All Halo Reach Spawn Theories are to be discussed here This is a topic for discussing potential theories of how the Reach Spawn System works. Each theory needs to be backed up in some shape or form by past experience in the game. Please do not just shrug other people's theories off if they contradict yours as we actually know nothing in regards to any actual truths in the Spawn System as Bungie themselves have not released the information. Respectable theories will be added to the front page. Most of my knowledge is based off personal experience and information gained from this article.
that us a really interesting theory on thrme seconf ring for spawn zones, I'll have to think on that however, on my one map, players nearly always spawned opposite of where you killed them also, I don't think spanwn points have a particularly high height for detecting other players, Iread that sonwher, so spawning a floor down could just be because the game considers it safe thats my 2cents
Your free-for-all theory is very interesting, because I found the exact same thing to be true in a team situation during my own testing... with one small difference; the teamate is a factor too. Basically, any player offers a weighting. Enemy players offer a +10 while teamates offer around a +20, or double. I have a lot more to say on it, but this is something best discussed in a party chat, maybe sometime next weekend, hm?
I would not bother speculating, I would just ask JonnyOThan. But that's me. Having said that, did you know in software development, you work with bits, which can represent any type of number that you want it to represent. They can be integer, signed or unsigned, floating point, etc. The same number in an 8 bit signed integer for -1 is the same as the 8 bit unsigned integer 255. In that regard, you could say that there are no negative numbers, but really it is a matter of how the processor interprets them. The fact remains that from a forger's point of view, a death creates a negative influence. I really don't care how it is represented in the spawn engine weight calculations.
MrGreenWithAGun: If he works for Bungie, why has he posted something that Bungie supposedly announced that there are no negative influences? So why did I have to spend 3 months re-working my spawn systems because my players kept respawning in the enemy base despite having two Respawn Zones inside their own base? Whole paragraph contradicts itself. If Weak = Anti, then in terms of numbers it may be 1 + -1 = 0. That "proves" that stacking has no effect. However, he then further states until you introduce a hard Respawn Area. That's completely irrelevant. If you have two factors in any mathematical calculation that cancel each other out, they become irrelevant from the calculation completely. He states there that they effect something if inside a Hard Respawn Area. He proves the first part this with this comment: But then he goes on to further contradict stacking: And I've ALREADY found out that Anti+Anti stacks regardless of whether it is inside a Hard Respawn Area. The reason I found this was because when I was implementing my spawn system... Players spawned in the enemy base (Inside an enemy teams respawn area(Which according to Jonny will NEVER HAPPEN)). I placed an anti-respawn area over the base. Players still spawned there. I placed another, players still spawned there. I eventually placed4 Anti-Respawn Areas over the enemy base... and low and behold... NO PLAYERS SPAWNED IN THE ENEMIES BASE. This was all completed through stress testing. By PLACING PLAYERS INSIDE RESPAWN AREAS, the Red Team were then relocated to different respawn areas in their own half of the map. My paragraph above just proved that information to be incorrect to some extent. If Team Respawn Zones are placed in the map, why would they fail to spawn team mates inside them? Why would you need to place a Neutral Respawn Zone over the entire map? I swear further on up in the article he said "Players will never spawn outside their team Respawn Zone" yet, he places at the bottom an alternative if the Team Respawn Zones fail. Like I stated before MrGreen, I wouldn't place all your trust in the first article you read about the spawn system. Most of the information is correct, but most of it also has massive holes that don't add up inside the game which is why people are conducting their own tests.
I still believe the best spawning method is too cover the whole map in one large spawn area and have respective spawn zones for both bases (plus covering nearby spawns as well). It works, I tested it today.
It might work for your map, but it hasn't worked for two of mine. How have you tested the spawn system as well? Can I test it with stress tests?
I'm watching this thread with interest. I usually make BTB maps and assign a respawn zone and an anti respawn zone to each half of the map (ie on red side I have a respawn zone assigned to red and an anti respawn zone assigned to blue). This system seems to have a 100% hit rate of spawning the teams on their own side of the map. However in team games with a lot of vehicles this can lead to pretty horrible spawn raping situations (exactly like hemorhage and paradiso).
I don't know what to tell you, Stevo. What JonnyOThan said makes total sense to me. And since I took him at his word, the entire spawning system has become totally predictable to me and has worked flawlessly just as he described. As I have said before, I would be more than happy to forge with you to help you discover what is happening with your map. @Gazzaverage, For what you are describing, the anti respawn zone is not necessary. If designed well, the teams will never spawn outside their half of the map. The only things that can cause you trouble during game play are obstructed respawn points and if you have Stock Pile Goals on your map. A good design will have plenty of spawn points to use even if some become obstructed. And you can just avoid stock pile.
so stockpile messes up spawns? if you can't use a bungie gametype because of spawning issues with your spawn method, then your method must be broken somehow
I think that was aimed at me, and yes I originally had much worse issues with stockpile, and previously had some Anti-Respawn Areas set to only Stockpile, this lightened the load of spawning in the enemies base a bit, but it still continued. And yes, the method was broken and it all started from the simple Hard Respawn Area per each side of the map. If someone were to take a look at my old Halo 3 maps, it's how I always created spawn systems in Halo 3. It's also how I first started to implement spawn systems in my maps on Reach, but I've since realised that just because a Hard Respawn Zone is there, it doesn't mean people on the enemy team won't spawn there, or players on that team won't spawn inside it. @MrGreen, By all means, you can come into forge on Reflect with me and stress test. Also, just because you can predict a spawn system, doesn't mean the theory is correct. HopefulRUIN on this site claims he has 0 knowledge about spawn systems yet he can perfectly predict my spawn system on Reflect 9 times out of 10.
