sm" then it only shows !sm to myself and it only shows the moderator list to me

I answered this already on Discord. Mentioned suggestion with reducing details by number of players can be solved only by Blacky since its his code base. Auto announcements are set to every 2 minutes I think but Im sure disabling advanced kill messages will be more enought or we can change it to 4 minutes. Join messages I would left how they are. Same spam u can consider that recs messages. Replies of commands to specified person can be done like that help system which I fixed. Question is what commands should be replied over page system except that mentioned !sm command.

3 hours ago, Goztow said:

2. Map fixes

- on RAID Dawn I could not place a beacon at the ref drop bay because "you can only place beacons on places it can damage a building"

- Field HON bug: please just remove that spawn

- Get Rekt B8: fix the possibility to shoot between the laser fences

- Complex: the harvester route for Nod is slower than the GDI harvester route. Remake the harvester route so it's more or less the same length

Raid Dawn - screenshot/record it for me for better understanding you can do that on test server. Field Hon Bug I mentioned on discord. It should be fixed but Field.mix only not RxD variant. Get Rekt B10 variant it should have it fixed and it should be on that new server box. Complex can be done. Ask Forithow or Pwncall. Here are latest TT updated maps: https://www.tiberiantechnologies.org/files/maps-4.7.zip

3 hours ago, Goztow said:

3. Team remix: on BlackIntel and TK2 server, the teams were remixed based on the score of last game. If I simplify it: players 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, ... would be one one team and players 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, ... on the other team. Obviously this logarithm can be improved upon and needs to take squads in account. But it would probably give better results than simply at random?

Suggestion: if there are two or more squads --> place them on opposite teams. Then for the remaining players, group on score: players 1, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, ... and players 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, ...

Again Blacky code base. Maybe we can try remix/rebalance teams again after some short time after map load.

3 hours ago, Goztow said:

4. Endless marathon games: while I understand this is somehow part of RC's "history", I think the tools provided to skip these situations should be usable. I have never (or hardly never) seen a vote pass when there are a lot of players, mainly because people simply do not vote. One of the reasons for this is the first point in this post (f2-chat has become too clustered). Please improve the vote system so votes can actually pass

Thats code in a BRenBot vote system which Blacky rewrote. But we can try modify it and lower that required number of votes.

3 hours ago, Goztow said:

5. Tags: please remember my !tag next time I join. On the CW server this worked perfectly, why does it not work on the main server?

Im thinking its conflicting with rank tagging system and legacy fds tags vs dragonade. Try it on test server under some non ranked player name and create new tag and try rejoin.

[Goztow]

Thanks for the replies. Isn't it possible to create plugins for DA? If the plugin is injected at the end it could replace existing functions? Just thinking out loud. 

Commands that could be paged are the most used commands. Nextmap, rotation, showmods to start with. Probably others. 

[ExEric3]

9 minutes ago, Goztow said:

Thanks for the replies. Isn't it possible to create plugins for DA? If the plugin is injected at the end it could replace existing functions? Just thinking out loud. 

Commands that could be paged are the most used commands. Nextmap, rotation, showmods to start with. Probably others. 

Its possible if you have source code and you know what to change and replace. But since this code havent nothing with publicly released codes we cant do much. Maybe one time if we decide use latest released branches for Dragonade and BRenBot but that would be needed redone whole moderating system or Blacky will comes here and will surprise us.

Ok I will look on that mentioned commands above.

[Itai795]

5 hours ago, Goztow said:

1. Drastically reduce the amount of messages in F2- and F3-chat. It has become impossible to draw attention of people in F2- and F3-chat because it's overly cluttered. This results in having to spam messages trying to attract people's attention for a rush, which clutters the chat even more! Some ways of doing this:

- reduce detail of kill messages. Alternative: reduce the detail once we have more than 16 players in the server

- increase time between auto announcements

- avoid useless messages like join messages

- only show commands and replies to some commands to the player who used the command. e.g. if I do "!sm" then it only shows !sm to myself and it only shows the moderator list to me

- reduce detail of kill messages - I disagree, I think it's useful to understand what's going on in the entire map

- avoid useless messages like join messages - disagree here too, they are useful as a player and as a mod. But maybe we can aggregate them and show all the join/left players in a single message every 1 minute.

