http://ace-spades.com/forums/topic.php?id=3714

The tags...

Anyone hosting this?

Ok, I think I'm all done -- I added parking spaces in the empty areas of the lower levels, I changed the pillar-space-blocking logic so that it avoids cars interpenetrating the pillars properly (but not the stairs), I tweaked the recoloring strength, I slightly tweaked the ramps to be a teensy bit wider and shallower (squeezing out one more space on the ramps).

The garage has 828 parking spaces, but typically you only get 768 vehicles because of the blocked spaces (exactly how many are blocked depends on how large the vehicle is that it tries to place in the blocked space).

I never did come up with a better car-clumping algorithm but whatever. Also I should probably change the recoloring algorithm to do a hue shift in HSV space instead of what I"m doing now, but I don't care enough.

@1337101, let me know when you're happy with your cars and we can make the final release. If you want, I can send you a copy of the generator for you to test with locally.

Ok, I fixed the solid voxel issue with KV6. Hey look, the cars have rear-view mirrors! Cute.

I also did the don't-recolor-grey, so I just have to do the interior parking spaces now.

I think we should change the color of the blue cars--they're too close a match to the blue markers on the map so they act as a sort of map camaflouge, but there's nothing like that for green. Maybe make them light blue or something.

@Lythrynx: Camping overall isn't a huge problem with be, but with the spawn-focused combat I'm a bit concerned about spawncamping (which is annoying). The hollow cars mean that part of the cars will fall off if we don't add elements to them that interfere with the asthetics, and it also means that griefers will have little trouble encourage the rest of the cars to fall off (though griefing even one of the vans only requires the destruction of 12 blocks in the tires anyways... but at least that doesn't leave a mess like a cracked-open car). So the hollow cars will probably have to go.

The hollow cars are very camper-friendly (not saying that's a bad thing). It's quite fun when you kill several incarnations of the enemy Intel carrier before taking even a single hit.

The main problem I see is that, although the griefers won't succeed in taking down the building, they try anyway and tunnel out everything at eye level so you're not left with any cover in the spawns on the lower levels.

Hopefully generating the interior parking spaces and cars down there will fix that.

Was playing this last night and it's a surprisingly good map. The fog adds to the atmosphere. You hear noises echo through the bunker-like structure as you search for your car.

Yeah, I saw a lot of that, but I never saw anything that I couldn't fix with a single block. Usually a single step gets taken out in the process of slicing through the pillar.

If anything I'm more concerned about the widespread griefing of the stairs that I saw when I was there.

To me it kind of screwed up the map.

I should step away from gameplay now anyway before I have to ragequit. There's a lot of griefers and trolls (even more than usual) on at the moment... and of course, no matter how good the game, server speed, and map are, add in a bad playerbase and no admin presence that I could find, and you've got crap. I'll get back to building some models and playing Dwarf Fortress, where I KNOW the goblins aren't hacking (I wouldn't put it past the elves, though, nasty creatures).

Overall though, yes, I think the map design is fun. It adds a bit of a fun element since even with the intel it's still tricky to pinpoint the enemy's vertical position. Raids are very much the fun element here. You can expect some fun without even leaving your spawn, and as a bonus it's not like the spawncamping in Hallway... the structure prevents spawncamping (or any camping, really) from being a big problem, so while you ARE slightly more likely to get spawnkilled, you'll also get a fair shot or three at revenge.

I don't think it had happened when I posted before (I had looked on the map at least and didn't see that, but maybe I missed it).

I think expecting admin on AoS servers is unrealistic in the long term. But that that level of destruction doesn't bother me too much anyway. It's a far cry from griefing the whole thing.

From the tests I've seen nobody has ever even managed to destroy a significant chunk (say, all of the area in between four pillars) of even a single layer. Plus, I'm sure that even if you mined out all of the bottom pillars, the top of the garage is well over the 4,000 block limit required for a structure to float freely.

EDIT: Was just on there and someone had, indeed, griefed out about 120 blocks of area from the top level. Still, that's on an Aloha server, and the Aloha servers are generally known as the most poorly moderated servers on AoS (and possibly in all of online gaming, it's that bad. I have yet to see an admin in one of the servers. Poor form, guys!). Hopefully the griefing will only be an issue on poorly-maintained servers. Servers like Gregery's or CheeseToast's shouldn't have such an issue with this.

...

have you seen that actually happen?

because if you read the thread, you'll see us discussing all the various anti-griefing strategies built into the map to prevent that.

(i just checked and the one that's running now is still solid)

and then some deucebag goes and griefs the whole thing.

