[Project]Base Melees

Date 06.05.2014 22:02 Edited 12.05.2014 20:57

Hello community,

I am starting a project to create a Base Melees scenario folder. In short: It will be made for the OpenClonk game content
and I hope to be able to merge both settlement and melee game play into a fun experience.

Checkout the github repository for more details!

Goal
====
The goals of this project are easiest presented in a list:
* Develop fun scenarios based on all aspects of OC game play.
* Provide a consistent setting for scenario development, but also for the player.
* Interact with OC development to improve the OC game content into the direction of base melees.
* Provide a package with scenarios suited for league and tournament play.

Development
=========
For development I am using a github repository, which has a nice overview of the project. I am working according to the
release often principle which allows for fast bug fixing. Currently the content is developed for the tutorials branch but this
will change to master as soon as the controls branch has been merged into master. And of course development is open
and any one is invited to join/contribute/test, the whole project is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 so you can reuse it as you
wish.

I am at least looking for someone who is willing to translate the project into German, and a few beta testers (at a later
stage). It would also be nice to have someone to do some small graphics and of course some scenario designers would
be welcome as well!

Future Contents
============
Some content I am planning to add is:
* 12 base melee scenarios, all in different settings.
* Allow team leaders to place a small settlement on round start.
* Awarding medals for special achievements (incentive for unorthodox gameplay).
* Specialized scoreboard using Zapper's new GUI (might get ported to OC).
* New rules: Domination (elimination on base loss), NoBorders (connected map borders).
* Messaging system for: medals, kills, destroying of bases.

FAQ
===
Let me also answer a few frequently asked questions (I might add more later).

Why don't you add this directly to the OC repository since you are an OC developer?

Mainly because I want to keep control of this project, also because I want to be able to release more often and provide
players with bug fixes faster. Moreover, it not being part of OC also allows new developers to join more easily and I want
to be open to other people in the community, especially fans of (good) base melees.

I wan't to join development/I have ideas/I want to play - How can I do that?

Ideas and feedback can be posted directly in the forums, I am trying to make the scenarios as balanced and entertaining
as possible, so all feedback is highly appreciated. If you want to join development, just pm me here in the forums. Currently
development is on the OC tutorials branch, which makes it a bit hard to join, but I will switch to master as soon as Zapper
is finished with the controls branch. Playing until then is next to impossible :) so be patient.

More Details
=========
I attempt to add more detailed posts later when development is progressing, I will provide links to these posts here.
* Base menus
* Extra rules
* Medals

Thanks To
========
* Pitri: inspiration for the medal system.
* Gecko: inspiration for skylands scenario.

Discussion & Suggestions
===================
I am open for discussion on all topics and suggestions are also very welcome. Also pointing to good base melees in CR from
which one can learn a lot is useful (and I like to play them as well!).

By ala

Date 06.05.2014 23:00 Edited 06.05.2014 23:11

That's the best clonk news I've heard of in a long time.

>* 12 base melee scenarios, all in different settings.

That's quite a lot. I'd say rather focus on like 2 or 3 and make them really good.

>* Allow team leaders to place a small settlement on round start.

Awesome! Actually I just remembered, I once had a concept made.. was it with Shadow? We had exactly this idea to give fair starts on dynamic maps.

[Edit]
Found it! 3 years old. I'll attach it: Most of the stuff didn't make it to the OC discussions, but the transport Post did... sad and funny, that no one ever reacted to it.
Well the concept document is PRETTY big and in German. I'm not sure if you want to go through it. It's so big that I won't have an easy summary either. I'll probably have to re-read it as well to extract the finer points of it.

Attachment: OCBuildings_Melee.txt - Old Building concept (26k)

By Maikel

Date 06.05.2014 23:06

>That's the best clonk news I've heard of in a long time.

Thanks!

Twelve was for the future, I am hoping that other people get inspired as well and add scenarios (twelve is the absolute maximum I will allow, beyond that number you loose overview in my opinion).

I myself will at most produce four scenarios, especially since I agree that having few good ones is much better than a lot of worse ones.

