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[Hempuli‽]

I had to update quickly to 1.6b due to bugs.

Tatu, that one was one of the things I fixed. It should work now.

EDIT: Make that 1.6c.

I added teamspeak! Type "/t" in front of your line.

[akavel]

oooh, that's not the peaceful family photo for which both teams arranged so carefully :D

[illisid]

I wish I had more specific feedback to add other than this game is really great! Do you have a website or place with all of your projects on it? because someone was trying to download paradise fort and your link to it was broken (just an fyi)

[lasttea999]

More ideas:

1) It might be nice to indicate when players are chatting, both in the pre-game lobby and during gameplay, the former because conversations tend to get disorganized when lots of players are chatting to each other, the latter because sometimes characters can be destroyed while they're stopping to chat. Maybe have an indicator next to the player's name in the lobby, and a speech bubble over player characters in-game?

2) It might also be nice to have different tilesets. I like the graphics, but they're getting a little monotonous; switching randomly between, say, the current tiles, desert tiles, and snowy landscapes might make the graphics more interesting!

[akavel]

Hempuli's website with projects seems to be: http://hempuli.com/

[Hempuli‽]

Thanks for the feedback! Let's see...

@illisid: As akavel said, my "official" website is www.hempuli.com . Paradise Fort got some false positives from certain less known anti-virus products, so my host wanted me to move it to some public hosting service; it's currently on mediafire. (Now that I think, I know why the false alarms were given, so maybe I ought to fix that :O)

@lasttea999: Good points. I'm not sure if I'll be able to do the lobby indicator without too much work to compensate the usefulness, but an in-game one is probably a must. I'll add it to my list. As for the tiles, I actually quite like that idea! And not too hard to pull out, even. (Adding simple things like trees and bushes has been on my to-do-list for a long time, eh)

[Filth]

ah, and I also did have problems with XCV - quite many times automatically rested my fingers on ZXC and got left without firepower

Hah, I have problems with ZXC. I'm always trying to shoot with V

Would the trees and such be only for decoration?
The bushes could be in front of the players, providing a place to hide.
The digging is really dull and monotonous, it needs something to make it more exciting.

Also, I don't want to turn this into one of those 'K/D ratio competition' games,
but there should be a way to see everyones stats (kills, deaths, mined ore, time in the control point?).

EDIT
Oh, and more bugs:

I was in the red square with the copter facing left and tried to fly up.

[akavel]

Also, today some more strange phenomena were seen, including:
- people walking in the air or teleporting into earth blocks,
- counter resetting to 180 for one side,
- the same counter then getting through NNN:0 to full 0:0, with the game continuing happily (although that was actually pretty much fun, with gameplay focus shifting from the map-center occupation duel to an intense base-on-base tribal war),
- me being freezed in spawn-point at one moment, with no reaction to action keys (chat was working; restarting the game got rid of the problem),
- unconfirmed gossips of people occasionally changing team on respawn.

Not that any of these would last long enough to reduce the fun. And my best memories today are strongly linked with a copter chock-full of crazy Rambos, covering the enemy base with unsustainable wall of fire for a couple deadly minutes...      

[Hempuli‽]

Remember that you can change controls in the "dat.txt" -file.

Uh oh, let's go through these:

-For the chopper thing, I've no idea what could cause that situation to teleport you anywhere. Unless I see this redone with more precise explanation I can't really do much about it. There's a slight chance that a machine will teleport upwards when left, but this is something else.

-The trees and bushes could indeed be used for fun gaming.

-I agree, the digging is boring. I've been thinking of adding random treasures or such underground, or something. Maybe random gas-filled blocks a lá Motherload?

-A status screen is something that is essential but absolutely nasty to implement. I'll try to do it, but it's not high on my priority list atm.

-The walking in air/inside walls sounds like the map desyncing. There are sometimes cases where a bomb detonates slightly different tiles for two players, and since the game doesn't note if two players have different-looking maps, it's possible that a tile is empty for one person only. As for teleporting, I can't give any explanations. That shouldn't happen. Also airwalking may happen if a player joins but doesn't get all the necessary data, so when he enters a vehicle no-one else sees the vehicle but only the player, flying happily. I'm not sure to which extent I can fix these; hopefully they're relatively rare already.

-The counter resetting seems to happen often to the host when a new player joins. I've tried to look into this but haven't really found a cause for it. Definitely something that must be fixed!

