Pushwall

But to do this their damage has to be turned into 100% splash damage. Which means that damage is calculated based on where the server thinks you hit instead of where you hit. Pre-delta has shown that to be a Bad Thing since it often caused TTs to do about half as much damage as they should do - if their anti-vehicle damage was all splash instead of partially splash like it was back then, you'd get to enjoy direct hits sometimes doing no damage whatsoever. Splash still has to exist against infantry since it's hard to directly hit them anyway, but for vehicles it would be dumb outside of fringe cases like the Arty/V2 which have large blast radii and aren't expected to be able to directly hit every time. Something I remember from Renegade's campaign (which I might be misremembering completely) is that damage-over-time effects actually worked against vehicles. If this was actually a thing and I'm not misremembering, finding a way to bring that back could be a possibility to bypass directional armour multipliers... but then we run into the problem where no matter how many shocks/TTs you have attacking the same vehicle, they'd all put out the same damage as a single one because DOT effects don't stack. Which isn't really an issue against infantry because while shocks/TTs rely almost entirely on that effect against them, it only takes two DOTs from a shock or one from a TT to kill standard infantry. Ok, done. By which I mean it's already +/-25% and has been since the start of Delta.

Nowhere near that bad. It's just less "dotted" than the old trail.

I'm all for this but I've been having trouble finding something unique for the APC. My last resort will be using an MLG airhorn and I really don't want to do that.

Pretty much what Jie said. Allies do have the means to win big games, but usually they have to act fast to do so, leveraging their cheaper faster units at a point where the economy is still really important. Spy shenanigans can help since the more players there are, the harder it becomes to keep track of them. Balancing around all kinds of player counts is really finicky in a game like this where both teams have vastly different units and playstyles. As long as the pendulum doesn't swing too far in one team's favour it should be fine.

Surely you can do that and have the secrets be something other than Script Zone Hell. I think the only other map with nearly that many script zones is Forest of Illusion, and that not only has no buildings and 3 separate gameplay areas all out of draw-distance of each other (so not too much visual overload - it just LOOKS like it because there's a lot crammed into 3 separate 100-square-metre spaces instead of even more spread out over a 1000-square-metre space) but only lasts 5 minutes so the crawl they may be responsible for never actually happens. And if teleporters were just able to pick a random destination or temporarily enable ghost soldier collision so people don't get stuck in each other, that map would be using about 80% less script zones anyway.

