Vice War 8 Public Beta Results

[GangstaRas]

First of all let me thank all those that came out and participated in the peak moments of Vice War 8 Public Beta. The team has received quite the positive feedback from you, the participants, on the development thus far and the scale of work that have went into this project. It warms me that the community is well appreciative of the effort we've put into this and I personally had a lot of fun with the aerial warfare that went down. Infact, I'm happy that no one has had any complaints of an imbalance of power or felt the game was impossible to make a comeback with. Those who don't have helis have Bomber Planes, those who don't have neither have RPG, sniper, nades and enough trees to hide behind lol. Was a real treat to be fighting in that mix.

We are not done yet, in the coming weeks a lot of finishing touches will be made to unfinished sections of the map and also your suggestions that we will try our best to work on. Expect more updates starting the end of this week, where I will be more available to direct the process.

Let me take this time though to formally address some issues and suggestions made in order of priority:

Issues

• Registrations
  
  
  Now we are aware that there is a monumental breaking period between when registration had originally launched and the soon debut of the final game. As a result, many of you have joined, or tried to join and have forgotten the regulations of the event regarding such. We understand, so this is a reminder on the process and what we enforce:
  
  
  • To register, go to the Vice War Portal website here. Input your name, the team you wish to join and your ingame password you wish to use.
    
    You then go to the Benchmark server, IP is 217.69.11.99:8192, login, spawn and let the server do the rest. Your system will be benchmarked through FOUR tests that you must complete and must pass in order to participate. After you are successful, we will verify your results and approve your account on the Portal. Once your status has been switched to approved, you will be able to join the main server, the event server i.e. 217.69.11.99:7192.
    
    
  • Your account:
    
    • Only ONE PC and operating system is allowed per account regarding your participation in the event. If you join with a different PC, or on a different operating system that is on the same PC, you will get a UID mismatch autoban.
      
      To rectify this issue, you report it by creating a new topic in the UID mismatch section of this VW8 board, i.e. General Discussion > Reports > UID Mismatch, or simply click here.
      
      Many of you have upgraded your systems at this point and require a refresher to your account in order to participate. The way you do this is to join the Benchmark Server, allow it to ban you if you have a UID mismatch issue, report it just to nudge us that that occurred and then we will unban you. Afterwards you MUST retake the benchmark test, pass all four tests with the new system then await reapproval. An unban of any kind deletes your previous benchmark record, so the benchmark server is a must go to spot first before you can join the main server. Your account will remain in an unregistered state until you comply with this.
      
      
  • Your In-game Resolution:
    
    A lot of persons got stuck for this one. We enforce the resolution you used to pass the benchmark test by accounting for the number of pixels within that resolution. If you join the server at a resolution, i.e. higher number of pixels, you will be autokicked from the server, and will require that you either:
    
    
    • Join the server at the resolution you did the benchmark test at
      
      
    • Join the benchmark server at a higher resolution and update your test results with that resolution
      
      Note: If you fail the test at the higher resolution, you will not be able to participate.
      
      
• FPS, Ping and Jitter Limitations:
  
  Whilst in the game, we still enforce FPS, ping and ping jitter limitations to ensure the most stable experience towards all participants. We eliminate the prospect of a laggy experience as much as possible.
  
  
  • The ping jitter limit is set to 30. What does the 30 mean? It is a standard deviation value that we must enforce to eliminate player warping and general player lag due to inconsistencies in their connection. It does not necessarily mean a jitter of 30 ms in your ping. Example:
    
    (160,90,80,82,94) <-- this is a spike of at least 70 ms, but a deviation value of 29.84. I spike of 50 ms in anyone is enough to cause a hiccup.
    
    Throughout the public beta, many of you have been urging to "fix" this jitter system when we are honestly serving you with it. In the Public Beta, the jitter limit was set to 100. This is what 100 looks like as a sample:
    
    (337,90,80,82,94) <-- a spike of near 250 ms. This is a full blown warp that cannot be caught in average ping, as this average is just 137 ms.
    
    The jitter system will kick anyone with an unstable connection, even low pingers that are jittering. It is the reason VW7 was a stable experience amidst the chaos in-game. Not a lot of servers enforce the jitter system but we do. So to players afflicted by this, if you want to participate, you are unfortunately going to need a better connection for the main event.
    
    
  • The minimum FPS required is 25 FPS. Since we have a benchmark test to eliminate PC's that are not up to scratch for the event, we do not really expect anyone to be kicked for this but it is still there just in case as this is an event with a lot of explosions. Failure to keep at the minimum FPS rate results in an autokick.
    
    
  • The ping limit is 300 ms. If you are averaging above 300 ms, you will be autokicked.
    
    

Suggestions

We've received quite a number of suggestions during the event, some of which we hope to take on. Some are flat out impossible, but we welcome guidance on how to rectify such if you as an experienced scripter yourself have found a way to pull it off.

One suggestion that was made as an example was to make enemy players appear on the map only when they shoot. Current VC:MP limitations doesn't allow for a player to be on the radar for some and off for others (i.e. consistently on the radar for his teammates yet off the radar for enemies).

Another suggestion was to have a top down view on the Bomber Plane you can toggle when you want to bomb. We plan on looking into this but as the gamemode is set in a fashion where anyone can spawn Bomber Planes and so on at any given point in time, we don't know how much of a load this would put on the server to process everyone, something we will investigate but the concept is very doable.

