Oddballs and kill zones

I don't prefer it, because I don't like to have players outside the map for 10 seconds at a time. It can be especially annoying to fall from a floating platform map and not die for ten full seconds. It's less annoying, and you have more control over it, when you run outside the playable space and are in a massive soft kill - in that scenario at least you have the choice to return. But it may be annoying to your teammates (who are a man short for ten seconds plus respawn time) or the enemy team. And I don't like to encourage jetpackers to try to find ways to break the map; hard kills are pretty strong discouragement, even if you don't hit them immediately upon leaving the map (which I think is a little severe).

Also, in your system the ball would only get reset if it's thrown into a soft kill. If it's thrown outside the soft safe and doesn't hit a kill zone, it won't reset - so you still have a potential problem.

Anyway, the main purpose of this thread was not to get into a discussion about how or how not to kill zone maps - just to explain a bug that people will want to avoid.

 

Due to multiple factors (dynamic lighting, budget and object limitations, and player orientation) I don't like to fully enclose most of the maps I build. I also don't like to make them float in space every time. And I let people play using jetpack if they want. So... there you have it. I do generally prefer physical structures as a way to keep players inside the map and to prevent them from breaking designed map flow, but it's just not always possible unless you want to trap them in an ugly white box all the time. My current preference is just to make it exceedingly difficult for them whenever possible, and make it more easy and thuddingly obvious from a visual and feel standpoint how they are supposed to move around, and stay inside of, the map. If they still try to break it, that's what kill and safe zones are for.

What I don't do is put them in an open field with a kill zone to prevent them from going too far. But even Bungie has used that approach a couple of times (on Snowbound and Sandbox) with some effectiveness. I don't think it's entirely off-limits as a design decision.

I'm well aware of them, thanks.

I tested it like this: I had one spawn point and one oddball spawn sitting in a 4x4 soft safe zone. To the left and right of the zone were a hard kill and soft kill, not overlapping with the soft safe. Ahead and behind me were no kill zones, just empty space. I spawned and threw the ball to various places. It behaved as I described - if I threw it into the hard kill, it didn't reset, unless it went all the way through and out the other side. If I threw it into the soft kill, it reset after a brief delay. If I threw it forward and out of the soft safe, it didn't reset until falling down into the water; it quite clearly didn't reset when just leaving the soft safe, which is what I would have expected it to do. (And also, what it does when leaving a hard safe - I did the same test again, just swapping out the safe zone type.)

 

No worries. I'm exactly the same way.

You're right, I did misunderstand. And I completely agree, obviously. It should be clear where the map ends and non-playable space begins; preferably, it should be very difficult to even reach non-playable space.

That's very weird. I used Ravine also, with a platform built down by the water. I may still have it saved - I'll have to check it again when I get the chance just to verify my findings.

 

Update to this old thread: I found out in a map I'm working on now that the same problem exists with soft kills outside a hard safe. That is, my map is surrounded (with a bit of cushion) by a hard safe zone, and there are some soft kills that overlap around the edges of the safe zone and extend down to the ground (this is on Impact, and the map floats some distance above one of the asteroids). I was testing and found that throwing the ball so that it came to rest inside one of the soft kills would cause it to sit and not reset. Easily fixed it by reducing the Bottom value so that the ball always falls out of the soft kill; then it resets.

My final recommendation then: try to keep all kill zones inside your all-encompassing safe zone, no matter which type of kill/safe zones you use; and if you have kill zones outside the map and the safe zone, try to have as little area as possible where the ball can come to rest inside the kill zone. Ideally the kill zone just won't extend to the ground. But if your map is at ground level, just don't use wide kill zones and you should seldom have this issue. The reason I seem to keep running into this is that I kind of go crazy with kill zone size, making them massive (max top/bottom and usually max length plus a width of 15-20) to make sure I'm not missing any spots players might use to break the map. That means there's often a lot of space outside my safe zone that is covered by a kill, and also has natural geometry for the ball to sit on and not reset. I'm going to be a lot more careful with my kill zones going forward, mainly by making them a lot smaller and letting the hard safe zone do most of the heavy lifting.