[blurb]Be sure to check out the latest development update for Red Alert: A Path Beyond. Featuring many changes to infantry, vehicles, aesthetics and maps![/blurb] [thumb]thumb_apb.7.png[/thumb] Red Alert: A Path Beyond Update INFANTRY TOZ secondary fire spray angle down from 7.5 to 6. RPG-7 damage up to 90 again, reload time up from 2.5 to 2.8 (DPS change is negligible, but the extra damage means it kills LTs in one less shot from the side, so it's a little more viable against early LT rush) Grenade damage to all buildings up ~4% (0.3375 -> 0.35) VEHICLES Light Tank reload time up from 1.1666 to 1.2 seconds (DPS down ~3%) Light Tank max speed down from 14.17 to 13.99m/s (-1.3%) Medium/Mammoth Tank muzzle velocity down from 250 to 200m/s (same as Light/Heavy) Artillery projectile damage down from 240 to 225. Artillery reload time down from 5.25 to 4.875 seconds (DPS change negligible for direct hits, up ~7.5% when only splashing) Artillery turret can no longer pivot 1 degree to either side, as this feature complicated aiming without a way to fix the pivot in place. Artillery barrel tilts 50% faster. V2 projectile extension adjusted from 3m long and 0.25m wide/tall, to just 0.01m long but 0.5m wide/tall. While this makes less sense for the big long rocket that it is, this should solve the issue where it sometimes falls through the ground, but the extra width/height should still keep it competitive when it comes to directly hitting things. V2 launch platform tilts 50% slower. Hind "tight" fire (primary) spray angle reduced from 1.25 to 1; should be more reliable against Longbows or other fast small-profile vehicles. Longbow and Hind have their side cameras replaced with an underside camera. Should be particularly helpful for helping the Hind hit ground units. Gunboat depth charge splash radius up from 22.5 to 30. Gunboat/Attack Sub damage to all buildings up by ~4% (0.12 -> 0.125) Mobile AA Gun splash damage down from 37.5 to 30. AESTHETICS Shock Trooper and Tesla Tank have updated reload sounds which are a combination of the previous RA/Gamma "charge" sound and the Beta "electric" sound. These updated reload sounds have exactly the same duration as the reload time so they should help with attack timing. Ditched a stock Ren death sound that sounded more like someone having a stomach upset, and replaced it with Tiberian Dawn's fire-death sound. Raap's new crate has better shading. Stuttering when loading should be reduced. Hind uses a smaller tracer. Hind no longer "lies" about its ammo capacity; it's now halved to 50/350 and so is its ammo consumption (1 ammo per shot instead of 2). This has absolutely no effect on its gameplay; it only *looks* different, and the purpose of it is to fix an issue the old system caused with a damage calculator. Artillery smoke trail is thicker. Fixed missing "Building..." EVA voice when purchasing vehicles. MAPS RA_RiverRaid Filled in a hole in the blockers for the blocked route behind the Allied WF. RA_Siege The secret has been removed. THIS MAY NOT BE PERMANENT - this is a test of whether the secret's script-zone overload is responsible for a lot of the slowdown or not! If the map's still unplayable near the end of a match, the secret may return. Adjusted fog thickness from 200/600 to 300/450; fog being less gradual may help as well. Removed the map-wide "anti sight-cheesing" meshes that no longer serve any purpose with the secret gone; this should also help? Like in most other maps, the trees on the map boundaries have been reduced in quality and merged into a smaller group of meshes, which should also help with performance. RA_LunarParadox Boss infantry now have Engineer resistances (splash damage halved, including from suicide units, and can't be burned). Very Panicked Technician health up from 10 to 25. Very Panicked Technician can now drive vehicles and collect crates. Uber Technician is no longer squishable. Airsub reload time down from 2 to 1.5 seconds. Lunar Longbow fire rate up from 0.5 to 0.8 per second. Tesla Glober reload time down from 2 to 1.5 seconds. Brain Jammer reload time down from 5 to 3 seconds. Brain Jammer/Tesla Glober should be much harder to flip. Brain Jammer's turret rotates 200% faster. Ransikmobile was not lulzy enough so it is replaced with the Flour Tank. What does it do? Well, it fills the same role as before, but there's another effect it has that I'll let you discover for yourself. If you were part of the testing team for Delta back when we were under BHP, you may remember it as a secondary fire that was under consideration for the Artillery. VTOL Yak no longer uses mouse steering. VTOL Yak health up from 300 to 350. Mine Bomber health/armour up from 400 to 500. Guided V2 health up from 75 to 150. Guided V2 charge time up from 0.5 to 1 second. Guided V2 price up from 350 to 700. Guided V2/Suicide Medic explosion damage down from 1250 to 1000. Added shifted sound for the Chrono Dust Blower. This only has a 12.5m radius, so only you will be able to hear it unless you opt to drive directly through an enemy. Added start/stop sounds for Yak. Fixed missing killstrings for Guided V2 and infantry bosses.

It's hard for me to pick a favourite but I've narrowed it down to a few. The RPG vs Engineer slap-fight interrupted by the ant who identifies as a vulture Silverlight runs from missiles and Swirly has a sleepover That very last synchronised death

Maybe so. Or we could just not have that feature on Under; all the close quarters and tunnels mean that not only is radar on that map more useful than it usually is, but that and the easy LST backdoors mean the War Factory is way less important than it usually is. Where's it going to land for the Soviets? The entire Dome-side beach is blocked off to prevent V2 base-to-base, and the sub pen's beach is a very tight fit (which real LSTs may also be using for Allies to leave/Soviets to embark at the time) and vehicles have a hard time climbing it. Plus it's really far away from the dome that people are buying it from. Far easier to make the custom cinematic or cut out some of the overhang than carve out a bunch of extra beach room for the Soviets.

