I can't seem to find the answer to this question. If you tag an object as SKEE BALL OBJ in Haloball, it despawns at some point, correct? How long does it take to despawn, and then when does it respawn (or does it)?
Wow, mega necro-bump. I'm now working on a minigame which involves skee ball objects, and I'm finding that the answer to this question is pretty interesting. If you tag a vehicle as a skee ball object, it despawns after one minute. Moving it around makes no difference - it can be literally flying through the air at the one minute mark and it will still despawn. Then it respawns according to its settings, and despawns again a minute after that. For my game, with 3 min rounds, I have warthogs tagged as SBOs with a 10 second respawn timer; so they spawn at start, despawn at 2:07 (accounting for the initial loadout cam time), respawn at about 1:56, despawn again at 0:56, and finally respawn back at about 0:45. However, if you're in the thing, it doesn't despawn. Being in it sets the one minute timer to whenever you exit. If I drive a warthog in the above scenario until 2:30, it would despawn at 1:30 and reappear at roughly 1:19. I can also confirm that if you pick up an armor ability tagged as SBO, it doesn't despawn off your person. But I bet they do if they're sitting on the ground unused. Need to go double-check that. I haven't tested this on anything but vehicles and armor abilities so far, because that's all my particular game requires. Nonetheless, it's pretty fascinating. I remember back when I posted this thread having a problem with structure objects vanishing; in retrospect I bet they were despawning a minute in, and were probably not set to respawn (as most structure objects are by default).
This is the reason why there are no Haloball puzzle maps. Because everything with labels on it in Haloball is run through a despawning timer. If you've ever played Labyrinth of the Destructaur, you'll also notice that about every 45-60 seconds everything on the map will despawn and respawn immediately. Even if the object is set to never respawn, if it is a skee_ball_obj, it WILL respawn. Basically, there is no fix for it, besides actually staying in the vehicle, holding weapons, or using armor abilities. I've tried grenades as well, but they don't register with goals once picked up and still respawn at the same intervals.
I found that out earlier about grenades (that they become non-scoring objects once picked up) which is too bad. Had a cool minigame idea that won't work due to that. Ultimately this won't put a serious crimp in my current project. It means that very rarely a team might get cheated out of some points they were about to score, but in all likelihood, full teams of 4+ players will never notice it because they'll usually be in the vehicles. I only noticed it because I was testing the map solo and moving hogs around without driving them. Interestingly, I think you could make a puzzle map out of this "feature" if you were willing to put some work in. By using staggered initial spawns and/or different respawn times, you could make the map do some seriously interesting things - platforms that appear and disappear in sequence so you have to keep moving, that sort of thing. It's the only way outside of invasion that I know of to despawn structure pieces. You don't have a whole lot of control over it unfortunately, but it does seem to behave consistently.