Pushwall

Well, that is pretty much what happens when anyone wants to look at that code...

Any changes with sprinting, besides the little that's already adjustable in LE (which is all speed-related), is pretty unlikely to happen because apparently CJ's code is the Ark of the Covenant.

That's something I sort of wished for during Delta's development too. In an early stage after I became objects.ddb groundskeeper, I figured that a way of making the C4 users more viable would be to give them infinite C4 but take a very long time to "reload" it. Since you had to keep it equipped to reload it, I had to keep the reload time fairly short for it to be even remotely viable, and because of that, it was just outright overpowered as long as you were never discovered and therefore never had to defend yourself. Since reload-while-holstered never happened, a proxy for the "infinite C4" mechanic got moved to the Supply Truck instead (and eventually the LST). Where it can still be strong under specific circumstances but definitely not to the degree that just pulling new C4 out of your ass would be. In hindsight the "auto infini-c4" probably wasn't the best idea anyway, it'd probably make Tanyas even more rambo-ey. The ability to reload while swapped for actual weapons could be problematic though. Particularly for Volkov or rocket soldiers. What with Volkovs being able to spend 8 seconds AT cannoning, then 8 seconds defending themselves from infantry by shotgunning, then AT cannoning again while largely averting the downtime that they're meant to have. It sounds like it wouldn't come up that much, but it would be 100% applicable to being inside buildings, so it'd be a big buff there, when they are specifically meant to not be building assaulters - at least not without the aid of a teammate with an actual anti-building weapon. Rocket soldiers would be able to practically dual-wield their launchers if there are some combination of 2 of air, ground and naval targets around, or even just a lone air or naval target at close range. It sounds like an infantry-only version of the Beta mech/vehicle system where a vehicle could somehow reload itself without a driver, so you just fire your vehicle weapon, hop out, and pop an OP beta wrench to heal at the same time, or pop a shock rifle burst for extra power, all while somehow keeping the vehicle reloading. Which seems more counter-intuitive than what you're going on about.

Nope, not without temping a bunch of new radar jammer vehicles for each map. (And heaven forbid I ever have to update any of the radar jammer's stats or scripts after doing that...)

Allies seem to have a really hard time winning games nowadays. That's the gist of most of this.

[blurb]Read about the big changes being made to Phase Tanks, Walls and more in this A Path Beyond update from Pushwall![/blurb] [thumb]thumb_apb.0.png[/thumb] Red Alert: A Path Beyond Update INFANTRY MP5-N rate of fire up from 12.5 to 13.33, reload time down from 2.1 to 2. (Overall ~6% DPS boost.) Volkov reload time up from 7.5 to 8. (Overall ~3 to 8% DPS drop depending on fire mode.) Volkov's cannon now visibly tilts when reloading again, to make reload duration more obvious and prevent people accidentally canceling it with a switch/sprint. LAW reload time down from 2.5 to 2.2. LAW range up from 105 to 110. RPG-7/LAW damage down from 90 to 80. (With the reload adjustment, this means the LAW's DPS is up by a negligible ~1%, but the RPG's is down by ~11%. Grenadier is now a better building wrecker as a result.) RPG-7 is no longer affected by gravity. Ghost Spectator is no longer crushable. VEHICLES Minelayer max speed up from 13.7 to 14.5. Minelayer health up from 200 to 250. Swapped tech level of MAD Tank and Mammoth Tank. (This really only matters for Bonsai right now.) MAD Tank damage now has 50% armour piercing against vehicles, like Tesla damage does. Primarily this means that mech-vehicles caught in the shockwave will take longer to repair. Mammoth Tank range down from 120 to 115. APC damage to aircraft up by ~14% (0.875 -> 1) Artillery/V2 damage to buildings up by ~4% (0.24 -> 0.25) Phase Tank is now radar invisible while stealthed. Hind range up from 100 to 105. Longbow range up from 95 to 100. Longbows now fire in quick bursts of 2 with a long reload. (Ammo capacity changed from 1/7 to 2/6, ROF up from 0.75/sec to 4/sec, reload time up from 0 to 2.75.) This means they take slightly longer to use up all their ammo (10 seconds instead of 9.33) but get two rockets off right away, have an easier time attacking while using cover between shots, and re-arm at Helipads/Refill Pads twice as fast (since they refill 1 magazine at a time). Longbow rockets turn 50% faster, making them hopefully more likely to track towards the intended spot. Longbow rockets are slightly stronger against certain targets: Damage to Mammoth vehicles up from 90 to 100 Damage to Ore Trucks up from 75 to 100 Damage to Submerged Subs up from 5 to 10 Damage to blockades/bridges (e.g. Concrete Walls) up from 20 to 25 BUILDINGS Flame Tower reload time up from 3 to 3.25. Tesla Coil reload time up from 2 to 2.25. Turret reload time down from 2.5 to 2.25. Concrete Walls no longer have 10x the intended amount of health. MAPS RA_AS_Seamist: Tech level message at the start now says 3 for Allies, 5 for Soviets. (MADs/Kovs are still absent as usual though.) RA_CamosCanyon_Bots: Fixed an Allied basic infantry bot who was spawning above the pathfind blocker and falling to his death. RA_RiverRaid: The vehicle route going behind each team's WF is now permanently blocked, though you can still shoot over the blockade to hit the WF. (Basically the short stint of walls accidentally being indestructible made me realise that not having 3 vehicle routes was actually somewhat beneficial to this map with no defenses. 1 was too little though.)