There are so many dome maps where this doesn't work due to map boundaries being water, cliffs, closed off, or too far away from the bases (Under, Bonsai, Coastal Influence, Siege, TTC as Sovs, Pipeline as Allies). Airlifting works everywhere except Under where some of the overhang may have to be removed to make the nook not clip through it.

Something I was considering letting the Radar Dome do to give it more presence was add a terminal that, if the WF is dead (but not if it doesn't exist i.e. Hostile/Seamist), can be used to buy a Medium/Heavy Tank for double the standard price once every so often (maybe a 2 minute timer), which would be airlifted in by a Chinook just like on Seamist. That's kind of like the reinforcement bay except not free - free vehicles kind of kill the point of the economy I'd say. But that only gives more presence for potential comebacks to one of the non-production buildings...

Problem is !vote hinges on more people on the losing team who can read chat, know how to type in it, and not be perma-repair-trolls like some people seem to be, than on the winning team. And since it's a bot command, it hinges on someone being able to update it to do what you want instead of being active all the time.

So we already know that Seamist is set up to end the game if the objective building dies. Lunar Paradox has the same thing going on when the WF dies (though I believe it's not been seen yet) because the map also contains a helipad that is invisible and therefore unkillable (which had to be done to make aircraft purchasable without making room for a "real" helipad). I now realise that I could combine this feature with the "trigger an event X number of times" logic used in FoI and Siege to make it so that if a team loses ALL their production buildings (Barracks, War Factory, Helipad, Naval/Sub, and arguably the Missile Silo) on any map (except Seamist/Hostile Waters where one specific building is an objective) then the game ends after a short time (say 3 minutes), giving the win to whichever team killed the production buildings (or in the case of mutually assured destruction, whichever team did it first). How does everyone feel about this? I'd say that while it is possible for situations like that to lead to surprisingly tense kapitan/truck wars like the one on KOTG last Sunday, in almost all cases having no production buildings on one side just leads to a long wait for death, and having no production on EITHER side means both teams usually can't make any headway, and in both cases, leads to people quitting because they're bored of waiting for the next match. And it's certainly much easier than trying to figure out how to make the PP/Dome/Ref/CY extremely vital to a situation where you can only buy sarges and caps. And, you know, means we never have to deal with any Ransiks.

View File APB Classic EVA Voice This modification replaces APB EVA voice files with the classic Red Alert EVA, which was used in versions prior to Gamma. However, many announcements are simplified as a result; all buildings report as "base under attack/structure destroyed" and all units report as "unit ready", "airborne unit ready" or "naval unit ready" - except the demo truck/MAD tank which I felt it was very important to hear about (plus they're easy splices). So unfortunately you will have to pay attention to chat announcements more. I will be working on an alternate version with voice splices to make these announcements more helpful; I had many splices done in the Gamma version of this mod, but since Delta makes use of more previously-unused EVA voices and even splices a few new ones, there are still some more announcements that need redoing in the classic voice. Keep your eyes peeled! If the sound of the Gamma EVA really irks you (and I know it does to some people) or you're looking for a nostalgia injection, then this is for you. To install this mod, unzip all the files to APB's /data directory. To uninstall, delete every file with "eva_" at the start. If you can't find this directory, then take the following steps: Open the game Open the Task Manager Go to Processes tab, right-click game.exe and Open File Location Navigate to /data from there Submitter Pushwall Submitted 04/04/2017 Category Custom Audio

