RUNNING WITH RIFLES :: View topic - Some stuff that would add more "pleasure" to the game

Spoiler:

(The following is written mostly with dedicated server Invasion online coop mode in mind, but might suit PvPvE as well in some parts.)

We've been discussing and thinking about this to death lately. We would very much want to have "some kind of" profile sharing between servers in general, but it becomes a mess with trusting the server admins, the openness of the game files i.e. modding and settings control, and hackers.

Going with trusted servers solution, it could easily demotivate people from hosting their own public servers. People would "only" play on trusted servers as it allows them the conveniency of playing on different servers while keeping their progression state.. so who would still host a public untrusted server no one is willing to join? We'd soon find ourselves doing all the hosting ourselves and we don't like where that's going.

Ok, instead, we could have no such thing as trusted servers, but organize it so that specific game settings generate a specific tag in the profiles that can be matched if you can use an existing profile on a server, assuming all profile sharing enabled servers store profiles (or if clients do the storing themselves) in some master database, like the Steam cloud. It's a chore to set up but it might work. Downside is that even now SAS Invasion, Pixelshifted and InvasionUS have "incompatible" profiles as they all have different settings.

Depending on if it's the servers that do profile storing or clients, there would be different problems. With server in control of it, an ill-behaving admin could do weird stuff from the server console, causing someone to lose all his RP or XP or items, and you wouldn't be able to do anything against it but avoid the server next time. The damage would be done already anyhow and it would affect your single shared profile. Similarly server admins could generate items and RP and take them to another server. We would be able to restrict the console access but I'm pretty sure someone would find another opening and we'd just fight against these guys for the rest of RWR lifespan.

The other choice was that clients would store their server settings tagged profiles themselves, in a cloud or even locally on the computer, and profile sharing enabled servers would accept profiles delivered from client side. Right now, the profile data is just an open text file, no securing in order to allow easy single player / host side savegame hacks and mods. Storing these profiles in Steam might help securing it from the player himself, can't say really as I'm not familiar with Steam cloud.

Getting back to the fact that "most" servers have tweaks in settings, making sharing profiles between these servers either difficult for determining profile compatibility or just impossible, but does it even make sense in most cases? We could instead further promote that you're supposed to have different profiles on different servers as the experiences are "supposed" to be unique. E.g. we could have InvasionUS have Brownpants as the friendly faction, Pixelshifted would use Graycollars, SAS Inva Greenbelts -- would you still expect to share profiles between these servers where you have access to entirely different weapons by default in addition to other tweaks that affect difficulty?

I personally like playing the early part of the campaign when you don't have that much at your disposal already, fits with Invasion too. It probably takes 10-20 hours in online to get to unlock all of the useful stuff so you might just as well switch to playing on another server at that point as there's some new experiences to be had by playing another faction and different settings.. So who needed profile sharing between servers in the first place?

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Regarding profile sharing, there's at least that one case where it's annoying to not have one: the sidekick mode. Someone you don't know activates the server on his locally played single player campaign, makes it public and you feel like you want to join and play coop with the dude. Joining the first time, you start from scratch, and you have no idea if that server is going to be up even for an hour, so any progression you make there is bound to be lost forever. Actually, you might not even care about that that much as you just want to play but you're still affected by the progression system in the campaign causing you to start from 0 XP.

Of course, in similar situation where the hosting player has just started the campaign, it would be awkward if you could join with your own 50 hour profile and just own all enemies with artillery and tanks, while the hosting player just watches you complete his campaign.

The best idea we had to remedy this was that you could derive the progression from the hosting player, but it felt phony as well, so we left it as it is. The system continues to work well for friends playing coop with the intention of completing a campaign together and in quick match where progression can be made to have no practical effect, you just play for that one match there, no strings attached.

