Idea Discussing RA_Siege

[Raap]

HW's problem is not the map scale or visibility. It is the lack of options for people who prefer to avoid naval combat. This was concluded after polling and feedback collection a while ago, and the new design is already "locked down", with one possible exception on the table; War Factory support if Naval Transports carrying vehicles are to become a thing.

As a reminder, HW's revamp will include a "land" route for infantry, a new underground bonus objective, and a unique means of travel not seen before in APB.

But anyhow, on the topic of Siege, what happens with the map is entirely up to Pushwall. I do not believe in a new land route however, it would just shift the perceived problem from the castle route to this new land route, which due to time limitations, is likely to be far more barren and lacking in cover than the castle route, which happens to offer more infantry space than any other APB map. Economic vulnerability adjustments, as mentioned, might help - or do worse. I'd say go and experiment.

Edited July 11, 2017 by Raap

[OWA]

I think that linking the ore tunnels together via a vehicle route would open up some additional gameplay options that are otherwise limited by the problems of having a single vehicle route.

Obviously, this idea opens up the floodgates on much easier economy harassment and the potential to starve a single team of resources (probably Soviets due to the effectiveness of Mine Layers in enclosed spaces); but it would also allow that second option of map traversal that would help to alleviate some of the meat-grinder-esque gameplay caused by the lack of vehicle routes. It would also serve to make driving into those tunnels worthwhile and not some kind of one-way deathtrap where you can be cornered like a rat.

Another option would be to open up some sort of thin, risky route around the front side of the castle on the shoreline. This would be fairly easy to do and wouldn't require development of a whole new section of the map. This route would be a lot more exposed to Artillery, but quicker than the main castle route. It also wouldn't interfere with the economy.

@Raap, I always have a lot of fun when playing this map personally (because using the Mine Layer is so satisfying on the choke points and the bases are laid out in a totally unique way) so the OP is clearly very wrong (and also a massive troll, holy shit that topic title).

[Einstein]

I forgot about this thread until today. I'm glad to see that a lot of positive discussion and new ideas came out of it!

On 7/6/2017 at 6:06 PM, erickgch said:

The insults are just trolling. Sorry if I haven't made that clear. I actually like the work you guys do. To prove that, I'll make a donation in the following days.

Was the donation a troll too?

[OWA]

I just realised that I majorly bumped this without realising until now. Woops! xD

I'm just going to go ahead and change the topic title to be less abrasive, since it's not cool to shit on people's hard work like that. Constructive criticism is always encouraged and preferred.

[Raap]

On 4-9-2017 at 12:43 PM, OWA said:

I think that linking the ore tunnels together via a vehicle route would open up some additional gameplay options that are otherwise limited by the problems of having a single vehicle route.

Obviously, this idea opens up the floodgates on much easier economy harassment and the potential to starve a single team of resources (probably Soviets due to the effectiveness of Mine Layers in enclosed spaces); but it would also allow that second option of map traversal that would help to alleviate some of the meat-grinder-esque gameplay caused by the lack of vehicle routes. It would also serve to make driving into those tunnels worthwhile and not some kind of one-way deathtrap where you can be cornered like a rat.

Another option would be to open up some sort of thin, risky route around the front side of the castle on the shoreline. This would be fairly easy to do and wouldn't require development of a whole new section of the map. This route would be a lot more exposed to Artillery, but quicker than the main castle route. It also wouldn't interfere with the economy.

@Raap, I always have a lot of fun when playing this map personally (because using the Mine Layer is so satisfying on the choke points and the bases are laid out in a totally unique way) so the OP is clearly very wrong (and also a massive troll, holy shit that topic title).

Wooh, bumping old topics... Actually is a topic old if it is still on the first page? Questions...

Anyhow, back when I worked on Siege I sort of used it as a pressure job to keep me from dealing with the real life obligations that one has to go through once a parent dies, so I cut some corners here and there, but one of the corners not actually cut was those ore mine tunnels. I created this map that, essentially, was a vehicle meatgrinder. I wanted to make sure infantry still had places to go and feel useful, so the infantry tunnel came to life for this purpose. There is still a small connection to vehicle play, the passage trough the trench can be a hazard, but ultimately I wanted infantry to be able to easily harass the income of the other team, something vehicles would have a harder time doing.