Yeah, it can't hurt. But it's also no hurry, since you can always add more vehicles even after my code is final. Even if there's an "official" release it's not like there can't be an official update.

yes, please :)

@nothings: OK, sounds like a simpler solution. Would you still like a few new models to add some shape variety as well?

I should probably still fix the loader to make the vehicles solid. Then make it a command-line switch whether it creates hollow vehicles like now, or solid like they should be. Except I don't really WANT to fix the loader since this is all an undocumented part of kv6, so it feels like kind of a waste of time. But I probably need to do this for other reasons, to have a proper kv6 loader for other generators.

Thanks izzy, I've swapped those models in.

I'm going to change the recoloring code so it doesn't affect black/grey/white, and that should fix the pastel truck problem.

i didn't realize the models themselves were solid inside. i'm glad the loader makes them hollow because it's better for gameplay. but you're right, that's why the bumpers on the sedans don't have support. i added two voxels under the bumpers to fix that: http://aloha.pk/files/aos/fixedsedans.zip

all the other models look fine

That may be a bug in my loader. The kv6 format isn't very clearly defined, so I think I'm not generating solid interiors when I should be, instead all the car interiors are hollow, and I'm losing the supports on that one.

The pillar problem is kind of a pain. Currently I have code that detects if spaces overlap pillars and it suppresses generating a car in that space entirely. However, if I do that if the pillar overlaps the space by just one voxel, then a fully populated garage has way too many empty spaces from pillars. So I used a kind of fuzzy rule about whether the pillar was too close, which seemed to work ok, but I guess it's a little too aggressive on some of those spaces. So I probably need to change it to try to track the pillars and suppress cars that overlap, instead of spaces that overlap.

no, not griefed. every car of that specific model is missing 4 blocks in the front. it will look fine in slab6 and voxed but any blocks that don't have vertical or horizontal support will disappear when loaded by the server, which is the case for those 4 blocks of that model.

I think someone must have griefed that car. I checked the model with hollow-fill and it said the car didn't have any interior cavaties (and there certainly weren't any exterior ones).

I blame the second picture on bad driving. Obviously the driver was a terrorist who wanted to shoot up Doc for conning him out of some plutonium, and was paying too much attention to his AK and not enough to his driving.

27 already, wow

well, i think it looks pretty good as is, but some more variety certainly won't hurt

one of the models has a hole in the front:
http://i.imgur.com/VllDA.png

and the pillar problem you mentioned:
http://i.imgur.com/q2kH4.png

We have 27 at the moment, so I don't think 30 would be quite enough. I should probably just start producing a lot more color varieties for the cars that look good in other colors (AKA "Not the vans").

ludicrous amounts of cars would be great

every single stall doesn't have to be unique though, it's normal to see identical cars in real life

i imagine 30 or so uniques would be plenty

You're right about six... although it's defnitely an improvement over the previous setup. The ratios seem about right, anyways, which will give me a good reference point for further sets.

I like the color variety in seven, to be sure, although it won't work as part of the generation code with what it does to white vehicles (those vans look like a bunch of easter eggs, and not of the "guns hidden in the back" variety).

If you want, I can take the amount of cars to "ludicrous" levels and make hundreds of car models for a huge increase in variety... how many cars total does the garage usually have? By making more models than will be used in a map, I can make repetition a lot less common.

If noticed a bug as well... sometimes the longer cars (particularly the vans) generate "merged" with support pillars. Is it possible to redefine the dimensions of the parking spots that are partially occupied by pillars to prevent this?

@1337101: here's a map with the new vehicles http://silverspaceship.com/aosmap/garage6.zip -- looks good.

It still looks a little repetitive (esp on the map), since that's just the nature of random numbers, so I tried adding in mild recoloring -- there's enough color variety that I don't need to turn red cars into blue, but turning them into different variants of red might be nice. http://silverspaceship.com/aosmap/garage7.zip -- which I think does look nice in terms of being less repetitive, even if the headlights and axles and tailpipes and such all get inappropriately recolored (but the recoloring is pretty mild). Although it turns all the white vans into pastel colors that look dumb. But i'll probably leave it in as an option (but not the default).

I've done all the tasks on my previous list except the new clustering algorithm and adding the missing interior spaces. That'll get done over the next couple days, and then I think we'll be ready to release unless you want to do more with the cars.

OK... lost a fortress and made a bunch of stuff. Here's a new set, with 10 sedans, 5 hatchbacks, 4 vans, 3 SUVs, 3 pickups, and 2 sportscars:
http://filesmelt.com/dl/Vehicles1.zip

Could you generate a map with this setup and upload a copy for me to check out (and let me know what you think as well)? This should fix the proportions up, and add quite a bit of variety.