Pushwall

Changed Status to Closed (Other) Changed Assigned to to EVA

Well those are some vague reproduction steps. Can you get video of this, there's no invisible object in that position and I can't get stuck there when I try.

Changed Status to Closed (Other) Changed Assigned to to EVA

In case you see the recent changelog and are curious, yes, revamping Fissure and other infantry maps is high on my priority list now that the anti-refill features are a reality. I just didn't want to delay the release of the anti-refill and bot overhaul any more than I already had.

In case anyone wonders where Stormy Valley went, we found shortly after pushing the patch that it crashes the server every time it's loaded. We'll put it back when it's resolved.

Red Alert: A Path Beyond Update [thumb]thumb_apb.h.png[/thumb][blurb]Fixed combat refilling, improved bot behaviour, radio command emoticons and more in this new update![/blurb] General Added emoticons for radio commands, like in Renegade. Refilling or buying rifles/techies in infantry combat is no longer possible. Fixed the "limit" on items in the B/N/M list, they will now display all players/buildings. Screen shake of most explosive weaponry has been reduced about 20-30%. Infantry Grenadier Splash radius down (8 -> 7m) Rifle/Medic Rifle/SMG (AK-47, M16, MP5) damage multiplier to light vehicle health/armour down (0.4/0.2 -> 0.36/0.18), a 10% decrease Rifle/SMG damage multiplier to heavy vehicle health/armour down (0.3/0.15 -> 0.28/0.14), a 6.67% decrease Starshina TOZ-194 buckshot damage multiplier to infantry decreased (1 -> 0.9), a 10% decrease Captain/Kapitan Light machinegun (M60, PKM) damage multiplier to light vehicle health/armour down (0.5/0.5 -> 0.5/0.4), an 11.11% decrease (but not against supply trucks or other unarmoured vehs) Light machinegun damage multiplier to heavy vehicle health/armour down (0.45/0.3 -> 0.4/0.3), a 4.75% decrease Light machinegun damage multiplier to armoured infantry down (0.875 -> 0.75), a 14.3% decrease Flamethrower Splash radius up (8 -> 8.5m) Splash damage down (35 -> 30) Tanya Self-healing delay increased (15 -> 20 seconds) Volkov Adjusted to be a little more "midfield" and less "enemy rooftop camping killwhoring douche": AT cannon range back up (85 -> 90m) Shotgun damage down (50 -> 45) Napalm direct damage down (25 -> 20) Napalm splash radius up (8 -> 10m) Napalm splash no longer penetrates terrain/building cover. Shotgun/napalm no longer gets improved accuracy from crouching. Self-healing delay increased (15 -> 20 seconds) No longer has infinite armour, the bar is there and it can be depleted. Vehicles Tesla Tank Physics redone slightly, should no longer be susceptible to randomly flipping over when reversing. (Unfortunately the suspension can now LOOK a little weird at times but you can't have it all. I'll figure out a better solution eventually.) Yak Decreased acceleration about 10% Decreased range (140 -> 130m) Buildings In dead buildings, prop monitors display static on screens and "blinklight" mainframes stop blinking. Construction Yard/Power Plant No longer has to be destroyed for a base destruction victory. Radar Dome Added Repair Tool props to the shelves. Airfield Removed physical collision from runway lights as they were making rotation difficult for Yaks. Tesla Coil Range no longer falls a few centimetres short of its targeting range (which made it possible for a Ranger to draw coil fire without being hurt). Splash cover penetration up from 0% to 75% Flame Tower / Turret Splash cover penetration up from 33%/0% to 75% Technology Centre Fixed the stickiness of the lower edges of the platform for the "mega mainframe". Bots Targeting priority for most bots (excluding base defenses, snipers and Tanyas) treats the target's unit