In other words, until voice chat is built in to the game, would you use it outside the game via options below? Trying to decide if I should add voice chat options to my servers.
I was thinking of taking Heartland's vanilla Escalation mode, putting a disabled neutral carrier in the center of the map in the water. Each team is trying to cap it and hold it for X minutes to win. The other team can re-cap and start a victory timer for themselves, etc.
Thinking of 6v6, no ARH. Not sure how economy would work out if people aren't farming ground targets for cash. Maybe reduce kill rewards but increase sortie payouts to discourage people from simply ramming helos as they cap.
Sinking the carrier would probably be a loss for both sides. I don't know how you prevent griefing in this mode though because you can't make units indestructible afaik. I guess you could scrap this loss requirement and just make it a small floating helipad or something instead but that's kind of lame.
Within the confines of what's possible in the mission editor, here's what I've been thinking:
It's easier to destroy than it is to extract, so BDF would probably not have a Medusa nor any AA missiles at all. I think balancing this part is the most difficult. Even AB4-ramming the cargo helo at warp 12 would win the mission for BDF. PALA would have access to everything. Both sides would start with plenty of money. 6v6.
Thoughts? I don't really want to build this out and ask people to test it if the community finds it to be impossible to balance.
The idea here would be to discourage kamikaze missions and non-interactive gameplay like tusko spamming. Probably the player would start out with $100m or so and any additional income would have to be earned via successful RTB. Standard Escalation objectives. Maybe reduced AI count for both ground and air?
I imagine there are players who would buy a Vortex immediately, farm a kill or two and die, then disconnect. But, maybe there would be enough people interested in a mode like this to make it viable over a 2.5/3hr match. And, you'd feel the risk / reward decision of taking a more expensive airframe or engaging in coinflip-type jousting.
I had no idea it was this tough just to stay upright! And I thought THPS was hard!
I have built a custom Heartland mission that disallows nukes, tuskos, and piledrivers. The game-winning objective is to capture the 3 main airbases of the other team while holding your own. Original Escalation objectives are available as well, but will not end the game if completed.
I was thinking a 14-16 player limit and a 5-6 hour match length. The idea is that this would be much more suited to conventional warfare, long-play sorties, and actual logistics / repairs / capturing and other helo gameplay. In addition, donating ground forces feels more impactful over a long game. Also, as bases get captured, the action will condense on the other objectives that are required to win.
EDIT: I have changed one of my servers to this mission for testing. It's called:
24/7 Pure Conquest Conventional Warfare PVP
I just built this mission today and it isn't published to the workshop, so please let me know of any feedback. I am pinged on Discord if you send an in-game chat message with !admin.
I run a couple servers and therefore I can see all the text chat (yes, all of it, I promise I don't use it to cheat in-game). This means I've seen some heartwarming chats from players in the game as I review the chat logs.
For example, today I have seen:
>[ALL]: that was one of the best gaming experiences of my life
and later, different game, different player:
>[ALL]: Best Nuclear Option game ever for me
Some more across different players and servers:
>That was a fun round!
>GG, very fun indeed
>That dogfight was so fun
I've also made a post about a pretty unforgettable triumph I had during a PVP game, and I had one of my favorite overall matches ever, just a couple nights ago on a very pretty Dawn version of the map, with 11 other players, no arguments, no stress, just a group of folks vibing and having fun.
Anyway, I labeled this as propaganda, just because I hope it inspires more people to try PVP, and more overall development on the PVP and dedicated server side of the game. I think we have something special here.
It uses the Klawifiantix steam workshop mission that limits all airframes on the map to helos, and removes the 76mm cannon from the Tarantula. I increased the starting rank to 1 at the suggestion of a player here.
I’m planning to leave it on this map for the week to see if there’s enough interest to get some matches going. If it does well I may leave it on the map. If it gets no interest I may swap it early.
Server name is 24/7 Esc. Helos PVP NO NUKES
A couple days ago I ran a poll asking the community which maps they would play in a non-nuclear server.
After the feedback I decided to try my hand at building a votemap implementation to allow them all as options, since there might be enough interest. So now, on my main 24/7 Escalation PVP NO NUKES server, that system is live. It offers all four map options in the poll, along with votekick, the ability to message admins, match restart, and a vote to immediately load a new map (!loadmap). I haven't been able to test every possibility yet, so if you run into issues, you can message me with !admin to let me know. I've also been working on server performance and it has improved significantly over the past week.
I opened an issue on the github after the panel filled up my disk during testing. Basically, the default server panel config seems to log the entire unity pipeline to a file, which is required for some of the tools they use (moderation for friendly fire, for example). On my server, with no players, this resulted in ~50mbps constant writes to the log file filling ~200GB in a day or two, and significant cpu usage on the dedicated server process, even though I hadn't installed or enabled any moderation tools.
This may not be the case for everyone. It's worth checking, though - especially if you don't use the moderation tools. If you plan to migrate to 1.7 and use a docker config and run into this issue, it could be more difficult to troubleshoot within the container. To prevent this, you could modify the server startup script to completely omit the -logfile switch to prevent these unity logs from being written, at the expense of moderation tools (and maybe the discord bot, depending how they've written it). I believe the startup script itself is nested into the per-server folder built by the server panel when a new server is deployed. Remote server commands and discord bot functions don't require the unity logs, and a simple pipe of the stdout would be sufficient (wiith log files being a few kb or mb per day).
I have a couple west-coast US servers and I’m trying to judge which non-nuclear modes the community would like to see. 2hr time limits by default.
I put up a new dedicated server called:
24/7 Escalation PVP NO NUKES
It has a 12 player count because I prefer a little slower / more tactical gameplay, and is running the Non Nuclear Escalation+ mission from u/GilgameshMA. I get a little tired of people rushing nukes quickly, although I understand this is the most effective strategy.
It started with a 4 hour time limit, but I saw multiple chat logs about wanting a server restart because too many bases were destroyed, and given the pathing issues of Jackknives and general low logi player count, I moved it back down to 2 hours.
TL;DR it may be worth testing the -limitframerate 30 switch on your dedicated server to help reduce the CPU bottleneck. This command is listed as an example in the official Shockfront repo's dedicated server guide and so far as I can tell, cutting it from the default 60 to 30 is essentially reducing the server tickrate.
According to the owner of the Atom Task Force servers (who run 64-player servers), they saw an increase in framerate with lots of units when using this switch, even on their 9950x3d cpu. I also saw a server CPU reduction that seemed like 5-10% improvement in framerate using this switch, although I can't prove that definitively as multiplayer games are so hard to benchmark and I am using a shared VPS.
Single thread performance is still king for this game, although at least 2 cores total are recommended, as multithreading "is already being utilized where it makes sense to do so", according to the devs. As such, your RAM speed will also have a significant impact on server FPS, and processors with 3d cache will probably be best. This weekend I tested an old i7-7700 machine with 32gb DDR4 and could not maintain 60fps on this map with just one player. I would expect you'd need a 2,000+ single-core Geekbench score with DDR5 RAM to maintain 60fps on a 16 player count on many maps.
Side note about VPS providers - many of them use shared virtual processors. Although my VPS provider uses a 7950x-based CPU scoring upwards of 3,000 in Geekbench, my vCPUs are shared with other servers, so I can't often reach that full potential.