Opening it up for vehicles would completely destroy that component. Back when I actively worked on contributions I always stated a Plan B scenario exists; If vehicles needed more play space, the castle rear could be opened up for play. Similarly, if infantry still struggled, a new infantry-only beach passage could have been added that connects the bunker area to the rocky beach on the Soviet side of the water. Both of these would have taken minimal development time.

I do not know if Pushwall ever altered the map beyond moving some base defenses around, so I don't know if anything changed here.

[OWA]

3 hours ago, Raap said:

Wooh, bumping old topics... Actually is a topic old if it is still on the first page? Questions...

Anyhow, back when I worked on Siege I sort of used it as a pressure job to keep me from dealing with the real life obligations that one has to go through once a parent dies, so I cut some corners here and there, but one of the corners not actually cut was those ore mine tunnels. I created this map that, essentially, was a vehicle meatgrinder. I wanted to make sure infantry still had places to go and feel useful, so the infantry tunnel came to life for this purpose. There is still a small connection to vehicle play, the passage trough the trench can be a hazard, but ultimately I wanted infantry to be able to easily harass the income of the other team, something vehicles would have a harder time doing.

Opening it up for vehicles would completely destroy that component. Back when I actively worked on contributions I always stated a Plan B scenario exists; If vehicles needed more play space, the castle rear could be opened up for play. Similarly, if infantry still struggled, a new infantry-only beach passage could have been added that connects the bunker area to the rocky beach on the Soviet side of the water. Both of these would have taken minimal development time.

I do not know if Pushwall ever altered the map beyond moving some base defenses around, so I don't know if anything changed here.

That's fair enough man. Good to know that there's some solid reasoning behind it. I can understand that infantry don't always get the best deal when it comes to map routes.

I think that the changes you describe for Plan B would help the map to become less of a meat grinder for sure. 

Cheers for replying.

[Raptor29aa]

I find it interesting that tunneling is the answer to a Siege... in medieval times they would tunnel under walls to surprise an enemy and break a Siege. If a door were added it would need to be a red access only door. And I don’t think the allies need one (phase tanks and helicopters and apcs are adequate transports.) Although,

Pro: would offer cool secret Volkov route to retake the castle.

Con: would create spy tunnel (currently there are two ways in 1: suicide helicopter Or 2: walk in the front door)

[Raap]

3 hours ago, Raptor29aa said:

 

Pro: would offer cool secret Volkov route to retake the castle.

 

Unfortunately the word "secret" has been banned from my APB-anything.

(Side note, I honestly doubt any of you ever found the last "easter egg" on the map, but it is nothing like the scale of the axed secret area.)

[Einstein]

Just thinking out loud here.... I wonder how Siege would play if the playable area were shrunk down or reshaped around the outer bits, and the bases as well, to the point where it was just a basic low-tech base. Something to put more of a focus on infantry. You could even have a HT and a LT version of the map, like at least one map in the past was done.

I think it would be neat to have nothing but a barracks+silos OR barracks+ref+single silo, and maybe a few defenses for each side. Helipads maaaaybe? A player-driven ore truck like on CamosCrossing? A one-time spawn vehicle or two for each side plus a supply truck or two that spawn around the map like other maps? The absence of vehicles could be used to shift focus more to whatever secondary objectives or easter eggs that might lie in side the castle. The objectives could be time sensitive, or something akin to Seamist.

Again, just thinking out loud. I know it was meant to be a meat grinder for vehicles, but I think it could have some other cool possibilities too.

[Raptor29aa]

3 hours ago, Einstein said:

Just thinking out loud here.... I wonder how Siege would play if the playable area were shrunk down or reshaped around the outer bits, and the bases as well, to the point where it was just a basic low-tech base. Something to put more of a focus on infantry. You could even have a HT and a LT version of the map, like at least one map in the past was done.

