First off, read this. It's a quick post by Zunni stating the Dev's official position on structure blocking. In essence, it states that two types of blocking are disaproved of - blocking a retreating alien, and blocking a vent.

I have made this thread so that I&S forumites can post and comment on ideas they think will allow the devs to enforce their position

Please also refer to this GD thread on the subject for some ideas.




To start this shindig, I'll post my idea: a comm cannot drop a building within a certain radius of an alien. While the distance would have to be tweaked, I believe that this would stop a commander from trapping an alien with a structure as it tries to flee.

Some ideas:

1. Building Disks http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/in...showtopic=80581

2. Transparent Buildings

3. Each alien gets a player ring similar to how marine structures have building rings that the com cannot drop a structure on.

The building has to be dropped close to a marine or another building would be a good one...

A minimum alien radius wouldn't work. The CC doesn't have to be right next to the Onos to block it off; you could drop it 50 feet away from them, but if it blocks off the entrance completely the effect is the same. Only being able to drop them near marines wouldn't do anything either since marines can just stand near the door. And both of these changes would have adverse effects on the rest of the game.

Ghost structures are the best and simplest solution IMHO.

Dont forget to check the threads in the subforums discussing CC blocking and low structural hp.

I'm all for a structure not becoming solid to kharaa players until it is half/fully built.

That way you could still block a hallway long ahead of an attack, but couldn't prevent an escape.

Naturally you would have to make sure nobody got stuck in a structure when it suddenly became solid, but you could probably use the same code as for dropping structures only in open areas.

It might not even matter: How often do marines survive building something in the middle of a firefight? It's about as bad as humping the armory.

edit: odd wording.

I personally think the way they did it in the early betas is best. When a building is dropped, it's a transparent hologram. It only becomes solid when the building is actually complete. The primary problem with this is marines clipping though the building when it's under construction so when it completed, the marine would be trapped inside. either:

1. The marine can freely walk around inside the building until he leaves it's clipping radius, and then is affected by it as per usual (what is used right now to stop marines from getting stuck under buildings).

2. The marine is teleported in (some) direction when the building completes and he's standing in the clipping radius. This would be hard to code.

3. Marines can not walk through unbuilt buildings, only aliens can. This would be hard to explain.

Option 1 is probably the most viable of the three you offer, Red. The only abusive thing I could see with that is dropping a structure directly on a marine and having him duck down inside it while building. Of course, this means he's not shooting the skulks that are chewing it down, so he'll probably get good and dead as soon as he stands up or as soon as the chew the building down. Either way, it would probably only be useful in silly end game situations. Just like gorges hiding out in DC-filled vents, you might have one last marine crouching inside a half-built Tfac. Not exactly game breaking.

About the third step; I'm not sure if the dev team have anything planned, or already solved, this problem, but me and a few of the guys at AusNS came up with a couple of solutions to this problem.

• Have a 'phase in' time for marine tech. This also seems plausable with the gamepaly, as a solid chunk of metal shouldnt just appear out of thin air, even with nanites. For four or so seconds the structure 'fades' in from nothingness, during said time it isnt solid. If a player is still inside the building when the four seconds is up, they are either 'pushed' out of the area, or the building wont be solid untill they leave the buildings boundries.
• Similar to the previous phase in idea, all marine buildings are not 'solid' for alien players untill they have started to be built by a marine player. If they are solid to marine players is up for argument.

There are plenty more methods using a hybrid of those two ideas, wether or not they are acceptable are another issue. A few changes to them could be that the marine buildings are only in their 'phase' state if they are outside the boundries of a built CC, or some other struture.

Open for discussion, please argue and contribute

As forblocking vents, maybe add a movement radius around each building.

Each building needs more room than it actually occupies to be placed, so aliens and people can move around it.

Like this:

|XXXXX
|XXXXX
|XXXXX
|XXXXX
|XXXXX
|XXXXX

The red Xs are the actual building, but to place it you need the yellow Xs in free space. This ensures everyone can move around the building (makes it harder to block exits/vents etc.).

If there were no yellow Xs, the building could be placed right next to the wall, which would make maneuvering around it rather difficult (exit blocking), but with the yellow X's there will allways be some space to maneuver.

A combination of the following:

http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/in...=28222&st=0&hl=
Building transparency.

http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/in...0&#entry1213557
Ghost structures -> Tangent on another topic.

Of course this only solves one problem, the blocking of retreating aliens, methods would still be required to prevent the blocking of vents.

I was going to post a topic but it seems one was already made.

My idea is allowing an onos (The most blocked. Marines can't afford to block fades that early) to just move the structure out of the way.

After all, he is bigger and stronger than the structure. No reason why he can't just ram it out of the way.

Edit: Here's a topic discussing alamo walling.

http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/in...showtopic=78211

We do have a few ideas, we are reviewing the pros/cons of each idea.

