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Please post ideas on what type of events might transpire in the story and over the course of the campaign. These ideas might be used by story writers and script writers to determine the direction the campaign might take. For example, a common one was the decision-path of both the stock and FE campaigns -- as well as the invasion of the planet in the stock/isdf campaign. What kind of basic ideas would be implemented in a good story?

Keep in mind that using ANY of these ideas is completely up to story writers. This is just here for brainstorming purposes, nothing else, really. It helps to get these things down early rather than trying to shoehorn an existing campaign to fit the ideas. Don't post anything really specific like planet names, and also if you're a story writer and post ideas here, dont feel ripped off if another person steals these ideas. That's exactly what the purpose of this thread is.

[These are the three options I see:]

I don't mean to disrespect the current guys that we have working on the story -- but I would like to get everyone's opinions on allowing everyone to resubmit their stories for another vote.

If your story was not allowed for inclusion into the first vote and you wish it to go up for voting on a new vote say so here -- if you would like to revote the stories, say so here --

If there is enough of a community demand for it, then we may begin to revote on the story. Again, I'm sorry if this offends anyone, but I think it is something that should be looked at as a possibility.

If a second vote was to be retaken, I would ask for the submission of story summaries (less than 400 words) as well as long versions. (most people will not read a story that is too long -- as it is straining to the eyes to read walls of text on a monitor). At which point the story would go to a community vote.

The other idea is for the story summaries and long versions to go to a volunteer (not elected) committee on people interested in deciding the story (must be willing to read all the stories, and must not have a vested interest in the success or failure of any of the stories)

These are the three options I see:

1) Keep it as it is, if you guys are okay with the current story.

2) Public revote, if you guys believe that this is the fairest thing to do

3) Allow a volunteer committee to thoroughly review ALL stories and vote on the best one. This will prevent the community from voting unfairly (how does one really decide unless they have read all the stories?) or reading any early spoilers, and thus be able to enjoy any surprises in the publically released campaign.

I recently played a map called MPI: Tangoline and my first thought was OMG this is huge. It would take forever to get anywhere so I thought of an idea.

I think mapmakers should begin implementing expressway tunnels in huge MPI maps.

In fact it would add a new gameplay characteristic to the map. For example, it could be set up so that theres an expressway tunnel right in front of the base, that leads to mid-map -- however the exit of the tunnel is surrounded by lots of defense, so in order to clear the exit, you would have to fight your way up to that point, and clear the defenses -- at which point you would be able to use the expressway to travel freely back and forth between mid-map and base.

Played a match of FS2 lately, we were PR and going against swarm. Most of the game we dominated on dogfighting and held all the field pools, however couldnt really seige their base or do anything. Eventually they built up a force inside of their base and overran our main base. Most of my standard ship weapons seemed to be weak vs bases, and even the heavy units like vanguards and walkers could not outrange guntowers.

What are the tactics for cracking a swarm base anyways?

I'm having some problems creating soldier DMs in 1.2 and 1.3.

I've changed svar7 (i believe thats the one) to refer to a custom vehicle list made up of soldier types (is* and fs* types) -- however the Deathmatch DLLs do not seem to take well to this, as they will instead spawn a 'dummy' version of the soldier type next to the player rather than spawning the player as that type. "Ships only" mode will cause the player to repeatedly die as they do not spawn inside of a ship.

I've also tried using the vehiclelist idea for (1.2) ZEMOD's soldier DMs however even this does not handle spawning properly.

Is there something i'm missing?

I made an MPI map a long time ago for PB3, however now when I try to play it in TA5, the AI team doesnt doesnt even deploy their rec. Now since normal MPIs work I was wondering if something has changed, like if theres a new required pathpoint (I have Recycler, RecyclerEnemy, Tank and Turret pathpoints), so i'm perplexed.

Is there something new I must do in order to get my map to work with the newer 1.3's?

It's hosted here:

http://zeroangel.overminddl1.com/misc_files/mpieveningstar.zip

I personally like these ones for various stuff:

Timedisruptor.com -> BZ2 utils, world issues, science stuff
bz2maps.com -> BZ2 stuff, spamming
forum.infjs.com -> A forum for my personality type and ppl that are interested in talking with INFJs.

What are your favorite forums and why do you visit them?

