War3:Source

Hoi,

I was gonna throw some stuff out here and would like to hear your opinions. All of the things I mention here are either made by Revan, me or both of us. (Just to clear up some credits, eh? :o) Feel free to comment on them.

Well, we took a look at what was there and what could be renewed, or just used differently. The CS:S hosts among us will know what I'm talking about when I say the mod started to decline. A few server I watched went down in APC (average player count)  drastically and our own server turned to a ghost town within a few weeks.
We had an APC of 22/24 and even at night the server was at least 50% full. Now, we're lucky if one person shows up -- we blame the mass of new games that were released.. But ALSO, the mod stagnated. The users complained about how there are no new things (I don't mean races here, people! We tried adding over 15 new ones).


So here are some ideas we came up with to take this to a new level. Note that probably only a few things will be released before CS:GO, as we don't play TF2. We hope W3S will support CS:GO, because we're really excited to do this. But all of the things we're doing should also work for TF2, we just can't support it.

We thought about how we could implement two great things: race-categories and a sort of skill-tree that we've created. What we came up with was a new thing called Factions.
Factions, as the name suggests, classifies a lot of races into different factions. We've created some, namely: Undead, Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Elementalists, Mechanics, Priests, and all of them are special. Because beyond just being categorized, the factions describe the relationship between two: friendly, foes or neutral. This also affects the way they can be played, but more on that once we're done.

We've categorized most of the classes we use and even removed maybe that just don't fit or suck.
The faction system is completely done and is just waiting to be used.

In addition to the Factions, we're also working on some sort of skill-trees. Sadly, CS:S doesn't support VGUIs nicely (or we haven't figured it out, yet) so we had to do it over the spendskills menu. Basically, when defining a skill, we added three new parameters for the skill, in case it depends on another skill and a specific level of that skill. And when it's not ready, the skill is marked as un-clickable and notifies the user of the req. ([Requires {skillname} level {level}])

We've also done this on a higher level, in race requirements. This is basically like what already is there (minlevel requirements), but since we wanted to define this per faction, minlevel was NO option. So we've added another option to do what we needed.

In addition to that, we're working on some faction-based items that can only be accessed when the current race is within a certain faction. This allows us to create items that are custom-tailored for a certain faction.

We're also working on a sort of global talent-tree where you receive points that you can spend on certain attributes. We've just started on this and the main aim was to force them to actually decide. So in case they ever want to re-distribute their points, server owners could "sell" a scroll that resets them. So they have a way of financing themselves, at least partly.

In order for everything to work out, we are forced to greatly edit the public races. They have to suit a certain faction and we'll be editing a buttload of races. We realize that many race creators will not approve, but as we're not forcing anyone to use em, see it as creativity. We'll be releasing all of our faction, including the adjusted races, soon. Every one is free to use them, so it's up to you. We have a lot of experience in regards to balancing and we think we can figure it out.

So there you have it. That's what we're currently working on.

Some of you will perhaps consider this a bit too abstract and even say it doesn't suit War3Source. Well, think as you will. :d
All I can say is you will all be free to use it to your heart's content.

We just thought we'd let you guys know what's going on beyond the official development.

Feel free to criticize and give us feedback. We'd love some feedback!


Cheers,
Vulpone and Revan

PS: Sorry for the long post. :d

1. Skill/Race dependencys were something I suggested a while ago, so I'm all in favor of implementing those. Grind keeps people addicted, and making a chain of races you need to play in order is a good evil grind mechanismn :>.

2. Factions I'm not too hot about. Seem to complex for the average joe player. I'm not sure if the mod should go into a more complex direction or if it should simplify things to be more accessible.

anything beyond 4 skills is beyond my comprehension as i never played wow or games of those sorts.

remember to keep everything backwards compatible, as im someone upgrading shouldn't expect any change to the appearance of their change race menu or go through configuration hurdles, etc, only when they manually enable these options should they show up.

well, if anyone will want to make use of the skill-trees, they would have to edit the skills of a race. i added three optional parameters when adding a new skill. so unless anyone explicitly wants to use that skill-tree, they won't even notice it.

i made sure of that. i just have to go through some last testing and i'll send you the patch in the next few days.

i can see that youre no fan of 4+ skills, but thats your decision. i know a lot of people who had played night elf so much, they had over 1 million extra xp. one person even had 3-4m xp overleveled on elf, 1m on undead, at least 100k on every other race (and we had other 50 running).

so yeah, why not cater to them? i still think that if someone wants to hardcore grind, they should be able to. as long as it doesnt affect those who DONT do it, its all fun, right?

Make a prestige/rebirth system so they can start the grind all over again  ;D

Funny you should mention it, lol. We have such a thing, but the people wanted to use the maxed races and were proud of their XP. :d

Does anyone have an idea if there is a way to access the space CS:S uses when you get an achievement?
I've been looking forever.. There has to be a way to do it but all of my attempts were futile..

If that could be used.. it would be sweeeet. When I saw what you did in L4D2, Glider, I was so envious of the freedom! -- too bad I don't like the game haha.

Was XP Mod, not me. We operate on the same engine though :D.

I was planning to have a rebirth system on my server where all your skills got slightly more effective but leveling also took a longer time.

I've definitely considered the idea of a rebirth/prestige type thing, but discounted it, as it allows players to become too powerful, unless the benefits are some sort of little things, like a new model. Otherwise players tend to play the same OP race to its maximum prestige rating, making even a slightly OP race nearly undefeatable.

Here's a bit of an interesting idea that I have seen NOBODY do, other than us: Make use of the built-in web browser! This allows for some very interesting ideas, including but not limited to: Skill trees in a visible format, extended raceinfo, statistics, <emph>PERMANENT EQUIPPABLE ITEMS</emph>, and many other things that we never even thought of!

how about sharing it, then?

also, how would this go about in regards of authorizing? does the steam web browser pass any id or any sort of unique information?

because having the user use the browser, navigate to a website, log-on with their information and then distribute a point seems pretty intense. i wouldnt wanna code that

There are definitely ways that you can authenticate a user by steamID through the webbrowser.
I don't really have anything to share, considering that that was for a completely different system, WCSx that we were building, when that was abandoned and I switched to War3Source that portion was abandoned as well, it would require nearly as much work to completely redo it as to modify that particular system to be compatible with War3Source.

I have HTML motd turned off and any server that would force me to turn it back on is a instant blacklist/never return deal for me.

I'm sure I'm not alone in this ;)

Also about the prestige system: You obviously need to increase the xp-needed exponentially. By the time level 1 to 2 requires 2 million xp players will eventually stop rebirthing ;)

Heh, there are some annoying things people do with the MOTD, most certainly, but for the most part the benefits outweigh the annoyances, at least for a game such as CS:S which provides almost no ways to easily show information.

Another idea, one that I don't think I ever really tried to implement was something I THINK I later saw done by another mod was to create a material which would basically show a skilltree, at which point the player only has to shoot through one of the 'buttons' to select an option. I never did work on that enough to see if it was feasible, however.