Devblog #18 - Gas 2.0, Skills Rework, CP Suits, Admin ESP
Todays devblog is written by @Gr4Ss so sit back with a nice cup of tea and enjoy a detailed read!
Screen overlay and overall UI (sped up to 1 minute = 0.3 seconds)
The original ‘gas plugin’ dates back nearly 8 years by now, and in that time has barely changed in its functionality. The original introduction on HL2RP was with a rather simple aim: to keep most players out of the sewers and concentrate RP back to the surface. It achieves this rather crudely by introducing gasmasks and filters as a requirement for entry, and killing anyone who enters without those rather quickly (to prevent healing item spam and/or a sprint to a ‘safe zone’).
This worked, albeit a bit too well. Gas v1 goes a bit beyond its initial objective. First of all it put up an item requirement for entry into the sewer, which basically became a script barrier for joining the resistance. Secondly, leaving the sewers required a rebel to wear a contraband item, which he may not be able to hide on the surface and will result in amputation if caught with. And so started the divide between rebels living in their bases in sewers, and citizens living in the slums trying to earn (or should we say farm) their way into the resistance.
In hindsight, this could have been better. On Willard v1 with C24 v2 we tried to just eliminate gas entirely given the negative impacts it had, but the old problems from 2013 (on i17 v1 back then) immediately came back: anti-citizens congregate in the sewers, killing all RP on the surface due to there being too little people around. So we went back to the drawing board to come up with a solution that avoids the pitfalls of the original solution.
From that 2 things came which will be different:
- The sewers in C24 v3 have been reworked. It is designed without bases, camps or other structures that attract large groups of people and/or encourage people to stay in the sewers. All this was moved to the slums.
- Reintroduce a gas plugin, but reworked to not put up an item barrier for entry, but instead with the focus to prevent long-term or permanent residence. The gas will be everywhere in the C24 v3 sewers (even the non-Xen infested areas). There will be no safe spots from the gas/spores in the sewers.
Together we hope that we can keep the sewers accessible even to brand new characters with zero items, while avoiding large numbers of people living there with no/limited intentions to ever show up on the surface again, and still support all forms of anti-citizen RP.
The main change is how the effects of the ‘gas point’ build-up: rather than this being a matter of seconds until damage gets applied, we are now talking about minutes and hours. The first hour in gas is almost entirely harmless, even to people without any form of protection whatsoever. The second hour is where the negative effects begin to build up, but as long as you get out on time there are no real long-term consequences. This is represented by ‘gas points’, which build up at the simple rate of 1 point per minute inside gas for someone without any form of protection.
The main cost of staying longer is in the cooldown period: this is exponential in how long you stay inside. Higher gas build-up decay much more slowly on top of there being more to decay. As you stay inside beyond the 1 hour mark, the cooldown period will explode. A simple example:
- 30 gas points = 30 minutes in gas => 2 hour cooldown to 0 gas points
- 60 gas points => 8 hour cooldown to 0 gas points
- 90 gas points => ~1 day cooldown to 0 gas points
- 120 gas points => ~4 day cooldown to 0 gas points
- 60 gas points => 8 hour cooldown required to get to 0 points
- Re-enter sewers after 6 hours cooldown => (8 - 6) = 2h cooldown left = 30 gas points upon entry
- +60 gas points (spending 60 minutes in gas again) = 90 gas points => 1 day cooldown! (vs 8 hours if entering the sewers with 0 gas points upon entry)
It is important to note that the cooldown only starts ticking once you have been outside of the gas for at least 5 minutes. Once it is running, it will stay running even when you are offline or on another character. This will hopefully facilitate players who are wanted by the Combine, and people who only have a limited amount of playtime each day. It allows everyone at least one 60-90 minute sewer visit or multiple shorter visits every day.
High gas point values will start to have certain effects. These include some passive effects which begin at different levels and generally become heavier the more points you have. Your character will start to cough, have some difficulty breathing, a soft heartbeat sound playing and the gas screen overlay making it harder to see. Spending more than half an hour in the sewers will also start to reduce your skills, up to 40% at the 2-hour mark.
Now what if you stay even longer? Once you reach 120 gas points, your character gets marked for death. At this point an invisible 1 hour timer starts running, after which your character will die. This creates room for you to roleplay this out before dropping dead. There currently is no cure implemented, once you reach 120 points your character WILL die (obviously admins can intervene in case of exceptional circumstances). Dying from gas at the end of the 1-hour timer will also automatically PK your character.