Also over time I hope people continuously add feedback from playing, like you gathered for your league/tournament mods, and I hope to implement that feedback as well, to provide the best competitive experience, but let's see that will happen :)

By ala

Date 06.05.2014 23:33

Rough and quick translation of the relevant part here:

1. The startposition:

Method a): Starting position with a mouse click: To achieve a fair and ideal placement on dynamic maps (not an elevator beeing generated above rock material), the players should be able to place the location of their start-buildings. The problem is: Fog of War. You can't show the half map to the players, that would kill the exploration aspect. So first the FoW should be modified to only show vague structures of the surface (and not the subsurface - you want to explore where certain mining areas are etc), or alternative to this - limit the sight to certain areas only. Also it should be impossible to detect the enemies location.
To secure the camouflage of the team-bases, certain team areas would have to be defined which can't overlap. The order should be random (not left to right, like in CR).

The placing algorithm with the mouse, can be enhanced to make the creation of whole castles possible. And this would again, be another create tool for Newbie-Scenario editors, which could just create objects without script knowledge.

--- Problems which follow from this:
a). Camping inside the Building-Place-Object: This problem is assuming that the clonks are not placed, till the buildings are all placed with mouse clicks. And with this, a player could wait and lame with this, or discover some other players activities and react to them. To avoid it I suggested to make the FoW smaller with time, so that they can't camp forever. And force the rest of the buildings, if the players wait too long.
Well today, I'm thinking this is not clever - just place the clonks, and if the player doesn't place his buildings at the start he cannot move. And if he waits to long, the clonks would get killed. That's an easy practical decision.

b) Players joining late:
Well if you dynamically divide the map into areas, you can't add another team (run time join). This would be imbalanced.

Summary: On a dynamic map, every player get's a start area and can place his base with mouse clicks. Late joins must be limited to static teams, and you should only be able to watch your allies.

---

Method B (no mouseclicks):
B) The old system should be usable and accessable in the scenario.txt. Because in some rounds it is not desired to start with this mouse-building idea.

By Maikel

Date 07.05.2014 09:26

Thanks for translating this, I fully agree with the problems mentioned, below how I try to solve them.

With the new map scripts in OC it is relatively easy to create random maps which still have equal starting positions. For example the first map I am working on contains 4 big sky islands and some smaller ones. Those 4 big islands are exactly equal (apart from MapZoom effects) and placed on a horizontally stretched map with no borders. Since the islands are equal and there are no borders each team gets an island and has the same starting conditions. The small islands contain valuable materials like explosives and gold, but those are beyond initial reach anyways and only provide minor luck.

So how I did it so far is, a team is spawned (also all its clonks) and the team leader can place some structures, while seeing the whole island, but nothing more. Also the team leaders clonks are spawned already, so placing the structures fast is essential. Since that also allows other players to start constructing weapons, etc.

Runtime join is always an annoying problem, but not important for league and tournament games, so I don't want to spend any time into that at the moment.

method B is always an option for the scenario designer indeed, but I hope the mouse placing will be a success and that method B is never needed.

By Apfelclonk (More than 200 posts.)

Date 08.05.2014 14:13

I'm really eager to see where this goes. If there is some need of players to test the game and I'm on IRC you can ask me, most of the times I'm up for a round of OC.
By the way, am I the only one who finds it hard to look at the models in the menus? The engine always renders them a bit dark and behind that semi-transparent background of the menu with the patterns of the earth textures my eyes kinda hurt, when figuring out which structure I'd like to build.

By Maikel

Date 08.05.2014 18:07

Good to hear, that is already one betatester :) We have to wait until the controls branch matures a bit more though, so don't expect too much in the coming months.

I agree with you on the menus, unfortunately I am not able to change this. Maybe make the background a bit less transparent also helps.

By Zapper

Date 08.05.2014 19:07

>Maybe make the background a bit less transparent also helps.

For the inventory menu, I decided to make the background completely oppaque (see this attachment in the OC forums).

By Maikel

Date 08.05.2014 19:20

I indeed saw that this helps a lot and will make sure the menus in this project will have low transparency.

By Pyrit

Date 08.05.2014 21:57

Or transparent white. I wouldn't mind inconsistency with current engine menues. :tongue:

By Nachtfalter (More than 1000 posts.)

