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APB 3.0.8.0 Changelog


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5 hours ago, Pushwall said:

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.)

I enjoy how so bugs so absurd are even possible, heh. I appreciate the work that must go into hunting down things to fix that don't really make sense in the first place.

Edited by OrangeP47
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54 minutes ago, OrangeP47 said:

I enjoy how so bugs so absurd are even possible, heh.

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.

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You know... I actually seem to remember that conversation happening back in the day now. It's been a long time so I don't remember everything, obviously, but I do remember a time period when people were extraordinarily mad about mine layers and how they shouldn't even work in the first place.... nostalgia...

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22 minutes ago, OrangeP47 said:

I appreciate the work that must go into hunting down things to fix that don't really make sense in the first place.

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 :v 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!

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6 hours ago, Pushwall said:

:allied:  Red Alert: A Path Beyond Update      :soviet:

  • 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.
Spoiler

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Regardless Antlion will be loads of fun. :p

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11 minutes ago, NoSpoons said:
  Reveal hidden contents

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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 :p

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Pretty substantial patch, Pushy.

Let me quote something to highlight it as this is quite a game-changer that could easily be overlooked in this wall of text you call patch notes:

Quote

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.

I'll run through some of the changes tomorrow, and I'll post if I see anything unintended. :)

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19 hours ago, Pushwall said:

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 :p

Haha well Mario APB had to get patched out eventually, 10/10 best Nintendo game ever

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With the sprint speed increase, I feel like the "fast" units like Tanya/Nader/Volkov don't run that fast anymore compared to the other lesser tiered infantries?

 

I also noticed how Tesla weapons directly skip Infantry armor now and hits their health only. PushWall can you explain to us what types of damages armor reduces against?

Edited by des1206
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3 hours ago, des1206 said:

 

I also noticed how Tesla weapons directly skip Infantry armor now and hits their health only. PushWall can you explain to us what types of damages armor reduces against?

I think that the type of armor and the resistance values of them versus each weapon should ideally be listed in-game somehow. APB unit and weapon balance is quite 'complex', well beyond the days of Renegade where only a select few damage types and armor types existed.

Frankly, if the in-game GUI could be more easily modified, I'd suggest having a complete mini-wiki available, with a page of information dedicated to each unit, building, map, etc. with detailed information (not just 'strong or weak versus'). But then again, countless other GUI functionality has been wished for in the past, from 2D/3D level maps with live building status information, to map-specific GUI tie-in capabilities. I'm assuming anything GUI related is just hard to do.

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5 hours ago, des1206 said:

I also noticed how Tesla weapons directly skip Infantry armor now and hits their health only.

They've done that for all of Delta.

1 hour ago, Raap said:

I think that the type of armor and the resistance values of them versus each weapon should ideally be listed in-game somehow. APB unit and weapon balance is quite 'complex', well beyond the days of Renegade where only a select few damage types and armor types existed.

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).

1 hour ago, Raap said:

Frankly, if the in-game GUI could be more easily modified, I'd suggest having a complete mini-wiki available, with a page of information dedicated to each unit, building, map, etc. with detailed information (not just 'strong or weak versus'). But then again, countless other GUI functionality has been wished for in the past, from 2D/3D level maps with live building status information, to map-specific GUI tie-in capabilities. I'm assuming anything GUI related is just hard to do.

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.

5 hours ago, des1206 said:

PushWall can you explain to us what types of damages armor reduces against?

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.

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I noticed it's much harder to kill infantry w/armor now with Mammoth tusk missile splash. Also, RJ's range boost is giving it a couple of additional hiding places on many maps, this is going to be fun. Also Mammoth's smoke emission and new nuclear missile strike speed are both very cool.

PS: Did you know, the world's fast sprint is about 25 miles/hour, this comes out to be about 12m/s. So our infantry sprint speed (tops off at ~9m/s) is fairly accurate?

@Pushwall so in general, the more anti-infantry guns (except sniper and Tanya's desert eagle, and tesla/nuke aside), the more effective it is at getting through/shredding armor. Armor though is very effective at protecting infantry from indirect explosion damage.

I wonder if headshots ignore armor?

Edited by des1206
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5 hours ago, des1206 said:

PS: Did you know, the world's fast sprint is about 25 miles/hour, this comes out to be about 12m/s. So our infantry sprint speed (tops off at ~9m/s) is fairly accurate?

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.

5 hours ago, des1206 said:

@Pushwall so in general, the more anti-infantry guns (except sniper and Tanya's desert eagle, and tesla/nuke aside), the more effective it is at getting through/shredding armor. Armor though is very effective at protecting infantry from indirect explosion damage.

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. :p

5 hours ago, des1206 said:

I wonder if headshots ignore armor?

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.

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