[VOSK]

I'd like to let everyone know currently progress for version 14 of Synergy.

As some of you may already know, I've been working on a system to save and load the current level, so that Synergy may be even more like Half-Life 2.

This system enables us to reset the map, without having the server change level - reducing loading times.
This system also enables mappers to utilize entities such as "trigger_autosave" and "logic_autosave", in the same way you would if you were creating a singleplayer map.

What this all means for players, is that the "one life per map reset" is making a come-back, however the map will be progressive now - saving your player's information at each save point. When everyone is no longer alive, the game will detect this and reset to the last save point.

So far the system works pretty well, but I fear some maps may get stuck in some cases. So to help with this, I'll be adding a VGUI voting system. Options include vote kick, change skill level (1-3), reset the map and change to a new map.

And on the side, we've got three new player speech options added. (One of which is automatic.)

There are also some still unmentioned features that will be added in the coming months.

Regards

[gmc.jimmy]

Nice! Sounds like an update I'd like to have.

[Silikone]

Disable it for trials.

[Nibbler]

Server owners to have ability to disable certain commands?
like changemap :/

[Lexxy]

Disable it for trials.

Trials4 will be updated to support auto saves.

-Lexxy.

[gez]

Server owners to have ability to disable certain commands?
like changemap :/

i hope not, or we probably have the same situation again: vote functions are disabled for normal players. i have no idea why, but in the last time votefunctions are disabled on most severs, i.e. when u type !votemap u get an error message: "You do not have access to this command"; same with votekick or voteban. this occurs in other source games too, like TF2 or mods like empires.

whats is a voteplugin good for when it is disabled/only admins can access it?
(or is this just a "feature"/bug of the new sourcemod version?)

sry, i digress from the topic ...


@topic: pls make the autosave system optional, so that admins can choose between the current and the new one.

custom maps without the autosave entities arent affected, am i right?

edit: oh and dont forget the barnacles^^

[VOSK]

Maps without any save points, won't save progress on the map. (Instead the map will restart from the beginning - though, without doing a complete server changelevel.)

[Nibbler]

I only want option of votemap to be enabled/disabled by admins for the story maps like ep1/hl2/ep2
I don't want people voteing all around the campaigns ;p
And fix the spam for the voice menu?
People spam it alot and theres no way to stop spam!

[gez]

Maps without any save points, won't save progress on the map. (Instead the map will restart from the beginning - though, without doing a complete server changelevel.)

omg no! what about the hard maps like fireteam, where players go down like flies? these maps will be unplayable, because the map restarts all the time.
pls keep the current system for maps that dont have autosave entities.

[Rothgar]

VOSK, this sounds like a great idea for co-op/single-player style maps.

I really hope that the "1 life" and "save point" system can be turned off? I'm not sure the best way to do this, you could possibly have a 'force disable" cvar and then alternately make this map based via an edt variable?

Server admins may or may not want these things enabled, especially since it sounds almost like once you are dead you could be sitting around for an infinite amount of time while someone plays super cautious.

Also I hope the vote system can be disabled as well by a command in case it ends up conflicting with SourceMod for example or for people who would prefer to use SourceMod for its granularity.

SourceMod can do most if not all those functions already and if this "map restart' method you are adding has a server command that can be used like "refreshmap" or similar then that can also be added to a custom SourceMod menu.

I only want option of votemap to be enabled/disabled by admins for the story maps like ep1/hl2/ep2
I don't want people voteing all around the campaigns ;p
And fix the spam for the voice menu?
People spam it alot and theres no way to stop spam!

this is another reason why SourceMod is good because it's flexible, for example we have changed our "votemap" list to a separate file where we have only added the first map of each episode etc which stops people voting to mid-campaign.

[CMaster]

omg no! what about the hard maps like fireteam, where players go down like flies? these maps will be unplayable, because the map restarts all the time.
pls keep the current system for maps that dont have autosave entities.

I'll try and go through all the maps I have released edts for (which includes fireteam) and add save points.

