JB-Alarscia...Released!

[Birelli]

The moment that has taken way too long to come about is finally here, a final release version of JB-Alarscia!

Nali City

You can download the map from it's NC page above. During my one last final bot test I took a slew of action screenshots which you can see below.

Edit: Direct d/l link changed to NC map page

[57@RDU57]

Heh, when it rains, it poors... Lookin' good (vJB, yay!), dl'ing now.

[G.Lecter]

Having serious trouble when playing it...
Weapons, vehicles, HUD, appeared and dissappeared constantly, and the Hellbendeer textures looked odd...
I only had a run and the map looks nice, but this bug makes impossible playing it...

[Birelli]

Do other JB maps run fine for you? I'm having trouble think of how something that affects all of those things could be map-related.

Originally Posted by Kantham (On NaliCity)

minus
-the bots are a little confused sommes times
-the minigun turrets are kinda strong
-no raptors
-the arena , is too wide , scale it down

plus
-the map is unique on his kind
-the bots are weel pathed
-the skybox fit whit the map Imho
-the fps are good
-a big map (like never in jb) imo
-i don't get stucked in water inside vehicles , nice

This is really a better place for feedback anyway.
I know the bots do occasionally get confused, I was unable to figure out what was causing it and they seem to sort themselves out pretty quickly so I decided to let it go.
The minigun turrets are actually half as powerful as they are in AS. If you're infantry fire Rockets/AVRiL at it then duck back out of sight, repeat. In a vehicle you should be able to drive past with ease.
Raptors + Release switches with no roof over them = spam. They just didn't fit the design, sorry. The same goes for the Manta, it'd be really easy to just jump over the side of the base and onto the switch.

Thanks for the feedback though, both minus and plus, I like hearing what people think of it

[ZedMaestro]

I got a broken UnrealScriptedSequence log message of a bot, the screen flicked to another player, and then I spawned in jail

The SentinelCannons arent visible until they're activated... did you copy the actor from the DM-SentinelTest file and modify that one?

Nice to have another vJB map though

[Birelli]

Originally Posted by ZedMaestro

I got a broken UnrealScriptedSequence log message of a bot, the screen flicked to another player, and then I spawned in jail

Huh, I've never encountered anything like that, I wonder if I just didn't notice or if something got broken by a change late in testing?

Originally Posted by ZedMaestro

The SentinelCannons arent visible until they're activated...

Same thing here, I wonder if the code updates I did broke the cannons in some ways. Very odd, the update method shouldn't have changed anything but the actual code, which shouldn't affect too much.

I'll have to look at this more carefully. I didn't do a lot of late-stage testing, I hope a bunch of bugs didn't creep in right at the end after all that extensive testing earlier

[CoolDude]

Originally Posted by G.Lecter

Having serious trouble when playing it...
Weapons, vehicles, HUD, appeared and dissappeared constantly, and the Hellbendeer textures looked odd...
I only had a run and the map looks nice, but this bug makes impossible playing it...

We played some games on the Mothership yesterday.

Strange thing we noticed in Alarscia.
On my PC (P4-GForce4) no problems at all, on Boost's PC (AMD-GForce2) in 75% of the directions you looked everything but the map itself disappeared. With everything I mean Players, Guns, Vehicles, Doors and even HUD). Looks strange if you only see the shadow of a car going by but not the car itself. Changing teams, or restarting UT did not help. The map before Alarscia was OK, the map after Alarscia was OK. Me and Rev both didn't experience any problems.

I still have to check if playing offline gives the same problem. It's possible that updating the videodrivers could help here, I must try that out. It's just weird that only Alarscia gives a problem.

I'll keep you posted.

[G.Lecter]

Originally Posted by CoolDude

Strange thing we noticed in Alarscia.
On my PC (P4-GForce4) no problems at all, on Boost's PC (AMD-GForce2) in 75% of the directions you looked everything but the map itself disappeared. With everything I mean Players, Guns, Vehicles, Doors and even HUD). Looks strange if you only see the shadow of a car going by but not the car itself. Changing teams, or restarting UT did not help. The map before Alarscia was OK, the map after Alarscia was OK. Me and Rev both didn't experience any problems.

