Telenode and map-based teleporter behavior changes

To clarify by “they” I meant just the individuals blocking the spawn and not the players that spawn.

Spawn blocking (as a strategy) is bad and would be removed. Instead of that undesirable player behavior, they should instead kill the spawn.

ur face.

Just because a thing CAN (or previously could) be done doesn’t mean it SHOULD be done… What sense does it make that a dretch can prevent a human from spawning, or that a human could prevent alien from spawning merely by sitting on top of the enemy spawn? In fact this maneuver as a ‘strategy’ is just stupid. Just kill the spawn…

It makes sense momentarily if you want to prevent spawning during the few seconds it takes to kill the spawn (depending on what you have). If a dretch can’t kill a node, then it might make sense for a dretch to block and wait for a team mate who can kill the node to come over.

however, if that this is effective, then it should be done.

u’re missing the point. a basilisk or a dragoon can wait next to a telenode, and immediately chomp down every spawing human; and a mass driverer can focus on an egg (from some distance), and drive every spawning dretch. there is no way u can deal with these cases (at least using anti-spawnblocking measures). so therefore, it would just look stupid to try to handle certain corner cases, such as when the above noted campers stand right on the telenode/egg.

from what point of view? from a strategic point of view, it’s useful. immersion (“it would sound stupid, in real life, that someone wouldn’t want to destroy its enemy”1) is a different point of view.

1 actually, humans in real life would really like to experiment with aliens, breeding them in controlled facilities.

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I suggest you to program a little JavaScript instead of Haskell, re-watch this a couple of times and think again.

irrelevant.

Program a little JavaScript instead of Haskell and think again (that there are more ways for a game to be punishing than mentioned in this video, and that an online multiplayer games can be unnecessarily punishing as well).

no, whatever u’re thinking is WRONG. if u believe otherwise, state ur thoughts.

For context, I’ll describe the event that was the direct inspiration for posting this topic. cron and I were playing with 3 other players on the test8976 server, on the map Nintendo Land. cron and I were on the alien team, and the other 3 players were on the human team. The humans moved their base to the grey room, which only one entrance, and that entrance is through a teleporter (the grey room also has one teleporter to get out). Only grangers, dretches, basis, adv basis, and maras can fit to teleport to the grey room. Eventually cron and I did defeat the grey room, but after all 3 humans rage quit from there not being a decent amount of time of very little to no progress for both teams. The other thing is that they did not build the best way for gpp, there wasn’t even a defense computer to autorepair the rets (had there been a defense computer, it would have been impossible for us to defeat that base even with no human players).

The ideas in the original post were brainstormed as a result of this teleporting problem, and the proposed concept was expanded to also address spawn camping issues, which can be very common. lamefun can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the point he is making is that such camping behaviour with teleporters and spawns create a punishing scenario that is at least virtual impossible to solve regardless of skill.

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The blue glow emitted from telenodes could act as a weak energy shield and repulser beam field offering limited protection to a newly spawned player that also gently pushes all players ‘up’ and ‘out’. This would make aliens get pushed away from base of the node (while directly over it) instead of just sitting on the node they would have to try to kill the humans teleporting in which would be invulnerable to attack for a second (but also unable to hurt the alien). Instead of telefragging - the player spawning in should cause massive knock back with upward force as they spawn in from the base of the telenode. This still gives both players time to quickly position themselves to try to kill each other once the human has fully phased in, and disallows any player from blocking the spawning ability of the node.

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if u spawn-die, there is no punishment: u don’t lose anything that u otherwise would have had (though the enemy can gain a lot; good job for capturing a spawn1).

1 ofc that automatically doesn’t make sense, because whenever the enemy wins, u lose

missing the pointdid i mention that u’re ? the most significant part of spawn-camping is that the campers get a load of credits/evos. postponing the humanchomping by 1 second hardly makes any difference.

You lose: time (that you could otherwise have spent, well, playing the game properly).

Maybe with an extra second humans have a chance to step out of the way and gain some situation awareness and injure / kill the spawn-camping alien or deconstruct the camped spawn?

This is true if it happens once or twice in a few seconds, but repeatedly being killed when you spawn for each consecutive spawn, without getting a chance to spawn elsewhere at a non-camped spawn, is punishing. Those situation happen when all or most of the remaining eggs are camped, or if there are significantly more players thn spawns in the spawn queue, or if the last spawn is being camped.

WRONG. if u spawn from a captured telenode/egg, then that most likely means that u can’t spawn elsewhere (so there is no difference for u), because the other spawns r overloaded (if they exist at all). if u actually can spawn at multiple telenodes/eggs, then what u lose is just 2 seconds, which is practically nothing.

i’ll also note that in the overloaded case, if u were once in the spawn queue, and had to reenter after a spawn-death, then u don’t lose time, but rather not gain time. and when u happen to spawn from a non-camped telenode/egg upon the “first” entry, u gain time. or, obviously, u see that there is an average spawning frequency (based on the amount of non-camped nodes), and camped nodes add some dispersion.

situational awareness is hardly of any use. a dragoon will still chomp/pounce down a human easily.

about destroying the telenode: no, because the proposal is for the spawned, invincible human to not be able to hurt the aliens as well (obviously, what is meant is that damage can’t be done by the spawner as well).

about deconstructing the telenode: there is hardly any difference: if the camped node is deconstructable at all, then the best way to deconstruct it is by immediately looking down and executing “deconstruct”.

I moved 5 posts to an existing topic: An educational video

When i read the title; i thought you were gonna suggest telenodes as teleporters. E.g., step on one, pop out of another.

I like the idea of telefragging, with the stipulation that it only telefrags human team players who have gone AFK while spawn queue, etc (general standing on node when shouldn’t).

The existing spawn-block smack is abusable; we used to use this as human and alien to reach ledges we shouldn’t be able too until s2 or tedious hardcore parkour. (Though quirks like this are why I like Tremulous)

I’ve seen F server make use of telenodes as teleporters, where you would press q at a node, and teleport to another one, and you can keep pressing q to cycle through all of the nodes. This might actually be something good to implement in mainstream trem (it would be easy enough to implement I think, since the code already exists) . There has also been discussion on these forums about doing something similar for aliens with hovels: Can we bring the Hovel back? - #4 by dGr8LookinSparky

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