Author:	gimmic [ Fri Sep 19, 2014 7:46 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Some stuff that would add more "pleasure" to the game
Brodaty wrote: 1st 1. Block weapon pick up Sometimes we are using rare weapon or purchased one and we don't wanna change it or lose it during fight. It's realy annoying when we are trying to pick up some granades, rocket launcher or other items and we are picking up some crap weapon by an accident. It would be great to block weapon pickup in options, or change it to another button. For example, all items we are picking up by pressing F, but weapons by pressing V, or double F. Excellent idea. Maybe it could even be set so that you just automatically pick up 'loot' if you have the inventory space. There could also be a different button for "pick up (to backpack)" so you can either pick up directly to hands or to storage. Quote: 2. Autoreload Yes. Some people are agaist it. It would be great to do something about it - autoreload would be nice, however if devs are agaist it we can make a compromise. How about sound at the empty magazine for rifles, sniper rifles and shotguns? You know. Shot shot shot shot, ding! It's empty! How many times I have died in the chaos of battle, because I forgot to reload?! I'm not counting anymore. Confused here. You say autoreload but then just mention a sound indicator. I am (with others) completely against any kind of automatic reload. I would be totally fine if the guns made a "click" noise though. Currently there's no sound and you sometimes don't immediately notice you're not firing anything. I loud "click" noise, even if it is unrealistic would be a good middleground to remind you to put a full magazine in. Quote: 3. Steam-Cloud profiles through the servers As I know, profiles are server-sided. If you another one, you are starting from 0. It would be great to do some kind of Steam-Cloud profiles. If the server have turned on Steam-Cloud's our profiles are taken from Steam and we have as much experience and the equipment as it's saved in Steam-Cloud. This could work between servers. Very unlikely due to the way different servers can be modded or even have different gamemodes. It would be trivial to host your own server, give yourself all kinds of gear and RP, then move to a PVP server and rape faces with radio-call-ins.. This game is just naturally aimed at server-specific character profiles. There are a few ideas I had with a 'trusted server network' or mods to enable an invasion character to carry over to a PVP one without the OP RP carryover... Quote: 4. Steam-invite There's nothing more awesome than Steam-Invite. Why RWR isn't supporting this? Also, this method is working as self-advertise. For example, invited user that don't have RWR immediately goes to see what kind of a game it is, right? Right. in addition, it would be great to see Steam friend list in the game! Sounds great. I suspect this would be closer to implementation once the steam workshop elements are integrated.

Author:	Brodaty [ Fri Sep 19, 2014 7:48 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Some stuff that would add more "pleasure" to the game
Quote: Very unlikely due to the way different servers can be modded or even have different gamemodes. It would be trivial to host your own server, give yourself all kinds of gear and RP, then move to a PVP server and rape faces with radio-call-ins.. This game is just naturally aimed at server-specific character profiles. There are a few ideas I had with a 'trusted server network' or mods to enable an invasion character to carry over to a PVP one without the OP RP carryover... Well, this option can be enabled only when many restrict settings are enabled. For example only for pure PVP servers where you must fight for your stuff rather than farming.

Author:	gimmic [ Fri Sep 19, 2014 7:53 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Some stuff that would add more "pleasure" to the game
Brodaty wrote: Quote: Very unlikely due to the way different servers can be modded or even have different gamemodes. It would be trivial to host your own server, give yourself all kinds of gear and RP, then move to a PVP server and rape faces with radio-call-ins.. This game is just naturally aimed at server-specific character profiles. There are a few ideas I had with a 'trusted server network' or mods to enable an invasion character to carry over to a PVP one without the OP RP carryover... Well, this option can be enabled only when many restrict settings are enabled. For example only for pure PVP servers where you must fight for your stuff rather than farming. It would be abused in a myriad of ways. 1) The design nature of the game makes it trivial to edit your save if you have control of the server. 2) The design nature of the game makes it trivial to flag your server as 'restricted' and have it totally modded. There's no trusted environment since servers are public hosted. 3) Even if it were, you'd have servers set up for people to 'farm' gear and equipment before moving to a 'real' pvp environment.

