I thought this would be easy. For an infection map I'm making, I want to make players spawn (not respawn) in two places equally. That is, given 10 humans, I want 5 on one spawn area and 5 on the other. My solution to this was to place one initial spawn on each spawn area, and fill the rest of the spawns with respawn points, kind of like what Bungie does with their maps. What this leads to is 9 people spawning in one place and 1 guy spawning in the other. I want to avoid the use of teleporters (using one sender and two receivers set to the same channel) as that would deplete my teleporter supply by 25%, and the map I'm making relies on teleporters for zombie movement. If all else fails, I could use the teleporter system and add some sequential zombie respawn points spawning throughout the game, but this has problems of its own. Any ideas?
Games use something I like to call "sequence spawning". If you've ever looked closely at the begining of a game, you'd notice that people don't all spawn at once. Instead, one person spawns at a Starting Point, then all the other Starting Points are filled up, the all the other Respawn Points are filled up. Based on some internal testing I've done, I've come to believe that the Respawn Point sequence is based almost entirely on where the first spawning teammate was. That means that when Person A and Person B spawn in seperate rooms, everyone else is going to spawn by Person A, because he was the first, initial, spawner. If you want to fix this issue, simply place several Weak Respawn Zones by where Person B spawns, and remove Person B's Starting Point. It might take some trial and error, but you should eventually be able to make the Respawn Zone have the same amount of "pull" as Person A's spawn. Again, most of this is based on unsupported testing, and the theories I've made as a result. Use at your own risk. Cheers, Hari.
Actually, your statements are wrong. Using weak zones will only influence, but not determine conclusively. And the Spawn Sequence property does not affect player spawning in any way (if that is what you referred to). What he is seeing is that both of the initial spawn points are used, because respawn points are never used before an initial spawn point is used. So two players spawn, one in each area. Then the spawn engine will spawn the third player. If both areas are equally laid out, then it is a 50/50 chance of choosing either area. If one area has a respawn point closer to the initial spawn point, it will probably be used, since the proximity to the spawned player is higher. Regardless, once that third player has been spawned, there is more weight from the two players than from the one, and the fourth player will spawn with the two. This will continue until you get 9 and 1. What he saw was entirely predictable. The proper solution is to use 10 initial spawn points as was suggested earlier in the thread. They must be used at initial spawning before respawn points can be used, so you can control exactly where all 10 will spawn. For more information, you can read my article on spawn points. Actually, as I think this through, there is a way to take the two groups of 5 and make their selection more round robin. You need to use a respawn zone around each group, then layer weak zones to give varying weights to each point. What this will do is allow you to define priorities so that each group has initial spawn points at one of five priorities - 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Given only 8 players, you can be certain that priorities 1 through 4 are used first in each group, making 4v4. With only 6, you will see priorities 1-3 used in each group. To do this, take points A, B, C, D, and E in a group (and then the other group too). Cover a group with a respawn zone, then A, B, C, D in a weak zone, then A, B, C in another weak zone, then A, B in another, then A in another.
I'm not so sure this would work for any game size above or below 10 humans. If it is 8 humans spawning it is going to be 5 humans on one side and 3 on the other. Too much and there's not enough places for players to spawn. If you add more respawn points I would imagine it would further imbalance the team sizes, but I'll try it. Thanks for the idea. All I'm worried about is the initial spawn of the humans. I never knew respawn zones affected initial spawn characteristics (lol I thought they were, you know, respawn modifiers). But it's good to learn new things. I'll try your idea too. Thanks for the info as well. [br][/br]Edited by merge: Yeah, I want to make the game playable with any medium-large game size. The 10 initial spawn point idea is making me cringe, because it wouldn't work below the suggested game size too well. I may just have to re-tool the map around the spawning itself with the randomized teleporters, and figure out another way to keep the zombies close to the humans. Thanks for the help as well.
Actually, I realized after I wrote it that proximity influence does not, but zone influence does. See my edit to my post for how to do this. If you do it and it does not work, I really want to know. Ya, this is getting complicated, but its not like bungie gave us the tools to do everything our minds can image...
Not at all. The idea for my map is to split the humans into two squads. The map is going to have a city feel (lol real original, I know), and the gameplay is going to be a destination infection game like the No Hope series by Rifte Gifle. The teams will travel together towards their destination oftentimes giving eachother covering support and opening ammo crates for each other that they couldn't normally get by themselves, but they won't be able to physically meet up with eachother until the second to last part, which is a Warthog run. Also, I plan to use a similar system from Godly Perfection's chess game, where the hill is set on one armor ability that each team gets. The radius for the armor ability is pretty big (not too big though) so everyone on that team gets the hill effect. Everyone inside the hill gets increased DR, and weapon damage, and the hill rotates every 30 seconds. Only one team can get the benefits from the hill every rotation, so it would provide for some interesting gameplay. The problem with the hill system is when the guy with the hill dies, there becomes only one hill, and the game glitches and the announcer says "Hill moved" over and over. I tried setting the respawn time to 1 with the min set to the max but it doesn't work.