Understanding the Spawn Engine - Basic Primer

Oh the Spawn System, the bane of every forger’s existence. How often in games will we be playing on a map and be absolutely baffled by why someone spawns where they did? Well, be baffled no more! I’m here to give a short primer to help you understand how this silly spawn engine goes about selecting where to spawn players.

There are a couple factors that come in to play here; the spawns, the players, and events (such as death, a player’s line of sight, or explosions going off). With the exception of spawn points, everything casts a numerical value over a set area surrounding them that is either positive or negative.(1) Spawn points themselves cast no influence variable, and are best thought of as being a neutral value such as zero themselves. Allies would be a positive influencer, enemies a negative, and recent deaths, active combat, explosions, and enemy line of sight are also negative. The exact values are not something known to us at the moment, and probably will not be divulged by 343i if historical precedent is to be expected, however it is possible for us to distil which influencers are the most powerful, but that’s another subject for another time.

The Spawn Engine actively seeks to spawn players in what it considers “safe” areas; that is, areas that are not negatively weighted, and with higher positively weighted areas being preferred. As game play commences on a map, spawn points will be influenced by the various influencers described in the previous paragraph, and as there are more negative influencers than positive, many spawn points will effectively be “blocked”.(2) While the engine would prefer spawning players at a positively weighted spawn point, this is not always possible, as players actively seek each other out and engage in combat, which consequently brings negative influencers into the area where a positive influencer would be present. This will force the Spawn Engine to fall to its second method of selecting a spawn point: choosing from various equally valued (neutral in this case) spawn points.

With this alternative selection process, the Spawn Engine essentially calculates two factors: Where the most negative point on the map is, and what spawn point of the one’s available is the furthest distance away. Ever wonder why players so often spawn at far extremities of maps? This is essentially the reason.

The secondary spawn selection process has a tendency to be the more often used of the two, but players are able to prevent this and force the primary method by a tactic called “anchoring”. Anchoring is the practice of having a team mate hang back in a safe position on the map, such as in their base, which will give the spawns in their vicinity a positive weighting (so long as no negative influencers become present). This results in their team mates spawning near them whenever they die.

I hope this helps clear up the confusion about the Spawn System in this game. It can be a little rough to wrap your head around at first, but once you’ve got it and are able to actively analyze it in game, where players are spawning really starts to make sense.

1) It’s been stated in the past that ever spawn influencer is actually a positive number, but it’s best to think of them as positive or negative relative to the neutral base that is an uninfluenced spawn point.
2) Negative influencers prevent a spawn point from being chosen if there are positive or neutral influenced spawn points available on the map. Additionally, there is a negative value threshold that prevents a spawn point from being chosen even if it’s the least negative one available (which resulted in Griffball not working initially).

 

No, and they won't any time soon (if ever). Tom French asked one of the guys on the multiplayer team to give us some information on the new "weighting" influences options in spawn zones, but he wouldn't. So far all the information we have to go off of is what we can observe in gameplay and our knowledge from past games, as the spawn engine is an evolution of past iterations, with the most significant changes being values of influencers and the sizes of radius of influence.

 

Bumping this up.

Some additional tips when forging:

Although 343 doesn't really hold forgers to their rule of requiring 64 spawn points, the rule exists for good reason. As individual spawn points lack any "weighting", all influences on the map are dictated by the dynamics of gameplay. Generally speaking, because of this, spawning tends to improve as additional spawn points are added.

Players should think of adding more spawn points as "casting a larger net" of which dynamic influences, be them positive or negative, can catch spawn points. With this "larger net", it increases the likelihood of players spawning in safer areas of the map away from heated action.

Spawn zones should be used exclusively for setting static or sided spawns. Although there is an additional option for weighting spawns, forgers should abstain from using it as the actual level of influence these cast are not yet known.

Spawning Order should not be touched. Spawning order allows individual spawn points (usually applied via spawn zone) to be given a set order of preference, (0 being highest presence) and lower order preference spawns are not selected by the engine unless ALL points of the higher order are BLOCKED. The more spawn points there are on the map, the less likely all points in a given order will be BLOCKED, which results in lower orders never being used.

When play testing a map, it's recommended you keep an eye out for players spawning repeatedly in the same location. The spawn engine tends to prefer spawning players at the greatest extremities of maps, which can result in certain spawn points being over used. If this occurs, try placing more spawn points on the map or moving/deleting the problematic spawn points.

Keep in mind that OPPOSING PLAYERS have the most control over where players spawn in game. This is because the strongest dynamic influence is that of opposing players, and they can effectively BLOCK spawn points in their immediate area. This component of the spawn engine can result in the opposing team easily being able to set up a spawn trap on smaller maps.