At the moment checkmarkers aren't on checkpoints, this will most definitely be added....when we figure out the bugs to do so in Java.

And other map additions to make the Ship accessible, it goes without question that those will be added, the beta is just a test of the script to find bugs as well as understand how well the server holds up. Also at the moment a fix must be employed to the autokick system in that even if you remain still after seeing the warning message, you will be kicked. That's not how it should be, so we working on that too.

Keep your suggestions coming, we are listening. Place them in the Suggestions board.


So with all that said, we hope to see you for the final event. The public beta is still open if you want to have a party or just want to check out the map. It's serving in both areas at the moment.

Use /reportbug to report any bugs in the script or map whilst you're ingame, we get the message to our Discord channel where we handle each report. Helps us greatly to track what's wrong rather than informal talk that we as humans can forget about.

[ripmemes]

Greetings, I noticed that the bomber plane's rotors are immobile, which really doesn't seem to be aesthetically great, it can be fixed with ease at the modeller's end.

[GangstaRas]

Greetings, I noticed that the bomber plane's rotors are immobile, which really doesn't seem to be aesthetically great, it can be fixed with ease at the modeller's end.

It is a limitation of VC engine itself. So a fix would make one blade alone able to spin. We had planned on moving to a Rustler but it had some collision model issues, couldn't sit on the ground without drifting away no matter what we did or tuned. Will look back at it when free time allows but that's the story regarding that

[klein.]

There were two more issues I noticed:

1- Blue players were not able to spawn heli's at their helipad because there was already a heli or the place wasn't clear. But in fact there was no vehicle near the helipad.

2- Map issues: there were some glithces throughout the map. Like the mining site A and some near the bridge or down the mountains.

Suggestions:

1- Mines. If this is possible, adding land mines in this vicewar would make it more strategic and fun. When they're concealed on the ground, upon walking or shooting them will cause them to explode same as grenade.

2- FBI Rancher. The FBI Rancher is more fast in speed and handling and a well made for a group of people. And its suits the gameplay more. I think it should be either replaced with BF Injection or added into the game.

3- Custom skins for blue and red.

[GangstaRas]

There were two more issues I noticed:

1- Blue players were not able to spawn heli's at their helipad because there was already a heli or the place wasn't clear. But in fact there was no vehicle near the helipad.

2- Map issues: there were some glithces throughout the map. Like the mining site A and some near the bridge or down the mountains.

Suggestions:

1- Mines. If this is possible, adding land mines in this vicewar would make it more strategic and fun. When they're concealed on the ground, upon walking or shooting them will cause them to explode same as grenade.

2- FBI Rancher. The FBI Rancher is more fast in speed and handling and a well made for a group of people. And its suits the gameplay more. I think it should be either replaced with BF Injection or added into the game.

3- Custom skins for blue and red.

Some glitches are lag based, the map doesn't have holes to fall through as far as I'm aware whilst running around. Other glitches are due to incomplete work on collision files. The mining site buildings are edited versions of GTA SA structures. We reuse the collision file however thats not been edited to match what you see, so you will get things like invisible object type of bugs around that side. Well aware of them and will definitely fix when I get the time.

In regards to the Helipad, by script, both helipad and plane spawnpoints are checked for obstructions to prevent players from spawning a heli/plane that's just gonna blow up due to collision with another object present like a troll spawning a vehicle in the way. Also prevents congestion in the case of the planes especially that need to be driven out of the Hangar. We are a uncertain why it failed in the manner it did at blue's base but we are led to believe its a sync issue of vehicles and afk players.

Land mines were a thought, but we believed its implementation would lead to a very frustrating war. Remember that everyone would have this ability. To drive to a checkpoint only to be blown up 10 times over without much chance to avoid them is tickling too much on the unbalanced side of things. Plus, we believed the remote nades served the purpose fair enough in a balanced way to not stress ourselves over implementing it. You can line up nades, hide in the bush and wait till someone unsuspecting passes by to blow them up, rather than lay a land mine, forget about it then rack kills without much cunning effort on your part.

FBI Rancher is a consideration but let it be known that all the land vehicles currently will be getting a retuning to be able to better handle the landscape. The Bus will be a brand new model designed by me to enable passenger shooting (simple stand/crouch and shoot), also the carrier helicopter will be a gigantic Pavelow type bird you carry teammates in if I can do that one. Whats there right now are placeholders mainly in that regard.

Custom skins, I welcome offers to me via Discord of some options, they jus have to meet the requirements that they're working, of an army type model and dont look bent up and stretchy ingame due to bad bone structure. Message me on Discord about that one, and provide example images and/or vid clips of it in action

Discord: GangstaRas#4180

[ferrari32]

The map itself is too blocky, land combat will be more luck than skill because of random blocky hill hp falloffs. No markers for blue and red base set, and they're identical and both give warnings when airborne. Driving a car or bike doesn't make sense since you can't look uphill, you keep looking straight ahead into the hill, meaning you may as well be driving blind. Hills and edges need to be smoothed out.

[GangstaRas]

The map itself is too blocky, land combat will be more luck than skill because of random blocky hill hp falloffs. No markers for blue and red base set, and they're identical and both give warnings when airborne. Driving a car or bike doesn't make sense since you can't look uphill, you keep looking straight ahead into the hill, meaning you may as well be driving blind. Hills and edges need to be smoothed out.

Changes for the next edition