LOS stand for Line of sight. How this works is you take a small group of spawns i usually use 3. place them in places that can be easily seen. You dont want to have very many clusters i would say 4 - 5 at the most that are easily visible. The rest of you spawns are placed in areas that are not easily visible. You place a Anti spawn zone around these not so visible spawns. and when the enemy is standing near one of you open cluster or has others in view players will spawn in the well covered anti zone. this allows players to spawn in more open and probably better possition as long as no one is near the spawn point or looking in thier direction. If this is the case they will spawn saftely in cover or in a open spawn cluster that has no one near it or looking at it. This typically works better with more players in the game. i would say you should have about 4 - 6 open clusters of 3 - 5 spawns. and 7 - 8 hidden clusters of 3 - 5 spawns. You do not want to have to many open clusters or this will not work. More hidden cluster is prefered but eats up anti zones really fast.
Wait, what? So you're putting priority on visible spawns, and expect them to go unused when the enemy has sight of them? I've heard about a LOS influence from friends of mine that also Forge and have seen it in practice, but it can't be that strong that it would override Anti Zones...
indeed, from what I've noticed LoS spawn influencing is very low. It's rather easy to have someone spawn in your sight lines if you're not in the same spawn area as them. This can usually be obtained by spawn trapping. If you place players over the clusters, or nearby them, their weight should disable the central ones forcing players to predictably spawn in the outer clusters that have anti-zones on them, which means it's much easier to team kill... This system also appears for it to be very easy for players to respawn in the wrong base as there are no designated respawn areas for each team... I can only really see this working for larger maps that have 12+ respawn clusters, and (if you're not using dedicated respawn points) Free-For-All only.
I discovered last night that strong zones can be overcome by LOS of some weapons if there are more team compatible respawn points outside the strong zone than within it. If my interpretation is correct (and I have a pending post for JonnyOThan to confirm this and to learn more about it), then you can choose if you want your team assigned strong zone to be overcome by LOS or not by how you design your map. What I really want to know is how did the Bungie engineers intend for us to use this feature?
The open cluster are only there to detect where the enemy is at mainly place where people are going to go alot and then saying if no one is there or looking there spawn here. Like i said i do not place all the open cluster in the center of the map only place that are visible from the center of the map. an you do not have to place all the anti zone spawn along the outer edge. and on the map im using this on i do in fact have hard spawn zones for each team. for the teams that arent red or blue i usually just place 3 - 4 colored spawns where i would like them to spawn at. i feel that a spawn zone will cause them to spawn there to much while a colored spawn point will just give them a slightly greater chance of spawning there. anyway stevo if you have a resource on what you have learned about spawn would you pls post a link to it. I am really just starting to get an idea of how to use the spawning system so bear with me if some of what i say is out of ignorance. I ran a small test on it. i place 4 spawns in the little foundry like room and 1 spawn up above the foundry room with anti spawn zone. when i stood in the corner near 1 spawn and had the other 3 in view he would spawn up top, but when i didnt have one in view he would spawn in the corner i wasnt looking at. Mabye my testing methods are bad. Im really just starting to understand spawns and what im trying to accomplish is simply a way of preventing spawning near the enemeies pretty much. While my test worked in a simple 1v1 i have yet to scale test it.(not to many people like fn around with spawn points). After reading Green dudes spawn post and testing my grid i realized the grid didnt do anything and confirmed it with a simple test. I was under the impression that if some one entered a spawn zone that it would have a negative impact on the spawns in the area. that fact that it dosent mean i have to use the only thing that can be influenced by the players the spawn point in order to control spawning. [br][/br]Edited by merge: in the test i did he would never spawn in any of the visible spawn points while i was looking. i made sure i was far enough away that if it was a weak zone he wouldnt spawn outside of it because i was to close and when i killed him he would spawn the anti zone. but when i did not have the spawns in my sight basically turned around and looked at the wall he would spawn outside of the anti zone.
Did you run a control -- a test without your Zones in place -- to see if the default behavior is any different from what you're observing?
What I want to know is how Bungie engineers expect us to work with their spawn system if we're forced to guess exactly how it works.
with that test you ran... you overlooked one of the things I'm currently looking into: Distance Parameters. I've found that there are certain rings surrounding a player which have areas of influence... when a player is next to spawn points, they are disabled for enemy players to spawn on.. however, one of the other rings further out increases the weight for enemy respawning in a certain radius so players don't have to spend forever traversing the map looking for each other to kill... I also don't believe height variance is taken into effect with respawning, so the respawn point in the quarry is unaffected by any player weighting. It's simlpy an unweighted spawn. So, my theory is for your test, the player weighting is a little bit less than LoS weighting do when you're looking at the two respawn points, the unaffected spawn in the quarry has the "highest" weight at it's natural weight, where as the other two are potentially on a negative balance due to LoS, even if it isn't very significant..
@Stevo - I wouldn't mind testing your ideas with you this weekend. If we can reproduce in a controlled environment, then I would present the results to JonnyOThan. We have to be careful to have conclusive and consistent results. He appreciated my presenting the LOS overcoming the strong zone, because it was pretty flagrant, but my test was not well designed and was not easily reproduced. In fact, his attempts to reproduce the problem lead me to discover the spawn point counts inside and outside were the factor. I sort of feel bad about not carefully taking into account the spawn points that I had in my various tests. It turns out that individual canvas settings are not the factor - the behavior is seen on all canvases that I have tested. He did reply to my test case regarding your anti zones stacking. He was not able to reproduce it at first. He is still looking at it.