Lets Talk Spawns

Probably a good time to bring this kind of discussion up, as I've seen/heard a few people have spawning questions recently. In fact I was trying to explain the overlapping zones to someone a little while back and how it needed the strong zone to actually take effect.

The above "article" should be basic reading for anyone creating a map, and is a good reference on reaches spawn system.

Schitzel you mention that we have no specification of how strong the normal zone is, but in fact we do, and its all we need.

With those 2 pieces of knowledge you know pretty much everything you need to about strong zones and their strength.

I've personally found the simplest is often one of the best, and that's for a symetric map, with static spawning of just having 1 normal respawn zone for each team. This keeps them spawning on their side, and the games default takes it from there. The other that I've seen some usefullness from was a static spawn system on a narrows stye map I made (Apollo), I used a stacking that gave the back of the base a +2 weak, the sides of the base a +1 weak,and then the middle a +0 weak to creative a bit of back weighting that seemed to work out fairly well.

 

I agree with DUCK NG. I don't feel the need to complicate spawning, I've always used a single respawn zone per team, and let the engine handle the rest. Just the idea of team labeling and gametype labeling individual respasn points is a complete nightmare to me. Using team labeled respawn zone also works for FFA as well. But hey, if that's what works for you then by all means... You go right ahead.

Another aspect that comes into play about safe spawning is spawn placement and the layout of the map. In some cases, spawning may be terrible simply because your layout doesn't allow for safe spawning or you just placed them in shitty locations. I find with my own maps that if you just place them right, and forge the map knowing where you'll want them to spawn, then you'll be just fine.

I have however, used a weak zone in my heavy Tempest variant. The thing was, I had spawn hives in the bases, but Players almost never spawned in their respective base because of the layout of the map. The engine decided to spawn players as far away from their death as possible, which it should, and this was NOT in their base is located not far from the middle of the map, and the furthest spawn points were much further away. Since then, I've added a weak zone to saturate the base with good vibes (lol) and since then I've no problems with spawning. Even with Gauss Hogs, Banshees and Scorpions running around on the map.

 

I took all of the information JonnyOthan put out in articles and his ANSWERS to our QUESTIONS and compiled them into an easy to understand set of articles at Forging Reach. It isn't rocket science. But it was a trick to get it all together in a coherent format. (If the skeletal articles on spawning provided enough information for us, then we would never have had the need to ask him questions.)

You do not form theories from evidence. You use evidence ONLY to show non conformance with authoritative documentation (from bungie). In other words, if you find something doesn't work as bungie said, you cannot go make any theory out of it. Instead, you report it as a bug. This has been demonstrated time and again and as a result my blog has a list of known bugs that for some I was working with JonnyOThan on.

And no there is no guess work about relating death influence to a respawn zone. JonnyOThan said that a Respawn Zone is so strong that no combination of negative influences can over come it. I then showed him that it was possible, and together we discovered what it takes to make this bug appear. But the point is you don't have to guess. We have the information already available to us from bungie/JonnyOThan.

 

I got into forge with someone yesterday to discuss spawning. He was talking about how he thought spawning worked. I tried to tell him how it works, but I don't know that it made any difference. Your GT came up in that discussion. I don't recall who it was though...

I am not into discussing theories, because they only contribute to misinformation and confusion. Theories are in no way based upon sound science. But if you want to discuss theories, Stevo's the man I recommend.

All I have is the model that bungie gave us and I only share it with people. I don't debate it, because there is no debate to have.

 

Mr. Green - your blog has been a very useful reference to me several times, and I just wanted to mention my appreciation for it. A lot of spawn questions - not quite all, but most - can be resolved with careful testing, and people have already done a lot of that work (though the information isn't very widespread). Plus Bungie explained quite a lot for us already, and the majority of that information has never been disproven.

Personally, my head was spinning a year or two back when I saw the insanely complicated spawn systems people were trying to set up, with stacks of overlapping spawn zones of various types. I'm like Nooooch: I keep it simple. I try to be careful with my spawn point placement, and when it comes to zones I do things as basic as possible: one hard spawn zone per team, unless the map is weirdly-shaped and I need an extra hard zone for each side to cover specific areas or something. (If the spawn system is dynamic instead I don't use a spawn zone at all, but dynamic systems are bad for the types of maps I usually like to make.) I almost never use anti- zones or weak zones.

