I have seen this argument before. But it assumes that you can define systematic behavior by observing empirical evidence, and you cannot. [br][/br]Edited by merge: If you ever come across a case where you can create such a spawning scenario and it looks to you like you found a new combination of events, then I would very much like the map and the film clip to study. Such an event is a bug and to study the map and the film can help identify what caused it.
Hence the word theory. I would say hypothesis if this were a more scientifically inclined community. Sure you can't define systematic behavior, but you can make a pretty good guess. In a game of CTF my team was being spawn killed for about a minute then wiped out in under a second when the enemy team swarmed our base and we all respawned in the enemy base. I checked respawn zones afterwards and saw there was just one covering each base and its surrounding area. Other than that instance spawns were fair to good so my guess was the absurd events leading up to that moment put an influence on the respawn zone high enough to send us to the other base. I've heard about it happening from other people (the four friendly deaths thing) too so I don't think it's a glitch. You appear to know everything about spawns so I'll let you decide.
I'm sorry, but did you even read the thread? Its pretty ignorant to completely dismiss what Bungie said simply because you don't trust them. Now as for the map in question and our "argument" over the spawns, I said that the zones were pointless because they accomplished the exact same thing as my method, giving an evenly distributed baseline influence. Using zones or not, every spawn point has an equal amount of influence affecting it. I did state the spawn placements were an issue, but that's a matter of opinion and my inferior knoledge of the subject prompted the two of you to dismiss it. The reason I told you that your spawn theory was WRONG is that you believe the spawn zones confer the influence of other factors that occur within to all spawn points in the zone. This is simply false. Now I appreciate your attempt at contributing to this thread, but your statements about percentages are an outright lie and an attempt to provide false data to back your claims. You're overlapping zones do work, but not for the reason you think they do.
Ya, I would call it a guess... a freaking wild guess. I can only tell you that my career as a software engineer tells me it is nothing more than that. On another note altogether, the idea of not trusting the publisher??? Really? Who are you going to trust? Someone who has no freaking clue what is happening under the hood? That makes no sense at all.
They do OK. The system definitely has problems though. I don't believe that for even a millisecond. You're talking about dying within 1-2 seconds of spawning, yes? There's absolutely no way that's true, unless you only play against coordinated teams who know how to spawn-trap like crazy. 5 tests? That seems like not nearly enough. Personally, I still believe that good spawn point placement, and having plenty of spawn points, is far more important than any complex system with zones. I use a very basic system on all my maps and have never had any "22% of spawns result in spawn kills" outcome; if I did, I would have been looking for a fix a long time ago. But I'm willing to be proven wrong. It's actually not all that hard to do limited tests of this stuff - create a very simple map in forge, place spawn points and zones around to set up both models, and get a few friends to help. You should be able to find out based on friendly deaths, LOS, etc. how the game determines which spawns to use.
I really hate to burst the bubble you and Redemption have, but we played the same map again, 3 times with respawn zones, 3 without. There was no real difference in this session between the two. I'm not saying the spawn zoning system he has is bad, just that in one case we got a 1% chance of spawn killing, and the other we got no change from no spawn zones. The system is confusing as hell and I am not going to pretend I understand it beyond some placement of spawn points. However I figured I should mention this result of our findings on this more recent round of testing on Redemption's 2v2 map.
Bungie explicitly stated somewhere that they are nt going to fully explain the spawn system to avoid other developers stealing it or parts of it. Even for those who trust bungie, that should be enough to not trust their little explanation. Sure it's probably correct but there's a good chance they left some important stuff out.
Its called abstraction, and every developer is going to do it, most even more so than bungie has. They gave us plenty of implementation details to accomplish what we need. It would be foolish from their perspective to give us a more detailed version of the inner core of how the system works. Ultimately it could be useful to know some exact details to manipulate some finer details, I think you can do quite well with the information provided
Look, it comes down to they told us what we had to work with and how those pieces function. With that information, you can use the tools they gave you to make a map function correctly. There are limitations with their spawn engine. But you have to realize that with any software product there are trade offs as to how complicated it can be and how much performance hit you are willing to take for the complexity. The spawn engine is a real time engine component, which means it cannot sit there and take time to think through every possibility (which is infinite in size). The engine is one of the best out there from what I have heard. Is it worth stealing? It doesn't matter. They have an obligation to their stock holders to protect their intellectual property. You all don't think past the obvious as to what their motivations are. Once you understand them, it will always make sense.
Ah, that makes sense. I have a few questions about that, but I'm sure I'll find most of the answers by reading through more of your blog entries. Thanks again