FRAYDO

I do hope it's your first time visiting me. The last person I found inside my factory scared me to death! (the N1 NK) Hoping this person would not try again, but hey! Let's say I don't make it through the night. I'll lay out some questions now should you wish to answer since you seem to have bypassed one important one to instead point fingers at others. This important one being question 1. 1) Why did you bus our claimed Tracker, ChopBam? Would you not be only hindering Town efforts in doing so? 2) I can understand Nodlied being N1 for the sake of randomly choosing, but at what point was it determined ChopBam may be scum and should be bussed? Did you not like when he claimed to have tracked you N1? 3) You have been very helpful and contributing well, but what have your actions really even done to help Town? 4) What do you think of that bandwagon that took out iLTS D2? As I recall, Jeod started the wagon on the reasoning of iLTS' actions not sounding like a town role. I voted iLTS believing he was responsible for my N1 death. Following those posts, you immediately changed up your vote from Louis to iLTS making it three votes. Orange added yet another vote on iLTS. ChopBam stated he was "tempted to vote iLTS" but chose to leave it be at NoLynch. Nodlied seemed to have missed the vote. Following up on Cat5's argument, who do you suppose is most suspicious from the voting (or perhaps lack thereof)? For reference: D2 Cat5 Orange Chopbam No Lynch FRAYDO iLikeToSnipe iLikeToSnipe No Lynch Jeod iLikeToSnipe Killing You iLikeToSnipe Louis Mojoman Nodlied OrangeP47 iLikeToSnipe Sunflower No Lynch Anyhoo, hope to see you in the day!