Date 08.05.2014 20:27

*volunteer* for testing

By Maddino (More than 50 posts.)

Date 09.05.2014 13:04

wow ich love your background sky :cool:

By Maikel

Date 09.05.2014 14:34

That's because it is exactly 20:15 in that screenshot. For this scenario I decided not to let the time of day change, cause I always find that very annoying in melees.

By Maikel

Date 09.05.2014 21:05

New Rules
========
OpenClonk is still lacking some rules necessary for functional base melees so I created three new rules (most of them are
already known in the CR community of course). Let me describe them briefly.

No Borders

The famous CR rule which connects the left and right border of the scenario to allow all objects to pass through the scenario
border. This is an absolute necessity for all base melees with more than two teams, so that some teams are not in the middle of
the combat.

Domination

Teams or players are eliminated when they loose their base. In OpenClonk the base currently is defined by a flagpole, marking a
certain region in the map. If you loose all flagpole you will be eliminated. I believe that in base melees the focus should not
be on killing clonks or keeping clonks alive per se, but should rather be fun and destructive. So about attacking bases and
defending them rather than to hide with your clonk in some hard to reach place in the landscape. In combination with the next
rule I hope this leads to more fun game play.

Base Respawn

This rule respawns a clonk for the player when his or her last crew member dies, as long as the team still has the clonk as base
material and there are still sufficient funds available. I have in mind to make clonks cheap and readily available so that players
will take risks with their clonks and engage in combat faster and in more experimental ways. Especially since the clonks are much
more agile than in CR I can see base melees become more aggressive and fast paced than in CR. Possibilities are flying over to the
enemy with a boompack and then dropping a few flints, hop on a catapult in the enemy base and fling back to your home. A single
attack which can be done in a 10 to 20 seconds. But which is of course risky and I would have never dared the equivalent in CR.

Team Materials

Of course teams already share their clunkers, but I also intend to let them share their base materials, this is more or less
obvious I suppose. This rule is not available yet, but will be implemented in the OC main package soonish.

Suggestions & Discussion

I am open for any suggestions on this topic, since I think there are probably more interesting rules for base melees which can and
must be explored!

By Maikel

Date 12.05.2014 20:56

Medals
=====
First of all let me thank Pitri for inspiration and allowing me to implement medals in OpenClonk as well. So what are medals?
Players can earn medals for special achievements like making three kills in a row, or blowing up an enemy base. Medals are in my
opinion a good way to make players do more fun and crazy things, especially in base melees I want to reward players for such actions.
So every medal comes with a small clunker reward so that more weapons and materials can be bought. So far I have implemented a few
medals and a basic rule which keeps track of the medals per player. For now the medals are stored in the player data locally. In
contrast to Pitri's system the player can earn more medals of the same type, so that in the end you just increase your collection.

Medals in the League

The medals are already stored in such a way in the player data, that this can be translated directly to the league storage. However,
there are still a few technicalities in the league processing which are annoying me... But in the future if there will be a base melee
league, there will be also the storing of medals in the league. And if someone codes an interface these medals might even be associated
to an account on some web site, so that you can keep track of which medals you already earned and compare with friends, etc.

List of medals

* Kill Awarded when you have killed an enemy (todo: make this a bit more special, maybe three kills in a row).
* Marvelous Miner   Awarded for mining at least one thousand clunkers during a single round.
* Decorated    Awarded when you get awarded with more than ten medals in a single round.
* Kamikaze Awarded when you kill yourself and an enemy clonk simultaneously.
* Pyromania    Awarded for setting 100 objects on fire in a single round.

Ideas and Graphics

Unluckily I can't just copy all medals from Pitri's rule since lots of the medals were tailored for CR and magic gameplay. So I just
started from scratch and am now adding medals continuously. So if you have any nice ideas for a medal, please share or code it. And
I will happily put it into the repository if a minimum quality is present :)

I have one request regarding medals, I need a template graphic for the base medal (128x128 pixels) from which the actual medals can
derive by overlaying existing images. If any person with graphical skills would be willing to do this, I'd be very grateful.