Jerad2142 Posted 11 hours ago Report Share Posted 11 hours ago [blurb]This release focuses on improving stability, also there has been progress made to improve the crime system, slot machines, as well as adding new highscores, perks, pets, and many other features.[/blurb]Note: Currently I'm trying to trace down one final crash (I think I've got it but I'm running the 4hour internal server tests right now to see if its actually fixed, if all goes well I'll have a release by tomorrow. This release features new jobs, crime system updates, slot machine improvements, custom drop helicopters, a plethora of crash fixes, tons of improvements, and a massive code overhaul that fundamentally changes players expectations and initial experiences. In 2023, the main code file was 61,760 lines of code. It is now streamlined to 32,599 lines and has been broken out into only 100 different files. New features Reworked the Private Contractor job into a Bounty Hunter job. You now search town for marks, and these marks either need to be killed or arrested. In addition, the job decides if you need to destroy or evict the marks from their vehicle. Payouts work by giving a small amount for each task completed, and a final payout once the entire contract is completed. The vehicle task makes up 25% of that total payout, and all the individual marks make up the rest of the payout. You can press Y while holding your contract to see what the payouts are. Added 9 high scores related to the new Bounty Hunter job. Vehicles that have had their passengers evicted now serve as a bonus to people driving vehicle carriers. Returning those vehicles to the Pay N’ Sprays will give some payout to the Bounty Hunter as well as the person returning the vehicle. Reworked the slot machines: Made the payouts more fair and common. Added new effects and sounds to make it a more enjoyable experience. Slot machines now have another perk to be unlocked. Added 8 highscores related to the Gmax shipping job. When committing crimes, wanted levels will now appear on the player HUD. As a reminder, a lot of crime needs to happen in front of a police officer. Law enforcement now has new vehicles. The wanted system adapts to the players’ destruction and reacts accordingly. Players can now customize their drop helicopters with 30 options (some of which have to be unlocked) by calling 555-4371. Added a hotkey to select handcuffs (default is U). Added the Shock Collar perk which gives your melee based pets an electric attack. Improvements The train blockers now only exist when the train is closer. This allows players to go over the tracks, and though it’s not a perfect system it’s better than what we had before, and it’s the best I can do with this version of scripts. Cleaned up how the Carryall’s determine what vehicle(s) are being held (thanks seifmagdi). Bots that are melee-only will now properly charge their enemies instead of standing there. Mutant Assault and Deer Hunter maps now show their time remaining at the bottom of the screen. Time remaining countdown is now displayed when a partial vote is completed. MA Island now shows a counter for how many rioters are remaining. General code cleanup, not going to list all the specifics. Revised how the racetrack code works to get some more performance improvements for the server (it now only scans the players instead of all the cars and infantry on the map). Simplified the weapon drop code to improve stability. Hovercraft that end up underwater can now resurface faster. The sea buoy drop helicopter purchase is now more… interesting, to say the least. Fishing boat script zones now only scan for players to further improve the performance of the FDS. The pathfind for AI has been massively extended. Osprey, X7-32, and Leopard Drop Ship have custom crash explosions. Osprey now has a custom crash model where the lights turn off. As usual, I updated the credits file to reference new assets. When infantry cap is reached, newly created infantry will exist for at least 3 seconds before being removed if they’re determined to be the furthest from player sight. Several updates have been made to pets: Pets now follow the player at a further distance (an additional 2.5 meters). Added a pet duck. Added a pet pig. Civilian Car Road System: Cars will now drive in the parking garages of the following: Hospital, Apartment, 8 Green Bottles, skyscraper, Police Station, and Better Stay Motel. Cars will now drive in the downtown parking ramp. Cars will now drive around Mr Limmers. Fixed a problematic railroad crossing by the park that often would result in cars backing up and ending up in the water. Fixed a corner where cars were turning too tight near Fancy Pants. Road system pathfind has been rebuilt and taxis can now drive players from all locations... with minimal stupidity. Fixed a corner where cars were turning too wide near the Christmas shop