Posts by SWAT_OP-R8R

  • Crossfire - Upcoming changes, upcoming content

    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.

  • Crossfire - Upcoming changes, upcoming content

    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.

  • Crossfire - Upcoming changes, upcoming content

    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.