9.8 for the fastest infantry. Who still aren't exactly travelling light. Volkov could justifiably run faster because cyborg legs, but game balance forbids that. On the flip side though, a lot of vehicles are slower than their real-life counterparts - which again is attributed to balancing vehicles against infantry. Yep. This doesn't necessarily mean the sniper/tanya/Kovshotgun are bad against armoured infantry though, just bad at shredding the armour to make them even easier to kill if they retreat. Nope, I kind of wish that was plausible. Headshot multiplier would have to go down though - 3x damage even with armour is pretty strong as it is, even 2x without armour would mean Tanya's colt starts one-shotting all infantry except the kap/kov/sniper.

They've done that for all of Delta. I think it's less that and more the fact that in vanilla Renegade, old APB, Reborn and so on, shields and health had virtually indistinguishable roles. It's still sort of like that for APB's vehicles in that shield is still like a "secondary health bar" for them, but the effect of not having armour as a vehicle is still more noticeable than in Ren (particularly Mechanics repairing health much slower than they do armour). I was hoping for something like this in Delta's development too, utilising Renegade's encyclopedia logic but allowing it to be accessed during a game, probably through the Esc menu. That never bore fruit though. I would have explained the efficiency of infantry armour somewhere in there. Infantry with armour take less health damage as follows: No reduction: Nukes, Tesla weapons/splash, all damage-over-time and environmental effects. (Since these bypass armour entirely, they also don't have any shredding power because that's not possible unless I give them like 0.01% reduction and shoot their anti-armour damage through the roof... I'm fine with them not shredding at all though.) -25%: Small arms that handle vehicles well (i.e. all types of machineguns), and also flame weapons/splash, direct hits from explosives, AP mines -37.5%: Small arms that have reduced effectiveness against vehicle armour (i.e. Assault rifles, incendiary shotguns, Sergeant slug, Pillbox) -50%: Small arms that cannot hurt vehicles at all (i.e. pistols, snipers, Kovshotgun), and also Grenade/Artillery/V2 splash damage -62.5%: Generic explosive splash damage -75%: C4 splash damage I recently added an autoannounce message about infantry armour, though due to character limits and the attention span for chat people can be expected to have while trying to play the game, it's much more succinct than this, basically just saying pistols/snipers/explosions are the big things to watch out for when naked (since they get muffled so much normally) and that you can recover armour by refill/medic/most dedicated transport vehicles. This "complex" armour system was developed because I thought Gamma's was really low-effort (it TRIED to be what this is, but the effect of losing your armour was negligible and you lost it in like 1 or 2 body-shots from any weapon anyway) and it made an interesting countermeasure to the "infantry heal when out of combat" system - you can keep surviving battles and regenerating all you want but eventually you'll lose your armour and be much easier to kill so it's pretty hard to go rambo forever. Medic/supply truck restoring armour was then added to help make those units more relevant (which might kind of downplay the countermeasure part, but it's not particularly hard to kill a supply truck to stop the flow of armour, and the medic can't repair his own armour and if there's several of them then that's a lot of manpower that isn't driving tanks). I didn't quite have it "right" for much of Delta though, as it previously took too long to lose your armour and medics also repaired it far too slowly because I thought it was a bigger deal than it really is.