Crime/Police Improvements: AI cops now know how to actually push the gas pedal down and accelerate. Cleaned up a ton of cop-related code so I don’t have to add the new cop vehicles into 100 spots. All cop cars now have horns (These can be used both by players and AI, middle mouse and right mouse control lights and sirens now). All police and military vehicles are now labeled correctly. Cops should now more consistently use their handcuffs when the player gets tased. The updated road locations above mean that cops can better locate players in those locations, be warned (blame it on security cameras or something). Rebalanced when the different tiers of police weapons, vehicles, aircraft start to show up. Civilian cars and taxis will now try to steer the opposite direction 50% of the time when backing up. This greatly reduces the chances of those cars getting stuck. Phones now support leading zeroes (0) on all numbers (A limitation made by how the system was originally built). PINs can also have leading zeroes as well. Trains, mechs, and dropships don’t use explosions to emulate collisions anymore. This is now all done in the code which saves a ton of network spam and extra code from being run. Cops and drug dealers will now move toward the doors of buildings instead of chilling out in the middle of road intersections blocking traffic. The Ghost Strike Craft now slides more, like a real hovercraft. Fixed an issue with the preset used to generate Pathfind (walkthrough). It was able to climb slops at super steep angles, which made AI think they could also climb those super steep slopes. Bug Fixes Quick fix for the Druggy script that was breaking for players when they road as a passenger. Fixed the E2 Hawkeye showing its passenger outside of the aircraft. Fixed “They see me trawlin’”. It was working in reverse, so now best case it will payout about $300,000 in 9 minutes. Sharks no longer break the trawlin’ perk. Small fix so the shipping job entry questionnaire can’t be spammed. Fixed a bug that spawned AI through the ground a lot when exiting vehicles. If an event is setup to give the player a pet, it no longer gives the max pet count. In addition, it doesn’t charge the player. Cleaned up the announcement text that used to have “Host:“ at the start of the message. Cleaned up how some of the message in the bottle code and bot code works to make it more stable in race conditions. Went through a ton of code that I made when I was 15 and added default constructors to reduce the chance of race conditions hitting uninitialized variables (changed 23 files and who knows how many objects). Basically, more code fixes. Fixed a bug that was causing cops to attack other cops if there was friendly fire. Cops now disengage the second the player is dead. Fixed a bug with 13 systems that were using game objects instead of id’s and thus could lose their references and end up crashing everything. More code stuff that works better for everyone. Fixed a couple of crashes that happened on loading the next map. Fixed a crash with the player pet system (it was using Get_GameObj_By_Player_Name, which is unstable in the version of code the ECW server uses). Fixed base defenses not attacking enemies when attacked. Fixed math behind the Gambler perk. Fixed some crashes (Calling Get_Sex in this version of the code has a stroke if the model is null). No sex for you, sorry. Fixed a bug that could cause destroyed or kicked vehicles not to spawn any civilians. AI exiting vehicles have to exit closer now, which will hopefully reduce the chances of them falling through the ground. Empty hands are no longer considered a beacon which was leaving projectiles scattered around. Improved housing garage and other zones to only scan for the player instead of all objects on the map which once again should help the FDS. Changed several zones from ‘script zone all’ to ‘CnC’ so that those zones will only scan for players to help with the performance and FDS more. The ocean entry of the Gas Station now is properly sloped instead of making people run over a curb. Reduced flickering in the desert. Police Charger headlights no longer have a red flash which would confuse the front of the vehicle irl. Fixed the police helicopter spotlight (pulled the version form Bear Island Redux) so it doesn’t artifact all over the screen. Curbs on the bridge are lower so AI can easily get up off the roadway (makes AI less exploitable). Fixed some aggregates that were being duplicated due to my sloppy work over the years. Sewer swimming zones now only check for players, the chances of AI ever getting down there is low so no reason to make the server scan all objects. Food Items and other beacon class items should no longer randomly cause the sky to reset or slowly fade red. Fixed several potential infinite loops, although rare for the server to just lock up. I did have it happen