I think it would be neat to have nothing but a barracks+silos OR barracks+Refinery+single silo, and maybe a few defenses for each side. Helipads maaaaybe? A player-driven ore truck like on CamosCrossing? A one-time spawn vehicle or two for each side plus a supply truck or two that spawn around the map like other maps? The absence of vehicles could be used to shift focus more to whatever secondary objectives or easter eggs that might lie in side the castle. The objectives could be time sensitive, or something akin to Seamist.

Again, just thinking out loud. I know it was meant to be a meat grinder for vehicles, but I think it could have some other cool possibilities too.

If it were low tech and no helicopters, maybe soviets could still get Yaks?

(Although the moment I mention yak I know  someone is going to remind me that the castle walls are too high for airplane flight... but I can still dream)

[Raap]

Overhauls of that magnitude take about as much time as creating entirely new environments, because it is actually the same workload; In both cases you're creating something from nothing, but with an overhaul you got the added challenge of making it fit within an existing canvas. Part of the reason Siege took a decade to be released was these never-ending overhauls, so ultimately I had to settle for a design and stick to it.

I can also point at the HW revamp I worked on (and will eventually finish). What you do with revamps is, you select the stuff that needs changing and you press 'delete', and go from there. But there is a bigger problem native to APB; The game logic set-up process has become quite convoluted and nearly all of it is undocumented, this is one of the reasons why Pushwall never got around to making a community development kit, explaining some of the things you need to set up can be confusing even to a seasoned W3D engine developer - and there are few of those left these days. Just another example of this is that before I can release a HW revamp, I have to completely redo the concept of 'water' due to all the various new collision logic that was added in a post-Delta launch patch.

But going back to Siege or revamps in general, some of these things are hard to pull off in some places due to the way I texture meshes. Once I've textured something, the 3DS object modifiers are deleted in a particular way so that the mesh can be merged to reduce draw calls in-engine and optimize performance substantially this way. The problem is, this development method assumes that once this process is triggered, the mesh is "finished" and not edited again beyond that point. If I did edit these objects later, then the textures would be stretched and warped, and you wouldn't want that. A vast majority of objects act this way in my work, save for tiled terrain.

TLDR: Lots of reasons for why revamps should be avoided if possible and that more thought should be put into initial designs to avoid them.

Edited November 11, 2017 by Raap

[Raptor29aa]

Before my old computer kicked the bucket, I tried to go back from level edit to edit the map I was working on. (To get it into level edit I had to split the ground into six pieces.) So going back to edit was a pain. I’m not skilled with texturing so I can image the difficulty of going back. Something about playing ping pong between two programs sounds tedious. 

Also developer scripts stuff sounds tedious also. If I try my hand at making a map again I will back up my work and I will keep it simple. Maybe something more infantry only. Like a hill top/Mesa tip match. (Or a box canyon normal match).

[Raap]

18 hours ago, Raptor29aa said:

Before my old computer kicked the bucket, I tried to go back from level edit to edit the map I was working on. (To get it into level edit I had to split the ground into six pieces.) So going back to edit was a pain. I’m not skilled with texturing so I can image the difficulty of going back. Something about playing ping pong between two programs sounds tedious. 

Also developer scripts stuff sounds tedious also. If I try my hand at making a map again I will back up my work and I will keep it simple. Maybe something more infantry only. Like a hill top/Mesa tip match. (Or a box canyon normal match).

Oh yeah, the days of simple single-file maps are absolutely a thing from the past. Both Hostile Waters and Siege consist of 30+ W3D files and 40+ additional files. The bigger the virtual real-estate, the bigger the file-count and size. It's a big shortcoming of the aging development framework of W3D; we don't have a cohesive file managing system and there is a lot of going back and forth between files and stand-alone applications, none of which feature instant-updates of new files and constantly require re-booting to load updated assets. Icing on the cake: Imagine if more than one person worked on the same project with the above kept in mind, I hope you like manual version control!