Regarding spawn point placement, I really think this is where most standard maps live or die, and I have some general guidelines that I try to follow: 1) Figure out the main areas of the map you want teams (not individual players) to be able to spawn. There should be at minimum 4-5 of these on each half of the map - this is incredibly important for a static spawn system, but pretty important for dynamic also. 2) Make sure said areas are spacious enough for multiple players to pop up, with a clear path forward out of the area, but also cover - they shouldn't be spawning in an intersection between three or four long lines of sight usually; that's a recipe for spawn-killing. 3) Lay down about enough neutral spawn points in each area for the whole team, or most of it, to be able to spawn simultaneously. This won't happen often, but why not allow for it? If you do it consistently across the map it shouldn't negatively impact your system. 4) Make sure no spawns face walls or each others' backs; players should spawn and be able to move forward pretty freely.

And that's basically it. I will occasionally sprinkle in a couple spawns that I think of as "auxiliary," meaning they're in smaller/tighter spots and isolated to one or two spawn points there instead of 4-5 (my standard amount for a mid-sized map). That's just for flavor. But I steer clear of the thing that IMO usually leads to bad, weird, or at least unpredictable spawning: just plopping a million spawns all over the map with no particular groupings. That doesn't work so well except for FFA games.

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As a side note largely unrelated to the above, I wanted to mention something I know a lot of people have stumbled over. Green's blog has an article on this, I see, but it's worth repeating as often as possible just to get the word out. If you are setting up CTF or assault and putting in respawn zones particular to those games, tag them as CTF or ASSAULT - *not* CTF_RES_ZONE, CTF_RES_ZONE_AWAY, etc. The res_zone and ..._away tags only apply to bomb or flag at home or away. If you put down a ctf_res_zone and not an away zone, then as soon as someone grabs your flag, all bets are off - there are effectively no respawn zones for your team until your flag resets. The CTF tag meanwhile is all-encompassing, so that zone will work whether your flag is home or away. (Alternatively, you can just have a zone created in slayer mode tagged as TEAM ONLY, and that will apply to CTF - but also to team slayer, assault, etc. This is usually what I do, but for arena maps a lot of times you need dynamic spawns for all games except the classic objectives.) Most maps don't really have any particular need for separate home and away zones, though Bungie gives you those tags if you want to use them.

 

When you want to discuss Respawn Points, then this is an entirely different topic. And I can tell you that bungie said next to nothing on how to lay them out. There are many different ideas out there, and many of them are good for different reasons. In all my maps I have always favored around edges with backs to walls as often as possible. But recently I have been shown that countdown has respawn points EVERYWHERE, which has reshaped my thinking, particularly when spawn kills are difficult to prevent on a map. I cannot say I know how to set them up in every case, and it is very subject to the map geometry and the behavior of the spawn engine (so knowing how the spawn engine will behave is critical). But in the end the spawn engine will only do so much and if the map cannot make safe spawn locations, then you will see the occasional bad spawn where an enemy spawns directly in front of you. I wish I had a simple solution to point people toward, but I don't.

 

Just wanted to say thanks to you guys for sharing your knowledge of the spawn system. I've had my initial questions answered. All of the information presented was clearly summarized at the end of MrGreenWithAGun's "Working with the spawn engine" blog entry. But...

I'm left wondering why it is "best practice" to do this?

 

Very good question.

I am a software engineer, so I think like one, particularly along the lines of re-usability of software. In this case, re-usability of Respawn Points.

Ultimately what makes this best practice is the fact that one Respawn Point can be used for both team and FFA game play, and even multi team use. In other words, it makes the map far more maintainable than having three or five Respawn Points stacked upon on one location. It is simply far more eloquent than any other approach.