cost as a much less important factor, so they will be more likely to target buildings and to finish already-damaged units. Targeting and "fear" priorities vs each "type" of unit (infantry, light vehicle/base defense, heavy vehicle, aircraft, building) have been tweaked for greater sensibility. Most importantly, bots in MBTs will no longer attempt to maintain max range against inconsequential rifle infantry that barely hurt them and they can barely hurt in return, and will instead try to charge through them but still return fire if there are no better targets, whereas the lightly-armoured Phase/Tesla bots continue to fear infantry and maintain maximum range against them. Rifle Soldier bots do not "fear" infantry, as they are free and expendable - this also means they can break past poor defensive lines and infiltrate buildings more easily. Behaviour of defender/repair bots has been improved; instead of randomly picking a building to repair/defend (even if it's in no danger) and then staying glued to its MCT until it or the bots die, they will now only rush to the aid of buildings that are damaged, and will just idle around if no buildings are damaged. Bots' per-map infantry restrictions have been revised once again to exclude more infantry that are unsuitable for certain situations. For example, since Metro is now an infantry-only map in the eyes of bots, bots will never purchase Rocket Soldiers there, and since Camos Canyon's lanes are straight and open enough that bots often find themselves fighting at long range, bots will never purchase Sergeants, Medics or Flamethrowers there. Bots don't buy Mammoth Tanks or APCs anymore, since they both have issues - with Mammoths they frequently manage to somehow leave the pathfinding grid, upon which they become "stuck" and only serve as a stationary turret, and with APCs the "infantry join a transport vehicle" logic isn't currently functioning in group rushes, so an APC in a group rush doesn't provide the intended effect of speeding up the group (because the tanks wouldn't have to wait for infantry to catch up at each waypoint) to compensate for being a mediocre combatant. Both may be re-enabled in future if these issues are fixed. Bots will still try to use an APC/Mammoth if they are left unused for too long (like with Rangers). Bots can now buy Grenadiers. (However, due to issues targeting around cover, they don't get bought on Metro.) Volkov bots now use the AP shotgun against infantry. However, due to the AI 1-weapon limitation, this draws from the same ammo pool as the AT cannon and takes no time to "switch" to. Allied Sergeant bots now use the dragonsbreath shot against infantry to balance them with Soviet ones, since being set on fire causes bots to aim sporadically. Bots will now react to the radio commands "Follow me" (causes some bots who are near you to follow you) and "Move out" (releases followers who will then do their own thing) Group rushes are less "patient" - they won't wait around for participants to join for as long as they used to. Bot "wakeup" time after spawning is randomised. Player kills versus bots are reported on the killfeed and play the kill sound. Maps RA_CamosCanyon Fixed OT pathfinding which somehow broke again. RA_Metro Bots no longer crash the game. Bots no longer get hung up on the War Factory props or the Cargo Truck. Moved Soviet north silo slightly south so it's easier to repair. Moved the boxes around Soviet north silo to provide more cover to repairmen. RA_NorthByNorthwest Fixed missing spy/thief zones for the Soviet Barracks, War Factory and Refinery. Fixed a VIS error in the Tech Centre. RA_RiverRaid Bots can now be enabled. (As usual, load up the map in LAN, press F8 to open the console, and type botcount 30 or some number around that.)