Sorry, I'll go back and embolden the big game changers.

Sorry man, it was just too easy to deal with them before when you could hug or goomba-stomp them. Even with the improved AI, the AI still isn't flexible enough to retreat from minimum-range abuse. Now you should be a bit more encouraged to work together with your team, or even the enemy team

I wasn't even aware that this was a real problem until a week ago, then it took a few minutes to connect the dots between it and the previously-fixed Demo Truck issue, and a few more for jonwil to fix it In the past I have noticed extremely rare instances of what seems like a single mine repeatedly blowing itself up for about 10 seconds, and just wrote it off as a harmless oddity not worth investigating because it looked too unpredictable to rely on and abuse (I saw it happen like once every few hundred games) until I figured out the 100% reproduction method of "be near the mine when it explodes", completely on accident due to now having a test map where all the units are within easy reach of each other and respawn instantly upon death (leading to me being unable to get away from a laid mine without it exploding and... you get the picture.) But yes, even if this isn't a perfect example of it, there's been quite a number of puzzling and crippling bugs in the past that have racked our brains for a while. Thanks for your support!

The script that lets the Minelayer's weapon do something different to the standard weapon behaviour of "fire this projectile" was coded over a decade ago - it's pretty natural that back then the original developers had to resort to hacky methods to make that happen. Even now we still use hacky methods for a bunch of other stuff, like the Binoculars being able to do their radar-marking job by virtue of being a scoped C4 explosive. Let that sink in for a minute. The issue was exactly the same as the one that previously caused Demolition Trucks to prematurely detonate if touched by any sort of explosion belonging to the driver (which could again be a mine you laid before, or it could be a grenade or clearing charge - the problem became much more widespread in Delta due to the wider variety of tools/weapons that use C4 logic), and that script is just as old.

