There’s nothing incredible about them, actually. Incredibly sucky, maybe?
I’m slowly learning why when I got here, all the coders were “Can’t do!“ers. Apparently last week I agreed to do hulks. Actually, I thought what I said was more on the lines of “sure we could do them but they need a lot of work and design or they’ll either be crap or use a lot of bandwidth, and I don’t think we want to use more bandwidth just now do we”?
Ramp’s been working on various UI things this week, there’s some real goodness potential there. Missions and brigades you have squad members on will have a squad icon next to them, you can switch to a squaddies brigade/mission with a click (agh, I better make sure he’s taken country into account there).
I was also trying to talk him into some other concepts like (common) mission shortcuts (e.g. right click on a town next to your brigade and get a context menu offering probable mission types), and the holy grail of right clicking on a town to select a brigade. Today, I believe, he was working on adding the AAR scoring details that I’ve been sending since 1.20 on the AAR screen – so you’ll now whether you bombed things, killed AI, etc, etc.
Gophur was also tossing around an idea to let you use “/join player” to switch brigade/mission to where a particular player is. Given the reaction to “/who” I think that’d cause hissy fits, so I suggested we limit it to a mission leader — i.e. if you type “/join gophur” and he’s running a mission, it’ll switch to the neccesary brigade and select that mission for ya.
I’m going to finalize what I was doing with hulks tomorrow, hopefully round off the /takelead and related mission changes, take a last look at the practicality of some changes to the multicrew system I was making (maybe late at this stage), and see if I can find somewhere to squeeze the 48 bits into an already crammed data structure so you can see squad tags under icons (if you turn the option on).
kfsone's pittance 
11 Comments
Changes to Multicrew?
Anything you’re allowed to tell us?
Not talking about actual multi-crew, just the API that the client is forced to use for negotiating it, which currently depends on negotiating between 3 different servers, and means that you can’t reserve a vehicle and then request crew for that vehicle.
Any changes I make this version you should, ideally, not notice.
Squad tags?
OMFG! I thought that idea was dead, cremated, compressed into a little capsule, and launched into space alongside James Doohan, given how Gophur rejected it a year or two ago in the playnet forums! That’s awesome, to hear it’s not dead!
Hm.. OK confused now (not that tkat takes a lot of doing these days).
You say you can’t reserve a vehicle then request crew???
Er, thats teh way you DO do it! Or it certainly is with the naval units.
Reserver your boat, select crew.
Or are you talking about the bug when you have rtb and want crew?
kfs, I assume one of the sucky things about hulks is the transition from player controlled to server controlled. If so, would it be feasible to have a default hulk for each type of tank that is used for people that were not in the area at the time it became STO, but for the players that are already getting data about what the tank looks like (flaming, tracked, etc) to simply retain the most recent data and use it until the STO is removed?
The drawback is that someone may say “he’s behind that tracked hulk over there” while another player that just spawned in will see the hulk, but not tracked…just the default “this used to a be a PzrIIIf” hulk.
mw: You reserve a *multicrew* vehicle, and then wait for crew. You can’t reserve an ordinary vehicle and then request crew. If you think you can then maybe Ramp has done a good job of masking what is going on behind the scenes. Switching from waiting for crew/solo cancels your reservation.
Gnasche, that’s not one of the sucky parts, it’s actually the easy part, since we’ve already done it with UMS. Infact, class HulkSTO : public VehicleSTO
Since they are STOs, everyone will see them regardless of vis limit.
– Oliver
Any chance that while things are being rationalized, enough additional capability could be found to permit an expansion of multicrew from two players to three, only for those vehicles that are so modeled and coded of course?
A three-player multicrewing approach for naval vessels would add immensely to the game’s modeling power.
Oops, sorry.
Looks like a lot of excellent features are going into 1.24, can’t wait!
If you could walk up to a tank or plane and press “J” and automaticly be added to an empty seat would be the code gold mine. You would also need a ck box “no multicrew” for when you spawn, just in case you don’t want anyone with you.