So I am examining this now at the beginning of the day to see what I can determine from it. Supposedly, Nodlied took out a roleblock on you, ChopBam. The pumpkin that Nodlied was in was stated to have given him a bonus action, allowing him to place you in a painting and additionally placed another random target into a painting which happened to be Jeod. If I am viewing Killing_You as scum, I see this as a good opportunity to claim a visit on ChopBam to clear himself of being available to do the NK. Before moving on, we should review his claimed ability and effect. He has claimed a driver, and he also has claimed that his target's destination is random. N1 we have the claim that he bussed Nodlied, which incidentally led to Mojoman learning a new language. Interesting enough, I don't believe we ever did hear a claim of who Nodlied's original target was. @Nodlied may I trouble you to fill in that missing piece of information? N2 we have the claim that KY bussed ChopBam, which directed him to Nodlied's roleblock. It's odd for ChopBam's action to simply fail, but considering who he attempted to track and being placed inside a painting by his target, you could say that is confirmation in itself. The question I have then is why? I suppose this is more directed to Nodlied. Was it Nodlied's decision to roleblock ChopBam, our claimed tracker? Were that so, it's not a very good move when ChopBam was the least suspicious player at the time as opposed to when our previous thinking was either Louis or Cat5 for the N1 murder. I think it's very important to note here: We don't know if any bussing actions actually took place. Both nights can only be taken at KY's word. N1 it is possible he lied about his bus and aimed to kill me, and N2 he again took the opportunity to claim a bus action when he instead followed up with Mojo's N2 NK. N2 specifically, it's interesting to think that Killing_You and Nodlied both visiting ChopBam is a little too convenient. A roleblock on the tracker and a bus also if for any reason the roleblock were to fail? Reading through the entire thread, I can somewhat begin to draw a partnership too between Orange and KY. I could be looking at a KY/Nodlied team or a KY/Orange team, though in either case KY is the common element. Nonetheless, I have opted to examine Orange as well. The two masons at the time were certainly suspicious. The fact that Orange and KY are still in mason is unusual, and the claim that it is KY's decision to close or extend the doc is more unusual. Of course, who knows? Call it a scum gambit, call it truthful posting. However, at some point I suppose we have all forgotten Orange's shifty reactions and responses to iLTS' zone of truth. Although, perhaps I'm distracting myself. We were looking at KY at the beginning of this post. It's not like these two could be partners or anything and the mason itself a hiding-in-plain-sight scum doc. Ignored question, page 21. Page 22. Just curious to take a look at the chart as it was then. We know Louis went down today as Third-Party, and I believe we can confidently say she was not responsible for the N1 kill on me. Category 5 claimed Hider and hid behind Louis too, so he too should be clear. If we were to question the KY/Orange mason even more, I would come to the assumption that Killing You did truthfully claim what he did N1 but Orange lied and instead did the NK. It's a mystery why scum would rolecop their NK, but at the same time it seems very convenient when I follow this scenario. Whether I were to live or die, Orange has a confirmed rolecop on me and would be in a position in either event to gain townie points for himself. Orange has claimed an investigative role, but we should keep in mind his best investigative ability is tied only to his item and not his character. Naturally, I can understand why you would be wary of an item thief in play. In scum hands, it would be a powerful tool to dispose of or more cleverly, use as a townie-points booster. Having to rely solely on your "random track" wouldn't do much good anyway. This quote in reference to my doing nothing N1. This would give us two trackers, difference being ChopBam's track is more reliable and Orange is limited to his "random" track which does not do much good frankly speaking. In closing, I leave this statement. I can't say I have proven anything or found an explanation, but Orange is looking more and more scum to me. D1 Vote N1 Claim Category 5 Something "weird that should have been impossible." Not verified ChopBam OrangeP47 Visited KY Not verified FRAYDO FRAYDO Passed a ticket to iLTS; Redirected <from no action> to follow Jeod, tracked to Nodlied Verified by iLikeToSnipe iLikeToSnipe Voe Received ticket from FRAYDO Receipt verified, but no claimed action Jeod Spare Voe Masonry w/ Nodlied Verified by Nodlied Killing_You Spare Voe BUS DRIVER Nodlied Verified by Nodlied Louis Spare Voe <nothing> Not verified Mojoman Jeod Visited Nodlied Verified by his accurate claim before Nodlied confirmed it Nodlied Voe Redirected->Mojoman, gimmick Verified OrangeP47 Voe Masonry w/ KY Verified Sunflower Voe <did not visit Nodlied> No claimed action, unverifiable Result Voe, doppelganger No deaths, FRAYDO saved Right, so back to Killing_You. Page 24. Seems KY has been gunning for these two quite early. Why, if I were KY and seeing how the day's vote was tied up between the two of them, I would say this: 'course, you would be a cheeky bastard had you did. Closing argument: Killing_You's claimed actions are dubious. We never did hear from Nodlied who his original N1 target was, nor any complaint otherwise of supposedly being bussed by KY. N2 we bussed and roleblocked our claimed tracker, ChopBam. The roleblock is definitive in itself, but the bus action cannot be verified as having happened at all. We again only have KY's word on his activity these past nights. Restating in case someone just scrolled down past it all. We don't know if any bussing actions actually took place. KY however, has taken both opportunities to claim otherwise as being responsible for Nodlied visiting Mojo and screwing with ChopBam when he was already targeted for a roleblock by Nodlied.

Objection! You claimed Hider. If Louis were to be Mafia, you would be dead then!

Ah, hmm. An interesting turn of events. This fiasco does give me something at least. I’m beginning to question Killing_You’s claimed alignment. @ChopBam Are you absolutely sure of your read on KY? Orange’s cop of me is to be believed, and Louis going down claims Third-Party. @OrangeP47 Your thoughts on KY’s alignment?

@Louis If I may be frank, I’m surprised you haven’t placed a vote onto Cat5 to tip the scales in your favor. I’m to assume then you’re fine being tied in votes and will leave your vote on Jeod? Another question. Your previous mention of taking someone down with you; would that someone be who you left your vote on end of day? Or do you have the opportunity to make a selection after the fact?

I just want to bring up this post for the sake of everyone being sure of their votes today.

You expect too much from me. I don’t understand the “sinister” vibes you are getting from me.

Track and Party Profiler are separate use then? To be clear, Track is ability and PP is item? But you instead used a mason ability instead of a Track?

If your track is random, then it’s just complete coincidence you copped your NK target in the same night? Would that be right? Or could you please explain the function and usage of the Party Profiler again? Perhaps whoever it got passed to can clarify, if you did in fact pass it. I suppose your other 15% would be your acceptance of there being two Neutrals in this game. We only have KY’s claim of his Neutral alignment after all, whereas Orange is absolutely sure of my alignment.

