[alpha] pb_pinball - alpha 5b released!

[MarvintheParanoidAndroid]

pb_pinball
Marvin the Paranoid Android

So, after spamball I thought I ought to continue bringing you the best in maps that nobody plays, and work on a phistball map. This is what I have so far, hoping to get some gameplay feedback before I go any further.

(Warning: dev textures ahead!)



I've finally got round to fixing some issues and updating it a bit, but this is still very much alpha. I'd love people to try and break it (get the ball stuck, make it fail to reset properly, anything like that).

Download:

Download pb_pinball_alpha5b here!

Hopefully I'll get it up on a server somewhere, or if anyone's interested then let me know and I'll try and organise a game.

Join the Steam Community Phistball group!

[Aurion]

I don't know if you changed anything yet, just played a bit of pinball_alpha2

I like the idea, but there are some things i do not like:

You can easily get killed if the ball is shot back to you, which happens quite often at the bumpers and the flippers. They should shot the ball somewhere else, so they bring some chaos into the game, and a chance for the other team to rush towards the enemy goal. Currently, the player who shot it just gets the ball back most times (and gets hurt or dies, often).

Also the flippers do react sometimes a bit to early, so that they move towars the ball before he made contact. Sometime they move even earlier, so that the ball gets behind them and they push it towards the goal, probably even in.

The starting area is also a bit awkward. I'm not sure if you really need the respawn device itself shown. Looks better with real textures i guess, but as, for example pb_round doesn't have it (not sure about others like dojo), why even put it in?

This area is also a bit small, a heavy can get through the narrow, but not several players at the same time. Is there any specific reason for it? Also it takes quite some time to get back into action, as you have to move around the wall through the narrow and probably race to the other side, and that after 15+ seconds of spawn.

I would also like to see either a way you can get the ball out of the goal while he is phisically in it, but not yet counted. Or place some accelerator in there, so if you get the ball into the walls of the goal, you score a goal immediately. Better for both teams, as you can not get it out. So either the enemy team pushes the ball in finally, or you need to do it yourself.

The ball is not starting right in the middle of the map, but a bit off to the south left i think (from a punks perspective if i'm right).

Another point is, it is possible to get into the enemy spawn. Is this intentional? You could sit there and block them.

I while post more if (don't think so) i find more.

[MarvintheParanoidAndroid]

So, I've been making some changes:

-The goals are now slightly larger, although I will probably tweak those some more and try to completely prevent there being any areas where the ball can get stuck.
-I tweaked the flippers, but there's only so much I can do - either they'll sometimes trigger too early (if the ball is moving very fast) or they'll sometimes trigger too late (if it's moving slow), I've tweaked the area that triggers them to hopefully get a decent middle ground. It is a little annoying when the triggers knock the ball into the goal... call it a feature though
-The spawnpad models are gone.
-The goals trigger earlier (the ball shouldn't get stuck in the goal any more).

When 1.2 comes out and this and cyber_jumppads are changed ("The cyber_jumppad entity has a field called JumpVector that points in the direction to boost players"), I will probably change the ramps, so that they affect players as well. Unless I can achieve the same effect with a trigger_push, in which case I'll do it now.

I thought the bumpers and flippers were working okay - although if you fire the ball directly at a bumper, it will probably come straight back at you, a slight angle usually sends it in a fairly different direction. Also the damage and kills from them I quite like, more fatalities is good! (Plus with instant spawn in 1.2 it'll be less annoying).

I don't mind that enemy spawns are accessible, it's not like you can achieve much there. If it turns out to be a problem I guess I can change it. Likewise, the small exits I thought would be okay, as you're spawned facing a single exit, so there should never really be two people trying to use the same exit. And hopefully the extra time this takes will balance out when instant spawn starts working.

Also there are some problems (long story short: phistballs don't respawn any more), so I can't upload a new version yet

[MarvintheParanoidAndroid]

Bump! I updated it a bit, with bigger goals, failsafes against the ball getting stuck in a number of places, fancy sound effects, and probably some other stuff I've forgotten. See the first post for a download link, I'll get it up on FastDL when Zero-Flame's site is back up. But seriously, it's less than two megabytes, please give it a try

I'll try and force some people to play at some point, feedback would be lovely.

[BurninWater]

i can put a 8man server up with it in rotation if ya want? (atleast as long as i am near the computer)/cant stay on overnite cus i wanna sleep

[BurninWater]

well it is up (or atleast will be in 5minutes) , put it on the normal map rotation and well maybe some people will like it

[MarvintheParanoidAndroid]

well it is up (or atleast will be in 5minutes) , put it on the normal map rotation and well maybe some people will like it

Cool, thanks very much! I'll see if I can get some people playing.

[BurninWater]

done and done , set it to 8people max cause well with more pb just becomes a pain i think and dont think my upload wants more as 10-11 people so 8 is safe for me

[bauxite]

wow nice this is probably going to be the best map tat no one will play

marv u should do a parkor map or normal map it wud rock, but seriously who plays phistball?

[Pyroguy]

We need Phistball night. I would play.

[MarvintheParanoidAndroid]

Alpha 5b released, with awesome new feature as suggested by termi which I can't believe I didn't think of before.

If nothing is broken in this build, then I'll get round to texturing it so it's slightly less ugly, at some point in the near future.

