Devblog #20 - Housing/shops, TBC additions, new admin tools
Thanks to @Fruity and @Gr4Ss for writing todays devblog!
As you all know, next weekend we are having our first Open Beta. We’re fully preparing for it, with the main server re-setup and planning having started. These past few days we’ve been working on preparing the server - setting everything up to showcase and explain the major features and the changes since the previous launch.
The goal of the beta is to keep an atmosphere of RP but also allow room for feature exploration and testing. That is, there will be room for RP, and the ‘OOC testing’ of stuff we will be limited to certain areas of the map. Outside of these areas we want to let people roleplay, and expect them to not be interrupted by others while doing so.
With the setup, admins have also been testing some of the new things added. This is a good sanity check as well to be sure we didn’t miss any important bugs that completely block the ability to test things. It also gives valuable feedback on how user-friendly things are - something which isn’t always easy to test if you know 100% how everything works. What is only logical to the developer might be very confusing to players. Keep in mind, not every UI / improvement is in place yet so some features may still be slightly obscure.
For those wondering: we will be using Industrial 17 for the beta. If you want to get ready for the Beta already, feel free to download the content pack:
Steam Workshop::Willard Networks Official Collection
Steam Workshop: Garry's Mod. [h1]WILLARD NETWORKS COLLECTION[/h1] The official Willard Networks collection, featuring models, textures, etc unique to our concept! You'll need to subscribe to this collection to play on the server
The housing system consists of opportunities for both citizen apartments and shops. Via the terminal; you, as long as you have a valid CID, will be able to request a non-priority type apartment, or a priority apartment if you’re a tier 4 loyalist.
It initially costs 35 credits (adjustable by CCA) to request housing, and once you pay, an apartment of the selected type will be chosen for you, finding the first apartment available with less than 3 tenants.
Once assigned, a key for the apartment will be available for you at the pickup terminal, which gives you access to the doors assigned to the apartment. You will have access to information about the apartment you’re assigned to, via the standard terminal. It will showcase the total rent of the apartment, the individual rent (rent is split between tenants), the due date of the rent and the total remaining rent payments. You will also have access to see which CIDs are assigned to the apartment, as well as the list of payments, and of course, you can request new housing, although in most cases you will be assigned to the same apartment, unless another apartment is more vacant.
By standard, to remove inactive tenants, there is a check whether a key assigned to a tenant has been used on any of the doors assigned to the apartment within two weeks. If not, the inactive tenant will be removed from the apartment.
The payments button gives you a variety of options to pay rent. The standard due date for rent is one week after the last rent due date (or creation of the apartment by admins), and if you have not paid your individual rent at this time, you will be evicted from the apartment. You do, as an individual, have the opportunity to pay the full rent of the apartment, if you’re a good guy willing to pay others’ part of the rent. Quality of life also lets you pay the remaining rent of the apartment. There is a standard enabled option of having your rent being paid automatically, which will deduct credits from your ID card upon the due date, if you have enough credits. If not, you will be evicted. This window also shows the payments already made before the due date.
Shops
In terms of shops, the system works the same way, although you will need to request a shop from CWU manually, rather than via the terminal. The CWU will then assign you to the shop, where you can then pick up a key from the pickup terminal. If rent fails to be paid, or there is no interaction, you will, as apartments function, be removed as a tenant, but you will also lose your business license. If you lose or get your key to the assigned shop stolen, you can report it to any CWU or CP member, to get your key disabled and a new one assigned, which you again, can pickup at the pickup terminal.One major complaint with TBC was around large fights being an absolute slow crawl. Although this was mainly a thing in the beta, where some hit registration bugs were resulting in abysmal damage which kept people alive in a fight for too long, we still felt it good to address this. We added in a mechanism where admins can force a fight into S2K mode, or once a fight reaches a certain size players can start a vote themselves.
Once a fight turns into S2K, any current turn is halted while the fight goes into a short S2K warmup phase (5 seconds long currently). This is to make sure the S2K start isn’t completely out of nowhere and everyone knows it is coming. After that, most TBC limitations are lifted (the only remaining ones are related to e.g. observer, char swapping, using /Act commands, …) and players are free to move and shoot as you’d expect in S2K. NPC’s are also removed from the fight to let them freely play, and will not be added into the fight anymore.