Give the thread a vote if you can to raise visibility on the C&C Reddit. Users who sort by Hot on the subreddit are likely to miss our news! APB Dev Blog (1 November 2019)

Thank you. Credit goes to Pushwall for that one! You're awesome! Yes sir!

It does! We are currently working on a wiki/guide of sorts in what we call Tacitus, which will serve as an excellent resource for players new and old. @Threve has written up a good amount for the Interim Apex section, so he will be your best point of contact for advice and tips in-game while we continue to work on completing the guide for public view.

Alright. Let's start reading from page 34! I like the color coding! Masterful presentation 10/10 Interesting theory. An item that passes itself via death. N1 did have a kill, technically speaking so passing the amulet would not have been without issue following this train of thought. aaaaaand wasted time. Sounds very useful! I imagine it would work well to boost an investigative role. I would tell you now not to give the pumpkin to me. It would only allow me to pass an additional ticket, which I wouldn't mind. It wouldn't get us much information though. Louis has been rather shifty as I am reading and catching up. Jeod's distancing seems to indicate he is not the partner though. I have lost count how many times Orange has used this now in this game. I suspect it is not the last time either. rip in peace I'm a touch annoyed that you have a 100% neutral read on me, yet insist on pushing me into a bad light. "Felt he's a bit more sinister". The gall of this man. Sunflower is absolutely on my good side. The rest of you, well. I like you all better than Mr. at least! Answered. Close, but not quite. You are not my heir yet, for I must be able to trust you if I can declare you that. Such is the masonry option, should you choose to visit. Only after the initial visit am I able to select an heir. That being so, Orange's reveal of my "item thief" ability doubles as me confiscating the ticket and revoking your heir status. When that happens, expect to receive this as well. However, we're not there yet! How vaguely threatening. CONCLUSION: I need to read closely again to determine my vote. I'm inclined to follow Sunflower's vote in any direction, as she saved me from death. However, there is much more day left to learn more.

Hi, apologies. First of the month has made work busy so I am unable to contribute much until late this evening. I will try to catch up on reading in the meantime. Last night I successfully passed a ticket away. I have not read closely enough yet to see anyone speak up, but they can claim if they want to.