Author:	JackMayol [ Fri Sep 19, 2014 9:53 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Some stuff that would add more "pleasure" to the game
1. There is a priority queue already implemented, so that if there are different stuff around you, press quick F will first grab valuables, then rare weapons, then throwables, then secondary items, and then normal weapons. If you are unsure what stuff is within your pickup radius, better call the inventory (keeping F pressed). 2. autoreload = no, just no Btw gimmic, there IS a sound effect when you run dry and still try to shoot, you will hear this "click" 3. That's a huge topic we also discussed recently. We at least have to do something about profile sharing as if SASinvasion is down, some people don't even bother to jump on another server because of loosing the higher rank and stuff. Trusted servers would be an option but who can we really trust. For now there is only SAS, Pixel and invaUS as for the other servers we don't know the admins. 4. We didnt yet investigate into this but it's planned and ofc will also be implemented. 5. Ya I know what you mean and we also have a lot of people who would want to be able to use everything right from the start, so hmm. Anyway, pretty much everything is relatively easy to get once you play a few ours inva. I made the M107 sniper to be really rare and it's cool to see people on the server talking about it as they didnt see it yet. There will be more rare stuff to collect and maybe even to bring to a black market to change it into something really rare which you can't get elsewhere. I would want people to trade stuff to be able to have the item requirements for different rares but we'll see about that. Repairs of vehicles has been discussed and I kinda like it but I am not sure if it would make sense in RWR. Maybe a radio call which drops a "repair vehicle" and once a damaged vehicle is within a max perimeter it would get auto healed over time. 6. you have 1HP in RWR, every bullet can kill you, so adding like 2% more HP might be an issue Also we wouldn't want a higher ranked soldier to have an advantage over a low ranked. Weapon XP restriction, squad member number difference, Radio calls is enough imo.

Author:	Tummerhore [ Fri Sep 19, 2014 9:55 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Some stuff that would add more "pleasure" to the game
Quote: How about sound at the empty magazine for rifles, sniper rifles and shotguns? There is already a sound when you fire a weapon which is out of ammo, but it's very quiet. If you want to, you can change the sound file (path: [...]\Steam\SteamApps\common\RunningWithRifles\media\packages\vanilla\sounds, name: dry_fire.wav) or rather make it louder as a workaround. Edit: Oh, JackMayol was faster...

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Author:	pasik [ Sat Sep 20, 2014 1:10 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Some stuff that would add more "pleasure" to the game
Quote: 1. Block weapon pick up Like Jack said there's a priority queue for the quick pickup feature. While it's not entirely like he said it's close enough. Anyway, the "item name peek" text display at your feet when you're near pickupable items matches with what you will pick up next if you press the pickup key, it means that you know what you're going to pick up before you press it. Room for mistakes should be pretty small this way, but it is still possible the game guesses it wrong what it is you want. If the game makes a wrong guess and displays the text for something you don't want, hold pickup and control the situation yourself. Easily, there could be some cases that have been overlooked with the priorities. Would be awesome to get feedback for those whenever you spot such situations. Quote: 3. Steam-Cloud profiles through the servers Wall of text warning. Long story short: don't be afraid to start over. Spoiler: (The following is written mostly with dedicated server Invasion online coop mode in mind, but might suit PvPvE as well in some parts.) We've been discussing and thinking about this to death lately. We would very much want to have "some kind of" profile sharing between servers in general, but it becomes a mess with trusting the server admins, the openness of the game files i.e. modding and settings control, and hackers. Going with trusted servers solution, it could easily demotivate people from hosting their own public servers. People would "only" play on trusted servers as it allows them the conveniency of playing on different servers while keeping their progression state.. so who would still host a public untrusted server no one is willing to join? We'd soon find ourselves doing all the hosting ourselves and we don't like where that's going. Ok, instead, we could have no such thing as trusted servers, but organize it so that specific game settings generate a specific tag in the profiles that can be matched if you can use an existing profile on a server, assuming all profile sharing enabled servers store profiles (or if clients do the storing themselves) in some master database, like the Steam cloud. It's a chore to set up but it might work. Downside is that even now SAS Invasion, Pixelshifted and InvasionUS have "incompatible" profiles as they all have different settings. Depending on if it's the servers that do profile storing or clients, there would be different problems. With server in control of it, an ill-behaving admin could do weird stuff from the server console, causing someone to lose all his RP or XP or items, and you wouldn't be able to do anything against it but avoid the server next time. The damage would be done already anyhow and it would affect your single shared profile. Similarly server admins could generate items and RP and take them to another server. We would be able to restrict the console access but I'm pretty sure someone would find another opening and we'd just fight against these guys for the rest of RWR lifespan. The other choice was that clients would store their server settings tagged profiles themselves, in a cloud or even locally on the computer, and profile sharing enabled servers would accept profiles delivered from client side. Right now, the profile data is just an open text file, no securing in order to allow easy single player / host side savegame hacks and mods. Storing these profiles in Steam might help securing it from the player himself, can't say really as I'm not familiar with Steam cloud. Getting back to the fact that "most" servers have tweaks in settings, making sharing profiles between these servers either difficult for determining profile compatibility or just impossible, but does it even make sense in most cases? We could instead further promote that you're supposed to have different profiles on different servers as the experiences are "supposed" to be unique. E.g. we could have InvasionUS have Brownpants as the friendly faction, Pixelshifted would use Graycollars, SAS Inva Greenbelts -- would you still expect to share profiles between these servers where you have access to entirely different weapons by default in addition to other tweaks that affect difficulty? I personally like playing the early part of the campaign when you don't have that much at your disposal already, fits with Invasion too. It probably takes 10-20 hours in online to get to unlock all of the useful stuff so you might just as well switch to playing on another server at that point as there's some new experiences to be had by playing another faction and different settings.. So who needed profile sharing between servers in the first place? -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Regarding profile sharing, there's at least that one case where it's annoying to not have one: the sidekick mode. Someone you don't know activates the server on his locally played single player campaign, makes it public and you feel like you want to join and play coop with the dude. Joining the first time, you start from scratch, and you have no idea if that server is going to be up even for an hour, so any progression you make there is bound to be lost forever. Actually, you might not even care about that that much as you just want to play but you're still affected by the progression system in the campaign causing you to start from 0 XP. Of course, in similar situation where the hosting player has just started the campaign, it would be awkward if you could join with your own 50 hour profile and just own all enemies with artillery and tanks, while the hosting player just watches you complete his campaign. The best idea we had to remedy this was that you could derive the progression from the hosting player, but it felt phony as well, so we left it as it is. The system continues to work well for friends playing coop with the intention of completing a campaign together and in quick match where progression can be made to have no practical effect, you just play for that one match there, no strings attached. Quote: 4. Steam-invite This sounds interesting. What and where is it in Steam?

