Spawn Sphere System and T2
by Jim "FlyingElmo" Andrews · in Torque Game Engine · 09/22/2002 (5:26 pm) · 1 replies
With the upcoming patch release from GG to fix T2, I thought now would be a good time to voice something thats been on my mind since the release of the game, relating to the spawn system of the Torque Engine.
I believe the spawn shere system was originally concieved to be a time saver for mappers. IE, unlike Tribes 1 where you had to manually drop in spawn points, Tribes 2 would automatically find them for you. Thus, in maps designed for 60+ players, a mapper wouldnt have to devote time to laying down each and every spawn point.
While this system looks good on paper and works well for CTF mappers, I find it to be immensely buggy. The problem is, the system works well when you are using a good amount of terrain in conjunction with an interior, but doesn't work well for the smaller, less compact maps. For instance, I map for a gametype called arena. Arena features 6vs6 action in maps which are quite small, and almost always require players to spawn together within a very tight proximity to one another, in a very compact area. To make matters worse, the maps generally require players to spawn on top of something, rather than inside a base or on terrain. Thus, it becomes a real problem when the system tries to find spawnpoints but fails (nearly 90% of the time), or makes one team use another teams spawnshere (this happens regularly as well, regardless of instant groups).
One of the things I'd like to see GG add to the patch is the ability to manually drop individual droppoints, to help mappers who work on a smaller scale or want to do "extreme" things with their maps (such as spawn players in midair). I'm sure any mapper who uses the torque engine would likewise appreciate this feature.
I believe the spawn shere system was originally concieved to be a time saver for mappers. IE, unlike Tribes 1 where you had to manually drop in spawn points, Tribes 2 would automatically find them for you. Thus, in maps designed for 60+ players, a mapper wouldnt have to devote time to laying down each and every spawn point.
While this system looks good on paper and works well for CTF mappers, I find it to be immensely buggy. The problem is, the system works well when you are using a good amount of terrain in conjunction with an interior, but doesn't work well for the smaller, less compact maps. For instance, I map for a gametype called arena. Arena features 6vs6 action in maps which are quite small, and almost always require players to spawn together within a very tight proximity to one another, in a very compact area. To make matters worse, the maps generally require players to spawn on top of something, rather than inside a base or on terrain. Thus, it becomes a real problem when the system tries to find spawnpoints but fails (nearly 90% of the time), or makes one team use another teams spawnshere (this happens regularly as well, regardless of instant groups).
One of the things I'd like to see GG add to the patch is the ability to manually drop individual droppoints, to help mappers who work on a smaller scale or want to do "extreme" things with their maps (such as spawn players in midair). I'm sure any mapper who uses the torque engine would likewise appreciate this feature.
Torque Owner John Quigley
Second, if you mainly run into your spawn problem with Arena, then maybe you could work with Teribaen to implement a custom spawn system for the mod. You could list the spawn points in a .cs file (maybe one file per map), then he could add code to read in the file and spawn players at the locations specified therein. I know this isn't a great solution but it might be your only option if GG doesn't change this in the patch.