He's had that 50% splash reduction for all of Delta, before the Grenadier even had his role remodeled. The +50 armour just means it's harder to bring him to the breaking point of taking much more splash damage - something the grenadier was never able to do against freshly bought engineers in the first place because the highest his armour-breaking's ever been is "equal to health damage". Fun fact: Something Engineers don't have 50% resistance to is... flamethrowers! They do block the burning effect, but in close quarters where you're reliably getting close splashes or even direct hits, that accounts for maybe 5-10% of your total damage. The burning really only makes a difference if your splash damage is being hampered by far misses or cover, which isn't going to happen inside buildings. I primarily use Flamers when I expect my vehicle to be able to get close to enemy buildings before it dies, when I need to defend against infantry infiltrations, and maps where infantry dominate (Pacific/Under on top of the obvious options of Fissure/Wasteland). He's the best option for taking out buildings - Starshina has a negligible edge in MCT power but Flamer doing more damage when not hitting MCT allows him to start contributing to team damage earlier and also continue doing noticeable damage to the building while defending himself from attackers, and Shocky has a more noticeable edge in MCT power but can't really hack it in infantry combat unless he scores direct hits. Downside is the explosion when he dies which can hamper his use in attack teams, but if you know about that and can predict how long you have to live, you can turn it to your favour by moving away from your allies and towards enemies. Flamer is also like the Shocky in that direct hits help a ton, though unlike the Shocky he can make do without them. If you're inside a building (particularly the WF where enemy has to travel a straight line to get up to you) and aren't bunnyhopping, it's not too hard to pull off. If projectile extensions weren't bugged to go through walls when fired at point blank range, I would totally give his fireball a larger projectile hitbox to make this purpose more reliable (but reduce the damage). As it stands though only a select few vehicle weapons have that property due to the difficulty of lining up their muzzle to almost the exact same spot as the wall (and even then they're still sometimes bugged - I'm sure all of you have seen a V2 rocket fall through the ground at least once). http://w3dhub.com/ranks/apb/unitstats.php Given that the flamethrower gets bought about as often as the Starshina (2 units whose stat tracking are actually workng, unlike the nader) with marginally better results against infantry and much better against buildings, and considerably outpaces the Kapitan in both departments when it comes to kills per purchase (Kapitan is only doing better on total kills because many more people buy him, presumably since he is much easier to use), he can't really be doing that bad can he? It's been a whole year since his last real nerf or buff (the "burn damage lasts longer but does less DPS" is more of a sidegrade, slightly nerfing him in CQC but at the same time buffing him in the field, and his increased armour-melting simply brings him in line with the captains who were also upgraded for that role) so I don't think it can be attributed to earlier use that much. Maybe he can splash himself less?

You know, I should probably link those vehicle spawners to the same playercount spawn system as Seamist/Wasteland so there's fewer cars with fewer players, so it'd be a bit easier to get out of the starting lane at smaller counts and people don't accidentally get in a car that's surrounded by empty ones and become unable to move.

Another mini-patch is up, once again not really worth its own thread. New kill icons for AT Mine, MGG, Grenade, Pillbox, Ore Silo, AA Gun, Missile Sub, Cargo Truck and Siege Cannon. Kill icons for Stinger and Strela now face the right way. RA_LunarParadox MISC Flying Dutchman and Slenderkov no longer give 100x the intended amount of points/cash. Crates now respawn after 15-30 seconds instead of 30-60. All the abnormal units/weapons now have kill strings. INFANTRY Super Soaker Sniper is now free. Super Soaker Sniper damage up (2 -> 3) Uber Captains are no longer squishable. Suicide Medic should now give a visible explosion on death. VEHICLES Flying Dutchman and Dreadnaut now regenerate 10 health/armour per second. Flying Dutchman and Dreadnaut now have a projectile size of 1m, will be much easier to hit small objects with. Enabled Soviet "Angry Tank", a unit that was left out of the initial release due to it causing server crashes. Micro Mammoth now regenerates 2.5 health instead of 5 per second. Mine Bomber moves faster (15.5 -> 20m/s) Mine Bomber projectile gravity increased (1 -> 2) "Lunar Battlefield" Longbow range up (80 -> 100m) Airsub range up (100 -> 120m) Guided V2 health down (100 -> 75) VTOL Yak damage up (20 -> 25) Pimpin Ranger damage up (50 -> 60) Ransikmobile damage up (40 -> 45) Brain Jammer and Tesla Glober move faster (23 -> 30m/s) Brain Jammer and Tesla Glober health down (300 -> 250) Brain Jammer's screen shake is now even more severe. Tesla Glober now causes massive anti-infantry damage from its "rays". There's no guarantee of how many of them will actually hit, but it should give the unit more anti-infantry presence than it had before (which was entirely from its weak damage-over-time effect.) Tesla Glober no longer has the special Tesla Tank armour which made it resist the Chrono Dust Blower's electric damage. Exit transition priority for the Supply Tank is no longer reversed. Demitri Super Tank now regenerates 30 health/armour instead of 20 health per second. Burst-Fire Medium Tank recoil down (2.1 -> 1.8) Changed Supply Tank/Flying Dutchman/Dreadnaut reload sound. RA_RidgeRacer Tweaked TurboDrift!Ranger handling a little bit. Since the hud message does not work over the network, the warning/countdown is now delivered in chat.