[blurb]Many changes for APB since the forum upgrade! Read all about it![/blurb] Red Alert: A Path Beyond Update Apologies for the long wait; the forum changes slowed things down a bit. However, I managed to cram more into this update as a result! GENERAL AI-controlled Allied/Soviet bots and defenses now earn points for their team when they damage or kill things, so they will no longer put close games in jeopardy when they steal your kills. AI-controlled combat units now use moonsense715's refined AI, which will attempt to strafe in combat, and not get too close to its target (except melee ants). Hitbeeps have been disabled entirely since CJ is no longer around to fix the issues with them (most notably, the "60 hitbeeps per second if you cause a damage-over-time effect" one). Hitmarkers are still there though. INFANTRY Issue with sniper camera on map transitions should be fixed for real this time. Infantry armour-shredding capability of weapons has been enhanced further for things that are supposed to be good at it, and nerfed for things that are supposed to be bad at it. (Shredding = how much armour damage is dealt compared to health damage.) Machinegun/Sergeant slug/flame weapon shredding improved from 100% to 150%. Flame weapons have zero shredding against Flamethrowers, Volkovs and Engineers (i.e. the same infantry that can't be set on fire) - saving the first two from some of the wrath of their own weapons. Assault rifle shredding improved from 75% to 100%. Dragonsbreath shotgun shredding weakened from 75% to 50%. Pistol/sniper/non-incendiary shotgun shredding weakened from 50% to 25%. Shell/rocket shredding improved from 100% to 200%. However, due to the added splash damage that has zero shredding, it's not that high in practice (but still more than the health damage in most cases). Artillery splash shredding weakened from 62.5% to 50%. Tanya, Volkov, Medics and Engineers have twice as much armour as they do health. Infantry can now regenerate up to 100% health when out of combat (balancing out the now much higher likelihood that most of them willl have no or very little armour). Shells/rockets do 25% less damage to infantry (this is countered by the improved shredding - you're very likely to 100% break the target's armour leaving them ripe for splash) Using a medic kit on a fully healed infantry unit will now instantly refill their armour. Technician/Sniper Spies now have no armour, so that they are not immediately given away when someone targets them and sees an armour bar. To compensate, they have 75 health. This tradeoff can be either a good thing or a bad thing depending on what weapons you're facing. Sprinting speed boost increased (30% -> 40%). Grenadier/RPG Trooper are no longer missing their head hitbox. Ants' speed increased (Scouts 10 -> 12, Fires 9 -> 10, Warriors 8 -> 10) to compensate for the increase in sprint speed and ants' forward charge being slowed by the occasional strafe. Fixed missing killstring for Fire Ants. Ant bites now deal splash damage against infantry, so they will still be lethal if they're in a place where their bite can "miss" your infantry. Ants now cause periodic damage to infantry that are within their minimum range. Technician bots are much more inaccurate than before. Technician bots no longer attempt to target vehicles; that feature may have contributed to the "panicked" motif but it also made them the ultimate Phase Tank detectors. Sergeant bots now always use the slug shot. Engineer C4 now kills basic base defenses (Pillbox, Flame Tower, AA Gun, SAM Site) in one shot. Shotgun chance to burn increased (20% -> 40%). Burn damage has now been split into two types: slow and quick. Previously all burn damage was 7.5 HP over 6 seconds (1.25 per second). Slow burn damage is 7.5 HP over 10 seconds (0.75 per second) and quick burn is 5 HP over 3 seconds (1.667 per second). Slow burn damage is used by flamethrowers, nukes and barrels; the longer duration means anyone who gets burned and retreats has to wait longer before they can regenerate health, but the lower damage per second makes it slightly worse in direct combat with flamethrowers (but only slightly as the burn damage is not much compared to the splash damage). Quick burn damage is used by dragonsbreath shotguns and artillery; the higher damage per second makes it better if you can land repeated hits in close combat to reapply the burn, but the lower total means it's worse if you can't do that (so for the arty/V2 it's a straight up nerf). Makarov and Beretta now have slightly different behaviour from each other, like how they did back in Beta. Magazine sizes now match their real-world counterparts (8 for Beretta, 12 for Makarov; was previously 10 for both). Reserve ammo of limited-ammo versions is altered (40 for Beretta, 48 for Makarov; was 50 for both). Beretta now does slightly more damage (9 -> 10). Makarov has a higher ROF (4/sec -> 5/sec) but has lower damage (9 -> 7.5). Silenced Beretta now has higher damage (12.5) instead of higher ROF. Makarov and Beretta now have slightly different behaviour from each other, like how they did back in Beta. VEHICLES Fixed an ancient bug where minelayers would automagically create a "free" mine if they were within the range of an explosion that belonged to the driver. (For example, the explosion of one of their own mines, which would result in an infinite chain of mines.) Fixed a bug where MAD Tanks dealt double damage to the SD/RPAD/Silo. Fixed a bug where manually detonating your own Demolition Truck would cause you to lose points for "teamkilling" it. Damaging/killing any other friendly objects will still cost you points though. MRJ jamming range increased (300m -> 350m). Credits received for damaging Supply Trucks now properly matches 20% of their price like everything else (60 credits instead of 40). Clarified MAD Tank's detonation timer of 30 seconds in the help text. Neutral supply trucks can now spawn in various states of disrepair (25%, 50%, 75% or full health). APC anti-mine splash damage up by 50%. AP mines no longer deal pity damage to vehicles. Ranger max speed increased (16 -> 17). Mammoth Tank rocket splash damage decreased (37.5 -> 30), radius increased (12 -> 14), cover penetration increased (20% -> 25%). Phase Tank splash damage increased (22.5 -> 25), radius increased (8 -> 9), cover penetration increased (20% -> 25%). Attack Sub splash damage increased (40 -> 60), radius increased (10 -> 14). Mobile AA Gun should no longer have a dodgy handbrake when spawned. V2 should no longer aim up so much while camera is looking to the side/rear. Gunboat cannon damage increased (65 -> 70). Reduced points value of a bunch of units: Ranger (75 -> 50). Ore Truck (125 -> 100). Phase Tank (150 -> 125). Tesla Tank (150 -> 125). BUILDINGS War Factory now has some large wooden crates in the back, providing ample cover and hiding places for infantry. Construction Yard has more large wooden crates for cover/hiding, mostly around the main door. Construction Yard main door trigger zone is smaller, so it will not be triggered by infantry hiding behind the new crates. Advanced Naval Yard's front gate has been idiot-proofed in various ways. Long story short it should be much harder for the gate to lift a boat, and even if it does, the boat shouldn't end up stuck when it happens. Construction Yard main door now correctly blocks helicopters. Walking onto depressed grate floors in the Advanced Naval Yard and Advanced Sub Pen should no longer cause your weapon to become inaccurate. Added some small crates to Naval Yard, to make it possible to climb up onto the containers and large crates. Tesla Coil charge time reduced from 3.83 to 2 seconds, and now has a 2 second cooldown after firing. So it's slightly slower in a drawn-out fight but its faster initial response should even this out. Naval factories now allow you to sell naval units! However, this causes your infantry to eject at the usual spot (the stern for boats, the bow for submarines) or just straight up drops them into the water if it can't eject properly, so I recommend doing this as close to shore as possible - or on Hostile Waters, just accept the death of your infantry. Base defenses are more fragile in small games. The fewer players there are, the more damage defenses take, up to a maximum of +50% damage at 0-2 players. At 10 or more players, they receive the same amount of damage they did in previous patches. Weapons with limited ammo do not benefit from this damage bonus (except the MAD Tank and crate versions of weapons that are normally infinite). AESTHETICS A familiar sound is now played when selling vehicles. (Mobile) AA Guns now have a visible tracer beam like the Pillbox. Animation of incoming nuclear missile has been refined; it now flies much faster, has trails like the one coming out of the silo, doesn't sink into the ground, and falls at a less ridiculous angle. Dead SD/RPAD should respond a little better to the area lighting. The old radar dishes in the Radar Dome have been replaced with the Advanced Naval Yard one. All instances (as far as I know) of the "small wooden crate" prop have been replaced by the one seen on RA_Siege, as the Siege crate is less performance-hungry. All power line transformers now have the appropriate sound effect. Mammoth Tanks now have exhaust smoke. Ore in the back of Ore Trucks is less blocky and doesn't shade as weirdly. Tracks of Tesla Tank/Mobile Radar Jammer animate faster. Fixed a sorting issue with the glass of the Cargo Truck. Gunboat/Destroyer rotors are now animated. Sinking Destroyers and Missile Subs don't emit smoke/fire anymore. Sinking Attack Sub now repeats its alarm like the Missile Sub does. Sinking naval unit bubbles spread out more. MAPS Opened a few shipping containers on various maps. (I forget which.) RA_AS_Seamist "Mission timer initialised" and "20 minutes remaining" speech no longer overlap. RA_CamosCanyon_Bots This map had to be rebuilt from the vanilla RA_CamosCanyon due to corruption in the previous Bots map file, so some unit placements may not be the same as they were before. Allied AI Ore Truck now collects ore properly. RA_Complex Expanded lighting around the Service Depots. RA_ForestOfIllusion Fireproof suit now increases maximum armour by 50%, like the heart container does for health, rather than a flat 50 points (you can't get naked characters on this map anyway). RA_GuardDuty Added a prop in the Soviet ore field to climb on to allow Allied infantry an easier route to the ore silo. RA_HostileWaters The bomb crate now actually explodes, and will destroy your helicopter if you're riding one. (The heli will still shield your infantry from the instant death like it did before.) RA_KeepOffTheGrass Added extra neutral supply truck in the central gem field. Moved the neutral supply truck that was near the Allied base onto the "lonely mountain" (i.e. the place in the opposite corner of the map from the house, which rarely had any reason to be climbed). RA_PacificThreat Added a small island on the west side of the battlefield, between the two main islands. This allows infantry taking the "long route" to stay hidden more easily. RA_RidgeWar Added extra neutral supply truck by the central mammoth tank wreck. Shack Service Depot rubble no longer clips into the shack's basement. RA_RiverRaid Removed base defenses. Added concrete walls covering the opposite base entrance from the one that already had walls. RA_Siege Added a neutral supply truck in the courtyard; there are a few different places it can spawn. RA_StormyValley Fixed some sticky rocks. Added extra neutral supply truck near the top of the mountain road. RA_ToTheCore Tesla Coil behind the Soviet War Factory is downgraded to a Flame Tower. Removed the concrete wall behind the Soviet Refinery to afford more coverage for its Flame Tower. RA_Wasteland Teamed supply truck no longer respawns. Added neutral supply trucks (also non-respawning) by the wrecked Allied base and wrecked Soviet tank column. Starting units are now based on player count: 2+ players: Supply Truck 4+ players: Ranger 8+ players: Medium Tank/Heavy Tank 12+ players: Light Tank/Tesla Tank After 10 seconds have passed, these spawns are "locked" and adding more players will not activate more of them. RA_Zama Removed the Service Depot closest to each team's Missile Silo.

This is the best unintended burn.

You were able to tag me here

To bring this back on topic: How about the Cyborg Reaper, aka the Veterancy Fountain? Not a bad unit by itself, but when enemies shooting it after it's already dead get credited for even more kills - and thus more veterancy points - it can be quite the liability if your opponent happens to be using some of the few units that actually have a noteworthy elite bonus (like the Attack Cycle or Tick Tank). If what I remember about of rules mods of old is still true, then pretty much every large rules mod out there boosts units' veterancy effects to RA2-esque levels where they're actually worthwhile- if you're doing that then the Cyborg Reaper becomes even more of a liability. Easy solution here: just have it instantly die instead of going through an animation.

Over ten years ago I had one to mod in a third "original faction do not steal" that wasn't even related to the TS lore (though I did attempt to keep it balanced and not go godmode with it). Those are a total pain to do under the original engine and I had to backup my rules.ini for every single line change just in case some completely innocuous change to something would cause the game to become 100% guaranteed to crash either while loading or right at the start of the game. Probably the most puzzling to me to this day was that a unit using Image=1TNK would crash the game (using a custom 1TNK voxel, not the default) but if i renamed the 1TNK.vxl to CRASH.vxl and updated the image tag in rules.ini appropriately, that stopped it from crashing. Somehow.

Same here. A lot of people seem to severely overestimate how long the medic's arms are. The talk of modding reminds me that I have an unfinished "chaos mode" rules.ini sitting in my TS folder, that was supposed to do a bunch of completely screwed-up stuff and not care one bit about balance, but I never got around to finishing it. I probably should do that some time. Right now here's a few of the things it does: adds even more spaces to the start of the Amphibious APC's name (in vanilla it just has 1 superfluous space) buildings produce a large wave of technicians when sold/destroyed - no light infantry aircraft fly just above infantry height the ring graphic for telling units to move somewhere is replaced by the Ion Cannon ring infantry disappear into puffs of smoke instead of leaving corpses. Germany approved!

