After several months of feature enhancement, addition, and hopefully enough testing to make sure that everything works exactly as billed, I expect V1.1 of this modification to be released within the first couple of weeks of December.
BladeIN is an enhancement to the original Multiplayer Invasion game type for Land of the Dead: Road To Fiddler's Green, that gives server operators far more control over the behavior of their servers. In addition to all of the additions and enhancements that V1.0 provided, as described on the mod home page, V1.1 provides the following:
* Built-in administrator functions (no more using a mutator with weird syntax, just give the "admin login" command, and you'll have access to a menu with the most common admin functions)
- Kick/Ban players
- Switch maps, and edit your map list right from within game
- End match, pause game, and restart map from the menu
* InitialInPlayOverride and PerPlayerOverride, allows the server administrator to eliminate or control all but one of the built-in level limitations on number of enemies that can be in game at once. (Test maps have had 300 zombies in game at once, although we've found that more than 300 will cause Unreal to crash)
* Server admins can add new characters (models, skins, or both) to their server
* Players can select a limitless number of new characters, based on a list setup by the server admin for their particular server - you are no longer limited to "fat redneck" and "skinny redneck" as your only player choices (a tutorial on how to create these character mods will be coming up before the release)
* Automatic map reload on server restart - when the server is stopped, or stops on it's own, and is restarted, a few seconds after it is restarted, it will resume at the map where it left off at - effectively providing crash recovery that does not restart your maplist at the beginning every time. Very handy since the server itself crashes occasionally on map change, when this happens, if you are setup to restart the server automatically, players will hardly notice the crash.
* Major performance enhancement to some original game code that had previously caused CPUs to choke while running games with a lot of players - my test server, a 2.0GHz computer, has served a map with 8 players and over 200 enemies in play at once, and hardly lagged. Previously, anything more than 50 enemies would've had the server jumping at 100% CPU usage regularly.
* Several more internal bug fixes made to various parts of the original game code
* 1.1 will include BladeDM and BladeCTF game types as well - extensions of the original DeathMatch and CaptureTheFlag gametypes that do incorporate most of the bug fixes that were already in the IN game, as well as implement the improved HUD and messaging system, although there have been few other changes to the CTF and DM games. These are considered "beta", as they do appear to function as normal, and as expected, but have not been nearly as extensively tested as the INvasion game.
* Plans right now are to include a server-launch program that will give server admins an easy interface to editing their server's configuration, as well as automatically creating a batch file that will automatically restart the server when unforeseen crashes occur. This may be released as a seperate package, if it is not ready within the next week or so.
OK, I'm bored, and I'm looking through a bunch of code to try and find out how to do something for the Dead Awake mod, and I run across some stupid simple idea like "Hey, why don't we make the Loading screen pop up when it's loading a new map in multiplayer?"
So, now we not only have load screens across the three game types, but there's now Screenshot support (displays shot while loading, ala Quake series) and it'll make use of the Level Summary info, as well.
I'm going to try to assemble a Complete List of everything that is changed for these gametypes..
For all gametypes, BladeIN/DM/CTF:
Admin login capabilities, use the command 'admin login *password*' from the console
You can use the 'admin' command to execute any server-side command, such as 'admin set bladein maxinplay 200'. You may want to read up on Unreal built-in server commands.
Additional admin commands, also which are available from the In-Game Menu (Press ESC after logging in as admin, and you will have a menu that organises all of these):
admin endmatch - Ends the current match as if the timer had run out, or the GoalScore had been reached
admin playersonly - pauses or unpauses all motion except for players
admin kickban *username* - kick and ban *username* from the server by IP
admin kick *username* - kick *username* from the server
admin restartmap - restarts this level from the beginning
admin switch *mapname* - switch to specified map name
admin addmap *mapname* - add *mapname* to your map list
admin removemap *mapname* - remove *mapname* from your map list
Once again, all of these are available from the modified In-Game menu, by pressing "ESC" while in game, then selecting 'Admin Menu', after you have logged in using the "admin login" command.