Well all of a sudden bots on KOTG are just flat out refusing to acknowledge the tesla coil as a valid target. Which makes it pretty impossible for Allies to mount an assault on most of the routes they take. So don't expect to see KOTG bots for a while (unless you want more delays). River Raid is cool though.

Both fixed in next release

Changed Status to Fixed

Tried to solve the problem of bots being too occupied shooting quickly-respawning infantry to bother actually getting inside a building to take it down. Created the opposite problem instead. You thought the Three Stooges were crazy? Get ready for ten.

There's not really any "unintended targets" though. Even if they don't stand much of a chance against heavy tanks they should still deal what damage they can as they may not be fighting alone. So they never get to use the horn though it would be possible for them to do so as you said.

To be fair I would not mind removing double flares if there's a way that doesn't have the aforementioned issues. Maybe making it so if a flare is planted (and actually sticks - since moving during planting causes it to un-plant) your team can't place any more flares until the current flare has succeeded or been disarmed, or something. Flare placements do get reported to mod IRC so we can see if people are hampering with that, but there's limited potential for that compared to with only one person being able to carry a flare at a time. A lazy quick-fix would be to extend the missile silo launch animation to have an extra 57 seconds of "dead air", since you can't plant during the silo's launch animation, but that would cause you to be unable to flare for a minute even if the flare didn't actually stick because you moved or got shoved while planting. So a lazy fix wouldn't be good.

Double flares > teamhamperers taking a flare, not using it, preventing the rest of the team from doing flare drops because they have a flare, and hiding their dickery by using a class that has multiple weapons (of which there are many) so the flare doesn't show up on their waist so that nobody actually has any idea who to report to the moderators (unlike with many other forms of TH) Or the possibility that people doing this aren't intentionally teamhampering at all and just haven't read the changelog because hardly anyone actually does that, and then they get hounded by their team for it.

Bit of a problem with that: bot vehicles under the new "smart AI" use the same preset as the player vehicles. Doing what you suggest would mean the naval maps would have to revert to the old "bots just spawn in the middle of the battlefield/battleocean already inside their vehicle, usually behind you and saying nothing personnel kid" way, which would prevent the naval units from being a part of the bot "player count", needing money to be "bought", and knowing how to form attack groups. But I may experiment with that for Pacific Threat sometime. Anyway, bots for KOTG have been done! Since it's such a large and complex map, it's proof that I should be able to easily add them to any of the large maps while avoiding the dreaded "too many pathfinding sectors = LevelEdit crash" issue. (Of course there's still the issues of bots being unable to properly utilise helis/boats and not being able to exclude vehicles from infantry-only paths that make certain maps not bot viable, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.) However, it's also made me realise that bots in their current state can't really use Mammoth Tanks or APCs properly - Mammoths as they think they're infantry-sized and thus have a very bad habit of slipping off roads/ramming trees, eventually leaving the pathfind grid and becoming stationary turrets for the rest of the match, and APCs as the "infantry bots try to ride shotgun" logic isn't applying to group rushes so infantry in a group that contains an APC will just continue to walk on foot and slow the whole group down as the fast tanks wait for the slow infantry to catch up at each waypoint. The APC bots were meant to prevent that to compensate for being mediocre combat units. Both of these were issues on Camos Canyon too. So by the next release the bot vehicle list will sadly be a bit more constricted, but hopefully these issues will be resolved in future and these units can be added back to botmatches. Working on adding bots to River Raid now but now I realise that sadly it's another map with heavy reliance on infantry-only lanes (the upper cave, the cave leading behind the Allied WF, the beach path to the Soviet WF, and the hedgehog-blocked plateaus), and the only vehicle entrance may get log-jammed a lot due to bots trying to path around the ore truck. I'll give it a try and see how it works though. If OT blocking is too much of a problem it may have to become another "bot infantry only" map. Axing the hedgehogs on some of the plateaus isn't really an option as bot vehicles have a pretty hard time handling steep slopes that don't have much clearance around them. edit 6 hours later: actually, having just put bots on RR, there's a different problem. Allied rifle bots Leeroy Jenkins the Soviet WF 1 minute into the game at an almost 100% success rate, because I haven't figured out how to make bots defend properly (on any map). But on the one instance where the Allies failed to do that, the game went on relatively normally with practically no blocking, so I think we're good on that at least and it will be a pretty intense bot map once I wrap my head around moonsense's method for making bots defend and repair properly!

No context required

The other issue would be getting the bots to even enter the subs in the first place since that involves walking off a ledge to a tall drop which is only "saved" by the sub itself...

I don't doubt their ability to pilot them since they're just like any other VTOL except with a different flight ceiling. The problem is that they have to be surfaced to fire, submerge to avoid damage, and are by design unable to hit anything that isn't a boat, naval yard, or an idiot who strayed into the water. That's a bit too complex for the berserker AI who will most likely attempt to fire at land units, and fire at boats when it's too low to even shoot (and even if it were allowed to shoot, wouldn't be able to hit the underside of any boats from that height anyway). And likewise AI units will probably try to attack the sub even when it's submerged and thus immune to pretty much all damage that isn't rockets and gunboats.

