The Stevo Spawning MethodPLEASE NOTE: This is not a guide on how to understand the Halo: Reach Spawn System, this is simply a method I have found that works and works well. As I frequently visit the largest Forging Community site on a day to day basis, I like to think I can contribute in some small way from time to time. Being the keen Forger myself, I always like to learn more and more about the Forging techniques in Reach so I can take potentially great maps, and make them flawless. Now, whether you play with me or not, you may know I've been forging two maps recently (well if you consider 3 months ago recent...) and I've been really stuck with the spawn system on Reflect. Now, I consider Reflect to be finally at a stage of release due to the fact I've created a new style of spawn system which so far (fingers crossed) has been unbreakable. This guide shows you how I implement the different Respawn areas to create complex calculations for the spawn system so it really does determine the best place to spawn your players. I've taken a lot of inspiration from Halo 3's 'The Pit'. This map has been deemed by many Halo players as the greatest map of all the Halo games. This isn't just due to it's layout, but it's also partially due to the fact the spawn system was "Semi-Predictable". By that I mean, when you set up a spawn trap, the enemy are left with two locations to spawn in. One option is the trap zone and the other option is free. So, using my innovative spawn system... I've figured out a way to implement the same spawn system on Reach Forge Maps. It's so far been functioning fine for both Reflect and Parapit, which is why now, I'm confident enough to release this information to you guys... Step 1 - Designating a spawn location. In step one, you need to figure out where your bases are located and end. It should be pretty easy since you built the map with a plan in mind (or I hope you did :O). I've drawn up a very simple layout of Parapit excluding all height changes, line of sight blockers, and some walls so it's pretty much just a box in a box. I've labelled how far each base stretches in comaprison to the map. The corner is where the objective would be located. Step 2 - Creating a Canvas Spawn area The map is layed out symmetrically with the spawn system, from this point forth, only Red Side will show changes Step two is all about defining the Canvas spawn areas. I chose Parapit as an example because it's a rather a complex layout when it comes down to spawning as single spawn areas don't bend round corners. The way I have it set up in the picture above is so two Weak Respawn Areas branch out over a wide area. When implementing spawn systems you have to take consideration of two factors: Permanent Influencers and Temporary Influencers. A Permanent Influencer is a Spawn Point or Respawn Area. They cannot move, or be disabled further on in the game (They can be spawned later on though if I'm not mistaken) and for this reason when building a spawn system you need to first establish areas that are "safe" for respawning. Now, taking into consideration Temporary Influencers (Players movement, deaths, allies etc...) you need to find a way to keep the whole half of the map greatly influenced to the Allied side. Most people at this point place a "Hard" Respawn zone down because it has a larger influence. However, as soon as enemy players enter a "Hard" Respawn zone, it's effects are greatly reduced. I chose Weak Respawn Areas to be my canvas because they can stack (As shown in the picture above) and if enemies approach form one side only, only half of the area is affected in the diagram above. Step 3 - Adding extra weight Once establishing your Spawn Canvas for each side, you need to add extra influence. This is where the "Hard" Respawn areas come in handy. They've been given a weight of somewhere between 2-3x more influencing than Weak Respawn Areas. So, considering a Weak Respawn area is approximately the same weight as an active player, if using the traditional "Hard" canvas system, if 4 players entered the "Hard" Respawn Area, every single respawn point on the map will be granted a balance of 0, and there will be no influence at all. If your team mates are then further out in the field, you've got much more chance of spawning in the enemies base (which in flag is the ultimate spawn fail) or somewhere in the neutral grounds where you don't want to be. Considering the line of sight on my map, I split up one of the longer runs and overlapped two of the "Hard" Respawn Areas. I know this doesn't affect anything in terms of weighting, but it does mean if an enemy player is in the overlap zone, they put a negative balance on both Respawn Areas causing players to spawn "out of harms way". This may be something you need to implement when trying to predict player movement. Step 4 - Preventing the enemy In this step, I've changed the key for the image. The shaded section is the existing spawn system with it's density (I haven't shaded the Hard Respawn overlap as it doesn't add extra influence). Notice how the most concentrated respawn area for Red Team is actually in it's objective location? The Blue boxes represent Blue Team Anti-Respawn