As for game logic implementation, it is tedious for sure, especially the naval stuff. If you made a generic ground level with no air or naval units then the process is fairly manageable in a timely fashion, since the process has been done so often and those systems have been perfected over a decade, you can essentially produce such a level with zero testing, push it to a live environment, and be reasonably safe in assuming nothing goes terribly wrong. Stuff like naval, air, and especially visibility culling when one or both of these things are present, is a true bitch, and absolutely one of the primary factors in what delayed new level development, at least on my part.

To re-iterate, it's not hard to do these things, just tedious and time consuming. 

 

Edit: And a personal note, working on naval content, such as Hostile Waters, is very unrewarding, because while the gameplay can be fun, from all other points of view W3D's concept of water is, to put it lightly, falling short. Despite all the work that goes into setting it up, in-game it still looks like a plane mesh with a texture you can walk through. I can make a single promise quite easily: Hostile Waters revamp is the last naval project I'd ever contribute to on W3D if this logic remains unchanged.

Edited November 16, 2017 by Raap

[Pushwall]

So Raap brought up the possibility of Yaks siege, I've heard a few requests for it ingame too, and it's something I really wanted to do though I'd rather have waited for someone to do a MiG before adding airfields to a high-tech map. And some recent changes to the airfield logic mean we can have both it and a Soviet helipad on the same map without their logic interfering in one another. The map clearly needs shaking up since whenever it comes up almost everyone just want it skipped even though on the forums almost everyone says not to remove it from rotation...

Where should the airfield go? There really isn't much room around the Soviet base.

Putting the airfield on the flat ground to the right would take practically no terrain adjustment, but it'd also make the airfield INSANELY exposed to Allied chinooks and the only reasonable way for Soviets to reach it in time if it's under attack would involve them blowing open their own walls and I'm not a fan of the Gamma thought process behind walls - back when walls existed to slow down their own team instead of the enemy team, because as if waiting 5 minutes for tanks wasn't bad enough, let's make you wait another minute to blow open the walls that are making it hard for you to defend.

Or should we pull a Guard Duty and make it replace the Radar Dome so that both teams are even on building count? This is what I'm leaning most towards since base destruction is rare enough as it is, but only if we ever get a MiG model so that losing the WF and not being able to scrape together expensive HTs from the dome wouldn't be as big a loss.

Having it up on this hill would probably look nice aesthetically (if the terrain was reshaped to fit...) and give Yaks very little to crash into on takeoff/landing, and would require Allied Chinooks to take a more circuitous route, at the cost of again being difficult for Soviets to reach.

Having it in place of the old refill/repair cluster would be good for the Soviets in pretty much every way - only problem then is, where does the repair/refill cluster get moved to?

There's also this, and then moving the heli landing pads somewhere else, but that's a lot of walls being either cut out or moved out even further, both making that side of the base even more exposed to chinooks.

Or maybe there's some other good spot?

 

As mentioned in the recent changelog thread I will also be opening up the rear side of the island to infantry/vehicle access, but not opening the rear of the castle's battlements to infantry. This reduced vulnerability to castle-top infantry should make the route worth the extra travel time.

[Raap]

35 minutes ago, Pushwall said:

 

Having it up on this hill would probably look nice aesthetically (if the terrain was reshaped to fit...) and give Yaks very little to crash into on takeoff/landing, and would require Allied Chinooks to take a more circuitous route, at the cost of again being difficult for Soviets to reach.

 

 

The hill gets my vote since there are no objects there and all you need to do is reshape the terrain. You might want to add an extra SAM Site near it however.

It will give the Allies a neat primary target to focus their attacks on, one not covered by the Tesla Coil. It's like having an objective on its own.

That being said, I am also still in favor of adding the Mobile AA vehicle to the Allied vehicle roster for high-tech airplane enabled maps... Of which Siege would be the first. It'd be the fair counter to MiGs.

[Killing_You]

Looking at it, I'd be fine with it replacing the refill cluster and moving the repair/refill cluster closer to the landing zones. I'm thinking adjusting the wall corner by the CY and PP would be best as it wouldn't make the Soviet base too exposed, and might actually give the SAM sites some much needed breathing room. It'd also give the Soviets some incentive to keep an eye on that particular entrance; most of the time that I see Soviets lose, it's because an Allied spy sneaks into that entrance and shuts off the PP long enough for a horde of longbows to have their way with the base.