several times while testing crime so I’d like to imagine I’ve fixed all of them. Fixed a potential crash with the Jail system caused by an undersized array. Fixed a bug with the mech shutdown text being initialized wrong which could reduce game stability. Fixed a few memory leaks with how strings were being handled. Fixed an overflow with how death messages were being generated, which made the Chronovirus event less stable. Fixed a bug with how the server loaded certain config files. Potential fixes in the phone code (I say potential because I never saw it cause an issue to begin with). Fixed a bug with the Delivery Job that wasn’t formatting the payout correctly. Fixed a possible crash caused when the AI go to “hang out” with their friends. Fixed a crash with the wild deer if they didn’t load a place to go hang out with first. Fixed a potential infinite loop with the nuclear power plant is in meltdown mode (don’t think this was possible to have happen but fixed all the same). Changed how the code handles strings and made things a bit safter. Some minor fixes in Death Match. Some minor fixes on MA Front Lines. Cleaned up the formatting of numbers and fixed a bug on the Delivery Job code. Fixed a possible crash with the Deer AI on the main map. Fixed a lockup that could be caused by the nuclear power plant, although I think its unlikely that could have ever happened. Fixed an edge case that could cause the tutorial to crash the game if you managed to have no weapons and hit the drop key. Player Jail times should now be properly recorded. Added a fix for Mech voice lines. Previously, Mechs could potentially crash the game if you had enough voice files queued up. Added a fix for the Chronovirus event that was causing the game to crash (The death message said “The Chronovirus” but the algorithm used to detect gender was only expecting 2 letters like A or An at most. Fixed an out of bounds array in loading shaders. Fixed a bug that would allow certain housing objects to have more health and armor than their max. Fixed a bug in how PINs were hashed which could cause the hashes to not match on next game load. Fixed a bug with how phone numbers are transmitted to the client. The number should no longer do weird rounding as it gets really long. Fixed a bug with phone pound numbers (#) that could cause an array overflow and crash the game. Fixed a crash that has been in the game since the military base first started firing ICBMs. If the ICBM exploded on its way up the game would crash. Cleaned up some poorly formatted perk text. Pet cat attack now works properly. Fixed MA Front Line (oh fuck I think it's been broken for like 2 years). Full Release Improvements Fixed bluehell thanks to jonwil for supplying some legacy code so I could rebuild some of the older files used by the server and standalone release! Restored stock printscreen code, this means that screenshots will work in Windows 10/11; however, they will be in .tga format. 4.x Client Improvements Fixed water now having shadows on it. Fixed a bug causing some vehicles to fire when they shouldn’t be. Task Manager will now correctly list the game as Expansive Civilian Warfare Updated game icon to be the ECW icon. Updated some text strings that used to refer to “Renegade” Instead of Expansive Civilian Warfare. Known Issues Although I put countless hours into fixing crashes and lockups there definitely still is one or two floating around in the code that can cause the game to sometimes crash minutes into the game, other times hours. It doesn’t seem to be directly caused by killing and destroying units but it's always hard to say how things are interacting. Black screen is still an issue in the stand alone release, I think it happens a little less often nowadays but it definitely still is an issue. As such, I recommend anyone encountering it to just use the Modern Client, as that’s far easier to deal with than trying to pin down why standalone won’t work. Although tons of work was done to improve systems and add more stability, some of the changes I made can have the end result of truncated strings (instead of overflowing into memory). If you see any strings that are garbled nonsense or truncated please report them. Although tons of things have been improved, I still recomend playing on the server as hosting the standalone relase is less stable than the server due all these "futuristic" graphics pushing things to hard sometimes. Special Thanks To the creators of CppCheck which helped me make my final code cleanup pass days before release. To Jonwil for saving me tons of time. He was able to identify which crashes were related which helped keep me from thinking things hadn’t been fixed when they had. And as always W3DHub and their support along all these long years. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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