The ‘add in radius circles’ also get disabled, so that moving around doesn’t keep on dragging people into the fight and the circles do not give other people’s position away. Being hit by or attacking anyone in an S2K fight, immediately adds the player into the fight without waitlist time.
Essentially this is everything you expect of S2K fights, and the server just tracks who is in an S2K fight and who isn’t. This S2K transition does not disable TBC server-wide, and remains only in effect for the specific fight. Should any TBC fights need to be merged into an S2K fight, they will be forced into S2K as well (without warmup - this will likely be a very rare occurrence).
S2K fights can be left by everyone if in the entire fight nobody attacked for 3 minutes and nobody took damage for 2.
The server box has been reprovisioned to clear out some things in preparation for the beta and re-launch. To improve the setup, there is now a web panel to do some basic server stuff like start/stop/restart, pull in updates, edit the config and pull the log files. Hopefully this will help in case of issues with the server and provide better access to the log files (although admins could already search logs in-game as well).
This also opens up room to give some more people access to do these things on the event and dev server.
With the automatic flag giving change of the last devblog, this was already announced. Giving permanent flags is heavily restricted now with only the Head of Staff and CM’s having access to the command.
To allow our admins to keep on supporting players properly, there is a tempflag command instead now that nearly all admins get access to. If you want to do any builds that are not purely for personal use, all admins are able to give you temporary flags now.
The player with the temporary flags gets a warning 5 minutes before they expire. Upon expiration, the player and admins get notified. Admins can simply give the flags again to extend their duration, or use the extend command to automatically re-give all current temp flags with an updated expiration time. Of course there also are commands to take certain temporary flags, or clear all temporary flags.
Temporary flags can be given for a maximum of 2 hours, and they will not save through restarts or rejoins. There is a config option to determine if char swapping should remove temporary flags as well.
A simple thing to address a really minor problem that we all likely have been annoyed by at some point: seeing a flying flashlight streak across the sky… Or having to do admin stuff in dark areas… Well, no more! Admins get their flashlight disabled when going into observer now, and restored upon exiting. In observer, they get a client-side dynamic light instead which lights up a large area around them, making admining in dark areas a lot easier. This effect is only visible to the admin in question, so it doesn’t interrupt anyone else either when they fly around with it. Win-win!
Options exist to turn it on by default when going into observer, or mimic their flashlight instead (light turns on if flashlight was on). Up to the admins to choose what they prefer. It can also be toggled with the flashlight key while in observer.
Another minor annoyance for admins getting fixed: third person disables when going into observer now, and gets enabled again when leaving. As you are invisible in observer, you couldn’t really see what you were in, except that third person is much more annoying to use in observer due to how it behaves around walls and fucks up your aim. Admins who like to play in third person can now safely stay in third person.
New features
Melee actions and experience were added, as well as the melee skill panel view.- Stormfox 2 was added. C24 v3 will be fully compatible
- New CharSetNeeds command to set hunger and thirst in one go
- Birds can actually fly now
- Washing machine was added, along with ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ clothes items for workshifts.
- Added crafting recipe for plastic bottle (junk item), as it is needed to split disinfectant bottle stacks.
- Added dummy mask item for OTA, as there was some confusion around certain things not working for OTA without the mask.
- Xen potion added, which is a slightly weaker but still very powerful version of the Xen Concoction. Will instantly heal all damage (down to gas points and bad eyesight), but doesn’t give the extreme attribute boosts. It is craftable (unlike the Xen concoction), but still requires Xen ingredients, which aren’t obtainable outside of events.
- Old legs plugin removed, new one added. The new one doesn’t show arms, but it works better. The old one was spaghetti code and so we had to cut our loses and replace it.
- New /Act animations ported from WN7, adding much more stand/sit options.
- Lots of permissions were updated to use CAMI as much as possible. Some groups of commands had their permissions combined to make it easier to manage.
- Advanced duplicator added, along with a flag
- Added MeD (alias: ActionD) and ItD commands. Minor changes to the * in front to distinguish various commands.