Looking at the stats, the game night lasted nearly 8 hours and peaked 32 players. Much better than usual. What caused so many more people to stick around so much longer this one time do you think, if it's not the new stuff? Sheer coincidence and it would have somehow had an even higher attendance than this already well-above-normal one if there was nothing new for the nth time? Also, while you were sitting here being whatever the April Fool's Day equivalent of Scrooge is, we just more than doubled your "lucky day" estimate and got another session to peak at 22 players without even scheduling it. Clearly that game night's sparked some interest, something previous ones don't seem to have done for some reason. Also, you have some funny memory, as I never switched to the racing map at 30 players, as I know it doesn't even support that many players (the starting lane only had room for 24 rangers), and every runthrough on the gamenight lasted only 6 minutes except for one that was 10 due to an extra lap in reverse. The only "25" minute run was in the inaugural test run 5 hours before the game night. Heck you even left the game when I decided there were too many players for Ridge Racer (as the player count ballooned from 24 to 30 between setting Racer and the end of CI) and decided to not play it. I'm getting mixed signals here. Could be hard to pull off. Can't adjust vehicle physics/speed on the fly short of changing the model (which is going to be hell if I ever get around to adding more liveries than just the vanilla Allied/Soviet ranger livery). Only powerups I can really think of that would be plausible that aren't straight up "kill another player and force them to respawn at the very start" (not very fun) would be maybe dropping a hedgehog or some other kind of blocker that gains collision after 0.25 of a second and sticks around for maybe 3-5 seconds so it doesn't perma-screw people if the collision manages to turn on while they're driving through it. Or dropping a "fake crate" that takes 5 seconds off the collector's health timer (which really only screws them if they get multiple or are already falling behind). However, the lag at least serves as sort of a great equaliser that makes it hard to ensure that a lead is permanent, which mixes things up in a similar way to powerups; in the one race I participated in instead of spectating, I got rammed into nearly last at the starting stretch pretty quick, but my course knowledge from being the one to test it (again, this is why I normally just spectate) combined with so many players drifting into walls and flipping let me crawl back to second anyway And naturally as it gets played more knowledge will be more of a factor for people besides me, but lag will always be there to mix things up.

I can understand where you're coming from for Ridge Racer (and again, I already said that won't happen) but Lunar Paradox? Yeah sure that's why the game night peaked on it multiple times I am pretty unlikely to stick Lunar in rotation but I'm sure people will call to switch to either of these maps on occasion (particularly Lunar) and that's perfectly fine. They'll probably get pulled out on game nights at times as well. They can be a good spacer when waiting for players, since when most people join midgame, there's nothing more that turns them off than seeing their base dead - an issue that simply cannot exist on either of those maps

Almost the same idea as I was going to go with, taking the race and overlaying Ridge Racer announcer quotes. Destruction Derby 2 works much better for the chaos of struggling to stay in a straight line though, and looking at it from your perspective it seems pretty accurate to that game where everyone seemed to focus on screwing you over specifically 1:08 is especially accurate to DD2. Don't tell me you've never driven the wrong way down the courses in Wreckin' Racing given how placing first barely scores any points by itself and any attempts to smash for more points tend to prevent you from ever clawing your way back to first anyway. God how I wish W3D had a damage engine. YOU'VE BROKEN THE REAR AXLE! Great.