I downloaded the latest firefox update a few days ago and have been having major problems with it:

- Huge memory leak, FF steadily increases memory usage from anywhere to 1MB/4sec to 4MB/1sec -- my FF is currently using 1,205 MB.
- Choppiness -- once FF hits 1GB of memory usage, things start to get really choppy. Including text typing, which means I can type a whole sentence and then everything will appear on the screen at once. CPU consumption of firefox is a constant ~40% or higher depending on how much memory it's consuming.
- Frequent crashes. FF crashes on average once per 30 minutes.

It is THE most unstable version of FF I have ever used. In fact it has crashed more times in the past 5 days than all the other FF versions combined.

Anyone else having a similar problem or is it just me?

I was wondering if GSH could include a small new feature in BZ2, and that is to give the player the ability to change the name of new nav points simply by typing in '/nav Northern front line' -- which will give future nav beacons the default name of 'northern front line' or whatever was typed in after /nav. It doesnt seem like it would be difficult to implement, and it would be quite useful for being able to tell what a nav points to simply by reading it.

I have a laptop with Vista 64-bit and am being annoyed by a really long delay from when the time the desktop shows up to the time it becomes actually usable. My laptop is a rather fast one and I have 4GB of RAM, so I dont think the specs are the bottleneck here, it's gotta be a specific program or service.

Heres what happens:

1) I log in
2) Desktop, taskbar, and sidebar appear almost immediately -- some programs load and show up in the system tray.
3) The hard drive light is flashing like the harddrive is under very heavy load, for 2 minutes -- the sidebar shows the CPU usage at a mere ~20% for both cores. If I ctrl-alt-del, the task manager shows no more than 5% of any given process.
4) FINALLY I will get a notification that wireless and bluetooth are both on. Programs like firefox will launch slower while the hard drive continues to grind
5) After 5 total minutes from logging in the hard drive light will stop and everything will work quickly.

I want to isolate what the problem is so that I can fix it but the task manager doesnt give me useful info (because the whole problem seems to be related to disk i/o and not CPU or RAM usage). Can anyone point me in the right direction?

I thought I'd make a thread for useful freeware utilities -- anyone can post one but they must link to the utility's website and they must provide a brief description. I'll start:

Windows Grep
This is a multi-file find/replace tool which allows you to search in multiple files at once and replace text with other text. For example I can search in all of the INF files inside of addon/missions/multiplayer/* (use subfolders on) and replace text from "ivar2 = 4" to "ivar2 = 8". It also supports regex and 'soundex' (sounds like) searching though I havent experimented with these.

Highly useful for modders and mapmakers as well.

Launchy
Is a 'smart' program launcher for those who prefer to use a keyboard to launch things instead of the start menu. It indexes your start menu and documents folder. To launch a file (ie: Battlezone 2), all you have to do is hit alt+space and start typing in the name of the program or document you want to launch (ie: batt..), and it will begin displaying results of what it thinks you're going to type. Hit 'enter' and 'voila!' the program runs. This program is linux compatable.

WinDirStat
Is a free program which gives you a graphical depiction of which programs and folders are taking up the most space on your hard drive -- you can then run the files, browse the folder, or delete the file/folder. This is useful if you're running low on hard drive space on any partition and need to free up some space.

I don't care much for BZ2's normal control setup, so I've taken the liberty of changing it around to one that seems much smoother. It helps a lot, particularly when it comes to running and changing weapons -- and is as follows.

First reassign you controls as follows

Prev. Weapon: Wheelup
Next Weapon: Wheeldown (remember to click on 'clear' first, because you are going to use mouse2 for multi-select)
Jump: Left Shift

Weapon Linking:

Multi-Select: Mouse2 (Right mouse button) (clear the old bind for this, since shift is now bound to 'jump')
Multi-Select Toggle Weapon: Mouse1 (Left mouse button)

To go into weapon linking setup, all you have to do is hold the right mouse button, scroll to the weapon you want to link to, and then leftclick.

Also, if you're fast running, using the shift key to control your jump thrusters is better because it allows you to go forward+right+jump at the same time.

Just curious why so many of the 1.3 STs are being passworded these days. Are people afraid of vets crashing their games? (in a metaphorical sense), noobs? People with bad attitudes? Because the games have special rules?

Huh. It's kind of strange.