Improvements
All needs commands default to 0 hunger and/or thirst if no number is given- Stash size was changed to 4x4
- Smuggler edit UI no longer shows prices (these cannot be changed)
- Outcasts were adjusted to no longer spawn without CID. Instead they spawn with a CID, flashlight, some credits, some chips and reduced social credits.
- Local citizen starts with a request device now instead of a flashlight
- Current radio channels are now networked from the server cache, rather than being calculated client-side every frame. This better shows what the server thinks you are listening on (to better find caching-related bugs), and makes showing your current radio channels more optimized.
- Vort beam damage lowered and accuracy increased. It can fire every turn now, rather than every other turn with reduced movement on top. It still takes 2 AP so movement and shooting are still not possible in the same turn.
- Vorts get 200hp health now.
- Garbage cleaner optimized and refactored to allow much longer times until removal.
- Medical items show their junk item in their description if they have one. These are needed to split their stacks, and will be given upon fully using a stack, or combining 2 stacks.
- Changed some categories on items to clean up the admin item menu (mostly clothing category got changed)
- CP faction no longer has male10 as an option, as there is no CP model for it
- Adhesives were moved into the crafting components item category, as they are used purely in crafting. No changes were made to how they are made.
- The safe requires a higher crafting level to make now
- Skill menus now show how many items the player gains from a recipe, as there was no way to tell this yet. Hopefully people realize now a bandage takes 6 cloth to make because you get 6 bandages from it.
- The chat damage log no longer prints 0 damage events, to avoid spam when your target reaches max damage before their first turn in TBC (especially with a shotgun).
- Bleeding overlay linearly becomes heavier based on % health, rather than being based on absolute health and only becoming heavier in steps of 20HP. This will also be much nicer with the heal-over-time from the medical plugin, as the screen overlay smoothly fades out now.
- Wearing glasses while not needing glasses will also apply the effect now.
- A server config was added to force players to use immersive glasses
- Items that you cannot buy on the smuggler due to not having a high enough level will no longer show. If a smuggler has no items available that you can buy/sell, you cannot start a trade with him.
Bugfixes
Fixed errors related to gas plugin- Smuggler ESP ghost no longer renders over smuggler ESP text
- Smuggler physics no longer desynced between client and server, fixes some physgun issues
- Fixed issues with CP suits not properly acting as radio items/not giving combine radio channels
- Fixed some radio channel caching issues related to radio items moving between inventories with different owners. Solves radio channels not updating when putting them in a container.
- Fixed turning a radio off actually not removing the channel from the player
- Fixed current talking radio channel not properly loading after a map restart
- Fixed a bug in TBC where pain level would go negative, giving increased movement. It properly stops decreasing every round when reaching 0 now.
- /Datafile target argument now mandatory, as it causes errors otherwise.
- Fixed a lua error happening for all CP’s when someone opened /datafile. It now properly shows the identity inspection line on the visor.
- Fixed CP area change notification not happening, due to helix calling the Area Change hook before actually updating the player’s current area.
- Split option no longer shows on item entities, as this doesn’t work and causes errors.
- Fixed the starting typing on CP’s & OTA not happening after the first time.
- Fixed CP/OTA having a double death sound
- A render issue with the OTA ESP was fixed where the render material wasn’t reset
- Combine filter was set as refillable, this is no longer the case.
- Fixed a typo in the charcoal filter refill crafting recipe
- Fixed OTA passive chatter delay
- Fixed a lua error related to bleedout godmode (preventing death while bleeding out until the bleedout timer expires), causing non-bleedout characters to no longer die.
- Corrected bodygroup name on the CP mask
- Fixed male CP’s becoming errors when equipping a suit
- Fixed CP’s having some animation issues due to a bad model getting set (accidentally had a // rather than a / something in the model path).
- Fixed being unable to set the name on combine suits due to the item option being broken
- Added ‘clear owner’ option on combine suits, causing the next person to equip the suit to become the owner.
- Fixed some ‘user’ permissions not actually being set that way, and having to be manually given in the admin mod to the user group.
- Fixed a bug with xen food items caused by changes in the gas plugin.
- Fixed a bug where the vote time on TBC end fight votes was not checked in regular TBC fights.
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