Author:	pasik [ Sat Sep 20, 2014 5:03 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Some stuff that would add more "pleasure" to the game
Brodaty wrote: Avaiable unlocks are a little too expensive, I have not seen any player who would use a mortar, claymore or other additives. Not sure they're too expensive, maybe it's just some people don't do the things that give them RP. It is however possible that in Invasion it is not that easy to gain RP from delivering valuables as you've got so many players going after them. Anyway, I've seen people use miniguns and mgs plenty in Invasion, a few mortars too. I agree on the remark about claymores, no one uses them, including me - anyone who does, please stand up and tell us where. The blast range is so insignificant that it needs to hit exactly on target which ruins it for me personally. I guess claymores are more intended for PvP where you may need to defend more, but we lack modes that require it (apart from king of the hill, but both KOTH maps have pretty open space to enter so you can't choke areas with claymores. Quote: Some of them should be avaiable as weapon, not just stuff until death. When you die, you drop the items you had, you or someone else can still regain them. There are some weapon unlocks, 4 or 5 of them, but they will need some re-adjusting because some of them now fall into being just a little better than stock weapons while having non respawnability and a medium price.. they should be either like they are spec wise + cheap + respawnable or rare grade + even more expensive + non respawnable. Ending up in the middle is bad.

Author:	harrified [ Sun Sep 21, 2014 2:01 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Some stuff that would add more "pleasure" to the game
On the autoreload question: How about using the reticle to show that your weapon is out of ammo? My preference would be for it to signal an empty magazine only after you've clicked and nothing happens, though. Actually I'd rather have that instead of an ammo counter on the HUD anyway. :] Next up: hardcore mode and autorefunds

Author:	JackMayol [ Sun Sep 21, 2014 8:20 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Some stuff that would add more "pleasure" to the game
pasik wrote: I agree on the remark about claymores, no one uses them, including me - anyone who does, please stand up and tell us where. The blast range is so insignificant that it needs to hit exactly on target which ruins it for me personally. I guess claymores are more intended for PvP where you may need to defend more, but we lack modes that require it (apart from king of the hill, but both KOTH maps have pretty open space to enter so you can't choke areas with claymores. I sometime try hard lol. Lately on SASinva, where it was really difficult to pass the junkyard in Rattlesnake Crescent I placed a few of them around the yard as I knew the enemies will push us back. Had a few nice kills but wasn't really worth the hassle. For 0.98.3 the explosion range of the Claymore has been increased by a meter. As pasik said, claymores might make more sense in PvP though.

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