Areas. These should be placed in the exact way the original Red Team Weak Respawn Areas were placed. This is because, as you increase the odds of Red Team spawn, you want to make sure you're decreasing Blue Team spawning to make sure you're dividing the combat effectively. Step 5 - Adding extra weight To put it simply, just adding those respawn areas WILL NOT give you a flawless spawn system. Every map is different and you WILL need to tweak it in accordance to your map. To add extra weight, simply place more Anti-Respawn areas or Weak-Respawn Areas where needed. In the map Reflect, I have 4 Anti-Respawn areas placed across each base to prevent them from ever spawning there. I also have stacked on each set of respawn points 2 Weak Respawn Areas (minimum) and 1 Hard Respawn area (giving approximately a +5 player weight, not counting allied players present etc...). I spent a good 2 hours stress testing this set up the other night by Spawn Trapping. It took a good load of tweaking to get settled on the point where every desination I predict a player to spawn in when being trapped, they still have alternative options to spawn in, and most of the time spawn out of my player line of sight. Thanks for reading, and above all, I hope this has helped you aspiring forgers. Thanks to DtL, further spawning information can be found Here
Offtopic: TGIF pl0x? Doesn't look too advanced for the average forger to learn, but it looks like possibly a good measure to prevent spawn killing from teammates spawning in the enemy team's base or enemies spawning in your team's base. I think there may be more advanced spawning systems out there, but this one looks like it could help some people. Good job, at that, though.
Makes alot of sense - a most useful spawn guides. The diagrams certainly show how spawn overlaps work. I used overlapping circular weak spawn and zones which converged over the bases and a regular spawn zone on my last map, i found this to work delightfully well for when the enemy team entered a base - the spawning players would move toward the outside as enemy influence centralized. Your diagrams show not only how this works, but alot more in terms of spawn control. Definitly highly usable. Put this one with the other spawn guides and sticky it.
It's an interesting guide, except you cannot stack two weak zones together. When they're overlapping their values are not added together. However, a weak mixed with a regular spawn area does stack. No two same spawn areas can be stacked together, but they can be mixed for varying results. I can try and dig up where I pulled this info from, but I know it came straight from a Bungie employee. Also something I just learned about the spawn system: Spawn areas only influence team designation and their weight influence, nothing more. Everything else (enemy proximity, deaths) are simply handled by the normal spawn system. I found this to be shocking because I always assumed the spawn area applied an influence of those negative values to all spawns within the zone. When in reality each spawn is still considered individually and not as a whole within that zone.
Duly noted points. It seems we've both drawn information from Bungie at different ends of the argument because the article I read was listed on b.net front page and stated that Hard Plus Hard = Hard Hard + Weak = Strong Hard + Weak + Weak = Very Strong
Before i srs didnt understand spawn zones and tended to put about 3 in the map but this has helped alot. Thanks.
And yes, you can stack different spawn areas to get varying influences, however overlapping the same type will result in no change: Strong+Weak= Really Strong Strong-Weak = Kind of Strong Negative weak + Positive weak = Neutral Strong + Strong = Strong Weak + weak = weak I'm still looking for the actual article itself [edit]: Found it! Spawning article [double edit]: Just realized they do combine if they're within a normal zone, turns out we were reading the same article, lol
Aye same article... I didn't really know about the player thing though. Which is always nice to know. However, it seems strange that you can set up spawn traps by positioning players I still think there's a lot to the Reach Spawn system people aren't letting onto. EDIT: Just saw your double edit, LOL!
The way I've been doing my spawn areas is placing one large area over the whole map and then placing anti-spawn areas in either base so that the teams don't spawn in their enemies base (except gyroscope that has a unique spawn system). However the way you have explained seems to be a lot more effective... but I'd be way to cbf to implement this into my maps.
Actually, if you dig deep enough you'll find that JohnnyOthan has revised a lot of the things he originally stated about the spawn system. Johnny and Joeski have been writing up a good bit about how spawns really work in private forge groups at bnet such as the WorkPlace and T00LB0X. Edit: If you really want to learn the values of each spawn zone as well as other influencers such as deaths, team mates and enemies; conduct a controlled experiment in forge. After doing that I've learned my previous spawn guide based off of JohnnyOThan's guide is more or less debunked.