-When the game ends, the host sends a message to every player that sends them to aprropriate winning/losing screen, and disconnects them. However, if the host is lagging or otherwise not having a good connection, it may happen that the game end message isn't sent/is interrupted, thus making some players or no players at all to disconnect. Also there's a slight chance of the counters going in desync, but that isn't probably the answer. I'm not sure how I could do this better, but it sure is a problem.

-Is your freezing is related to buying stuff, or entering a vehicle you just bought and then dying? I've seen this happen to myself once, and I'm quite sure this is something that isn't too hard to fix. Trying to find the cause for the next update!

-changing teams mid-game is simply impossible, so don't worry. There's a slight chance to see everyone belonging to the blue team when joining, in case you don't get all the necessary data but still somehow pass the join checks, but that happening midgame is simply not possible. (I'm almost 100% certain of this!)

I'll try to fix all bugs, but some of them will most probably be too much for me, so I wont promise anything! Of course it'd be great to have a bugless game, but with MMF 2 that's hardly a given thing, haha!

[Filth]

-For the chopper thing, I've no idea what could cause that situation to teleport you anywhere. Unless I see this redone with more precise explanation I can't really do much about it. There's a slight chance that a machine will teleport upwards when left, but this is something else.

Oh, it's similar to the older bug when you could push the choppers outside the view.
They don't teleport, it's more like sliding through the ground.

I don't really see how the gas blocks would work. Wouldn't it be just a 'don't dig here' thing? What about something like NPC enemies instead?

Also, I got an idea when we were talking about the rocket launcher; What about mortars? They could work like portable turrets or something.

[akavel]

As of freezing, I absolutely don't remember what was I doing before; I think the death was some regular one, but I won't promise. What I'm sure of is that after the respawn I got immediately freezed at the spawn point.

Regarding the game state synch things, a link I found today may or may not be of any use to you (unless you've already seen it):
  http://trac.bookofhook.com/bookofhook/trac.cgi/wiki/Quake3Networking
Anyway, it was quite an interesting read for me at least

Btw, can I ask if you're hosting the server on your site or on some free service?
tx

[Hempuli‽]

I'm using a free public server dedicated solely to the Lacewing protocol. I think I'll add a separate server hosting program and support for external servers eventually, though.

The 'mortars' are something I had had in mind straight from the beginning, but couldn't really find any good use for them. The shape of the ground prevents any vehicles that can't jump, like tanks and such mortars, from working most of the time.

The synch thing is something I could work out, but it needs so much time and work that at the moment I don't feel like it. Sorry!

On that note, version 1.61 is in! Changelog:

• In-game control changing!
• Chatlogs and ability to save them
• New item, a box of five rockets!
• Bugfixes as always
• I'm testing a short unfinished music provided by shojin in this version. Please do give feedback! It's very short currently, though.
• Nicer starting menus
• You can now safely drop items with down + throw
• I changed the shape of the base to accommodate UFOs and mech suits better
• You can now make and join private games. Type the name of the game to the host bar and press "join/create private"!

VERSION 1.61 GET!

[JCSopko]

Ton of fun, I called some friends and had them get on and we had 4v4s around 5 EET.

When do (hempuli) and the other guys typically play around, it's not much fun unless you have people that know how to play/even teams.

Only bug I've found is if you're building the fence builder and you cancel it then leave the vehicle you can't move unless you re-enter the vehicle and leave while not building something. I think those are the conditions but I'm not positive. I can get it to do it every single time.

[piper65]

Any chance of a Mac version so I can play this thing.  It looks and sounds pretty epic.

I am trying to get it running on Linux with wine. You could try that too.
For me, without any extra, it runs and I can connect to servers but it runs so slowly that's unplayable.
I'm trying to figure out what I can do. And also the automatic update doesn't work.

Other than that this has become a really fun game have been playing it whenever I can since I discovered it two days ago. I play as 'cactus' in-game.

[mokesmoe]

A neat but probably hard to add feature would be that people can't see tunnels until they see them with some line of sight mechanic. (and can't see you if you're in them) It would let you dig secret tunnels under people to ambush them.

Another idea I had is for an item. You could have a pickaxe, witch you can still shoot with, but gives you the cybermason's mining ability as well as the classes normal ability. If the cybermason had it, it would give him the effectiveness of a digger while mining. He still wouldn't be as effective as a digger, because he wouldn't have the hover ability. (If you implement non-cybermason classes mining slower, the pick would be at the other classes mining speed)

[FK in the Coffee]

I really, really think that some more modes and maps should be next on your priority list. 
A kill-count oriented mode, a resource-gathering mode, and a capture-the-flag mode in addition to the "King of the Hill" mode already present would be great.