Various notifications in chat will point out some basic things as you enter a zone, your points build up and you leave again. These are turned on by default, but you can turn them off in your settings should you find them annoying.
Gas bar below 60, filling up from 0 to 60 minutes in gas
Gas bar above 60 (the dark orange part filling up from 60 to 120 gas points), and the warning (also shows color difference caused by screen overlay effect)
Warning shown at 120 points, death timer is running, the bar is no longer shown
For those who wish to stay longer in the sewers or have a shorter cooldown period, masks and gasmasks are the solutions. What is the difference between those two?
- Masks do not require a separate filter item to use, they essentially provide protection by themselves. Their downside is that their protection doesn’t last as long as is not as good.
- Gasmasks require a separate filter item. The protection duration and quality depends purely on the filter.
Various filter items are planned, varying in length of protection and their quality. Some will be craftable, others will be only available to the Combine, while others will be acquired via smuggling. Some filters will slowly decay if used outside the sewers and should be unequipped, others do not have this problem. Note that no filter or mask provides full protection. At best you can stay very long times in the sewers (assuming your filter supply is large enough), but sooner or later you will have to surface and deal with the cooldown.
As filters/masks are starting to wear out, their quality will also begin to drop. At this point you can consider if you want to replace your filter or when you want to refill your filter. To refill a filter, it must be unequipped and can be done simply via your inventory (note that the high-quality filters generally are not refillable). You can also simply replace a filter with another one by using the menu option on the new filter - this will instantly swap the filters out. Just remember that the gas doesn’t instantly kill, and the negative impact of having no filter equipped for a few seconds is rather minimal.
A bandana (which functions as a mask), gasmask, makeshift filter, high quality filter and combine filter.
A mask item, which functions as a filter with a low quality. Can be cleaned with alcohol if degraded (integrity value).
The makeshift filter, average quality but can be refilled rather easily.
Partially used filter, note that the quality still remains the same.
Heavily used filter, quality has degraded below half already.
The refill option on an unequipped, used filter. Note that there is no equip option as no gasmask is equipped.
Replace option to replace an equipped filter immediately (not that this is necessary, but just for quality of life).
Upon character creation, we now allow you to distribute some skill points, further allowing you to build the character you want right off the bat. Together with your attributes and food/drug boosts you'll quickly be able to reach above average levels in one or two skills. Back in devblog #14 we showcased the removal of attributes however since then we've decided to instead balance it out with a few "free" skill points to allow players to specialize more easily.
(Ignore the "bartering" skill selection, bartering no longer uses levels and of course smuggling is missing from this as well).
One of the requests that came out of the initial launch was the ability to have all skills active at the same time. So we added in just that: you are no longer limited to only 3 skills, and can freely level up any and all skills. That is on one condition, rather than limiting you to 3 skills, we now limit the total combined skill level of your character. This is to prevent old characters from becoming good at everything.
As there may now be some skills you may only wish to level up to a certain level (or not at all), levelling up is no longer automatic. Your experience is saved up separately for each skill until you have enough to buy a full skill level in that skill. Then you simply click the level up button and poof, you have gained a level. There is a notification as well for when you reach enough stored up experience. Experience will continue to store up until it reaches 1999 total, just 1 experience (0.1%) short of having a second level stored up. This grants you some buffer if you do not immediately click the level up button and ensures no experience is wasted.
If there are certain skills you are certain you want to train, you can also toggle auto-level on them. This will immediately level up that skill when you gain enough experience to do so. This way you cannot forget to do it.
New skill overview, including ‘auto-level’ boxes and level-up button
Skills not set to auto level will alert you when they can be leveled up
Skills set to auto level will notify you when leveled, along with a sound-cue.
CP suits have gotten a major refactor to improve upon their functionality. Script-wise, a lot of CP stuff was tied to being whitelisted on the faction. No more! Except for some OOC things, everything is connected to having an active Combine (CP or OTA) suit equipped now.
Together with that, masks were also added to support the maskless CP models we have. Masks are also a thing for OTA, but mostly just there for technical reasons as they do not have a maskless model with a mask bodygroup.
At the moment the foundations and all of the groundwork is done, along with the vast majority of refactoring in other parts of the gamemode being done to make use of this. Before and after launch, more improvements will be made here, the important fact is that this is all easy to do now as the systems are there to do it with.
