The last few patches I've on multiple ocassions noticed friendly vehicles and squads disappearing. They just vanish into thin air, possibly respawning closer to the fight? I don't mind if the game does this to balance things out a little but it shouldn't happen where a human player is at that moment. Breaks the immersion...

Similarly, I've also noticed enemies spawning on the battlefield itself, often even inside friendly territory. It's very demotivating to have finally pushed an enemy back into their own zone when suddenly 5 more pop up out of thin air right in front of you.

I've found myself ragequitting more since 0.87/0.88 because of this strange spawning behavior. Not being able to hold a rare weapon for more than two seconds before dying again isn't helping either. (See also:http://www.modulaatio.com/runningwithrifles/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1214)

The old RP system was quite good but the current one isn't in my opinion. My most recent match (Coast, +0, 300 men) consisted of a 2-hour stalemate in which I went from rank 2 to 10 without getting a SINGLE point of RP. All the items were always under heavy fire and despawned before it was even remotely safe to gather them and no RP was ever awarded for capturing since we were locked in a stalemate. No RP = no stalemate breaking powers = permanent stalemate = no RP...

Sorry if this looks a little ranty, my last few matches have been lacking a great deal of fun for me. I'm going to put the game aside until 0.89.

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Does this happen online or offline?

Online could be explained with having an occasional weak sync situation, together with the issues that concern offline too.

Offline it can happen for 1) you're carrying a sniper rifle which allows you to see to the inactive region of the world, so when troops move in to active region from the inactive region, you see them created as physical soldiers, 2) areas with water are problematic together with point 1, the soldiers in the inactive region don't care whether they are in water or not, but when they are created after reaching the active region, they favor being created onto a nearby platform (bridge or dock) if the block has deep water in it.

3) It is also possible to see in the inactive region in a place where a downhill approaches north from your standpoint or if you're on a kind of peak (building or hill). This together with point 1 and point 2 obviously increase the chances of having to see people created into characters.

Would any of these fit your experience?

Note that the soldiers never spawn in groups in thin air (except paratroopers which the AI doesn't use), the sudden appearances of groups of soldiers is always related to the points I presented. The game doesn't use spawn hacks to make it harder or balanced, eww

This stuff has been there since forever, with point 2 making an entrance sometime after map5 was introduced, as it uses some heavily watered areas that are also meant for soldiers to move in.

This is a good point actually, would be interesting to know how others have experienced it. RP/min is easy to add back with a mod though, there's rewards.xml.

300 soldiers for map2 might be a bit too intense and crowded for the match to make any sense in my opinion, though.

And don't forget there's a comms truck in map2 which you can potentially use to break stalemates, by destroying it.

Keep in mind that we will balance the RP situation quite a bit and it's more experimenting right now. I don't feel that good about giving stuff according to the time you spend in game. Basically you would gain 50 RP by just idling 10 minutes in a corner. At least now you get RP by capturing bases to compensate it a bit. There will be other things which will give you RP, other than valuables and base capturing like enemy vehicle spotting and most likely much more.
At the end we don't want anyone to get frustrated about the low RP but it just needs time to tweak and find the correct formula.
When you get into a stalemate you might try to backdoor, this should give you the 50 RP as reward without too much effort, especially if you capture a base far away from the heat of the battle and you have a bigger squad. Get an APC or the truck to be protected until you reach your target, but as pasik said, 300 AI is maybe a bit too much.

One thing here is that if you ignore taking valuables or rare weapons to armory, and the map doesn't feature cargo truck (map2), and you're not the kind of stealthy person that would go around and spot enemy vehicles (or all enemy vehicles could be in attack when no rewards are given) (0.89), and the map has 7 bases (like map2), and you start it with even bases when you'd have 2 or 3 bases to capture until the final base battle, you end up getting 100-150 RP from base captures given you are there in the capture zone when the capture happens.

This means you get enough RP for 1 mortar strike in a 2 hour game, if it takes 2 hours to capture 3-4 bases, it can. You probably got more like 10 mortars in pre-RP & calls -version when you were given mortar strike for each 500XP increase.

The new RP rewarded objectives we have in mind are mostly about stealth ops in the end (locate & steal item, locate & assasinate / capture / rescue soldier), so this can possibly leave plenty of run&gunner -players largely without RP rewards, which is a shame.

Maybe getting promotions could be set to give an RP reward to compensate this, it's closer to the old way of things, but still doesn't have a direct relationship with getting RP from kills. The RP reward from promotion shouldn't be a huge one, but something to compensate the lack of RP/min or RP/kills.

But they did...


But they do...

It was in offline mode by the way.

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I don't think it's _spawning_ you see, it's _transform_ from virtual soldier (inactive region) to actual soldier (active region), there's a difference.

Spawning happens only at spawn points and paratrooper calls. Transform happens when virtual soldiers move or you do. These soldiers traveled from somewhere to where you happened to be. The sad part was that, because of the points presented, they appeared in your field of vision. I'm not saying this isn't critical, it has been critical since forever and all the more since the first sniper rifle became to be, I see this from time to time as well.

East bridge in map3 is one of those places where it happens regularly, it's both a downhill + it has water. Standing on the hill, you stand in one block, see over the next block to the inactive block. This leaves the virtual soldiers only one place to become created as real soldiers, right there in player's field of vision, as illustrated in the screencap below.

I asked if there was a chance any of the points were valid in your question. Did you maybe have a sniper rifle, M24 or Dragunov, or were you on a peak where you could see farther than normally?

I believe our feasible options to fix this permanently is to reduce the sight factor with weapons or increase the block size. Increasing block size will have an impact on performance, and we are struggling with performance already.

Without knowing anything about the internal workings or the performance bottlenecks, would having smaller block sizes with more of them loaded be an adequate solution?

I actually started to experiment with a similar approach earlier today, I currently have it at 5x5 as active area around players, with roughly half the previous size. Plenty of places around the code have been using the 3x3 as something they can depend on, and that it'll roughly cover 150m x 150m area, but so far so good, I haven't spotted out of place AI behavior or anything else odd, excluding the fact that the map view is pretty much filled with numbers now.

Sniper is still capable of seeing in the inactive region tiny bit when mouse is at right top corner when standing at the edge of a world block, but it's better than it was.

With some luck, this could give a performance boost in the physics department too as the blocks are tighter and have less potential collider pairs with characters, vehicles and static objects.

I did indeed notice it in the past with a sniper rifle, Ive also seen it happen on two other occasions in the past two days that didn't involve scoped weapons.
One was in the construction pit in the west of Coast. We had just driven the enemy back and I was about 20 feet from the fence to jump out when at least three enemy units suddenly popped up out of nowhere and opened fire. Definitely not a paradrop.
The other time was today in St. Anne where at least three guys suddenly appeared in Village while I was looking in that direction from the Bridge area.

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