Some more maps would also be nice, and not only some procedurally generated ones, but some hand-designed ones too, with different base structures and everything.  Speaking of which, the ability to be able to purchase base upgrades would be a very-much welcome thing.  Putting up turret defenses or more efficient ore-gathering machines would add an extra strategy element in edition to the current mindless shooting in the current version.

I know I'm getting ahead of myself with all of this, but these are just a few things to consider.

[tehmrbd]

Some people still have a bug with the speed of walking. Need fix it.
And bug with infinity HP.

[Filth]

When do (hempuli) and the other guys typically play around, it's not much fun unless you have people that know how to play/even teams.

Usually around 18.00 - 23.00 GMT.

I saw the mortars as items you carry around and when Z is pressed it'd turn to a turret.
There should probably be a way to indicate if someone's hit by bullets (and flashbangs?).

More item suggestions:
-An armour pick-up which doubles your health but makes you slower
-A bullet deflecting shield
-A petrol bomb
-A temporary speed boost
-A bomb which could prevent your targets from shooting (and possibly vehicles from moving as well?)
-An item which shows the opposing teams healths (also, the scientists should see their teammates health by default)

I don't think that the game modes should be a priority right now, I'd rather concentrate on the engineer and the lab thing next.

EDIT

If you're planning to do the typing indicator, please, add an option to turn it off so others can't see when you're typing. I can think of a few ways how it could be harmful.
The teamchat probably should have it's own button (Y, perhaps?)

[Hempuli‽]

Ok, thanks for the feedback, let's go through thse...

JCSopko: Thanks for the bug report, that one is fixed for good now! As for when I play, I usually look at the games somewhere near 21:00 or 22:00 GMT + 2, since that's when I usually have a version going. Quite often the game's will continue well over midnight (my time), though. Yesterday I played my last game a bit over 3 AM, GMT + 2.

I'm afraid that a mac or a linux version isn't possible due to MMF 2's unability to port anything. Technically I *could* port it to flash, but that'd mean massive rework and even slower gameplay so I'd rather not.

mokesmoe: Yeah, that's something I thought of, but unfortunately it's quite hard to do and requires a good computer to run fast, so I've hesitated implementing it. As for the pickaxe, I'm not sure if I see the use in that; I'd rather keep the cybermason as the 'digger' class.

ThePortalGuru: I'm not sure about the priorities, but new gamemodes would surely be a welcome thing. I think I'll add bushes and other decoration today or tomorrow, so the current level will get at least a bit of freshness to it, but people have also suggested different environments (desert, glacier etc etc), and I quite like that concept.

tehmrbd: The movement speed is directly caused by the game running with slow FPS. I'll set machine independent speed on for the next version, we'll see if that helps at all. As for infinite health, I'm quite sure it relates to the 'invinvible' player lagging badly and thus not receiving the hits. Both problems are really unfortunate, but at the moment a bit out of my grasp. I'm sorry.

Filth: I agree especially about the flashbangs. Maybe a star floating above their head a lá commander keen? That could be implented with the typing icon to prevent typekilling, as well.
as for the items:
-I'll get back to these health/speed upgrades later.
-A shield might be pretty cool, I like the idea!
-How would a petrol bomb work?
-The 'lock' bomb was actually meant to be implemented the day before yesterday, but I made it the gbomb instead. I fear that this kind of a bomb could easily be quite overpowered. I'll think about it.
-Showing the health of other players is something I'd love to have, but it'd be really tricky to code and would require a lot of data to be sent, so I'm afraid it's a bit of a no-no at the moment due to the already heavy code. If I can somehow reduce the slowdown, this might be a possibility.

[Filth]

The petrol bomb could set the ground tiles on fire, doing low damage to nearby people.
It'd mostly be useful for blocking the ground troops.

quick mockup

The lock bomb could have a a small delay, three seconds should be enough for anyone to flee unless you're stuck somewhere.

What if the scientists could see if someone has, for example, less than 50 health?
I'd imagine that would require much less data. The injured players could have like a red exclamation mark over their heads similar to the typing- and flashbang icons.

Oh, and one little thing: