Crossfire - Upcoming changes, upcoming content

As you might know, back in February I've put the development of CF on ice due to the RL political situation in combination to the content refresh of the Coalition faction and its connection to the planned blackstar content.

Four months passed by and the situation is still the same but I feel the urgent need to start working on CF again.

I was thinking about this for some weeks meanwhile and I am still not entirely sure how to do it.

Most likely I will cut the update into smaller pieces and at least release the non-critical ones, such as the launcher changes, the visual upgrades for Sirius and maybe even a bit of the Blackstar fleet related content.

The Coalition updates (eventhough this is the part where I made most progress in so far) will remain on hold.

There are technical difficulties to overcome anyways.. so... no promises.

I most definitely will need some help getting some of the work done and also with the technical issues I ran into.

Instead of working towards a big update I intent do release the done work on the fly once working and tested.

To put it into perspective, the entire Blackstar Fleet update was meant to be about half the size of the current mod. That is very much and it is very easy to get lost with all the work done and work to be done.

Smaller junks might be a good way to organize stuff and keep the development running without going nuts.

Maybe time will allow to touch Coalition content at a later point. I at least hope so.

I also intent to discuss the future development of the mod in a chat meeting (to be announced).

This will be for people interested in supporting and contributing to the development. Details about what needs to be done, what can be done, where help is needed, etc will be discussed there.

Last but not least.

I got a reminder about the status of the clan systems.

I intent to update the owership status next week. Clans which might loose access to clan bases can get access to them again at a later point. Nothing will be lost.

There were some payments done which I have not appoved yet... I will take care of that aswell and update the status of the rent accordingly.

well the way I see it it is possible to ask 1000 people and get 1000 different opinions on this matter

I have a strong one with this topic and I am not really comfortable atm with doing as if nothing happened. But yes it would be a shame to do nothing at all. That is why i am trying it with a compromise.

Generally yes, I just think it would be beneficial if such donations are done to help clans with their clan system rent.

This way it would be a support for the server and the clans at the same time.

Two birds, one stone.

Early October I intent to release a fairly large update

Content:

graphical improvements (first package of a larger graphic update)

update to the shaders

a bunch of bug fixes

expected size: somewhere between 600Mb and 1Gb

maybe more, but that depends on my progress in the upcoming weeks.

Quote from darkwraith007

I'm dismayed and disturbed that there is such a hostile attitude towards those who want to adjust the SINGLE PLAYER experience to suit their needs. It is one thing to say this is a 'friendly' community but another to outright belittle those who have committed no crime other than being older than you are. What a shame.
Yes, some older players can adjust and 'learn' how to play despite their age, but for others it becomes an 'altability' issue where they may be unable to do things the way the rest of you do but could still accomplish the same objectives using alternate means.

I would think that SWAT-OP the admin wouldn't have forgotten that I'd posted about this VERY issue oh so many years ago. How the single player was janked-up and how 'protect this NPC' missions were nearly-impossible to complete due to said NPCs not having the 'stats' required (health/shielding/durability) to withstand the beefed-up AI and damage numbers from the CrossFire modded weaponry.

There's nothing wrong with offering an alternative, especially since they are asking for changes exclusive to single player. This would be a meaningful update that anyone could do as it just involves editing single-player-exclusive text files (the 'campaign' files in particular).

There are many ways to do it but just a few:
-remove all auto-fail conditions
-make mission-critical npcs invincible; these are the ones that would cause an auto-fail if they die

-make mission-optional npcs/objectives have 10x the shielding/durability that they currently do; these are the ones that give a bonus or 'better' outcome if they survive

-have someone actually play the campaign (as of Sept 2022) from start to finish and to record the gameplay in a livestream while they do so; fix every 'show stopper' bug that comes up

I've already done both of those first two points just on my own; I'd only need to do the 3rd one and I'd be done. But it isn't my place to tell anyone how to run their mod/community. If his royal highness SWAT admin would graciously permit this lowly pleb to post the updated files, I wouldn't mind doing so. To remain so stubborn after so many years would be a disservice to this community IMHO.

Good day to you all.

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There is no hostile attitude other than saying "no" . Not even on reply to the stuff you have quoted is in any way hostile towards the original request or the person posting it. Infact in every case helpful comments were posted guiding players to instructions how to do the combat stuff in the mod or other tricky parts of the storyline.

As I have explained it many times before the singleplayer and multiplayer balances is exactly the same. Change one thing and you also change the other. Making it easier for some has negative impacts on all the other players. That unfortunately how the game engine is designed to be. That can not be changed no matter how much we want.

"Allow players to modify the files for singleplayer?" -> No, just no.

Again singleplayer and multiplayer are connected and the MP anticheat is designed to detect and revert such changes to protect the server from cheats and from crashing. We had such situations in the past where people thought it would be a nice idea to edit files "just for singleplayer" and then started to crash our server every 5 minutes and ruined the experience for all the players this way. I just won't allow it to happen again.

Putting the risks aside which would ruing the fun for all other players, I then also could close this forum then. Because giving support to players which have edited files on their own is not possible. I and the community members which help me with giving support can only do that if we know exactly to what we are expected to give support.

Trying to edit the storyline to make certain areas fail-proof is a nice idea. It sounds simple enough, right?

And now back to reality.

It means to check 88462 lines of code (just had a look at the files), crosscheck all objects in there with other parts of the mod just to identify what these objects actually are, then figure out which triggers and conditions are linked to the objects, identify trigger loops and potential side effects that would be caused by making certain stuff invulnerable.

There is no "this is a mission critical object" marker in the files. There also is no marker that tells me "this is where people fail".

What you suggest in theory sounds nice but in reality is a nightmare to do. Without knowing where exactly changes need to be made it would mean many months of work to be done followed by testing every mission dozens of times to figure out if everything still works and which side effects occur after the changes.

It is just not that simple.

Just simply making something invulnerable (if you know what people struggle with, which I don't know because nobody ever told me) is not as simple as editing the object. The whole trigger loop needs to be checked for this to work without conditional side effects.

And please, this underlying tone that I would not listen to the players is pure bullshit.

The whole mod was developed based on player feedback. I always did listen to what players suggested but ask 100 players and you get 100 different opinions about a topic and in the end it matters what is best for the majority of players. Not every wish can be granted and not every wish makes sense in the bigger picture.

So who is acting hostile now?

To delete fail conditions is not genius, it prevents multiple of the following triggers to even activate. Multiple fail conditions in the game do not cause the fail of the mission but instead trigger the activation of optional events, even event loops that are important for later parts of the mission.

Especially when there are timed triggers this is a problem since if there is no such fail condition anymore the following set of triggers start with the wrong timing and potentially even the wrong order which in result causes a shitload of other problems for the mission.

e.g. 60 second timer with the objective "dock with tradelane" and a fail condition that now is disabled.

The players does ignore the objective and explores the system instead.

At some other location (station) there is another conditional trigger to despawn your wingman and of course you activate that trigger because you ignored the other stuff before (because the modified SP game now allowed it).

Now the whole mission is bugged. You still can return to the tradelane you originally ignored but since your Wingman does no longer exist in the mission the following triggers required to play the mission just simply will not work anymore.

Fail conditions have the purpose to prevent that the logic behind the trigger activation of a mission breaks down.

The creation of a single mission very often takes weeks of hard work and testing over and over again just to make the triggers work correctly to get the timing right and check what side effects might happen if players don't do exactly what they are meant to do.

You did not do something clever here. You just made use of a shortcut that served your needs for that very specific situation. All side effects are totally ignored by you.

That is nothing I ever would do and release to the players.

That is not how I work.

I am not 100% sure how to approach your response.

You have accused me and generally the community members which replied to the comments you have quoted to be hostile. But the underlying tone of your comments holds more hostility than anything anybody else on this thread did write.

It is this "do this or..." and the "I am better than you" attitude without even considering the made arguments that were made by me.

The example I posted by no means was meant to be based on a very specific mission or situation.

It was an EXAMPLE, easy to explain and easy to understand. One that could apply to a widespread amount of missions.

I could easily have posted more of such examples where your approach of "lets simply delete stuff without really knowing what consequences it has" would have lead to negative side effects.

It never was my intention to say "in mission X the the removal of a fail condition will cause this or that", especially without investing the required time to look at the code, the trigger loops and then testing everything in game over and over again under different circumstances. From what you so far wrote I really got the impression you just removed the fail conditions en masse and hoped for the best. I repeat it again, that is not how I do my work.

The dock restrictions you did mention btw. almost exclusively apply to the very first part of the first mission but what I described in my example can happen on every location based trigger condition which are btw. used in EVERY mission of the game.

Now let me take your example where King is being killed because you went off tracks.

You say that this is very unlikely to happen.