I'm having trouble hosting games. It seems that half of the ZST games I host, I will enter the world and it will have ZEMOD recs, then about 2 seconds later, everyones ships will detonate and they will drop from the game.

Can anyone point me in the right direction on how I can fix this? Without doing possibly hours worth of work on reinstalling everything?

I've noticed in a lot of games that builders tend to get stuck trying to climb inclines of about 40 degrees. While this may not seem bad, a lot of maps have hills that have a 40 degree incline somewhere (they are not uniform in their slope), this includes some of the 4-way maps (the one with all the loose scrap in the middle is a good example of this). Builders have a far worse time with getting stuck than constructors do.

I think builder traction should be increased to allow it to traverse up to 60 degree inclines. This should allow them to traverse 'normal' slopes and still prevent them from building on top of hills which are not designed to be built upon (note: in 1.2, turrets could not traverse tall inclines greater than 60 degrees, and it did a fine job of keeping them off of hills). AFAIK: I think the greatest allowed terrain slope in BZ2 is somewhere near 80 degrees.

Multilock missiles aren't the most well designed weapons in BZ2 for various reasons:

1) Multilock missiles lose their lock too easily, unlike shadowers which retain their lock even when the player has turned away from the target.
2) Its often more effective to fire single lock shots from the multilock missile because if the target moves out of the narrow cone range than ALL of the locks are lost.
3) Multilock is a rather weak weapon. Shadower missiles do more damage if two similar foes were to face each other and fire until the other one is destroyed.

Therefore, I propose that multilock be made to keep its lock even when the enemy turns out of its cone radius and locking distance, just like is done with shadowers.

This would fix a glaring weakness with multilock missiles and make it so that rec variant makers can balance them in to be at least somewhat useful.

I'm running XP home on my desktop. My computer has 3GB of RAM, and i've allocated 2.7GB of space to the paging file (which is probably not even needed at all). My antivirus is Avast! and I don't run a lot of tasks in the background. So i'm curious as to why I get warnings every once in awhile that my virtual memory is low.

What kind of programs might I use to find out where all the RAM is allocated? Task Manager doesnt report everything (if I added together all of the memory usage values of everything on task manager, I might get ~500MB or so of total usage, out of 3GB RAM+2GB paging)

I'm having some trouble getting my soldier AI's to properly work in pb4a -- Many of my units attack with both their primary and secondary weapons, which means that if they're on the ground, they must crouch to use the secondary weapon. In previous Betas i've gotten around this by equipping such units with hoverpacks.

In PB4, units that attack with secondary weapons will become 'stuck' in the crouch position after defeating an enemy. The problem seems to affect the Soldier, Morphtank, Rockettank, and Aircraft AIs which I typically use on soldiers.

Does anyone know of an AI type which will correctly work with these soldiers in PB4a?

I recently bought a laptop that has a canadian multilingual keyboard. I've had to jump through some hoops to get Vista x64 to stop changing the layout and all the keys work as expected in all my programs. Except for BZ2. I find that some of the keys dont work at all from within bz2. This includes the tilde key, equals/plus key, left bracket/brace, and quote key.

AFAIK, the layout itself is not hugely different than a normal keyboard:


I've tried playing around with my keyboard layout settings, and the few of them I tried havent worked fixed the problem -- which happens in both 1.2 and 1.3pb4a

Anyone have ideas?

[Lag and Drop Bug]

Spawn, Greenheart, Feared_1 and I did some rounds of testing. And we found the following bugs in PB4a.

Lag and Drop Bug
In some matches (Strat and MPI), all clients will start out severely lagged -- and then be dropped sometime within the next 20 seconds. In other matches, most clients will severely lag and drop out in the middle of the game. This seems to happen sporadically and randomly.

DM Spawning Bug
This happens when sync join is turned on in a DM. All players will spawn in the exact same place. This happens almost every time.

Permanent Fog Bug
If a player goes underwater, their vision will inherit the water's fog for the rest of the game. This also happens when the anti-hover code causes the 1.2 variant scouts to drop just underneath the water.

ST: Death Island Pathing Bug
On my test, I experienced pathing issues when sending scavs, turrets, and constructors to the center island from the north. The units would, after a certain point in the game, want to walk all the way around to the other side of the island and cross from that bridge. Spawn claims that he hasnt experienced the problem. This needs further testing.