Even if you're not paying full attention to their speed, there's another giveaway that a unit's been limpeted: the selection box turns yellow. I've never played TS multiplayer though (and even if I did who'd actually be using limpet drones on it?) so I don't know if that effect is actually visible to anyone other than the limpet's owner.

It's just you. When you're good enough, attempting highly suboptimal strategies can be fun. Doubly so if they actually work out.

Limpet Drone. Like... what's even the point? The "turn enemy vehicle into a scout for you" aspect is not that useful as you probably have decent exploration by the time you can build them, including into the enemy base, and the "slow enemy vehicle down" aspect is certainly not worth the price of this unit, unless maybe a Mammoth MK2 blunders into one? Especially since they can just repair their unit and bam, problem solved, drone is dead. In any case it all pivots on the enemy driving onto the exact square that you want them to, which is really only feasible with Harvesters. But they return home all the time and are bound to be quickly repaired, so slowing down a Harvester for one trip is probably not going to set the enemy back by more credits than you spent to make the drone. If you want to spend valuable build time and money to create a minefield of them to deal with actual units, well, slower vehicles that you can see are still going to annihilate your base if you don't have your own to assist in defense. Sure they're pivotal to that one campaign mission... which is heavily scripted and puts you into circumstances that would never happen in a real game. Really its only foolproof use is something completely unrelated to its gimmick: it's Nod's only option for amphibious scouting... at least, until you get aircraft and finagle them around the edges of the shroud because that's a thing. And if they're not facing any GDI then obviously they don't need this. I have no idea how they would be fixed within the limits of the engine though. Dropping their price to 100-200 or so seems like the lazy answer.

To speak for APB: When we left BHP I kind of promised the old staff that we're going to stop going crazy with feature-creep and completely overhauling the gameplay. Partly because we just don't have the team size to do it, partly because the game had been in development for over 13 years at that point, and partly because we're satisfied with what it is now. This seems like a pretty drastic change that would take an eternity to pull off with a questionable impact on the player base (how many of our players really want to spend the first half of a match grinding for buildings, not being able to fight, and yelling at each other if some newbie decides to drop the WF anywhere other than the optimal position of "rear of the base and facing towards the battlefield"?) On top of that, as Siege has shown, forgoing VIS leads to horrible performance issues... buildings spawned midgame would be excluded from VIS and would be a big contributor to frame lag since they have so many meshes, so just put two and two together there. And how are the buildings with basements going to work with this?

Well technically you can but then you have to deal with the possibility that players might be moving through the recently unblocked area at the time. So yeah you shouldn't. Maybe adding/removing blockades (and also base defenses!) would go over better in TSR since they have a much smaller number of maps - with APB, having 6 of the 23 maps not appear in rotation below a certain player count and having another 6 not appear above that same count, that's still 17 maps that can be in rotation at a time and 11 that are always around no matter how few or how many players are around. Whereas TSR has a small enough number of maps that you can't remove many from rotation before things get stale. But frankly I think the TSR team doesn't want to delay the next release any more than they have to; if they take it into consideration it probably won't happen right away. We already have scripts to toggle map content based on player count (last time we covered this, they weren't around) - APB uses them on Antlion and Seamist to control how many ants or starting vehicles spawn, and I may add them to more maps to remove base defenses. So if the TSR team wants to go the "block/reveal certain map lanes" or "add/remove base defenses" routes those are entirely plausible.

Wouldn't the "have map size match player count" system render voting redundant...? APB had a similar system in place a few months ago, but instead of us making differently sized versions of every map (you do realise that would be a huge timesink right?) and having those swap in/out of rotation based on playercount, we just had the very small/very large maps leave the rotation entirely when it was appropriate. However there were crippling bugs with this system - I don't remember what they were exactly - and Silverlight had to disable it. I've asked him to look into remaking the plugin again recently; when we get it working, TSR/AR/etc should easily be able to use it as well.

I might as well return to my original avatar too.