Admin Password is set in the INI file, under "AdminPassword=" in the section.
Admins may broadcast using the "#" as the first character of their "say" messages, to make them appear in the MOTD box at the center of the screen.
When people die while looking far up or far down, the servers will not lag out with "ServerSetPitch" errors.
HUD messaging works properly, so other mod authors can easily put up information, as well as improved chat that takes up a lot less space, and gives you a lot more room to type in
Players may issue the command "tsay" to bring up an input box for using the 'teamsay' function, so that what you say will only go to your team. (They of course, can bind this to a key, I personally use "Y" as it's right next to "T" for regular say) .. this is mostly useful in Team DM and CTF games, but it does work in IN, although it's not of use there.
Server logs no longer spammed with "Accessed None" errors whenever a player uses their weapons.
Client logs no longer spammed with "Accessed None" errors from MANY places in the playercontroller.
All gametypes have a "Character Customization" menu that opens when a player connects. They can use this to potentially select an unlimited number of characters and skins, that can be added to any server relatively easily. (Expect character packs to come out very quickly after the official release of the code)
When changing maps, the Loading screen will popup, instead of the game just sitting there with nothing at all happening. If a Level has a custom Screenshot inside it, or there is an image in your "LevelScreenshots.utx" texture package, it will display that, instead of the Zombie Head texture that came with the game, for the background of the loading screen.
Game crashing when downloading from extremely fast servers bug is fixed. You can make this work even before you have joined the server by changing the line that says "OverridePlayerControllerClass=" under to:
OverridePlayerControllerClass=Class'BladeIN_V11.ZPlayerController'
Upon a player's death, they can spectate from the POV or Behind view of any human or undead still in game.
*Major* performance enhancement - maps with tons of objects in a small space will not lag a server to death anymore, as well as this fix enabling us to multiply what the servers are capable of handling by at least an order of magnitude. (or just to have a normal server that uses a LOT less CPU time)
As the HUD works properly, the Server MOTD lines in the INI file become functional and useful.
Server stores name of last map that it was on, or map it is switching to, so in the event of a server restart or server crash, about 10 seconds after starting, the server will return to the map it was on, if that map is in your list. If not, it will return to whatever the last map in your list that was played was.
Game-specific changes:
CTF has several performance improvements on both the client and server side, players should notice a potentially huge frame rate boost while playing CTF, and servers may notice performance improvements on the server end.
CTF also announces when someone scores via text as well as via audio cue now.
No specific changes to the DM game
IN has all the same enhancements as the original BladeIN 1.0, as well as two new settings in the INI:
InitialInPlayOverride - Set to -1 to ignore In-Play limitations except for "MaxInPlay", otherwise if there are less than 2 players on the server, there can be no more than this number of enemies in play.
PerPlayerOverride - Set this to 0 to use level settings, or set it to a number to bump InitialInPlay with for each additional player online.
(this means, that if there is 1 person on, and InitialInPlayOverride is set to 10, there can only be 10 zombies in play. If PerPlayerOverride is also set to 10, and a second player logs in, then there may be 20 zombies in play. In play will never exceed MaxInPlay, and may not ever reach it, depending upon the way the level is built.)
All IN options can be specified in your map list, such as:
Maps=INCemeteryPC?InitialInPlayOverride=-20?MaxInPlay=200?MinInPlay=10?InitialWaveSize=20?WaveSizeIncrement=20?PerPlayerOverride=20
This will set INCemeteryPC to allow up to 20 zombies in play, with wave 1 starting at a size of 20. It will increase by 20 maximum in play per each player logged in after the first, until it reaches a maximum of 200. Unfortunatly, CemeteryPC is limited by it's level design to around 12 or so in play at a time.
If command line options are specified in one map, they will go to the next map, if they are not changed!
...if anyone has any suggestions for how to better organise this, please feel free...
I told Fat McNasty and Xxena, the owners of the UG.Com servers, that today's last update to them would be the last change for V1.1, barring any showstopper bugs.