News W3D Weekly #10 - 25/08/2021

[OWA]

Welcome to the 10th edition of W3D Weekly!

Dive in for your weekly dose of news below!

DDoS Attacks

First off I just want to address the elephant in the room here. Over the course of the past week, we've been getting hit with what we understand to be a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks. What this basically means is that an individual (or multiple individuals) are flooding our servers with a large amount of incoming junk traffic in order to bring them down.

We're currently investigating what we can do in order to mitigate these attacks with the resources that we have at our disposal, however we are unaware of what the attacker's motivation is at this time. Over the course of the next few weeks, we will be taking some defensive measures, but as this is still fresh and we're still gathering data, we will need some time.

I'd also like to personally extend an arm out to the attacker to come and talk to me personally about what their motivation is and whether there is any way we can solve this problem amicably. I am not aware of anything that we have personally done as a team that would warrant these attacks, but I'm willing to hear the attacker out if they have legitimate complaints. If this situation can be solved diplomatically, we're willing to consider it for the good of the games. At the end of the day, all of this effort to shut down a small community that is trying to enjoy a niche game seems a bit much, so it would be good to understand the why of the situation right now.

To the players, you have our word that we'll work to overcome these attacks if they persist, but in the meantime I'm sorry to say that we need more time to put some more substantial defence in place. We'll keep you all informed on Discord in the meantime.

- @ OWA

Tiberian Sun: RebornThankyou to everyone who joined us last Thursday for our Tiberian Sun: Reborn stream! It didn't go quite the way we anticipated, but we used the opportunity to take a closer look at TSR 2.0 form where we left it last year.

If you would like to watch the stream again, it's has been linked below:

 

Red Alert: A Path Beyond

For the next release, we've made some adjustments to how the score sharing works when buildings are destroyed. In the current build, if a main base building is destroyed, every individual on the opposing team is given 250 points, regardless of their efforts during the match. Support structures and major defenses are 100 points per player and smaller defenses are 25 points per player.

This has led to some complaints of unfairness when it comes to matches and game nights where individual scores matter. A player on a winning side could be AFK most of the round and earn well over 1000 points for simply being on the same team that destroyed the other team's buildings, whereas someone on the losing side who has superb amount of work to defend wouldn't earn any such advantage and may even be placed below the other team's bottom player on the roster.

Our adjustment is this: the team's shared score pool will still earn the same amount of points as before (250/100/25 multiplied by the team's player count), but no longer are any extra points given to those individual players when buildings are destroyed. You must do the work if you want points.

As a result, players will actually need to work to have a higher score, and not earn points sitting around. This also means game night awards will be more fair.

Moonsense715 deserves credit for doing the coding gruntwork, and ChopBam has applied that code to the various parts of the game that need it to get this function working.

Screenshots are included below of how the scoring works in the public (left) and internal (right) builds when one player destroys the War Factory by themself. You can see the Allies gain 1875 points in both, but the only points given to the players in the internal build are actually earned by the one player's work, and everyone else on the teams are still on equal footing with each other.

Additionally to this, there are some points adjustments regarding the nuke flare and C4 charges:

1. Disarming A-bomb flares will soon grant a joint 250 points to all the players who worked on it, and the other 250 points will awarded to the team's score after it's disarmed. In the current public build, 500 points went to the player who did the last bit of disarming.
2. Disarming C4 charges will soon grant live points to all the players who work on it, rather than awarding all the points to the person who fired the final disarming shot.

Bonus:

Spoiler

If you haven't been playing APB lately, we've been firing up a few games during the week. See what sort of shenanigans you've missed:

Renegade X: Firestorm

Surprise! We don't usually talk much about what other communities are doing, but the Renegade X team recently held another one of their Q&As on Renegade X Firestorm! If you've been living under a rock, this project is a very exciting and ambitious attempt at bringing a redesigned take on Tiberian Sun to the Unreal engine.

Here's a link to the video below:

 

Tiberian Sun: Rising

Double surprise! We don't usually talk about what other non-C&C-FPS mods out there are doing, but this one deserves a special mention.

Assassin's Tiberian Sun: Rising mod has been in development for a very long time now, but recently showcased some really exciting developments as part of the Tiberian Sun 22nd anniversary celebrations!

A lot of you probably don't know this, but back around during 2005-2006 before the Apocalypse Rising team joined up with the A Path Beyond team, Assassin and the crew at C&C Source hosted Apocalypse Rising for us, which was a really fun time during development. You can read back through the first 20 AR dev blogs that catalogue this point in our development.

