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Author Topic: Ketchup vampires  (Read 22021 times)
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« on: September 04, 2010, 07:21:35 AM »

I've been having a lot of fun playing with these settings lately:
Code:
g_vampire 0.3333333
g_vampire_max_health 998           // better be safe than sorry
g_catchup 2
g_awardpushing 1

On the one side the vampire setting makes you receive 1/3 of the damage you inflict on others as health points, but on the other side the catchup setting makes your weapons do less damage when fighting weaker opponents. This totally changes game balance and calls for crazy tactics, you can make awesome quad runs and stack your health up to 999 in the process for example, but if you score too many frags you'll get slapped around by your opponents afterwards, no matter how good your health is. Finally, the awardpushing setting makes it very rewarding to make players fall to their deaths on 'floating' maps like oa_shine and suspended, as it's not only an easy way of killing opponents but of racking up a lot of vampired health also.

It's a lot of fun in elimination mode also, give it a try sometime.

edit:
Changed the cvar to 998.
« Last Edit: September 04, 2010, 08:39:20 AM by 7 » Logged

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« Reply #1 on: September 04, 2010, 07:50:38 AM »

sounds like a lot of fun - are there any server currently running with this?
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« Reply #2 on: September 04, 2010, 08:25:00 AM »

Someone wrote in the wiki (special game options page) that the max vampire health cvar should be never set to 999, but up to 998.... because 999 would be considered by the game as "infinite health", making the player impossible to kill.

I never did tests in this way, I don't know if it is always true, if it was true in previous versions, if it is true when running some mods, if it is wrong or what else....
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« Reply #3 on: September 04, 2010, 08:33:30 AM »

sounds like a lot of fun - are there any server currently running with this?

None that I know of I'm afraid. I was goofing around with some friends on lan about 3 months ago and we came over these settings by accident, but playing these rules was so much fun that we've been playing very little else during our (weekly) lan-sessions ever since.

One of my reasons for starting this thread was to motivate more server admins to consider enabling callvote on cvars like g_vampire, g_vampire_max_health, g_catchup, g_awardpushing and such (which I think is better than having a lot of servers with different rules/mods, because too many servers scatter the -rather small- OA online community too much).

Someone wrote in the wiki (special game options page) that the max vampire health cvar should be never set to 999, but up to 998.... because 999 would be considered by the game as "infinite health", making the player impossible to kill.

I've been playing it a lot and we didn't run into this problem. Perhaps we didn't reach 999 health completely (because 1/3 vampired health isn't very much), or we did some self-damage? Anyway, I'll use 998 in the future, better be safe than sorry. Thanks for pointing this out Smiley
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« Reply #4 on: September 05, 2010, 04:13:13 AM »

Well, I did a couple of tests with OA 0.8.1 and 0.8.5. The counter of the HUD goes up to 999, but with g_debug_damage enabled I can guess more. Even with 999 or more, the health continues to go normally, it slowly goes down and takes damage. The problem is that, if you have more than 999 health, you risk to survive to a fall in a deadly pit (that gives 999 damage), and stay there unless you suicide in some way.

I did DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/index.php?title=Special_game_options&diff=6789&oldid=6755]this change to the DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Special_game_options]Special game options page. I added a note about the deadly pit, but did not remove the part about "infinite health". If someone (Sago, for example, that added the note about infinite health) wants to do further fixes...
« Last Edit: September 05, 2010, 06:12:03 AM by Gig » Logged

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« Reply #5 on: September 05, 2010, 08:16:01 AM »

The note about health is that 1000 is generally defined as infinity. This is not truth for health as for instance the obelisk be default has 2500 health. However somewhere in the code there might be places that uses the 1000 = Infinity definition. The note was added just in case. For ammo the 999 or more equals infinity always (originally it was 1000 or more).
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« Reply #6 on: September 06, 2010, 05:25:07 AM »

I was thinking about another thing: if a fall in a dedadly pit causes 999 damage, to be absolutely sure that a player cannot survive to it, I suppose the maximum vampiric health should be set at max at 798. 798 (max vamp. health)+200 (max armor)=998. Right? Should we write about this, too?