[Pushwall]

This is probably the easiest way to handle the gap in the rear route on the Allied side, though it may not be aesthetically appropriate right next to the castle. (Those terrain gaps will just be covered in rocks if I go with this.) It's a lot easier to deal with on Sov side where the thing blocking vehicles from progressing is just a pile of rocks that can be spread out/deleted.

[SarahNautili]

asthetically I kinda like the idea of the airfield being behind the base and the refil cluster being kinda in a line next to its tower. Of course that risks hinds and yaks sharing the same airspace a bit too much. also, well, Siege already has a problem with its bases feeling a bit too big so I rather prefer the idea of it replacing the radar dome... and maybe that hill getting flattened out a bit to make an easier approach? I'd also argue as a temporary measure, since no MiG yet, put the dome's tank terminals in the airfield / tie them to the airfield. I mean it sorta makes sense that the airfield would have the sorta communications equipment to call for reinforcements anyway since it'd have to do air traffic control duties 

Edited February 9, 2018 by SarahNautili

[Pushwall]

Oh and in case anyone brings it up, moving any of the main buildings (as opposed to deleting like the dome) to accommodate airfield placement wouldn't really be an option because of how VIS sectors work - unless I ended up redoing the VIS entirely but then that would slow down the update a lot (though I should probably do this at some point given all the building props that got added post-production). Plus moving the WF/Ref would mean tweaking its tunnel system which I'd rather not touch. Moving auxiliary structures like the refill cluster, silos, defenses is a-OK though.

[Pushwall]

After a bit of extra feedback on discord, this is most likely what I'll be going with for the sov base layout.

Pay no mind to the pavement leaking out of the wall and the terrain holes, obviously I'm not fixing that up until positions are finalized.

Another possibility on my mind is flipping the positions of the landing pads and refill cluster (and therefore also where the wall is open).

[Pushwall]

I don't think diving into the castle courtyard will be as much of a concern as I previously thought. Ridge War with all its high plateaus though... And yeah, damage values are subject to change as Yak has never been tested against cannons/LBs before.

[Jeod]

Yak adds a whole new form of strategy to Siege, wow. Can't wait to play it!

[Raptor29aa]

After watching the video, I am excited! It turns out the trees aren't as big of an issue as I previously thought. I still don't like trees and yaks, but I think the map has an open enough sky. Lastly I've never tried longbow vs Yak.

[des1206]

I feel on large maps with little vehicle cover and well-defended bases (thinking back to A Path Beyond), speed and quick damage output is key, since defenders can easily re-buy vehicles to wear down even a large attack force. This gives the Soviets a disadvantage. Is there a way to manually lengthen vehicle build times for all sides on larger maps?

[Pushwall]

A disadvantage that doesn't really seem to be making itself known on Siege. The maps where Allies are actually doing better than Soviets on 10+ players (my usual metric for measuring this stuff since the game isn't designed with 1v1 in mind and Allies typically win that because of speed) are Guard Duty, Complex, Metro, Coastal Influence and North by Northwest.

None of those fit the bill of being ill-defended, large and open (except naval battles). NBNW is large, though it's too new for the little data available to be a reliable indicator of if it's Allied biased. Guard Duty is open, but on that map it's the Soviets who have the edge in speed thanks to Yaks, though they still need a lot of refining, and it's likely that a lot of recent Soviet losses are due to people who adamantly refuse to use LAN mode to get a grip on the Yak before employing it in online play resulting in way too many crashes, or adamantly refuse to just stop buying Yaks if they find they can't fly them properly. And Metro is "undefended" in the traditional sense but really it's more defended against vehicles than against infantry since the hedgehogs complicate early vehicle rushes. Vehicles certainly aren't the problem there.

Camos Canyon, Canyon River, Hostile Waters, To the Core and Under are pretty even with either equal wins or a 1 win difference between the teams (though HW may change due to the big revision). Everything else is Soviet biased to either a minor or noticeable degree.