- As Eric mentioned the rec messages are better to be removed when there is enough clutter in the chat

5 hours ago, Goztow said:

3. Team remix: on BlackIntel and TK2 server, the teams were remixed based on the score of last game. If I simplify it: players 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, ... would be one one team and players 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, ... on the other team. Obviously this logarithm can be improved upon and needs to take squads in account. But it would probably give better results than simply at random?

Suggestion: if there are two or more squads --> place them on opposite teams. Then for the remaining players, group on score: players 1, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, ... and players 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, ...

Eric if at any point it is something we will be able to control, we can think of a more interesting algorithm to balance teams, for example: considering monthly rank, kills and k/d ratio (to balance snipers) and more

5 hours ago, Goztow said:

5. Tags: please remember my !tag next time I join. On the CW server this worked perfectly, why does it not work on the main server?

It works fine for me :\

 

@ExEric3 thank you for your support here!

[Goztow]

We can think of a lot of logarithms but IMO you should keep it simple. And avoid that people never get to play together because they are close in monthly rank... :-)

[WNxH3adSh00t]

Butterfinger crate

[MarcPoulet]

When a player join, it's fine for me that we know, but we could remove stuff like these lol if not in blacky script :
"Host: In the beginning there were n00bs, in the end there was Nani. (304 recommendations)"

"Host: WOW! I have just one word for gypsies... GODLIKE!!! (846 recommendations)"

[Manuel857]

Getting forced swapped to enemy team from crate lmao

[Manuel857]

Kill messages need to be added again. Its just weird that it doesnt show anything.

[ExEric3]

49 minutes ago, Manuel857 said:

Kill messages need to be added again. Its just weird that it doesnt show anything.

We should play with it in a test server. Shai forgot put one value in server.ini so it was without any messages but I saw that sounds plugin would have problems with that like that killingspree, pistol kills messages etc.

[ExEric3]

13 hours ago, MarcPoulet said:

When a player join, it's fine for me that we know, but we could remove stuff like these lol if not in blacky script :
"Host: In the beginning there were n00bs, in the end there was Nani. (304 recommendations)"

"Host: WOW! I have just one word for gypsies... GODLIKE!!! (846 recommendations)"

Its done:

[Goztow]

1 hour ago, Manuel857 said:

Kill messages need to be added again. Its just weird that it doesnt show anything.

It's not supposed to be that way. It 's supposed to be XX killed yy

[Itai795]

10 hours ago, Manuel857 said:

Getting forced swapped to enemy team from crate lmao

omg yes we can call it the AprilWar crate <3

[Forithow]

1 hour ago, Itai795 said:

omg yes we can call it the AprilWar crate <3

If username = AprilWar or IP address is similar to AprilWar, swap him to other team :>

[PwnCall]

I can take a look at complex.  Someone mentioned the nod path had been changed at some point, does anyone know why it was adjusted or what the original path was?

 

my understanding is that it cuts through between hon and air now and before it may have gone around the end of the air strip landing circle?

either way I can try to fix it.

[Goztow]

It was changed by TT because it often died when someone bought a tank. But the choosen path seems to be unnecessarily long. The clan war guys have a correctly fixed version on vultiserv. I suppose I can check what the pathway is there. 

[ExEric3]

On 12/27/2023 at 3:44 AM, Goztow said:

It was changed by TT because it often died when someone bought a tank. But the choosen path seems to be unnecessarily long. The clan war guys have a correctly fixed version on vultiserv. I suppose I can check what the pathway is there. 

Complex I fixed on VultiServ. So I will upload it on RenCorner server box.

On 12/27/2023 at 3:15 AM, PwnCall said:

I can take a look at complex.  Someone mentioned the nod path had been changed at some point, does anyone know why it was adjusted or what the original path was?

 

my understanding is that it cuts through between hon and air now and before it may have gone around the end of the air strip landing circle?

either way I can try to fix it.

Can you level redit Tomb.mix? There is issue with GDI harvester and 3rd waypath will always stuck harvie at end of barracks.

[PwnCall]

I’ll see, it can be really difficult if you don’t have the level edit file though.

[ExEric3]

Field.mix and Complex.mix I forwarded to Owa and Unstoppable again so maybe TT will ship also updated maps for everyone.