I say this is very likely to happen once you reach the missions that I have created, because the difficulty is significantly higher there and also because there are NO fail conditions to prevent this. I did not create such fail conditions and security triggers in the new missions because I did not have the time for that. I did not have the time to think about every eventually the player might do other than following the instruction on the screen. Result of no fail conditions in these new mission has been that every few weeks players came here to report that missions stopped working for some strange reason. The long term members of this community can confirm to you that the main reason for bugged SP missions in the new campaign are result of players not 100% following the missions paths and the instructions on the screen. Fail conditions would have solved all these problems, but like I already mentioned I did not have the time to take care of that.

So other than removing fail conditions my top priority in terms of story content would be to add more fail conditions and security triggers to the mission. It is better to let a mission fail at some point and let the player do it better next time than to risk bugged savegames.

Long story short. I know for sure that the lack of fail conditions and security triggers in the current version of the new missions is a problem and I am 100% convinced, that your approach of simply deleting the fail conditions from the other missions (which actually work fine for the vast majority of players) is a big mistake that only will cause problems (that in the end I will have to deal with... not you... you are not the one giving support once the problems start, it is not your time that will be wasted then).

I am not against looking into specific situation where players might have problems, trying to make it easier in these very specific situations (if requested). I am also open to reasonable suggestions if they do not cause unwanted side effects, but I generally react very allergic to demands.

Your "I told you to do...", "you didn't do what I wanted...", "so now I blame and accuse you" attitude won't get you far here.

I don't refuse to improve stuff but I refuse your shortcut because I know that your method only will cause more problems in the long run. And just because you did not notice any problems or side effects does not mean that there are none. I can also play every of my new missions without any issue if I want to, but other players still run into issues because they might do something slightly different than I do. This is because the lack of security triggers and fail conditions and I am willing to take the blame for that. I did not have the additional year it would have taken to make everything perfect on these mission.

There is only one thing I can agree with you atm.

Crossfire made everything more difficult.

But you totally ignore here that Crossfire changed so much more than just the NPC difficulty. You start off with much more money that you can instantly use to buy more powerful ships and weapons than you would have had in the original game. There are plenty of new, better ships and weapons to get throughout the entire story campaign. The reward structure also is higher than in vanilla FL and there are plenty of additional ways to earn MUCH more money which can be used on way better ships and equipment than the original game would allow you to use.

The higher difficulty is easily compensated by all the other changes and features the game has to offer (if you actually bother to make use of it).

Dunno.

I don't want to argue, I don't even have the time to.

In my eyes your approach is the wrong one. I tried to explain why. Often enough I experienced that easy solutions were the path to even more problems. Pleasing 2-3 players and potentially messing it up for everyone else just is no option to me.

A final word: The harsh, partly hostile tone did not exist on this thread until just a few days ago. It would be really cool to get past this tense condition.

Ok,

the new update just got released.

it contains:

• a bunch of fixes to the ingame news
• several memory related fixes
• new improved skybox for Sovietskaya
• redesign of two Coalition station exteriors to bring them in line with the new style aswell as some texture fixes on these stations
• new improved textures for all the Sirius Station
• ~30 retextured base interiors
  Goal is to improve the visibility all stations. The stations will have a much clearer, more defined look. Texture errors got fixed and structure and way how FL renders these scenes has been totally changed.
  Multiple textures got some AI treatment to improve resolution and sharpness. However, I am totally against the trend of upscaling all textures and call it a HD version. In my eyes this is counterproductive since simple upscaling won't noticeably improve the the quality due to how FLs render pipeline works, while significantly increasing the file size (for almost no benefit).
  My approach here is to individually decide how to improve each texture using different methods. AI improvements are only used in areas where noticeable quality improvements can be expected. In most cases manual editing of the textures and the texture settings lead to better results.
  This however is very time intense. There are interiors which only took be 2 hours to complete but there are also ones which took me an entire day.
  The today released improvements are about 1/4 of what I want to overhaul. That means more work in the upcoming weeks and months. I have the intention to release the improved interiors on a weekly basis from now on. Maybe till end of the year the majority or all of the improvements can be done this way. Dunno, will be a hard task to get that much done in that time. But I managed to fix a problem I had been working on for more than a year so it at least is a bit easier now.

The Reshade update has not been included in this release. I just did not have the time for it yet but will look into it asap.

Also there are a bunch of bug fixes which I might push out relative soon. I only have to review the changes before a final release is possible.

Since only 1/4 of the interiors are released how about a little challenge.

I leave it to you to find the changes in game and post screenshots. Ill confirm if you are right or not.

both times wrong actually