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If its any consolation, it looks balla cool.

It isn't. I'm still quite disappointed how unplayable it turned out being. The lag is probably the main issue. The "difficult" I can easily address with the missing gameplay progression.

Guess I should get that lag fixed before anything else.

Its not difficult at all, its just slow and without armor your primary mech is useless.

I wish I had Brood War to play it.

It even lags in 1-player LAN, and I guess it shouldn't actually... And imo 2.8GHz 512MB RAM should be enough for any SC map...
How often are you ordering move commands and on how many units?
From my experience, move commands (attack move commands, actually) cause the most non-connection-lag. SC seems to have a rather bad pathing algorithm for large numbers of units, and when you are spamming move commands, it seems to lag even the strongest CPUs.
I experienced this especially in Omicron RPG. Mass lings kept stacking somewhere and were spammed with move commands. To be able to finish the game off, I had to go to that location and tear away 100s of zerglings again and again, everytime their number was causing lags again.

Apart from that lag:

- It spammed me with text when I put my pilot on the hangar beacon with a firebat still on the field. Imo 1 of these messages at once should be enough.

- some text of the descriptions in the hangar is white in the first line and light blue in the second.

I'm working on lag fixes right now. I'm looking for all possible triggers that are running in the background causing potential lag. A lot of my failsafes seem to be culprits, but until I finish going through them all and getting them all delagged I can't be sure yet. Some triggers are unavoidable lag culprits, but fortunately they're mostly restricted to certain events or sequences.

Thanks for informing me about the text color thing. Can you tell me which purchase it was?

I'm sorry I can't remember what purchase it was. But I think it was one of the bottom row.

I've noticed an interesting problem that is majorly farking up player 1. P1's pilot unit remains in the top-left spawn placement box...

Wo! such a great map!! I must say, i'm a DotA player.. And that is kinda hot And all the twist we can do.. 10/10 without hesitate!! But some little things remain to fix.. I'm sure on next release it gonna be hardcore I played with my bro on a LAN.. and it never lagged.. Oh maybe at end when i had like 100 air spawner And someone said we should start with more money.. I AGREE!!! lol just enought to buy Arbiter+dropship+guardian

Dear SEN,
I have been decieving you all these years, I am in fact, a male.
-FireKame

Awesome map tux templar, tho ive only gotten the chance to play single player, and when ever i try to deploy my mech it says "mech deployment failed, try re-deploying in a more open space" , and i have tryed deploying everywhere, and same thing happens , and after this my pilot stays at the top left of the map so i cant do anything. Is anyone else having this problem? or is it just me?

EDIT: i finally found a friend to play it with and it is awesome, and the deployment prob didnt happen, still its weird that it happend in only single player tho.

Nothing seems to be working right on Macs. When I actually do get a mech deployed, I can't do much with it. No matter what gun thing I have, it shoots like once then just freezes in position or moves in circles. When moving with the pointer, the base doesn't use its weapon. Seems like the only way to do anything is with deployables...

You tried switching modes yet?

I had a really bad bug while playing this. Once I entered the opponents HQ area, all shields and weapons of my mech started moving to the left of the screen. I tried deploying a pointer and doing a lot of stuff, but still, the shields and weapons moved to the left. I ended up getting killed, because all my mech part flew over various bunkers and were shot by turrets, and then my cockpit was slain by an opposing mech. I lost the game because of that bug.

The idea is awesome! The realization is perfect! Very very very good map Tux, but there are still some thigs to work at.

Can those lag be caused because of constantly giving order to move parts to the pointer or constantly giving parts to different players?

Just some things that I thought about... Can the pilot really deploy the mech? It can be more realistic if the pilot just can exit the mech and the mech itself will remain on the place where it was left. For example giving all parts to P12 or just forbitting selecting all of the parts. And even further, what if you could capture left mech?