7, could you please write down a map rotation script with the maps you think are those are the best for this particular game style?

PS: g_catchup 2 seems a bit low (it takes 2% less damage for each frag of difference, starting from the sixth. With 10 frags of difference, it does only 10% less damage, right?), why don't set it to 5 or even a bit more?
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« Reply #7 on: September 06, 2010, 08:38:14 AM »

I've done a bit of testing myself, and it seems to me that bots do act strange when they reach 999 health, but human players don't. It looks like bots don't take any damage whatsoever (you can't even move them by hitting them in mid-air), but human players do.

The g_catchup value has to balance out the g_vampire value, iow. the higher you set one variable, the higher you need to set the other one so players are able to build up good health by killing others but can't go on an endless killing spree once they reach 500 health or so. The values are balanced right now so players can't easily vampire lots of health by constantly shafting other players with the LG once they're in the lead by about 10 frags (the more frags you score, the more you have to rely on your aim with heavy weapons like the RL and the RG, because lighter weapons just don't cut it anymore as your opponents will do much more damage to you -and consequentially gain a lot more of your health- than you do to them).

We prefer playing rather open maps because the closed maps give too much opportunities to play hit and run, eg. to rail somebody and immediately take cover and go into hiding until you've built up a huge amount of health without scoring a lot of frags, making you nearly invulnerable. Maps like oa_shine, wrackdm17 and suspended work great, but maps like aggressor seem to generate lame gameplay (with these settings, I think it's the best 1vs1 map ever) and maps like oa_koth2 are somewhere in between.

Edit:
Forgot about the deadly pit: this isn't a big problem because there is what I would call a 'resurrection bug' in vampire mode anyway. If you fire a delayed (non-hitscan) weapon like a rocket or a grenade just before you die and you hit someone with it in the moment of your death, you still receive the vampired health and get resurrected if you end up in positive health again. Sometimes it's just for a moment, but sometimes you can play on as if nothing ever happened. I've been resurrected in the oa_shine deadly pit more than once, and I even have railed people taking the jump pads from down there...
« Last Edit: September 06, 2010, 10:57:29 AM by 7 » Logged

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« Reply #8 on: September 06, 2010, 10:55:54 AM »

if a fall in a dedadly pit causes 999 damage
There are a few maps that suffer from it. But a deadly pit should be created so you they touch/overlap the bottom of the pit so you should suffer continuously damage while walking there.


I did not know about the resurrection bug, sounds semi serious. Not because you get back to life... that is fine. But the death logic has already been executed and the game could crash if something is used that was freed during death.
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« Reply #9 on: September 06, 2010, 02:05:51 PM »

I did not know about the resurrection bug, sounds semi serious. Not because you get back to life... that is fine. But the death logic has already been executed and the game could crash if something is used that was freed during death.

I've been playing vampire mode every weekend for months now, and we've stumbled over the resurrection bug quite a lot but it never crashed the server. Bots suffer from it too by the way, so it's quite easy to reproduce and test (you can easily see them make their death animations and stand up again immediately after they have finished it).
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« Reply #10 on: September 07, 2010, 04:55:44 PM »

Hey, 7... what do you think about DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Configuration_examples/Vampire_mode_with_catch_up]this?
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« Reply #11 on: September 08, 2010, 12:11:18 PM »


Good job! Just a few minor remarks:

  • Fraglimit 20 is a bit low for g_catchup 2, because the game will end before the catchup damage reduction really kicks in.
  • To my taste you should at least give some important weapons (like LG, RL and perhaps RG) a lot of ammo or even unlimited ammo in g_elimination mode, because it really sucks when you work hard to get up to 500+ health just to find out you've run out of ammo and there is no way to replenish it.
Edit:
Perhaps a bit of clarification. A tactic that rose quickly after playing just a few hours is to willingly give a greedy player (the lamb) a good head start of about 20-30 frags in a few minutes time by letting him kill you without much resistance so he racks up lots of health but lots of frags too. Once you observe it gets difficult for the lamb to kill you even when you're not really resisting, you lead it to the slaughter and kill it as quickly as you possibly can, gaining on average about 1/5 of its huge amount of health, but with just one frag. After that the lamb will struggle to get more frags because it still has a huge catchup damage handicap from its lead in frags and not enough health to survive the next fight. This makes it essential to have a high fraglimit (or none at all) because players taking turns at having killing sprees is more the rule than the exception, more so if there is a quad on the map.

