Pushwall

Yes, this is to give more variety to the stuff bots get to balance them against the Allies who randomly buy rangers/APCs. If the Soviet bots all got heavies/mammoths/TTs they would just stomp.

Stay tuned, I'll be bugging moon to make them spout canned phrases like "pffff", "hax", "typical" or "BG" when they die. (not really) I think the deal with the APC bots is they expect only bots to ride in them, and so they're scripted to make sure their passengers can only stick in the vehicle when they NEED them to (i.e. they are in the process of transporting them around and not currently in combat). If a bot is attempting to ride the APC as a passenger, you should be fine to do so yourself.

A year ago I would have told you to get fucked if you wanted me to add VIS, or told you that it's not worth sacrificing your own sanity for, but it's gotten a lot easier now due to both me figuring out that certain parts of the 15 year old tutorial are BS (particularly the bit where it tells you to place the VIS sectors below the ground - all that means is you need to spend more time on manual VIS points, especially if there are tunnels) as well as fixing a lot of building materials that the previous owner had set alpha rendering on despite them being opaque walls separating the player from blue hell - which often resulted in VIS gen basically throwing up its arms and saying "uh no, I can see forever in this area, so I'm not going to hide anything". You'd be surprised how much of a map's meshes are from buildings. Since this map has a lot of them and the VIS camera is so low-res that it has a lot of trouble detecting small objects from 200m+ distances to make them visible, a lot more stuff is hidden than you'd think even when looking from base to base. Of course, VIS camera being the way it is has its downsides and sometimes really obvious things get hidden, as you noticed. It depends. If you're just adding foliage and such it just means I'd have to re-generate the VIS. If you're adding new tunnels and such, that means having to carve out new VIS sectors too. If that new foliage is part of the same mesh as the old and around the same area (like extra grass around an existing grass mesh) it probably won't need any VIS change at all.

4 hours of terrain splicing, ~6 hours having the VIS auto-generator on while I was asleep, 2 hours of manual VIS points. So really just 6 man-hours. It's really not that big of a deal I didn't make air VIS sectors because they wouldn't affect much, but on the ground FPS is up by about 50% looking from base to base, and I assume it's worlds better inside the castle and the underground areas.

Can you guess how long this took? They are pretty draining on performance, but really only about as much as a normal player as far as I can tell. Something else I forgot to point out in is that in vehicles, they will try to find another path if they stay "blocked" for too long. So they won't get permanently hung up blocking ore trucks - only temporarily. They do scale by player count automatically - whenever a player joins, a bot leaves. But yeah, they need quite a bit more development (and to be excluded from stats) before I'll consider making them a mainstream thing.

Medics are still heal-over-time, and we still have instances like the one I just mentioned, the multi medic rush on Under around the inception of the MP5, and some other occasions that tell me healing over time doesn't instantly make it bad Yeah the Gunboat's been in a pretty experimental stage for most of Delta, trying to make the depth charges actually act like depth charges and not just a cannon with different damage multipliers that can still be launched onto land. None of them worked out so it's back to Beta handling and it's been this way for 7 months I just tried this on Beta (as in 1.2 - since that's the one that was all the rage with SG back in the day, I figured it was the one you meant) and it takes 6 missiles to kill a V2. Less than the 8 needed now, but still, molasses ROF kicks into gear here and thus only plays into your favour if the V2 is completely unguarded. Was there a server side mod to buff the phase back then or something? Certainly not with that ROF/damage. While it may appear tougher than before on paper with 200+200 health, that's not telling the whole story, as Mechanics have a 1/3 repair speed penalty with them (so it's still encouraged to not get hit as you spend more time needing to repair) and Tesla weapons deal 50% more damage to them. And considering other light vehicles take 25% less that means the Phase essentially takes double damage. In the TT's case this is enough to smack the Phase into red health instantly, removing its stealth and making it a sitting duck unless a mech breathes on it. So while it's certainly tougher than in Beta it's not THAT much tougher and you still want to avoid contact with teslas at all cost. "Reload when unmanned" is a global thing, it affects either all vehicles or none of them. Even if we were to figure out how to restrict this to certain vehicles - arty mechs would basically be the same as in Beta except that it would be easier for V2s to shut them down, and Grenadier-V2 or Volkov-V2 combo sounds terrifying - a single one would kill buildings at the speed of 2.5 medium tanks, and here's it's not even a case of tailoring because it's not like there's much reason to use any infantry other than the two long-range ones in the vehicle that is never going to be within Shock Trooper range of the enemy base and is very likely to die before it completes its mission. Hopping would just enforce this one combo further Would probably more relevant nowadays since radar range isn't finicky in vehicles anymore.