Then I thought about destroyed parts... I just thought what if they are destroyed you have to buy new ones? It is more realistic I think. Why can you deploy the whole mech after it was destroyed?

After all this is said you can even have an ability to catapult your pilot with some kind of really fast unit given for several seconds and exploding the mech after that. But if so pilots must be even times more important than the mech.

By the way, what do you think about reaver chasis? It could be an alternative to the Dreadnaught.

Well and the last paltry thing... If you dont made it yet. It will look better if you add <2> color to the end of the names of Menu items so the final bracket will look the same as the first one

ADDITION:
And... Oh well, I consider you know it but still... You can fix this unplacable bug near criffs using the fact that moving units to the location where at least one another unit is moves those units regardless to wether there is a criff or not. Just first move your mech and then remove the pilot.

That's partly it, but there's many possible lag sources within the triggers. I've determined it's not the quantity, so I simply have to narrow down and attempt to eliminate the worst culprits. I'm doing that now.

I've been considering something like this already. My original idea of deploying and redeploying was to seperate the pilot functions from mech functions so the gameplay could stay on track, but that idea only held during the early planning stages and now it probably works out to the opposite of that.

I might decide to do this, in fact. Or at least something close to it.


No that was on purpose. I wanted players to freely engage in mech battles without worry about losing money from lost parts. The reason for this is a gameplay one: If building mechs meant little more than operating a complex contraption that is no less risky than simply putting a bunch of spawners or buying an army of deployables and upgrades, what's to make them want to bother with mechs at all then?

At least, that was my worry originally. That too much not be as bad as I'd originally thought. But even still, there are other costs for losing mech parts that aren't as severe but no less effective (lost time, for example). I think I'll stick with those (with some needed modifications, of course).

What's wrong with the infested cc? I personally don't like reavers that much, frankly.


Unplaceables on cliffs? I thought I fixed those already?

It still remains. I dont mean that it crashes the map but showing you the message to redeploy the mech. Mabe it's not so important but I thought that deployment that never fails would be better. By the way, that solution with the Escape Pod seems very interesting, but you could do this without it simplifying the triggers by the way.

PLEASE more money$$$ at start, so you can buy more parts.
And the troops that go to fight in the middle look stupid because I think nobody will send troops in that suicide move, at least reduce the number of orders so the game will not be slow

Oh that. Yeah it's hard to fix that because you need to find an area the ground cockpit will fit into that's as close to player's pilot's last position as possible and doesn't allow potential exploits like cliff jumps through its method (though I doubt that'd be a real significant problem with this map). I could use displacement placement like you suggested though and risk it anyway.

I figured it'd just be easier to prevent it from happening altogether with a failsafe and let the players know not to do it next time. Hopefully it isn't too punishing gameplay-wise to do it like that.

I see... There are very few ground parts (only chasis?) that they could jump over a criff or another obstacle, but if you still aware of that to happen your decision is the best. Anyway I really like this Escape Pod solution!

I think that you can deploy anywere is a bit unrealistic, I think that the deployment will need to e realized only in the hangar and the mech will apear near it

That would slow game speed severely.

Yes as I said I'm considering something like that. Though I could just explain the current system by saying the mech gets "beamed" to you via. satellite or something each time you deploy it. The reason I use that system is because I wanted players to be able to move around at the same time as their mechs were getting ready, instead of having one block the other. That way they get into position quickly instead of hauling their slow mech around everywhere.

To consider that option fully though I'll need to add some new mechanism to move mechs around quickly without putting them away completely (like what happens now with mech recall). Any ideas for a way to do this?

One thing you really need to do is uh, make the "mechs" actually look like mechs. With what I saw, they just look like a disorganized jumble of units.

The only way I can think to do that would be to use mobile grids to arrange the units in patterns. That'd be an enormous pain to do, though. I'd probably have to redo the whole mech system from scratch to accommodate that.

I'd rather keep my aim on a playable map instead of a pretty one.