Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20180827202615/@comment-3547390-20190922221339

Sounds definitely like a struggle, I can see you have been pretty busy lately.

Yeah, from what I saw it just wasn't my style. I do like the fact that he went through each level and offered on opinion on each, very nice manner to do a review that I rarely see done. But the Quad Rampages just slowed things up in particular. A good way to understand what I mean, take his video and jump to a random point. You are likely to hear a Quad Rampage with no audio from him, which just feels like padding. A big part of what I try to do is to continually talk, I feel silence ends up coming off as awkward and breaks away attention, so this sort of thing just happens too frequently and wasn't much of an interesting running joke. I also am not a big fan of the screenshot jumps that seem to pervade more popular recorders like this one. Overall, I just find it overly produced and not really containing anything that drew me in.

Of course, my tastes tend to be more towards the origins of Let's Plays in general, the Something Awful community in particular. I miss the era when people would put up pictures of plastic toy dinosaurs and ramble for 20 minutes about something that had nothing to do with the game, only to wonder why they were playing a game and then advertise plastic dinosaur toys. The players of today seem too... flashy... and don't focus as much on this type of stuff. It is more Reddit or Facebook oriented, catered to normal people who have the attention spans of rodents and yet don't want to appreciate cheese. Yeah, I think it hard to describe what I mean, but there is just a world of difference between this and the stuff when Let's Plays were more fresh.

Funny thing is that I think you mention that almost every year, shows you how important it is.

EDIT: Random Server Ambitions

Big news for the server, I am finally working on tackling some of my biggest gripes. Namely, trying to make the server so that the player that is dead stays dead, but gets a spectator mode. A new mod (not on the Wikia yet since it has a lot to tackle, of which this is but one small part) has led to a better spectator mode with certain mechanics that previously I questioned the possibility of. Previously, the problem was always that upon death the player couldn't type an impulse and get to spectator mode, so said modifications were entirely useless. I have found one that allows you to press the fire key upon death, whereupon you get to spectator mode, which works perfectly with what we are trying to do.

There will be a delay on spawning so that stuff like Q2 doesn't become an issue. Furthermore, each level will reset the player's resources back to shotgun start. It might make sense not to do this for the vanilla game, but the monumental number of levels that have nothing to do with each other becomes problematic when every single level we need to reset our resources. I also find that even for the vanilla game, coop means that a shotgun start is not necessarily a bad thing, and can increase the difficulty on top of all the other difficulty enhancers (which you need when you know every secret like we do).

Another great reason to kill the ability to transfer resources between levels? We are starting to accrue quite a few campaign levels, which can be chained together with relative ease. We could make some unofficial episodes, likely with Enter the dragon having its difficulty portals instead link to four Episodes. This means the benefit of having another campaign series that isn't just start and stop a bunch, plus a much better flow for something like Aftershock which does not properly reset player resources (since it is very easy to have the mod also working for Aftershock, the only thing preventing it from just working with the base game are that some textures are the same name while being different sizes).

Left without consequences, the balance would be horribly broken. In fact, one of the big issues of playing levels with actual level exits on the server would be that you would jump to another level, such as E1M1, which would result in you being stuck with the new Weapons. We would need to jump to Introduction, then go to another level, which could be quite the hassle. It just feels like it is better to make it all shotgun start based, especially since my videos have proven that you can complete such solo, and cooperative should be harder than a solo version.

Note this is a big thing for the server and is quite the hassle to "code", since I essentially had to learn what half the functions did so I could get things working right. The defaults were horribly off what I wanted, which meant a lot of redesigning. But I am happy to report most of the major issues have been worked out. The player can shotgun start each level without issues from what I have seen. Dying results in either key placing the player in spectator mode, whereupon they are stuck until the level changes or the map restarts. They can move around the match, watching the surviving players. Note that while an automatic restart would be best, currently it would require me to restart the level, which is relatively simple and easy to control.

Spectating players are entirely invisible, some in the past have been floating players but this one is entirely unobtrusive to the living players. There are no visual effects or tints, it looks just like the normal game, which I felt was better than the annoyance of stuff like the JAFO patch. It was designed with Deathmatch in mind, so the main issue was getting stuff like notarget to work right (it was pretty bad flying around and being able to alert the map just by being a spectator). It was latched to a bunch of other stuff, which meant detaching it led to weird issues such as losing the Shotgun or regular mode just being specator mode but slower. It has been quite the struggle to get to actually work, for a while it seemed like the modification would just deposit errors.

Just need to get the delay settings working, everything else seems to be working fine. Only problem? Threewave works by delaying the time it takes to respawn after death, I need a delay that prevents each player from spawning for a short but random amount of time. So close, yet so far unless I can find something that works well here. In fact, I am not exactly sure such a delay COULD work, since what is the player's position prior to existing in the world?

The better alternative seems to be using frag limits, there have been ones that kick the player from the server when they hit a certain negative value (Oh how I found those mods terrible, but in this case it could be modified to work for good). Perhaps I could use the trigger for entering spectator mode and call it when the player hits such a negative value. Will require some messing around, but it has the potential to work, and sounds more intuitive than having multiple controls that either jump into spectator or respawn. DaScott's Quake Deathmatch mods does what I described, but is closed-source. Quake plus kills the player on -10 and is luckily open source, so hopefully I can work with that.

Doing a basic test using the spectator mode modification along with some variables I figured out on my own, I managed to change the behavior of the spectator mode. If the player has -2 frags, or has died twice, they will just spawn into spectator mode. Aka giving that little space I need to allow support for stuff like Q2. Now, I am not sure if due to it being a telefrag and punishment for killing a teammate if the value is more extreme than 1 frag, but that is pretty easy to change. Aka later on today I should be able to iron out the remaining issues with spectator mode and thus fully bring the server to the style that pretty much has been the goal all along but could never be possible. We are finally getting the largest and most essential portion of the server done, meaning from now on it should be a lot more brutal and punishing, but also a lot better than the older limitation of just sitting there on death or having to kill ourselves prior to switching levels.