Red Alert: A Path Beyond Dev. Blog APB update coming soon! In the meantime, have a dev blog of the latest changes that will be implemented. Water Effects Tweaked Come on in! The water's fine! Water effects have been tweaked just a bit so that the blue fog/tint that normally only shows for submarines now shows for anything going underwater. Anything! Even those soldiers doomed to a watery grave... Good day for a swim still! Planes Free-look Players love to fly our Yaks and MiGs. For our intrepid pilots, they will be glad to know that planes will now be able to free-look. This should offer better visibility when necessary and offer better scouting to report enemy movements back to your teammates. Remember that you can now type in team chat and global chat without fear of crashing or stalling out, thanks to previous improvements in our flying mechanics. New Unit Sounds Before we get into what we have added, let's preface with something neat. For those who have been keeping up with Command & Conquer news, CCHyper, Nyerguds, Tore, TaxOwlBear and Chad1233 have shared Red Alert Beta with the community! Click the image below to be directed to the Reddit thread celebrating this present to the C&C Community and all its full details. From the Beta, we have been able to make use of unheard voices for our units. Particularly, we have given our Thief new lines. Allied Thief “Like candy from a baby.” “Let’s pick ‘em clean.” “Time for a little five-finger discount!”. Players should know however, that you will only hear these lines when you are actually in range to steal. Good luck to those brave infiltrators! May you make a clean getaway after the Soviets hear "Credits Stolen". Additionally, we have added another line to our generic Allied infantry. Generic Infantry "It is done." Perceptive listeners may have previously heard these lines in Counterstrike's Radio 2 Remix, during the vocal break in the track. Before CCHyper and Co.'s delivery of this build, these voice lines were not isolated from the track nor found anywhere in the game files. With the release, we are fortunate to now be able to add finer details such as these to A Path Beyond. Battlefield Unit Reference Players familiar with Renegade's menu may recall the EVA Data Link that included the map, objectives, and data for your campaign missions. Players may also recall there was a tab for Characters, Weapons, Vehicles, and Buildings. What we are excited to unveil is the Battlefield Unit Reference for our APB units! Thanks to CMDBob, we can now offer this useful resource to players new and old. Pushwall is adding the models and unit descriptions and will ship this out with the next APB update! As you may guess, there is much to fill out. We have barely scratched the Characters tab after all! And that concludes this dev update for APB! However, there is much more to show! Dghelneshi, our scripts and coding wizzard, would like to show you the following... Dynamic Lighting Improvements The way lights were handled in W3D has been a thorn in my side for a while so I recently decided to tackle that problem. Especially spot lights were basically unusable (not a single one is presently used in any 5.0 project) due to various shortcomings both in the engine and the editor. To be clear, I'm almost exclusively talking about how light interacts with dynamic/moving objects, not about the baked vertex lighting for static meshes ("light solve"). The latter is not easy to replace at a reasonable performance cost despite how terrible it looks, so I'm leaving that for the future. I'm also slightly misusing the term "Dynamic Lighting" to mean static lights illuminating moving geometry. We do not have moving lights in W3D. Lighting in W3D The most egregious problem was that most of lighting calculations were done on a per-object basis, at the center point of the model. For example, the incoming light direction was calculated once for each mesh and thus every light was effectively treated as a directional light (infinitely far away) in the pixel shader. This means that there was no smooth distance falloff (attenuation) for the light across a larger object. The only thing that was considered per-pixel was the angle between the mesh normal and the incoming light direction. You can clearly see the jarring visuals this can create in the screenshot below (walls are usually not lit as dynamic meshes, but they demonstrate the issues quite well): The wall in front is lit by a red spot light, while the back wall is lit by a white point light. There are horrible discontinuities in the lighting across the three wall segments, and the leftmost segment in the front doesn't receive any lighting because its center point is not within the maximum attenuation radius of the light. Furthermore, the tree to the right is fully lit up despite only grazing the red spot light cone (the cone visualization is also new) because it is still only checked aginst the radius, not against the actual cone. The latter is not just a minor visual problem since we can only have a maximum of four lights processed per object (for performance reasons), so if there are multiple spot lights close to each other with non-overlapping cones, but overlapping spheres according to their attenuation radius, the game might have a difficult time picking the lights that contribute the most light to this mesh, leading to annoying situations where lights suddenly "pop up" or flicker when you're moving through the world. This means we largely had to make two fundamental changes: Move the code that handles light attenuation from the CPU side to the GPU pixel shader and pass all the relevant information along (light position instead of direction, inner and outer attenuation radius, etc.). Improve the light culling code so that it can more accurately predict how much a light would contribute to the resulting illumination of a given mesh. New Changes #1 was mostly straightforward, modern GPU shader code is quite flexible and the worst case performance impact was below 10%. The overall behavior of lights was kept close to what it was before in order to not force the project developers to relight all of their maps. #2 required adjusting the code to work with the bounding boxes and spheres of the objects instead of just the center point. Every model now first checks its (axis-aligned) bounding box against the bounding box of the light (hierarchically using an AABB tree), then its box against the light sphere and for spot lights it also calculates the intersection of its bounding sphere with the spot cone (box vs cone is much more complicated and costly). The picture below shows the sphere vs cone test in action, with various colors representing the different individual tests that are performed in that function (you may notice the cone visualization now has a proper spherical cap instead of just a circular base). If all of these tests succeed, we try to approximate the potential contribution of this light by doing the same light calculations that would now normally happen GPU-side and per-pixel at the center point and the eight corners of the bounding box of the object and averaging them. This kind of code needs to exist for light solve anyways. If more than four lights pass the intersection tests, we use the approximate contribution to (hopefully!) pick the four visually most important lights. If we don't additionally use the corners for the approximation, we can run into problems where the light is considered for inclusion, but displaced by other nearby lights that visually contribute less in the end. I'm still not happy with this result but for now I can't think of anything better that isn't even more expensive. The two screenshots below illustrate the "popping" behavior that can happen if light culling isn't picking the most important lights correctly. During the course of development, a few smaller changes were made to improve various aspects of lighting: Accurate visualization for the spot light cone instead of just a sphere like for point lights Numerous types of objects that don't actually use any dynamic lighting now don't unnecessarily have their light environment calculated as per the description above The rotation controls in Mammoth were actually broken in a few ways, this has been fixed. Light attenuation has been changed to a quadratic falloff instead of linear (between inner and outer radius), for a smoother appearance without changing the overall look too much I considered using a more physically accurate attenuation model, but decided against it since that would make the light's maximum influence radius bigger (potentially forcing a higher light limit per object) and the results would look so different that all lighting would have to be redone across all of our 5.0 projects. Added inner cone angle setting to spot lights, replaces "spot exponent", which was completely unused anyways. Light solve and approximate light contribution now use the same code instead of there being two functions that even slightly disagreed with each other (e.g. spot light direction was not consistent between static and dynamic lighting, which is yet another reason why they were not used at all) Small changes to specular lighting shader code After all of this work, the scene from the first screenshot now looks like this: Aaaahhhh... Much better! [blurb]APB update coming soon! In the meantime, have a dev blog of the latest changes that will be implemented. Water effects tweaked, Battlefield unit reference, and more![/blurb]

