Excellent post! This will surely help all my maps, especially my larger ones. Anyways, i thnik the spawn orders may dictate how they are checked, which could be done 2 ways (i think so, anyways) 1- It looks for 0, which covers 3 spawn points. Noone is near any of the spawn points, so it spawns you there. Now you die, and it looks for zero. someone is near the spawn points, so it looks to number 1, which is still too dangerous for its liking, so it then decides to go to number 2, which is safe so you spawn there. 2- this one seems alot more likely. What it does is it looks for 0 and if its not safe it goes to 1, then you spawn there, and then it picks up at 2 and continues from there. Maybe it throws in the "uncovered" (as in, not in a spawn zone) spawn points randomly aswell. I dunno, its something to think about. At any rate, what we REALLY need is some difinitive answers from bungie!
You've really gotten me interested in how the spawning system works, I guess all I can contribute with is that I've spawned in a grenade explosion sometimes in matchmaking. I'm going to keep reading this thread and I think it's a really good idea to send some official Forge Hub questions to Bungie.
In case anyone missed it, Bungie gave a little more insight to their rather complex respawning system in last weeks update: "A few weeks ago we pointed users to MLG’s first ever ESPN Halo 3 Top 10 and we were interested in Strongside’s creation of the Halo 3 Spawn Trap (it’s number two on the countdown and in Bungie Favorites right now [slot 14]), was the film an exposure of a bug? Multiplayer designer Tyson Green investigated and sent this info-heavy report back: A clip of this film was graciously supplied to us, and we've determined that everything is operating By Design. What happens here is that Blue lost four players in the shotgun corner almost immediately prior to the spawn camp. This resulted in that corner having an extremely negative weight (-2000), ruling it out as a spawning area. Meanwhile, a red player was crossing the middle to grab the flag, ruling out those spawn points too (-1000, plus an additional penalty from his enemy bias, so probably -1100). Another red player was standing on top of their sniper tower, so those points are also off limits (-1000 to -1100). The following happens in rapid succession: 1. One blue player spawns in the spawn trap, and dies. Those points are now -500. 2. A second player spawns, but because all of the other points are -2000 or -1000, he spawns on the -500 points. He dies immediately. Those points are now -1000. 3. A third player spawns, but the -1000 points are STILL better than any other available points. However, because he's there, his teammate positive influence is bringing these points up to -900. 4. A fourth player spawns at a -900 point. The third player dies literally 2-3 frames later, followed by the fourth player. These points are now -2000. 5. A blue player spawns back in their base, where we'd expect him to. The cycle is broken. The dead teammate influences have a duration of 20 seconds, so they are starting to decay towards the end of this episode, and I expect spawning has returned to normal at this point. It's basically a perfect storm of Red dominating the Blue team. Note that on the default version of this map, the respawn zone is larger, and there are some backup points above the flag that likely would have come into play.†I'm guessing by that last comment that the MLG version of the Pit has it's CTF respawn areas changed around from the default version.
Wow this is great Furious. Im working on a symetrical map right now so this is gonna help alot thanks.
thanks for taking the time and look forward to hearing more My take on spawning - use 1 neutral spawn covering the entire map and rely on the game engine's spawning system. If the neutral spawning system doesn't work, then there's a good chance the problem is with your map design (as it works with the game), not the spawn system. Another way to say this is you may have an easier time changing your map design to work with the spawns than vice versa. Consider the game's spawn logic: - I can't find a single good spot to spawn the player anywhere on the map - but I have respawn areas - now I will look again within a *subset* of that initial area Also - let's assume the game engine uses its own logic to choose the next respawn area - based on the testing it seems to. I'd guess the logic used in choosing a respawn area would be very similar to what's used to choose a respawn point. 2 main causes for bad (predictability aside) spawns I've noticed: 1) messed up situations 2) spawns overloaded I've watched a good deal of gameplay stepping through every single action and spawn in games. Almost all of the bad spawns I noticed fall into the messed up situations category. Most also made perfect sense...until moments before the spawn. They did not happen because the spawns were overloaded - there were other open spawns available (that were used appropriately in other cases). These are cases when a chaotic situation instantly turned a good spawn into a bad spawn. Thus I don't think spawn areas will help much with this. These are just some thoughts, not necessarily right but hopefully helpful.
That is exactly how i set up the spawning on my maps. Its worked a treat every time. I'm going to start making more spawn areas, as per this Tutorial, from now though. Thanks for the info peoples.
This was brought to my attention by Feign, so he deserves all of the credit for this. When you place a spawn area node directly on foundry's ground, the node is raised just a little bit above the ground, now normally you wouldn't think this would effect anything but it DOES. Because the node is raised in the air, the spawn points placed on the ground are NOT in the spawn area. As a result, any spawn point placed on the ground now does absolutely nothing. A simple fix is to make the spawn area drop down .5 or 1 so that it does reach all the way to the ground. A lot of my maps that I have had trouble with using spawn areas now work MUCH better than before.
Hmm... I always assumed bungie would have been better to us than that. That's probably why Cyclopean's spawns were so messed up originally (maybe?), and why none of my little tests ever worked.
Probably. This really changes the dynamic of how spawn areas work. You would have thought Bungie would have fixed that small issue....maybe I'll bring it to their attention.
Damn, I was hoping for something a little more...eye-opening. This is an interesting conclusion, but unfortunately I've already been doing this. Not because of any excellent observation like Feign's done, but I was simply copying Bungie. If you look at their (limited) respawn areas, they all extend waaaay into the ground. I guess I just lucked out. It does seem like a really rotten thing to not tell us, though. Their respawn tips were already woefully inadequate... This is a great find for all those who haven't already done it, and I hope it really does help a lot of people with their smaller maps.
Just when you thought spawn areas worked, this happens. Blue spawned directly below me in a FFA slayer game. There are respawn areas on the map. I don't think they work in FFA games, and even if they do there are a lot of good spawns in the area besides the one directly below me. I guess the game decided that because we were on different levels it would be a safe place to spawn. It wasn't.
Why wasn't it safe you mean? It wasn't safe because I was jumping out of that area right as he spawned. It's a small map, but it isn't that small. I dropped down there and killed him.
No, spawn areas don't work in FFA from my experience. If you remove them and let the game do it's thing, you should be fine. It's like the only gametype that you can leave untouched.... usually..
I'm of the opinion that respawn areas can work in FFA. If I remember the forgethrough of your map correctly Furious, for Slayer you only have two team respawn areas and they overlap each other. I think that 1. Team designated respawn areas are ignored in FFA. 2. Having neutral respawn areas (that extend into the ground) set to the random 0 setting can be utilized in FFA. 3. respawn areas cannot overlap or they will not be used in the determining of where a player respawns, especially when they were just killed in an area that may be overlapping one or two others. Even though it's a small map, there's not a whole lot of spawn points. Adding more may help.
Furious, your work is amazing, and this is most helpfull for me. I give thanks and use this great tool now to fix that stupid spawn killing problem ^_^