@Roth - ugh, I found sourcemod horrible with synergy, especially as it couldn't count players right, didn't with certain numbers etc. although the votemap list was useful. Still I'd far prefer something nice and integrated - although you should indeed only be able to start a campaign, be that an offical one a mod or say, canal escape (ick). That said, I'm far from arguing that [b]you[b] should be prevented from using sourcemod.

Overall, sounds like a good system and a movement towards making synergy feel like a polished game experience in its own right, rather than a clever but crochety hack.

[Rothgar]

I'll try and go through all the maps I have released edts for (which includes fireteam) and add save points.

@Roth - ugh, I found sourcemod horrible with synergy, especially as it couldn't count players right, didn't with certain numbers etc. although the votemap list was useful. Still I'd far prefer something nice and integrated - although you should indeed only be able to start a campaign, be that an offical one a mod or say, canal escape (ick). That said, I'm far from arguing that [b]you[b] should be prevented from using sourcemod.

Overall, sounds like a good system and a movement towards making synergy feel like a polished game experience in its own right, rather than a clever but crochety hack.

We have been running SourceMod with the correct offsets for a long time now and I believe we reported a number of bugs like the fact the vote numbers were incorrect and it was due to Synergy disconnecting people before they actually were being "detected" as connected, so the numbers were getting incremented and never decremented i believe.

This bug was lodged and I made a debug build of SourceMod and worked with the dev team and they added a new function "OnClientConnected()" which is what the vote plugins and all base plugins I believe should be using so the player count is not incremented for example when someone connects but ends up being disconnected before fully connecting for not having the right mount files.

In any case SourceMod works pretty much flawlessly these days. You just need to add the Offsets because they are not yet included in the official build.

[Meeps]

Server admins may or may not want these things enabled, especially since it sounds almost like once you are dead you could be sitting around for an infinite amount of time while someone plays super cautious.

The way VOSK has described it, it is 1 life per map restart but I think this is refering to the team as a whole, meaning that players will still be able to respawn while the place is safe.

Also I hope the vote system can be disabled as well by a command in case it ends up conflicting with SourceMod for example or for people who would prefer to use SourceMod for its granularity.

Sourcemod provides a vote system which only Admins can use, unless you use 3rd party sourcemod plugins. The Synergy vote system sounds like it will be accessible to the actual players without the need of an admin to start the vote.

SourceMod can do most if not all those functions already and if this "map restart' method you are adding has a server command that can be used like "refreshmap" or similar then that can also be added to a custom SourceMod menu.

So the default sourcemod setup can change the skill level and restart the map through votes? Last time I checked I had to make a quick plugin for the vote restart. Like I say in that post, If used properly (i.e only when a map breaks) you can use the log it makes in ./synergy/logs/ to determine problem maps that break, investigate them, then report the problem maps. I recommend not using it after the next synergy update, and I will be taking it down too after the update.

IMO the whole idea of the synergy vote system is to give the players the power to fix maps with a restart, tweak the difficulty, etc without the need of a server admin. After all should something go wrong and a map just can't be completed, you end up with an empty server for hours untill an admin comes along to fix it.

I'm not being nasty or anything with all of that. I am just laying down the facts as I percieve them to be from personal experience, and how VOSKs original post reads.

Also, I hope that some of the votes can be optionally logged, for example the map restarts. Should help server admins in finding maps that break, if they opt-in for logging the votes. Overall though, the update sounds pretty sweet

[VOSK]

I'm still thinking of how the different maps should handle the lives of players. I don't think I'll be using a convar for that, I'll most likely add a new keyvalue to worldspawn.

There is a possibility players will still be able to respawn once they die after a save point. I've just got to think about how it should work out. I also don't think I will be using the respawn timer either, I'll simply state on the dead player's hud that he/she will respawn shortly.

[CMaster]

How frequent are save points on a typical map? How much time would a typical player be spending dead?
These are the questions to be asking about whether players respawn between save slots or not. Well, that and how immediate do we want the game to be, how much should the players be looking after their own lives. How much are they prepared to?

[VOSK]

Regarding the campaigns, there are numerous autosave points, particularly near dangerous places (e.g. dropping down and dying, trying to get across somewhere - Episode 1 shield path).