Transparent or ghost-buildings are in my opinion the best ideas to prevent onos/fade blocking. And the building would be solid when its really "ready".
And to the argument "can marines or aliens move inside the transparent building?"
My reasoning: Marines can't because nanites prevent them from doing this because it might endanger their lives.. But aliens are not bound by this rule because they are a different lifeform..
But would bullets still go through? ..that I cannot reason

And for blocking vents.. I'd say you really can't prevent that IF the vent opening is at ground level. It's upto mappers to put the vent openings somewhere out of ground level.. ie. so high that buildings can't block em.

Another interesting idea.

Make a certain type of terrain that you can place on the map that marine structures can't be built on.

Place this terrain in places near ground vents, marine spawn doors, etc.

I don't know how hard it would be to make terrain that isn't buildable on, but it can be done.

Though from a development standpoint, wouldn't it just be easier to make some sort of "no buildings allowed to be placed" trigger or somthing?

The problem with ghost structures is inevitably when a player is inside the ghosted building and what if the structure becomes solid WITH the player inside of it...

Anyway, I believe theki11er's idea of slowly rising from the ground is excellent. If a player is ON the structure as it finishes, the player gets bumped up.

To solve the problem of structure identification, I propose this idea:

1) Have the structure hologramed to let the player know what it is.

2) The actual structure is below the ground.

3) As the structure is being built, it rises FROM the ground.

4) Any player ON the structure is gently pushed upward (think of an elevator), thus solving any telefrag, knockback issues.

I like the idea of the built structure pushing up to solve and issues of marines inside the unbuild transparent structure. A /stuck command might be needed as a just incase for the first release

I REALLY hope something happens with this idea/suggestion and its taken onboard seriously by the developers.. it would solve so many problems in ns_strat

/me winks at Zunni

CC blocking OC's and Aliens is just a bit frustrating and depressing for the alien blocked.. it takes the fun out of the game when a commander uses these tactics.

If this comes through, OC's might gain some of their value back.

A) as it states in the FAQ, /stuck will never be implemented by NS Staff.

B) We are still investigating all of our options, trust me as soon as something is put into the game and tested, I'll let you guys know..

Why not lower the initial health for the command chair so that a retreating onos can destroy it rather easily?

Lowering the initial health doesn't matter when it only takes 1 second of delay to kill something under heavy fire. A block is still a block and if you have to stop and whack something three or four times, you're dead.

lower it enough so that the onos can take in out in 1 hit.

If that is too low for the game, give the onos a special boost so he CAN take it out in 1 hit. This applies to "just placed" buildings (or just the cc) where no marine has started to build it.

There is a problem with purely ghosted structures. Say a marine is ninja'ing a phase, and he doesn't finish it before he's killed, the alien couldn't kill it, so another marine would walk along finish it and it's a ninja PG.

My opinion is the disk idea, and that the building phases in after complete, but during construction the disk is killable (it would go along the same standards of health, so if it's a almost-finished phase gate, it'ld have 2900 HP, while if it was just dropped, it would have 1500 HP).

About marines being in the way, well, this is why we have voogru. He made the phase push mod (where if you are on a phase gate and someone else phases, you get pushed out of the way), could he not do the same thing in this instance?

A fix for unattackable holo-structures (ninja PG) would be that the holo structure disintegrates after a minute if noone builds it.

To be more precise, it's HP will start going down after a minute of not being built. If it's HP is at 0 it dissapears. If a marine starts building it while it's disintegrating, it stops disintegrating and the timer is reset.

Unbuilt structure disintegrate speed is 3% HP per second (so it lasts about 30 seconds before a 99% completed structure actually disapears... 90 seconds if you count the 60 second 'no build' timer).

When a structure is complete but aliens/marines are in the way, the solidifying of said structure will be "On Hold" (it doesn't go solid as long as a player is blocking it, to prevent stuck situations). You can look at UT2K4 onslaught for this. As long as a player is in the way of a respawning vehicle, the vehicle won't respawn, but show an outline of the vehicle instead (coloured rings).


Edit: Ofcourse there's no resource refund on disintegrated structures (to counter early game RT spam on 'alien' nodes).

RTs will have to be exempt from the ghost-immunity; otherwise marines would drop them all over the map and they would block alien RTs indefinitely(even if they disintegrate, it would slow aliens down a lot).

I think giving the structure a very low amount of HP when unbuild is most easy way for the devteam to solve this problem in a first step.

They might even consider giving all unbuild structures the same amount of HP when unbuild (this would make a unbuild CC as vulnerable as a unbuild TF or any other structure)

I think that a big creature like a onos should be able to take down a unbuild structure very easily (2-3 attacks). this way a gorge sitting in front of a unbuild RT would also be able to take it down much easier intead of waiting for another alien to get rid of something that was only dropped to slow him down (unrightfully) at doing his job.

One might think to apply the same rules for unbuild alien structures, but I don't think these rules should be applied for alien structure since the gorge cannot really arm rines by dropping unbuild structures and he only can drop structure in his proximity.