Did we miss an action? Or did you discover this at Day end?

And I had just given him a ticket too. This is a shame.

I'll think about it and let you know.

Are you responsible for my death or not?

My death resulting from following Jeod is a possibility still, and something I want to consider for this post. Were that the case, iLTS would be at fault for sending me to my death. I'm currently not sold on a scum iLTS forcing me to follow a scum Jeod only for me to survive and have gained some knowledge. Were Jeod responsible for my death and I stayed dead, iLTS could have simply not claimed any control at all and left my NK a mystery. However, maybe Sunflower's save threw a wrench in that plan completely. Jeod and iLTS may be our team. ##vote iLikeToSnipe

I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS

Yeah, kinda

I went ahead and made a chart myself. For me, it's easier to read no offense ChopBam :alp: Anything missing? Corrections? Spooky Scary Chart D1 N1 Category 5 Voted no one Visited Louis, received item from Louis ChopBam Voted OrangeP47 Visited Killing_You FRAYDO Voted FRAYDO Passed ticket to iLikeToSnipe Forced to follow Jeod to Nodlied iLikeToSnipe Voted Voe Received ticket from FRAYDO Gave FRAYDO bonus action Jeod Voted Spare Voe Masonry with Nodlied Killing_You Voted Spare Voe Bus Driver / Nodlied Louis Voted Spare Voe Passed item to Category5 No action claim Mojoman Voted Jeod Visited Nodlied Nodlied Voted Voe Visited Mojoman, forced Dutch gimmick OrangeP47 Voted Voe Masonry with Killing_You Sunflower Voted Voe Doctored FRAYDO [RESULT] Effectively NoLynch NK failed, target was saved

You're spoiled with the chart if you just won't look back at page 25. Fortunately, I have time. D1 Vote N1 Claim Category 5 Visited Louis, received item from Louis ChopBam OrangeP47 Visited KY FRAYDO FRAYDO Passed a ticket to iLTS; Redirected <from no action> to follow Jeod, tracked to Nodlied iLikeToSnipe Voe Received ticket from FRAYDO; Gave FRAYDO bonus action to track Jeod Jeod Spare Voe Masonry w/ Nodlied Killing_You Spare Voe BUS DRIVER Nodlied Louis Spare Voe Passed an item to Cat5; no other action Mojoman Jeod Visited Nodlied Nodlied Voe Redirected->Mojoman, gimmick OrangeP47 Voe Masonry w/ KY Sunflower Voe Visited FRAYDO, saving him Result Voe, doppelganger No deaths, FRAYDO saved

Conversely, we can ask why I was saved. I'm not sure of why myself, though I am grateful still to Sunflower.