The easiest way to sap a lot of health from a lamb and kill it quickly is by using the LG up close, because it constantly sucks the life out of the lamb while its LG doesn't do much harm to you in return because of the catchup handicap. This almost demands setting elimination_lightning to 999, because the LG is curial to catching up efficiently (but almost useless once you're in the lead by a few frags).
« Last Edit: September 08, 2010, 02:32:03 PM by 7 » Logged

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« Reply #12 on: September 09, 2010, 12:56:38 AM »

I didn't thought about the possible long-living given by vampire, and thus the need to begin with many ammo with g_elimination enabled... and I just copy-pasted the default values. Anyway, it is a Wiki and this "ketchup vampires" is your idea... so tune the settings in that page as you think it's better.

You can also add notes about tactics, if you wish...
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« Reply #13 on: September 10, 2010, 10:32:41 AM »

7, DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/index.php?title=Configuration_examples%2FVampire_mode_with_catch_up&diff=6836&oldid=6833]I added ammo to the configuration example. Anyway, if you want to tune more...
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« Reply #14 on: September 10, 2010, 11:45:49 AM »

Sorry a didn't reply right away, I had a lot of work to do in the last few days. I've edited the page, but I seem to have managed to screw up the layout in the process. (At least there is an iframe in the settings section I cant get rid of. Where does that thing come from anyway?)
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« Reply #15 on: September 10, 2010, 11:52:11 AM »

After a rapid look, I don't notice layout changes from DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/index.php?title=Configuration_examples/Vampire_mode_with_catch_up&oldid=6836]this to DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/index.php?title=Configuration_examples/Vampire_mode_with_catch_up&oldid=6852]this.
Could you please explain better what do you feel strange? Or try to update your browser cache, I don't know...
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« Reply #16 on: September 11, 2010, 10:55:16 AM »

Well, there where 2 empty iframes in the page, I suppose they were meant to hold banners. The one at the top of the page wasn't a big problem, but the one in the settings paragraph divided the whole paragraph into two columns with the empty iframe in the left column and the paragraph text in the right one. The iframes have disappeared, so everything looks fine now.
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« Reply #17 on: September 11, 2010, 11:09:10 AM »

Probably, a problem of your browser cache, or, as usual, Wikia's fault...
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« Reply #18 on: September 20, 2010, 04:50:16 PM »

7, did you try OAX Beta 47? It should have fixed the "resurrection bug"...
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« Reply #19 on: October 12, 2010, 10:42:59 AM »

Hi, I'm just posting to inform you about me having a car accident 4 weeks ago. I've spent 3 weeks in hospital and I'm now recovering from a broken tibia (shinbone) and fibula (calf bone) at home. As soon as I'm well again I'll do the testing I promised a month ago.
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« Reply #20 on: October 12, 2010, 02:03:41 PM »

 Shocked

get well soon! don't worry about OA :>
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« Reply #21 on: October 12, 2010, 02:54:42 PM »

Get Well Soon Smiley
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« Reply #22 on: October 12, 2010, 03:25:38 PM »

Get well into OA soon ! Smiley
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« Reply #23 on: October 13, 2010, 08:01:09 AM »

Hi, I'm just posting to inform you about me having a car accident 4 weeks ago. I've spent 3 weeks in hospital and I'm now recovering from a broken tibia (shinbone) and fibula (calf bone) at home. As soon as I'm well again I'll do the testing I promised a month ago.
Oh... I was wondering why I didn't see you around here for some time... (in the meanwhile, a user named "seven" appeared here, and I was wondering if he was you... now I guess no.).

Get well soon, man!
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