And pretty overpowered for the Soviets who have automatic interior guards in the form of AP mines. But then I suppose, in turn, that would make the spy more useful. On the other hand it'd just make it harder to end games that should be over since you can't tell a bot to stop repairing, and killwhores don't want to go into buildings to stop it because they'd put themselves at risk. Which would result in more killwhoring.

Thanks for pointing out exactly the reason why I shouldn't have had Canyon River on this poll.

I'd absolutely do this once the bots are more refined, particularly with regard to how they interact with stats. It's just that now we can actually enable them on the server without having to worry about people ragequitting over dying to seemingly nothing because the enemy vehicle turrets were improperly rotated for clients before. Still, right now it requires jumping through the hoop of disabling the rank plugin so that people who just camp in place with a sniper/roll around in a permacloaked phase tank for the express purpose of picking off riflebots all match to try to grind their KD instead of actually playing the game don't get "rewarded". Though I'd prefer if one could choose how many bots get replaced by a single player. Games with actual players can start to carry themselves at around 12 players and at that point they probably wouldn't want any bots around, but that would mean only having a bot count of 12 - which would make them pretty inconsequential since they're still not particularly great at anything other than shooting what they can see, and half of them idle in their own base. If we could make it so every player joining causes two bots to leave so the default bot count could be upped to around 20-24, that'd be a bit better. In addition that would mean that both teams always have the same number of bots (someone joining kicks off a bot from both teams) so both teams have an equal chance to be points-screwed by bots charging headfirst into base defenses that they can't solo. ^ I wouldn't mind if the score granting can't be "fixed". I mean, they have to be able to receive and give out points for a winner to be properly decided in bot vs bot matches that don't end in base destruction anyway, and nobody masturbates to how many points they can amass, whereas KD whores are abounds. Another thing is that they rack up recommendation messages like nobody's business (and when they were first used, achievements which they've now unlocked). Enable bots on the server and every minute or so it's "None was recommended for killing 7 infantry/vehicles".

This is completely normal, happens on all maps, and happens with SDs in some instances too - they have a collision ramp to make it so that ground units can actually get onto them and vehicles - particularly minelayers - don't get stuck in the process. Minelayers getting stuck around refill pads was a big problem before.

I originally wanted to do that, having the tech centre be capturable and possibly enable the purchase of higher-tech units, but when I decided to start working again after my break it was only a few weeks back and I felt didn't have the time to figure out how to make it work - and in the end I only just barely got this stuff out for Christmas day anyway. So I decided to do a variation on the KOTG crate thing instead, which is probably more balanced anyway because it means one team isn't going to immediately have a full regiment of mechanics ready to go right after they get their first "capture" in. Some time in the future I may give a try at making it capturable though.

3.1.4.1 minipatch: General Server no longer crashes if a C4 or clearing charge gets attached to terrain. Buildings Neutral Technology Centre Fixed floating snow on top of the rooftop entrance. Added vehicle blockers to the exterior walls, to stop vehicles from getting flipped over by them since they're slanted. Maps RA_Metro The waypoint system has been implemented to allow bots to attack the enemy base from up to 5 different directions, since the removal of vehicles means we don't have to worry about them trying to go down the infantry-only routes. RA_Zama Fixed a very obviously floating rock.

So I was testing out bot waypoints on Metro. Clone army HUT HUT HUT HUT HUTs its way through the alleys and the subway.

Neat! At some point I'd also like to see the option to exclude certain unit types from waypoints so we can actually have infantry organise attacks down infantry-only routes without vehicles attempting to join in. Or vehicle-only squads down routes that would be suicidal for infantry to take, like tiberium-heavy areas in TSR maps. In any case, by the time all this happens, I'll probably have added bots to a few of the maps on this list, and at that point we can have a new poll including all the maps that become "unlocked" with these refinements.