I still have to check if playing offline gives the same problem. It's possible that updating the videodrivers could help here, I must try that out. It's just weird that only Alarscia gives a problem.

I'll keep you posted.

Really strange bug... :
I tested it only offline and gives me the same problem as Boost, but my PC has the same things as CoolDude's (Pent4 - GForce4MX). Only in this map, of course...
I have had problems before with my card, (it did not show the ECE Paladin's shield), so I downloaded the latest card patch a little time ago. I think this is not the problem.

[ZedMaestro]

OK coders and people who understand UScript; Throughout the game there are the following log messages:

Error: JBBotSquad Autoplay.JBBotSquad (Function Jailbreak.JBBotSquad.MustKeepEnemy:0059) Accessed array 'ListInfoEnemy' out of bounds (8/8)
Warning: xBot Autoplay.xBot (Function UnrealGame.Bot.RateWeapon:0008) Accessed None 'W'
Warning: JBBotTeam None (Function Jailbreak.JBBotTeam.CalcDistance:0017) Accessed None 'Controller'
Warning: JBBotTeam None (Function Jailbreak.JBBotTeam.CalcDistance:001F) Accessed None
Warning: JBBotTeam Autoplay.JBBotTeam (Function UnrealGame.TeamAI.NotifyKilled:0040) Accessed None 'S

These messages appear a heck of a lot in the log.
The top one appears most, followed by the second one, and both seem to appear to happen when newly released bots encounter their first enemy. The error implies that there are too many enemies on the other team for them to cope with
The 3rd and 4th ones appear in threes: 3rd, 4th, 3rd, pretty much immediately after each other.
The 5th one is last in my log and the only occurance of it too. I remember what happened here in much more detail:

I was driving with a bot in the Hellbender towards the enemy jail, when they were released. I assume the releaser was killed. Garrett aimed up a load of skymines while I drove directly for the enemy bots (who had lost release protection since they were shooting us). Before the Hellbender was overwhelmed with Assault rifle grenades, Garrett cleverly detonated the entire sky-mine combo, annihilating all 5 enemy bots. Good bot . Anyway, the 5th log message appeared around that time, though due to my awe at Garrett's skill I dont know exactly when.

Also, the message:
ScriptLog: Warning - PATHS NOT DEFINED or NO PLAYERSTART with positive rating
...appears every time there's an arena match, even though I had just rebuilt the paths. I dont know what a PlayerStart positive rating means though.

While I did all that, I had a look at the Sentinel properties. Probably not very cleverly, all the properties were set to None. So I set them back to the Rocket ones and, most importantly, set bSleepWhenDisabled to true, since thats what makes the sentinels visible while they're inactive.

I cant even imagine what this could be down to... maybe vehicles + turret + sentinel actor? Probably not since the log implies nothing like that.

Those who understand UScript: have fun

[Birelli]

Ok, so during the update process I must have lost the settings for the cannons, annoying but easily fixable (although I like the lasers more than the rockets so I'll keep those).

The log messages seems like they might all be related to pathing, but I did a full rebuild directly before packaging the release just to make sure, so I know it's not paths not having been rebuilt. There are 4 inventory spots that pop up errors when doing rebuilds about not having paths from them, they're the 4 on top of the 4 ruin towers, I checked. Other than that I can't think of any reason the pathing would differ from any other JB map, so I guess I'm at a loss on what could be causing it.

Anyway, given the odd bugs that have cropped up I'm gonna hold up on fixing the cannons and re-releasing, it's not a serious enough bug IMO to warrant releasing a second version now just to (possibly) have a third one later.

Edit: Oh, and as I understand it every PlayerStart is given a rating at spawn-time based on how many other players can see it and stuff like that in order to combat spawn camping. I believe a negative rating is given to one that has something serious wrong with it, I'm not sure on the specifics. Maybe it's because there is no "Blue" PlayerStart in the arena (both are Team = 0 so that it is randomized)?

