I am stumped. Can someone with Halo 3 forge experience tell me why the spawning player only spawns on A? The map is Sandbox. The two zones are neutral respawn zones splitting the map down the center length wise. The two spawn points are equal distance from the center (shaft to basement). The two spawn points are on blue end, enemy is on red end. Enemy is slightly off center in zone A. Flag stands are all next to each other in the middle by enemy. Game mode is CTF. Spawning player teleports to basement and suicides by rocket. If I move enemy anywhere on red side of map (where is is already) in either zone, no difference. Only if he moves close enough to A, then spawning player spawns at B (enemy proximity). I am beside myself trying to figure out why spawn point A is preferred over spawn point B. If anyone has any insight it would be much appreciated!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Here's what I understand from the situation, hopefully I can clarify things. Think about each spawn point as a number regarding its "weight", defining how good of a spawn point it is. Each spawn point has a small area around it (I believe about a double box length in radius) that adds "weighting", for example, has a teammate died here recently? -100. Is there a teammate in this area? +100. Is there an enemy in this area? -500. Can this spawn see an enemy player? -200. Note that my numbers are just random, but you get the idea. In addition to this, spawn areas add extra weighting! So, it can add a little extra negative or positive weighting if the enemy or teammate is in the area, if somebody's died recently, etc. Okay, so now on to your problem. I'm going to say that your spawn points are too close to each other, making them essentially weighting each other (this is a desirable trait in many competitive maps, hence why clustering spawns is often a good idea if done correctly). Their weighting is almost exactly the same, but an enemy is in one neutral zone (relatively low weighting in comparison to the multiplying weights of each other). That said, there's probably some kind of tiny, impossible to detect difference -- the engine can choose a spawn based on pixels, and it can be extremely frustrating to figure it out. I'm gonna suggest that you try to reduce some of the weighting between those two spawns to make that enemy in a neutral area weighting effect more. Try moving them farther away (at least a double box), and making sure the B side can't see the spawning player! Please do come back and let me know how it went, I'm curious to see what causes it, this is only my best guess given my knowledge of the H3 spawn system
Could be that both points have equal weighting and spawn A is simply first in the internal list of possible spawns, by virtue of being added to the map first. Delete them both and replace them, paying attention to the order you put them down in, and see if there's a correlation. It was confirmed in Reach that enemy presence in a spawn zone didn't affect the weighting of the spawn points contained by the zone, and that all respawn zones simply apply a flat weighting, so I feel it's safe to assume that spawning in H3 works in a fairly similar way. Thus, without the enemy proximity influence, both spawns would be equally weighted. There is no "better" spawn, so the engine just picks the first one in the list.
THIS ^ is what it appears to be. So it is the last point laid on the map (the first on top of the collection object) that is chosen first amongst the highest weighted points, and being in the zone does not affect the weight of the points in that zone (proximity will, but the zone is a flat weight). This also means that there is no random value applied to any of the points to make spawning appear less predictable - that feature was introduced with Reach.