 

Well as I've argued this point with schnitzel already I don't trust a bungie employees word on spawning. No disrespect to him but to me it seems like bungie has no idea how to make a spawn system. I can safely say at least half of all of my deaths on reach are from spawn kills. To prove this further, tomorow I will play 5 team slayer matches and get a percentage of spawn kills.
Schnitzel has tryed to argue that my method of using a tic-tac-toe pattern of spawn zones doesn't work by the basis of what the spawn zones do. Although they may not have the exact effects they seem to, I've tested this method of spawn zones and it has worked repeatedly on everything from 2v2s to BTBs. Personally I believe having proof outweighs any hypothesis you may have.
To further prove my point, my good friend DHG redemption has made a 2v2 map using my method of spawn zone layout. Over the course of 5 or so tests the percentage of spawn kills out of all respawns was only 1 percent. The same map with a style of structure specified by schnitzel (that he says should work better) was nearly 22%.
I'm not 100% grounded on exactly all the influencers that the spawn zones plus number and density of spawns plus player location has, but I do know an overlapping tic-tac-toe pattern works.

 

My theory on how this stuff works:

Respawn zones give a fixed influence (~four friendly deaths for strong, one friendly for weak, one enemy for anti) plus player and death influences in their area
Respawn points take influences from players and deaths in their area (unknown how large) and enemies aiming at the respawn point (I've had enemies spawn in my crosshairs so I'm unsure if this even exists.

I know all you people who know about this stuff are going to start bashing me because this is completely wrong, but using respawn systems based off of this has worked out pretty well for me so far.

 

Again, there is no theory. It is what it is said to be by those who wrote the software and are the only ones who could possibly say anything about it, or it is a bug. Nothing else.

 

Its too bad that they didn't provide a deeper and more through user documentation to the public, but at the same time I can understand why they would've left certain sections abstracted.

Something I've heard discussed before, but never seen any official documentation on, or definitive answer for. Is the spawn point choose when the player dies, right before they spawn or at another set time (ex 2 seconds before respawn)? This is a rather critical factor in spawning because it means that point may have been safe, but are not by the time some goes to respawn there.

The part of spawn points was brought up earlier though, and I think ultimately this is the key to good spawning. Proper placement of spawn points keeps players from spawning in sight, or at least reduces that risk. I doubt there is really any definitive structure for this since it will ultimately depend upon the maps structure, its LoS's, and the players playing the map.

I'm going to use asylum in an example real quick. It has pretty open lines of sight as we know, and im sure many here have been spawn killed on it before. Part of the problem to me lies in the fact that most of its major spawn areas lie in view of the center of the map or the enemy base. This means that the enemy only need control into the center of the map to begin to spawn trap. If the enemy is in the center and their base, this means there is no kick out spawn to be used in the center of the map that is safe.

From my perspective asylum has 2 kick out spawn areas per team, one is inside the ring, the second is underneath your teams car/the enemy sniper bridge. By having someone in ring it is eliminated, and by having say your snipe in your objective, you eliminate the car sideo ne as well. That is ultimately how I feel aslyums spawns fail. It has los's to most if not all of the major spawn areas without the enemy team having t extend past mid field. If the enemy team was forced to push up field more, then the kick out spawns become viable, but due to the structure of the map they do not always work to the effect that they need to. As the enemy can keep all spawn areas in front of them in view.

Well if anyone follows what I'm trying to say I'd love an opinion/comment or if you didn't follow that ask and I'll try to explain better what I mean.

 

Look at it again. It's adding more detail where bungie leaves things out. If you know exactly how the spawn system works, please explain.

 

pyro, in my first post in the thread, see the first quote i used, from the original article by JonnyOThan, and see this page from Mr. Green's site, specifically the part about Line of Sight. Those 2 in combination contradict the theory that you posted above.

Also a question i raised in my last post was partially a response to something you said about spawning in the crosshair, and that is when does it decide where you will spawn?

 

I had an interesting conversation with JonnyOThan on a topic about LOS and other sudden/immediate influencers and I think it is safe to say that the decision as to which spawn point to use is made in the computer cycle in which the spawning occurs.

He said that while LOS will negatively impact the weight of a spawn point, explosions do not, because they are instantaneous. And the next moment when a player spawns, there is no explosion to do damage.

 

I forgot to add in the special case for strong zones not adding double the value.
I have seen cases though were players will spawn outside a strong zone due to some absurd combination of events that occasionally occurs in big team. I remember it had 4 somewhere in it, possibly an overkill or something can create a large enough negative influence to overcome a strong respawn zone.