[RabidZombie]

Originally Posted by G.Lecter

Having serious trouble when playing it...
Weapons, vehicles, HUD, appeared and dissappeared constantly, and the Hellbendeer textures looked odd...
I only had a run and the map looks nice, but this bug makes impossible playing it...

Well, I know this IS kinda old, but i have exactly the same... it would even affect other maps and even the skaarj (with his trusty minigun ) when ut 2004 starts, I thought my pc was just too crap... whats interesting is the framerate is EXTREMLY low, in the 1s and 3s(ok in the best of areas its 7 )
All models and some textures will just dissapear, and others have a strange checkered effect (it was long ago)

75% of the directions you looked everything but the map itself disappeared. With everything I mean Players, Guns, Vehicles, Doors and even HUD). Looks strange if you only see the shadow of a car going by but not the car itself. Changing teams, or restarting UT did not help. The map before Alarscia was OK, the map after Alarscia is OK.

All that 'cept the the map thing, just having it in ut2005 map thing makes it nuts, as soon as I play a map in ut2004 it goes wron, restarting ut means that the skaarj (as i said)goes funny displaying nothing but red grid on all but the front side of a imaginary cube.[/QUOTE]

Also I updated the drivers, defragged and anything else immagenable. This means I cant have the map installed looked a fun map

[RabidZombie]

Slightly off topic, but because BU has been slow, I'd just like to say, THAT TOOK AGES to submit, and also excuse my small spelling errors, I hope people arn't too confuesd by the ut2005 :P There is none and there isn't like to be one, with 3.0 in production.

[gunhero]

any update on this?

is he going to look into the bugs?

[Birelli]

I have no clue what is causing any of the reported bugs except the disappearing cannons, and that bug I don't consider major enough to warrant a re-release. If someone even came up with a possible cause for a bug that I could play around with and test, I'd put some time in on it, but at the moment there's not much I can do.

[CoolDude]

Originally Posted by Birelli

I have no clue what is causing any of the reported bugs

The strangest thing happened last sunday at the lockdown.
Boost played Alarscia this time without any problems. Honest, I did not change a thing!!! Go figure.
(/me points at the earlier bug report)

[Trueblood]

I think you should add high powered jump pads that help people on foot get around the level. Like add afew landing pads on the hill side with abit of ammo or something
bots stealing my ride and leaving me to walk all the way to the button does make time drag

[Birelli]

Yeah, after seeing the map played online with a whole serverload of people I guess I can see the need for a few more vehicles on each side. I didn't do that before because I was worried they would over-balance the map toward vehicles, but I think that's already happened anyway.

[gunhero]

Originally Posted by Birelli

Yeah, after seeing the map played online with a whole serverload of people I guess I can see the need for a few more vehicles on each side. I didn't do that before because I was worried they would over-balance the map toward vehicles, but I think that's already happened anyway.

honestly you can never have enough vehicles man, nothing sucks more than when an idiot teammate shoved you off a manta intentionally or runs away from a hellbender.

since you seem to make another revision i hope you fix these bugs that are reported (by some)

[Aersik]

After a fair bit of fiddling (read: deleting things until it worked) I think I have the culprit of the mystery bug: ALA_GenericWaterShader (the water skin). I have no idea why its causing these problems for me, but it refuses to display in the texture browser in UnrealEd, makes parts of the map disappear in the editor, and causes my HUD, vehicles, static meshes and character models to disappear randomly in game. In fact the texture browser refuses to display anything above ALA_GenericWaterSurface, and gives a wierd screen glitch. At least, on the machine with a GeForce440MX. It runs fine on an almost identical system with a Radeon 9200. Replacing this with FirstWaterShader fixed this, and as far as I could tell its exactly the same as the original.

[gunhero]

*claps for Aersik*

wow man. quite a find. I'm acually really impressed.

Now i hope that Birelli can make a new version as i hate the crap bug that makes things dissapear