It doesn't because nothing stops you from jumping while charging. It's only discouraged with C4 charging because C4 has to be stuck on the MCT to work whereas golden wrench is an area effect weapon that instantly works if there is an MCT nearby. And changing it to work like the Beta wrench which did need to be direct-targeted onto a C4/flare/MCT would mean that any flares that get dropped inside props/pseudostructures like the Service Depot become impossible to disarm. Which was not an issue back then because the Service Depot/Ore Silo were "real" structures which granted them proper collision for flares, but being a "real" structure also means you can only have one of each at a time and they have to be destroyed for a base destruction victory.

Lunar Paradox will probably not be a rotation mainstay as the server bot REALLY can't stand it for some reason, it just keeps crashing. If that's dealt with it can go on, but for now, no. You can still ask for a moderator to switch to that map though (but even that's not happening until i fix a few things). You're the one player who was crashing constantly so yeah I do get the feeling the issue might be something on your end. I remember Jerad having some performance issues with ECW which he resolved by enabling the CheckStarsOnly flag on a bunch of script zones that didn't have it (I think "stars" means "players" or "player-controlled objects"). Maybe that would help, and not break anything in the process since only players have a reason to trigger the many teleporter zones, so I'll give that a look. e: Well gg, you thought of that already and all the zones that should have that flag already do. I will say though, starting a fresh game on the current Siege my FPS looking from Sov to Allied base while standing on the SD is ~190 and after deleting all the teleport script zones (but not the teleport maze itself) it went up to ~220. So there may be something to be said for ditching the secret, but given that it's not a big performance increase and other maps start out at a noticeably lower FPS than 190 for me (KOTG and Camos Canyon Bots have it the worst, though the latter is just because of a high unit count which doesn't get any bigger when real players arrive to replace the bots) and yet they don't get as choppy over the course of a match as Siege does, that may not be the whole story.

Okay so we went through quite a bit of minipatches here from .3 to .5. The rundown of them is as follows: Added RA_LunarParadox, a spiritual successor to an ancient fan map known as either the "LOLmap" or "SovietsAlliesLOL". Much like those maps, as well as Red Alert's very own Lunar Battlefield multiplayer map and Paradox Equation mission (from which this map is named), you will face a lot of unconventional weaponry, and that's about all I can say without spoiling too much. There's a minor issue with the points distribution right now, as well as a Soviet unit that had to be edited out due to causing server crashes, but when this is all fixed, it might become a part of the main server rotation. Until then, ask a moderator to enable it, or open up single-player LAN mode and check things out. Added RA_RidgeRacer, a spiritual successor to another ancient fan map, Ranger Raceway. This one is RidgeWar modified into a race track, complete with turbo-charged drifting rangers. It's not entirely scripted right now; the countdown is broken and the map needs a moderator around to spot winners and hand out point rewards, and since it departs from standard AOW gameplay even further than Lunar Paradox does (the only form of attack involved is spinning other drivers out), it may be relegated to just being an event map that people can ask for when they feel like something to cool down between battles. Unit/weapon icons for kill messages have returned, and have been updated for most of the new units/weapons and things that lacked them before (like the non-lethal tools)! The font needed some extra spacing to make this work so it may not look the same as before, and there are still a few things that need adding. RA_CamosCanyon_Bots should no longer crash if too many explosions happen around the Allied WF.

The issue that caused the bot map to crash from your double-demo shenanigans should be gone as well.

Have I screwed something up somewhere?