One of the more amazing features in TS Rising however, is the Tiberium Ecosystem that evolves the state of the map as you play. Check it out below!

 

We wish Assassin and the team all the best with this awesome project!

That's it for this week!Come back next time for some more top W3D content!

Spoiler

Trebuchet!

 

 

[blurb]Welcome to the 10th edition of W3D Weekly! Dive in for your weekly dose of news below![/blurb]

[NodGuy]

I absolutely love the APB changes. I never liked what I call participation score. Why should I get X points because PXD2000 blew up the Refinery?

Really excited for Reborn as well.

[1000MammothTanks]

I like the points change but why not award the full 1875 points to the players? And ironically Chopbam got less points for destroying the War Factory after the change.

Edited August 25, 2021 by 1000MammothTanks

[Gummiel]

8 minutes ago, 1000MammothTanks said:

I like the points change but why not award the full 1875 points to the players? And ironically Chopbam got less points for destroying the War Factory after the change.

Ehmm that is what is happening on the current build by giving the 250 bonus to all players (which is also the reason chopbam got more total points after the change). IN both cases he get 375 points for actually destroying the building, but in the current version he and everyone else on  get another 250 on top. After the change he only get the points for the work he actually does.

 

Another effect the current system have that this will fix as well is that it usually makes spied super easy to spot, as most times after a few buildings are destroyed for the most part the scoreboard will have the leading team in the top half, and the team being behind in the bottom half. With this change hopefully it should be more mixed, and you thus can't use score to spot the spy as much (there are still other things in the scoreboard that can be used, like the rate of credits tickles if its not the same for the 2 teams, or when a harvester dump comes in, the spy is not getting money at that point)

[ChopBam]

4 minutes ago, 1000MammothTanks said:

I like the points change but why not award the full 1875 points to the players? And ironically Chopbam got less points for destroying the War Factory after the change.

Points distribution isn't really a simple thing.

1. If we awarded the full 1875 through damage hits alone, we'd have to counterbalance that massive 5x points boost with a points boost for repairing and doing other things in the game. If we only boosted building damage points, players could seriously pointwhore by simply shooting at enemy buildings all game. So if we boosted repairing points also by 5x, that would skew the rewards for killing infantry, destroying vehicles, disarming things, and small objectives like harvesting. A player who sat in the base repairing would have an undue amount of points compared to someone fighting in the field who doesn't happen to hit enemy base buildings.
2. We're not aiming to eliminate the team score boost, because up to this point the current points balance system between how teams should win has been working out pretty well. A team score should be rewarded substantially for destroying a main base building.

[Jeod]

Q: How's this DDOS saga compare to the one in 2018 (I think it was also IA to start with)? Worse? Same thing back then won't work now? Etc.

[Raap]

I honestly do not remember why I added the Test Level to TSR2. I believe we were initially planning on using the new environment art for TSR2, but things got shuffled a bit at some point and they ended up being moved to AR. AR's version of that level got a bit more developed before I left the team.

Bit surprised some of the other environment tests aren't in there anymore, like the new Tiberium flora tests, etc. But then again with the changing of the guard so too comes expected changes of direction.

You could have probably showcased the GUI/HUD improvements, the encyclopedia has a fair amount of content in TSR2, which took quite a while to set up! 

[NodGuy]

20 minutes ago, Raap said:

the other environment tests aren't in there anymore, like the new Tiberium flora tests, etc

What!? I wanna see that! I love Tiberium flora

[Raap]

8 hours ago, NodGuy said:

What!? I wanna see that! I love Tiberium flora

You'd have to poke the W3D Hub team for that. I'm not sure they ever passed final approval though. There were actually a LOT of environmental assets that have yet to be publicly showcased, due to a large portion of them having been left in various stages of development (mostly stuff like fixing bad normals, collision meshes, and LOD's).

[NodGuy]

6 hours ago, Raap said:

You'd have to poke the W3D Hub team for that. I'm not sure they ever passed final approval though. There were actually a LOT of environmental assets that have yet to be publicly showcased, due to a large portion of them having been left in various stages of development (mostly stuff like fixing bad normals, collision meshes, and LOD's).

I want to see more of those crazy Tiberium lifeforms, especially the ones from Firestorm, in Reborn. That stuff is awesome! Here are some pictures, most being concept art but still close to what we got in game. It really shows that Tiberium is terraforming Earth into an alien world.

The first image is the Genesis Pit. The Genesis Pit is a large valley, where Tiberium contamination has reached critical levels causing mutation and rapid evolution of various Tiberian wildlife. CABAL along with Kane use it to observe the way Tiberium transforms carbon life.
 

Spoiler