Upon equipping a CP suit, combine functions are activated even though this character is on a citizen whitelist. Equipping the mask starts drawing the CP HUD as well.
Suits are the main item at work here, and come in a CP and OTA variant. Of each variant, multiple different versions might exist with different bodygroups, but functionally they will be the same.
Upon a suit being equipped for the first time, it will lock in to its owner. This turns the suit into a fully functional and active Combine suit, allowing its wearer to access various Combine functionalities in-game (opening Combine doors, controlling force fields, using datafile, …). Suits have 2 values on them: whether they are ‘active’ (allowed to operate Combine stuff), and whether they are ‘tracked’ (security systems active + locatable by Dispatch).
The suits will be dropped on death. What prevents a random player from taking them, equipping them and going haywire with his newfound Combine powers? Suits are tracked, and tracked suits upon death of their owner will be disabled. An inactive suit may still provide some functionality, but essentially its ties into the Combine systems are broken and will no longer work. Admins have an admin-option to re-activate a suit in case of OOC accidents.
Note that a suit being active, and a suit being tracked does not depend on each other. So inactive tracked suits can exist (they will be dropped on death by CP’s), just as active untracked suits can exist (still TBD how these will be obtainable). An inactive untracked suit would mostly just make you look like a CP and give you some armor without much else, but also be undetected by the Combine.
Masks can be equipped when wearing a suit. They work as a gasmask, activate the vocoder and cause the HUD to appear. They will also conceal one’s identity and instead cause the identity of the owner of a suit to show. Some mask functionality is tied to them being equipped in combination with an inactive suit, and won’t work with inactive suits.
Some UI rework was done for Combine factions. The CP visor was simplified and will now only show waypoints, visor status and ‘combine feed’. No more ‘there is a weapon here’ or ‘this person is attempting stealth’. The old clockwork combine overlay was also removed.
The OTA HUD was reworked in the same way as the CP HUD, except they get a tactical ESP which highlights people wearing a tracked Combine suit (CP or OTA) and will show the aim location of other OTA. This should help coordinate OTA between themselves, but doesn’t give them any extra info on adversaries. Especially in the dark sewers this is important.
The ‘combine feed’ was also somewhat reworked. Extra stuff was included like PT’s or lone units changing locations, datafiles being opened, etc. Extra alerts tied to the new suits were also added. Some old feed items were reworked or removed as well.
OTA unit and aim position on which the player has a direct line of sight highlighted by the OTA HUD.
OTA unit and aimposition on which the player has no direct line of sight (or when the player has his flashlight on) highlighted by the OTA HUD.
(Ignore the giant errors in the sky)
Passive chatter got a rework as well. Rather than playing a random sound file, it now uses the built-in sentences from HL2. On code blue, these will be more passive lines from CP’s. On code orange and higher these switch to a different set of sentences that better fit in with a heightened state of alert. OTA will only get chatter on code orange and above as they don’t really have passive lines.
If you die as a CP you'll hear dispatch call out your digits (again ignore the giant errors in the sky)
CP death sounds were reworked as well. Dispatch will now call out the unit by tagline and number, and if the location they died in was set up for it, it will also properly call out their location using sound files.
Dispatch ESP is reworked to only show units with a tracked suit. No longer do they get a full "admin ESP" that shows everyone's location, to combat metagame. In future some extra ‘traces’ will be added to this, e.g. briefly highlighting citizens moving through force fields or being seen by a camera and showing camera locations. Long-term this should allow us to open up dispatch to non-admin players too, assuming they can be trusted with access to observer on their dispatch character (only that character will get access).
We reworked the admin ESP. The default Helix admin ESP frankly is rather hard to use: finding players is difficult due to the text fade distance, health is not clearly indicated and overall it is confusing to use. This was fixed with a new way of highlighting players through walls and a more dynamic approach to showing information. At a distance, only someone’s name will show, and as admins move closer in observer extra info will fade in, including HP, armor, steam name, current fight, group, medical status, gas points and weapon. More info can easily be added as well. Overall a minor change for players, but a big quality of life improvement for admins which will hopefully also allow them to better support everyone.
The same bot screenshotted at different distances. The last picture has a direct line of sight as well, which only renders a glow rather than fully painting over their model.
Items show who dropped them and how long ago now