Honestly, my theory to working spawns is to put as many as I can in as many locations can rationally hold a spawn point; the more that you use the better reach's system works. And once you have that, play a couple games and work out all horrendously bad spawns, and somehow it all works itself out. At least, thats what works for me.
That's more or less what I do. I also simply go with a respawn zone for each team's side of the map. I'm under the impression that hard respawn zones, if active, don't allow that team to respawn anywhere else. This nearly ruined one of my maps before I figured it out. I'd literally be able to stand ten feet above on team's spawns and they'd always respawn there no matter what. Also saw that the OP mentioned spawn zones being spawned later in the game, this may work in Invasion but doesn't work in normal slayer. I've tried.
I remember respawn zones in Halo 3 spreading the influence of kills, deaths, and players to spawn points in the areas. Does this still work in Reach or do the zones just add to the baseline influence?
The respawn points already do that in reach. And they were much more complex in Halo 3, even more so now... So, basically, it did all that AND add an influence to all spawn points, a value which was inversly prop..... (trails off and talks for several hours about his theories on spawining and the trivial differences between the games systems) Basically, though, what you need to know is that the spawn points already do all that on their own, and respawn areas influence each spawn points primary effect.
If you are a Red Team player and there is a Red Team Strong Zone, you will always spawn in it, period. You cannot spawn anywhere else. If you don't want Red Team spawning in Blue Team's base, just don't extend Red Team's Strong Zone that far. Problem solved. There is no need for anti-zones or any such nonsense.
Couldn't be anymore more wrong. If your theory is correct, how would you explain how my spawn system has been failing for the past 3 months in Reflect? I had your method of a Hard zone placed for each team and teams were spawning in enemies bases. I placed Anti-Respawn zones down, it still happened. I placed small weaks inside the hard... it STILL happened. This is the only way so far for me that doesn't break through player influence. All other spawn systems I've implemented I've tried to stress test (Placing more than realistic amounts of enemy players inside respawn areas and killing enemies in their spawn zones to see where they spawn) and they've all failed until now, which is why I've posted my method online. If you (as in everyone) does not agree with this method and have already found a way to spawn people, then you're under no obligations to implement this method from now on, it's here to HELP people who have no idea how to implement ANY kinds of spawn systems.
Stevo, bring me into forge sometime with you and we can devise something that works for spawns. At this point I've got it down to a science, but am far too lazy to write up an article ATM.
I dont quite get it. I was with it until you added the hard respawn zones. Basically the way i do it is putting hard ones over the main respawn zones and weak ones over the secondary respawn zones.
A few things to clarify... Spawn Zone (Hard) is maxed out influence. It forces all spawns to take place within it. It should only be used to define team spawns, and in the case of nuetral area an additional Spawn Zone (Hard) should be included to allow spawning in said area as well. This may come as a shock, but there is no negative spawn zone. A Anti-Spawn is merely the lowest influencer... An anti set to a team specific merely states to spawn there if there are NO other viable options. A Weak Zone and a Spawn Point not within a zone are roughly equal in spawn influence, the weak zone often times barely outweighing the individual point. The influence radius of a point is better in most cases than the boundaries of a Weak Zone. Now as I said earlier, go into forge and do some controlled experiments to learn the spawn system for yourself.
Stevo - did you by chance have any neutral zones of any sort placed? I had issues with the spawn system on City by the Sea. (It still has some minor issues, but I think they are mostly due to the map being so tiny - the game just doesn't decrease influencer radiuses to compensate, so you get some bad spawns at times.) The main problem I was having was this: there's a front and back "deck" which contain the objectives, a neutral center room, and ramps on the sides where the initial spawns happen. I basically wanted blue team to spawn on their ramps, their deck, and the center room; and I wanted red team to spawn the same, just the opposite side and deck. I was tearing my hair out going through what you were going through - players spawning on the enemy's deck was the most prevalent problem, and it tended to happen in objective game tests. What I eventually realized was that I had some neutral spawn zones covering a few areas that were placed in an attempt to sort out the issues with people spawning in each other's laps. Neutral was being treated as both red and blue, so it acted as an additional hard spawn zone. I stripped the map down to nothing and then added back a very simple system - two hard spawn zones each for red and blue. Since then in numerous tests and games I've never seen a player spawn outside of their own hard zones.