I will be allowing respawns between autosaves - it makes it easier for players and avoids additional problems where players go afk or similar situations.

[Rothgar]

The way VOSK has described it, it is 1 life per map restart but I think this is refering to the team as a whole, meaning that players will still be able to respawn while the place is safe.

it sounded to me almost like a bad case of Counter-Strike where you must wait until all the players die so the map can "reset to the svaepoint" and then everyone will be respawned but it sounds like VOSK has cleared that one up?

Sourcemod provides a vote system which only Admins can use, unless you use 3rd party sourcemod plugins. The Synergy vote system sounds like it will be accessible to the actual players without the need of an admin to start the vote.

I don't know what kind of weird setup you are using, the "rtv" plugin has always been public in any mod. As for making a different menu with some additional commands like "restart map" and "change skill" etc there's a few plugins I think one is called CustomVotes and the other PlayerVotes and they can be tweaked to add commands and set thresholds for minimum players, percentage required to be successful etc...

So the default sourcemod setup can change the skill level and restart the map through votes? Last time I checked I had to make a quick plugin for the vote restart. Like I say in that post, If used properly (i.e only when a map breaks) you can use the log it makes in ./synergy/logs/ to determine problem maps that break, investigate them, then report the problem maps. I recommend not using it after the next synergy update, and I will be taking it down too after the update.

IMO the whole idea of the synergy vote system is to give the players the power to fix maps with a restart, tweak the difficulty, etc without the need of a server admin. After all should something go wrong and a map just can't be completed, you end up with an empty server for hours untill an admin comes along to fix it.

I'm not being nasty or anything with all of that. I am just laying down the facts as I percieve them to be from personal experience, and how VOSKs original post reads.

Also, I hope that some of the votes can be optionally logged, for example the map restarts. Should help server admins in finding maps that break, if they opt-in for logging the votes. Overall though, the update sounds pretty sweet

At the end of the day we have made numerous plugins to change our server in certain situations, we run different configuration on custom maps vs campaign maps etc. There is absolutely nothing wrong with SourceMod and having in-built menu's etc might be great for some but in the case of L4D server admins were frustrated with the fact that the menu could not be customized, players were able to kick admins for example because there was no immunity checking, there is no threshold to say what percentage of votes are required to make a vote pass etc etc.

A lot of your points are well redundant in my opinion. Maybe you aren't using SourceMod to its full potential and taking advantage of plugins?

If you set RTV for example to have a minimum player number of 1, then if you have a map that can't be completed and everyone rtv's you can change maps? Alternately we have a script which automatically changes maps after X minutes of the server being empty? Although you can only "RTV" once per map but then again that was made so people don't spam "RTV" through the whole map just because they don't like it.

As mentioned I just hope it can be disabled for those that would prefer to use SourceMod as the admin tool which is what it is. I also hope VOSK takes this into consideration and server cvars/commands are made available to utilize by SourceMod or directly through console to achieve the same results? How else are you going to make small scripts for example stopping people abusing the "kill" command, or making chat triggers to execute the "kill" command in Synergy if you aren't using SourceMod/Eventscripts?

At the end of the day we are running one of the few Synergy servers left and are ranked in the top 5 of the world, we get consistent users, so we must be doing something right. If this update breaks all that because of a in-built forced menu or life system that can not be easily changed/disabled etc. Then I don't know if we will continue to run a Synergy server. I don't know if I could handle any more frustration of getting things working and then have it all break.

If you want to run the Synergy menu's that's fine but for those of us that don't want to use these features all the time/at all there should be cvars to disable/modify them. For example I would probably want to use the life system for campaign maps but not for others. This could be achieved as said maybe through EDT's or I can make a SourceMod plugin to enable/disable convar's.

[Littlejohny]

Hi,
At which day comes Version 14 out for the Synergy Players ?

- LJ

[VOSK]

Hi,
At which day comes Version 14 out for the Synergy Players ?

- LJ

It'll still be a while since we're adding some new big things;

- stats and achievements,
- saverestore autosave system,
- voting system

[Nibbler]

Special guns/models something new and non hl2 added to game for achievement awards tho
you don't want to make the mod too hl2-ish