Changes:

-Energy regenerates in the spawn areas
-Added some brushes to hopefully prevent the ball getting stuck in the corners by the goals
-Multiball!

[Esoj]

I played the old version 4 alpha on the ww3 server today with JohnnyWalkerBlack and some of the feph guys. it was a lot of fun and we all agreed it would be awesome if it got finished and textured up so it could be used eventually in phistball scrims/matches that some people want to get happening soon. i can't wait to play the new version multiball seems like a cool addition.

[Agent Wave]

We had alpha 5b running on a full 18-slot server just now.

Here's some thoughts:

We found it difficult to get multiball enabled without both teams cooperation and actively trying to enable it. It was actually pretty hard to do with random people hitting the ball at bumpers that were already green and such. I'm not sure if that's what you intended.

It seemed that sometimes the indicator lights above the bumpers were a little too low to see when you're close to the bumpers...

You may want to look into overriding some of the phistball physics like I did on pb_timebomb. In the model's override parameters I have 'inertia,0.5,mass,10.0,damping,0.01,rotdamping,0.05,drag,0.01', that's with a Scale Factor for Inertia of 1.0 and Physics Impact Damage Scale of 1.0. It'll make the ball roll further, get hit in the air easier, etc.

Once multiball has been enabled, would it be possible to reset all of the green lights to red and make multiball re-triggerable once the additional balls are gone? Just a thought...multiball was good fun.

Players could enter the enemy's spawn. A dys_forcefield would stop that.

The flippers seem to hit the ball in the goal more than out. I know you've been working on this...what kind of trigger are you using?

Without spawnpads you have to suicide in order for loadout changes to take effect.


After a couple of rounds we put:
dys_melee_only 0
sv_friction 0.5
sv_maxspeed 1000
sv_accelerate 400

and we had some good fun. The map lends itself well to a chaotic deathmatch arena.

[MarvintheParanoidAndroid]

Hey, thanks for the feedback. I'm really trying to balance this around teams of 4v4 or less, as that's how I feel phistball works best, so I guess 9v9 was probably a little hectic, although I can see that the multiball might have been cool with larger teams.

Multiball was definitely intended to be reasonably hard to get - so that maybe it'll happen once over the course of the round, if players keep an eye on the bumper status and deliberately aim to get it at some points. For the same reason, I planned on it only activating once. I could think about making it repeatable though, adding more ridiculous entity logic is always fun!

I'm aware that the indicators don't quite work brilliantly as they are, hopefully I'll come up with something better when I finally get round to adding polish.

I'll definitely take a look at those physics changes and see how they play, thanks. Judging from the size differences between this and timebomb, though, they might be a little extreme.

Did players entering enemy spawns actually turn out to be a problem? I didn't think it'd really affect much, seeing as the ball resets when it goes in there anyway, and you can't achieve much by spawncamping in phistball. A few people have mentioned it now though, so I suppose it wouldn't be too hard to add forcefields. I'll take a look at the spawnpad issue too, although I was complained at when I had the models in (they just make the area a bit awkward).

Right now, there's a trigger_multiple in front of each flipper that activates when the ball enters it. I tried shaping the trigger carefully, and adjusting the speed of the flippers, but ultimately it's really dependent on which direction the ball is coming from, and how fast it's going. One thing that somebody suggested was to simply have buttons that activate the flippers - I'm starting to like that idea. Maybe have them on the walls near the middle of the map, so that people have more to do than just cluster around the ball and goal.

[Agent Wave]

Well, to be completely accurate, we started off with a smaller group because we came from pb_timebomb (which isn't on the FastDL server) and only had something like 4v4 or 6v6. Once we were in pinball for a while it filled up. That's when it became quite the clusterfuck and it turned into a ice-skating-deathmatch arena.

Perhaps instead of an indicator at the top you could do a glowy cylinder somewhere mid-way up the bumper...either with a cylinder brush or a 360 degree arch. It could be about head-level and be visible 360 degrees around the bumper. Just suggestion.

Yes, the physics do make it travel quite far. Add some to the dampings, maybe the inertia, maybe the drag...no need to add to the mass I don't think. I've found that if you let the players hit the ball further, they generally spread out more when playing.

The players in the spawn was not as much of a problem as it was a "Oh my god you are deflowering my spawn!" kinda deal. It's one of those things where everyone expects the enemy not to be able to go in there because of the color-coded visual cues on the exits of the spawn.

I haven't played with it yet but this: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Trigger_impact may work. Make it so the trigger_impact is what does the work (it has all the logic to do so already in there) and have the flipper flip as more of a cosmetic thing? Just a suggestion.

[MarvintheParanoidAndroid]

Perhaps instead of an indicator at the top you could do a glowy cylinder somewhere mid-way up the bumper...either with a cylinder brush or a 360 degree arch. It could be about head-level and be visible 360 degrees around the bumper. Just suggestion.

That sounds like a good way of doing it, yeah. I'll give it a go.

I'm torn as to whether to try trigger_impact or to use buttons and have the flippers controlled manually. I suppose I'll play around with both and see what happens.

Anyway, once my exams are over at the end of next week, I shall be attempting to finish this off so I can start something new and exciting!

[Remonttimies]

We had a nice game on this map today on MFP and I quite liked the map. But then the ball got stuck there:

Link