Interesting. In one test I had on my map, it has sort of a 4 base layout. Its almost like a square with the bases in the corners. Blue and red are caddy cornered. What i did was setup 4 circular respawn areas, 1 for each base, and I gave 2 bases to red and 2 bases to blue. This worked out just fine in Team Slayer and FFA. I havent messed with it much at all in any other gametype but it worked this way. Usually if it works in slayer it will in Oddball and KoTH in most cases. I wanted to add though, in some games, its okay to spawn in the enemy base as long as there arent any enemies there. Of course its not good in CTF or Assault, but it happens all the time in other games on Bungies maps.
9 times out of 10 Steve ;D I've never bothered going into much thought about the spawn system but I guess I'll have to some time.. I just tend to throw them on a map and put Spawn zones where it seems like they should be.
True, but the reason why I brought my map up for this is because it's an Objective map primarily. CTF, Stockpile, Assault, King, Ball and Slayer in that order... So spawning in your own base is absolutely paramount. I've found that simply adding a Team dedicated Respawn Area to a map doesn't prevent players from spawning outside this... and in all honesty, this happened in actual games (before I implemented the new system) when 3 or more enemy players were inside the respawn zone.
Actually, my spawn system is based upon JonnyOThan's articles. Stevo claims to have different insight on the matter, though JonnyOThan works for bungie and is our source of information for forging. That aside, respawn zones (AKA strong zones) are so strong that a team will spawn in their assigned zone so long as there is a respawn point that is both compatible with the player's team assignment and is not obstructed. However, stock pile drop zones actually create a strong zone of their own. This means that they interfere with the typical application of respawn zones on maps and that this side effect is ambiguous, making designing for stock pile extremely difficult. This is by design, but JonnyOThan did not offer any explanation as to what the engineers at Bungie were trying to accomplish by this design decision. This is what I know, but I will be learning more over the next couple of weeks and writing about it in my Spawn Tutorials on my blog. I am currently in the middle of updating my Respawn Zone tutorial. @Stevo, Now having said all that, Stevo, I have to tell you that I was doing some prelim tests to verify what JonnyOThan said about stock pile drop zones and I came up with a very interesting problem. I have to verify this. I do not want to say this is certain. I want to try to make it happen again before I say it is something that can be replicated. For all I know it was just a one off that I lost all test controls over. It seemed to me that after I applied a stock pile drop zone, the problems were obvious. BUT it "SEEMS" that after I removed the stock pile drop zone, the problems remained. This leaves me with the question, if adding a stock pile zone to the canvas presents a problem, is the problem then permanently applied to the canvas? AGAIN I have to be able to reproduce this problem, but if so it may point to a problem with the canvas holding onto information that is obsolete (e.g., the drop zone was removed, so its affects should be obsolete). If so, this is a bug that i need to share with JonnyOThan.
I was referring to MrGreen's comment where he told another user to avoid stockpile after clearly saying his way was fibe and telling that user to use his spawn method stevo: to me, your method makes sense, even if MrGreen's is fine, yours makes sure everything runs without a hitch, like having a backup generator I am probably going to go the Stevo Way from now on for my maps
I am going to share my own personal experience regarding this matter. About a month after Reach came out, I messaged several different Bungie workers, inquiring as to the inner workings of the Reach spawn system. I made it very clear that I wanted something identical to what Jonny wrote. And every response I got back was very clear: "Bungie will NOT reveal the workings of their spawn system ever for business purposes." How surprised was I when somebody who obviously had nothing more than a Public Relations job released information that I was looking for after I had been told that I would never see it officially... Even more interesting that a good third of it contradicts itself. Guess what? It turns out that he probably did the exact same thing that we are all doing. Testing. His status of Bungie gives him no super-powers that label him to be better than us with spawns, just the same as my title as the Staff of a forging community does not make me a better forger than most people. It simply means I am good at my job. Him releasing that article that tries to explain it is almost akin to seeking out for attention and recognition. He got more stuff right that most people, and a good number of his theories probably came from people who worked on the spawn system, but he didn't get every single thing right. I just hope you keep that in mind while reading his articles. Regardless, there is enough good stuff from everyone involved that we can hopefully get everything aced out to perfection.
Didn't think anyone was all upset with Jonny like this. Well, if you can tell me what he said and tell me why it is wrong, please do. Finally, MrGreenWithAGun: Rockets aimed at a respawn point within a respawn zone overcome the respawn zone and force the player to spawn outside the zone. JonnyOThan: Interesting. I looked at the defaults when drawing that conclusion, but the weights for weapons (just like most other engine-created influencers) can vary per map. It is up to you, but you might want to cut JonnyOThan some slack. He is a great source of information, even if he does make mistakes, because he has access to information no one else has access to.
Its funny you mention that. When Shadow was working on Attainment, he kept having a problem with the flags in Stockpile. Whenever we picked up a certain flag and started heading for the base, another flag would spawn on the point in which we had just picked up the previous flag. I know thats got nothing to do with players spawning but we couldnt figure it out. In fact I'm not sure how he figured it out later, cuz I wasnt there, lol.
Check the minimum flag count (I believe in game type settings). If the number of flags is greater than the number of flag poles, then as soon as you take a flag, the engine will try to spawn another to reach the minimum count. I have seen this also myself some time back. Again, I am not certain where the flag count is at. You might have to search for it, but I think it is in game type settings somewhere.