Depth charges handle the same way as in Beta now (i.e. fired from the cannon). Unless you mean how they're ineffective on surfaced subs? Beretta is high-reward but also meh? (I will say that duels between techies pretending to be Tanya due to killing each other in 1 hit was pretty fun though.) Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Beta medics run on the same rule as mechanics, where even though they healed a big chunk they couldn't heal both health and armour in the same swing? Since flamethrowers seem to be one of the few Beta weapons that actually pierce infantry armour, wouldn't that force Medics to only heal like 5 health instead of 50 armour and therefore easily shut them down, especially since every infantry back then also died faster? As for new medics, on the last game night on Pacific Threat, we managed to keep a 2 medic 2 captain team alive on the brink of the Soviet base for a good couple of minutes even while under multiple Hind/flamer/starshina fire. We were only overcome once the Soviet flamers got close enough to reliably surround, direct-hit and suicide us. I'd say they're pretty strong, but still limited to specific circumstances (though wayyy less specific than "Fissure and Fissure alone"). I'll have to look into this, I might bring it back, but I think the sneaking mechanic would mean that infantry in vehicles will lose their radar marker anyway so everyone would be invisible instead of just thieves. There's also the issue that it reinforces the problem of Allies being forced to take an infantry that has no use in the field just to make their vehicle not suck - an issue which is sort of already present with Mechanics (who can at least do something after their vehicle dies if friendly vehicles are around) and GTA!Spies (who I'd say are much more powerful than thief-phases though obviously much harder to pull off - even with spies now being uncrushable). I was never around for "Beta" Beta - only NW Beta - so my only experience is with the NW Phase. Looking further back at the Beta phase I have to ask - how exactly was this thing considered powerful? Against infantry, the rockets are so slow that I'm pretty sure it would have actually been possible to bunnyhop out of their way even if the RNG tracking works. And their splash damage actually takes more hits to kill infantry than Delta's phase vs Delta's infantry, which is pretty funny when two of Delta's mission statements were "nerf OP splash damage into the ground" and "make infantry out of something more resilient than paper mache". I'm pretty sure NW improved their splash over Beta because I remember it actually being something to worry about (but maybe that was also the improved ROF talking). Against vehicles, they do barely more damage than the current phase, and that's ignoring the fact that their salvos take twice as long to unleash and to reload as the current ones. With that molasses ROF combined with the high turret rotation speed of Beta tanks, I find it hard to believe they would have been able to get all 8 missiles off before the enemy noticed and forced the phase to either retreat/hide before it could unleash its whole salvo - leading to it being less powerful - or get wrecked, which a TT could do in one hit! Though I guess back then, the "some of the anti-vehicle damage comes in splash form so there's a RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR determined chance that your TT may just not deal all the damage even though you clearly hit the phase" aspect might have lessened that? At the expense of being more dumb? Against buildings, I can see where you're coming from - their TTK is worse than the current Phase on paper but since they seem to do precisely 1/6 damage to a building per salvo, I imagine a popular strategy was to take 3 of them, attack a building, and kill it on the second salvo, so everyone only has to go through the Volkov-tier reload time once and it works out in a pretty quick 18 seconds... which 3 Delta phases can also boast. I'm seeing way too much risk and not enough reward. But lacking a proper testing environment for this I could be wrong. I imagine they were just the Allies' version of the MAD Tank - only good against buildings (and idle/chatting infantry) and needs to be in groups of 3 to work. The other things I'll give you, but yeah, some were sacrifices to vary up the unit compositions (seeing armies composed entirely of med mechs and maybe 1 or 2 arty mechs gets a little boring after a while) and make the game more playable for the newcomers.

Well some people !killme to move to other spawns so this just makes them more human no? This happens when they can't find a path out of their spawn area. They get refunded for whatever they bought so it's ok. Yes and no. It doesn't put a radar marker on gap units but AI TTs will still shoot MGGs and the things sheltered in them with unerring accuracy because the stealth shooting code is a simple "is this thing stealthed, yes/no".

Nope, frankly I feel they needed more help. Is a supply truck really that hard to kill? When you look at it this strategy is basically just an alternate demo truck for lower tech levels, and with all the "leaving the base" risk shifted over to "at the enemy base", and less damage but more focused.

Problem is bots contribute to stats. People can farm kd off them pretty easily. Also, there's a bit of an issue with how vehicle bots behave on the server currently - their turret rotation for the client does not match what it is on the server. So they may be appearing to shoot something like 90 degrees away from you but will still damage you. Fortunately the only vehicle bot in regular play is the non-turreted non-combatant OT so I let this slide for this release. If both of these issues are solved (particularly the latter) then yeah I'll do it. Regardless, I will definitely switch to the bot map once or twice during the Game Night, unless it turns out that the server just can't handle all the bots. Also you have an interesting definition of "dead" or "past five days"

[thumb]thumb_apb.h.png[/thumb] Red Alert: A Path Beyond Update GENERAL Reverted some netcode changes that may have been responsible for all the recent crashes. Please let us know if they keep happening! Reenabled hitbeeps, and they no longer trigger on damage-over-time effects. INFANTRY Clearing Charge explosion no longer deals distance-based damage and no longer gets blocked by terrain - any mines in their 10m blast radius are dead, no questions asked. They are also more effective at clearing multiple hedgehogs as a result. VEHICLES Added zoom cameras for Tesla Tank and Phase Tank. Tesla Tanks now reveal Phase Tanks on radar within 75m (which is the max distance of the radar anyway). Like with the Engineer's mine detector, other Soviets can see the Phase's radar marker. AI Tesla Tanks also emulate this by being the only bot unit that can detect stealth. Demolition Truck explosion damage to infantry down from 160 to 105. Supply Trucks/LSTs now only take 5 seconds to refill occupants' ammo. AT Mine damage reduced from 356.25/475 (Ore Trucks/everything else) to 250/150/200 (Light vehicles/Ore Trucks/everything else). However, they now instantly deplete all armour of the affected vehicles, so the damage of the first mine you trigger is a lot higher than that if you're using a big tank - best to never get hit by a mine at all, especially if there are enemies nearby! AESTHETICS New Hind sounds by @OWA. Aircraft rotors should now spin down at a rate appropriate for their sound. Blood effects for rocket/shell direct hits on infantry are a little easier to notice. MAPS RA_CamosCanyon_Bots Bots are now using an experimental version of Moonsense's AI that attempts to mimic player behaviour more. Here's how they've changed They have names now! They get money from dumps/silos, and will use it to actually purchase units instead of spawning as those units for free. Sometimes they attempt to attack in groups, and won't all charge down the same attack route. They can attack buildings now. This was doable before but wasn't worth the effort of implementing before since with the old AI they rarely got close to those buildings anyway - now they do! RA_Siege Added VIS. Changed saturation of objective messages to be more readable. RA_StormyValley Partisans are now using the updated AI that was introduced to every other bot in 3.0.8.0. This isn't all though. There will be more coming on April 1st. But I won't say any more than that... [blurb]Some changes are reverted, and some added aesthetics. More to come on April 1st, but we can't say any more on that...[/blurb]

The thief changes that got unanimously agreed on are being saved for a later date for specifically that reason: it would require a ton of maps to be re-exported and patched, resulting in another big patch.

There will be a patch. It won't be big though; I'm switching to using always2.dat for minor patches, and only a couple of maps are updated, so I predict it'll be maybe around 40mb? It should go live in the evening of March 31 at the latest, but it might happen earlier.

That's been a thing for some time now, for this very reason - compensation for how the only well thought out thing about Gamma's Autocannon!Hind was the ability to splash repairing mechs to death.

0:36 Woo the sandstorm did something! 0:55 That still of @Silverlight running away from a missile needs to be his new avatar or something. 1:05 / 1:10 Those quotes suit Atari perfectly! 1:07 Is that an arty shell incoming or did you add that sound in for him falling? Cause if it's the former that's a pretty great coincidence. 1:32 I really need to make the blood effects for directly hitting someone with a shell/rocket a bit more noticeable. It's basically impossible to see them right now and it's not very satisfying

I seriously can't get enough of the stock infantry death animation where the character looks like he's pelvic thrusting or arms raised in surrender (i.e. the one in the thumbnail). Seems to show up a lot in your vids.

Refilling in combat is a bad mannered thing, supposed to be against the rules, but detecting and dealing with it is pretty difficult compared to, say, demo noobing. There used to be a bot plugin that made it so if you tried to refill while in combat it would reset your health to what it was before the refill (which still afforded you a tiny bit of protection due to lag), so that eliminated any need to moderate it (except when the bot wasn't around, but then you couldn't moderate anyway), but I believe it's not compatible anymore. I personally just rebuy and even that's somewhat cheesy.

I'll have to ask the scripters about this, sounds like a solution. Could be extended to refills as well since we still don't have a proper solution for refills in combat. Thing is though, respawning counts as buying a character; currently we have a thing that prevents you from rebuying too fast - 3 seconds - and if you try to buy right after spawning you get denied. So adding this feature would make spawnkilling easier?

I didn't want C4 to have a charge time - there's a future feature that would mean C4 without a charge time could be impossible to disarm in more situations, so I might as well nip that problem in the bud now. With the golden wrench, charge time sounds like a good idea for this instance, but it's not possible because charge time happens for each shot you make. Except for tesla coils but they don't use actual charging logic - they're able to get away with emulating odd things because they're not being manually fired by a player. Perhaps the repair "damage" could be spread out over a smaller ammo count to facilitate charging but that could complicate captures... Nope, just popped into my head. There's a reason I throw these kinds of ideas to you guys

For Technicians and most other infantry that's as true as it's always been, but Engineers are pretty beefy now (50% explosion resistance, has armour while techies don't, can't be set on fire - that last bit being something that was constantly advertised in Gamma but never actually true) so they can stand up pretty well under arty fire as long as there's a wall separating them (so repairing defenses under arty fire is still difficult). Maybe some of that could go? This was more for encouraging their use in the field than enhancing their already good repairs though - besides, even before that change, I think the only times I've ever seen an ENGINEER in a building die to arty fire (without any help from infiltrating infantry or incidental mine detonations) is from 3 V2s hitting it in sync, and maybe once or twice of someone being too stubborn to refill when the building isn't even near death. But the damage those 3 V2s deal is now equivalent to an entire golden wrench use whereas in Gamma a golden wrench could repair 9 or 10 V2s worth of damage I think? So now it cripples the defender's economy even more which... you're getting into anyway. Heh. Good points all around. @JigglyJieif the wrench stays I could easily just ditch the special warhead so both the wrench and the tool can do captures. But right now the wrench warhead, compared to the tool, is half as effective against disarmables and building exteriors - of course since the wrench has more base "damage" that's not true in practice, it just means that switching to the tool warhead would mean the wrench would suddenly be twice as good in those categories. Which would be quite a problem especially for disarmables. How'd you like to disarm a flare in 2.5 seconds - or, if the warhead was nerfed to compensate, being in a situation where you have to resort to a techie to disarm in 25 seconds I could also just let the tool do captures, but then the only time you'd actually end up using engies for captures is being Allies on Pipeline (because people love to AP mine the derricks). So the Soviets get to save even more money on the map they're already moderately favoured on.

Thing is the modifier for credits stolen is a property of the thief himself and not the stealing zones, so it's the same wherever he goes. If that turns out to be a popular request I'll have to poke jonwil about that. But it makes sense, I like it.

The disarm speed difference between the wrench and repair tool is actually not that big compared to the repair speed difference - it's 5 seconds for the wrench and 12.5 for the repair tool. Which yes, is a lot in practice, but I'd say the engy's durability plays just as much of a role in helping him succeed at disarming. If the "stronger repair tool disguised as a wrench" goes through, it'll just mean this difference gets narrowed somewhat with the side effect of Technicians being a little better than before, not that it'll help them unless the area's completely clear of enemies. A plus to this is there's no possibility of getting blindsided by running out of wrench use while disarming (which may happen if you're in combat and desperately trying to disarm it while avoiding vehicles and bullets) and having to switch to the tool. Taking Reborn as a base where the engineer was 50% more effective than the techie, a possible outcome here would be 10.5 seconds for the techie repair tool and 7 for the "totally not a repair tool" wrench. Well, if he gets a stronger repair tool it would just be reskinned to look like a Golden Wrench. After all, he's not an Engineer without it, and we might as well reuse that asset

Golden wrench spam seems to be quite the source of rage as well as failed attacks that honestly should have succeeded - even after being nerfed from its old RenAlert state of literally instant full repair to merely trickling up ~9% of a building's health per second (which, it turns out, is still a damn lot given technicians repair 2% per second) and capping out at 2/3rds of it per purchase. Given how long it's been around, I can see why some people might think it's just "part of the game". But maybe it's time for it to go? After all we've done away with quite a few alienating antique features already. So what's everyone's thoughts on this, and the possibility of changing the Golden Wrench to just be a slightly stronger version of the Repair Tool? Would buildings need to be made tougher to compensate as well maybe? Or should we just keep it in its "emergency repair" state and nerf it even more? There's some positive side effects to making it a "better repair tool" as well: it means he doesn't need the repair tool anymore - removing some clutter from his weapon list. And since it would share warhead behaviour with the repair tool, it would also mean we'd be able to deal with another oft-requested thing: allowing both Technicians and Engineers to capture neutral buildings on Pipeline/Hostile Waters. Though Engineers would do it at a much faster rate so there's still a reason to use them, and Technicians would do it slowly enough that it's easy to stop them if they're unprotected.

Could make them more useful? I bring this up because much of the what made this feature insanely overpowered in much older versions of APB are no longer there: you can't steal while inside a vehicle anymore - so no outright flipping the bird to AP mines (Gamma fix) you have to be touching the silo computer instead of any part of the silo - making it even harder to avoid mines (Delta fix) there's now a short delay between entering the stealing zone and actually stealing - so you can't just jump out of your vehicle, insta-steal before the mines trigger or before enemies can kill you, and merely give the enemy 1 ranger/LT/other transport of choice in exchange for half their money. (Delta fix) In addition this would completely remove the confusion about when you can and can't steal from a silo. Thieves are the same tech level as Minelayers so this would not create issues on River Raid/Guard Duty. Silos with inaccessible computers, like the one near helipad on Pacific Threat, would still be unthiefable. I could do the same for some other silos on other maps if they prove too troublesome. As far as I've seen people typically mine the silo on maps where it's not well defended anyway (probably because of Tanyas), so this shouldn't change game flow much, except maybe the percentage of money stolen might need to go down a bit, or increase the stealing "charge-up time" even more?

At the time, APB was entirely CJ's thing, and scripts 5.0 was almost entirely his too I think, as it was never intended for vanilla Renegade (IIRC it actually strips out a lot of vanilla functionality to improve performance) and I don't think TSR/AR were even considering moving to it at the time - he didn't just "walk in" and make a mess of someone else's house. Besides, he did make a lot of very valuable contributions - reverting to scripts 4.x would have opened a bunch of cans of worms even back when he left. We've gotten back in contact with him, but since it's been a long time for him, there's no telling what he may or may not be able to fix.