Things I would like to see for the Map Makers

[Z-Man]

Yeah, but that's for the map maker and server admin to tune. There are limitiations to AI abuse. The possibilities are only limitless if you spam the clients with updates every frame; if you don't do that, you're limited by the cycle movement physics parameters. I'd say we shouldn't try to automate anything here; we should just tell mappers that if they want moving walls in a way compatible with old clients, they have to use AIs On Rails and live with the limitations.

[Luke-Jr]

Yeah, but that's for the map maker and server admin to tune. There are limitiations to AI abuse. The possibilities are only limitless if you spam the clients with updates every frame; if you don't do that, you're limited by the cycle movement physics parameters.

Or you could predict when the client will have trouble (by network version), and send the necessary extra update at just the right time. Eg, right after the cycle goes through a wall.
I should try this for MCP Attack, but I'm not sure where to start.

I'd say we shouldn't try to automate anything here; we should just tell mappers that if they want moving walls in a way compatible with old clients, they have to use AIs On Rails and live with the limitations.

The reason to do our own "moving rimwalls" to AI emulation translation is so newer clients at least see it correctly and don't see AIs. And so we don't encourage hacks, of course.

[Z-Man]

Yes on sending extra updates for old clients when a cycle passes a wall; optimally, it should only happen if the sync is required, that is when the client has a version that thinks the wall is unpassable. Of course, that would be too much work, so we won't do it We should add a simple setting to control which client versions get the extra syncs. The server admin will know best what to waste his bandwidth with.

No on the fake AI automation. It's just too complex and won't work most of the time, and unless the server admin explicitly tests his server with old clients (who does?), we won't know whether it works. And AIs On Rails aren't a hack You can set up a fortress attack training server with enemy AIs following increasingly difficult to beat defense patterns and a fortress startup training server with AIs doing the standard grind pattern and the trainee in between them (further back than normal).

[Luke-Jr]

And AIs On Rails aren't a hack You can set up a fortress attack training server with enemy AIs following increasingly difficult to beat defense patterns and a fortress startup training server with AIs doing the standard grind pattern and the trainee in between them (further back than normal).

Using AIs as moving rimwalls ignorant of other players/walls is a hack.

[Z-Man]

No, it's only an abuse It would be a hack if we offered automatic conversion of whatever real system we'll be implementing to AIs. But we won't do that.