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40oz

How do slaughtermaps hold up in Multiplayer?

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There was a ZDaemon Thursday Night Survival on SF2012 a few months ago, but no comments after the fact. From my speculation it seemed like SF2012 was being used as a stress test for the source port more than anything else, but I wouldn't know. I wasn't there.

I was curious at how well slaughtermaps play in coop. I assume some maps were better than others. It seems like some of the maps depend pretty heavily on a single player directing where the hordes of monsters roam, crowd control, or by the player being able to restart it from scratch. I'm curious to know whether or not these maps were any fun to play in Multiplayer game modes -- and more importantly, if there are any ideas to how they could have been salvaged to work better as a coop map.

I'm familiar with both survival and regular coop game modes but I've not been able to play any slaughter wads with other people. The closest I've gotten were the later maps of Scythe 2 on Odamex, where I was brutally slain because I was distracted by my awfully high ping. I couldnt determine if it was my computer, my internet, or the source port to blame. I'm sure Zandronum and Zdaemon do much better on those maps but I'd still like to know if they do okay with SF2012. I know a lot of maps had to be clipped from the maplist to make it work.

I'd like to incorporate hordes of monsters in my future maps but I'm on the fence with the contention that it would be awesome for single player and just a miserable mess for multiplayer. Any input on that subject in regards to multiple players, players respawning or not respawning, and how certain source ports cope with large monster quantities would be highly valuable.

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slaughtermaps in MP rule, but ofc to be fun they usually either have to be relatively good maps to start with, or specifically tailored for coop/surv/whatever.

the SF mapsets weren't really designed around MP gameplay, compatibility was enforced sort of as an afterthought and I wouldn't be surprised if the maps weren't overly fun to play (I haven't extensively tried them out myself in MP, I've been wanting to, so if I'm wrong feel free to call me on it). I think it's best to consider such things from the get go, so the MP experience can be more interesting than just camping safe spots and fighting randomly placed cyberdemons.

things to keep in mind when designing MP slaughtermaps:

- too huge + many monsters awake at a given time = lagapalooza, often times unplayably so (or at least this has been my experience in zd, zandro). Easy to fix by having tele closet monsters wake up incrementally, etc, but it's something to keep in mind if the map gets large.

- slaughtermaps tend to 'lock' players into rooms more often than other mapping niches, so make things accesible from the outside by other players, but not in a way that allows people break traps and trivialize them. teleporters are your friend.

- often times many encounters are designed such that having multiple players makes it much harder than just 1 person doing it alone, due to less predictable pathing / stray projectiles, etc. definitely not gamebreaking if this is the case, but if you can design encounters such that people don't get in eachothers way or have different tasks to do then it can be a bit more fun.


my opinion may be shit because I'm still pretty new to MP, and recently I've mainly been playing terrible spammy maps, but they're still fun damnit -.-

anyways, making encounters that are well balanced/fun on both SP/MP is definitely a challenge, but I'm sure in most cases it can be done with the appropriate finesse: additional ammo/monster placements, triggers that only activate in MP, etc.

btw come on zandro or zd and I'd play slaughter stuff with ya :D

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I imagine one pitfall to avoid would be allowing the player start area to get crowded with monsters. This will prevent players repeatedly respawning into certain death.

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The more "popular" slaughter coop/survival have been outfitted for multiplayer (i.e Sunder and Chillax). I ping fine on American servers, and my "bronze" level 5 MBPS internet holds fine during the gameplay, with little to no lag at all, even in a bustling server. The only problem might be heavy bandwidth usage rather than connection lag. I play on Zandronum, 0 Odamex and 0 Zdaemon.

edit: english fail

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If you are curious we are playing this week in ZDaemon TNS a slaughter map-pack: Phmlspd (I think these maps are used in Chillax?).
There are several maps with 1000+ monsters and one map (13?) with 4000+, join us in case you want to see in action a crowd of marines fighting these hordes :P.

We previously tested the server with SF2011 map30 and it was alright, but as the previous post says, the problem could be client connection side overload.

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Ribbiks pretty much nailed it. Make mobs in spawners wake up incrementally, not at the beginning of the map; avoid getting players trapped without any way out (Sunder has that) and your map will be good enough for MP. Most slaughtercrew in zandro is fine with waiting few minutes until someone does the trap alone, this happens all the time. But it's always nice to have something to do for everyone, or to have some nonlinearity.
Even the big beasts like holyhell or okuplok's untitled2 are quite well playable online (lags only on connect), network limitations aren't as bad as someone might expect. Few maps in SF12 aren't net-friendly, but could be fixed if someone really wanted to. Haven't played it in a long time, but i remember skipping only ~5 maps or less.

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Awesome. You guys are all terrific, thanks for all the input! And thanks for the invitations to play too! Odamex is my preferred source port but I'll give it a go for the sake of studying the maps and gameplay from a multiplayer perspective.

I'll be conscious of how many monsters can be awakened at once. But it's still good to know that monster quantities alone aren't a huge ordeal for these source ports.

Has anyone played them on regular coop with respawning? Quite a few levels start with monsters swarming into the starting area. Come to think of it, maybe a design like that would work very well if the player starting positions were scattered, E2M2 style.

I know Odamex recently got an upgrade to how it sends and receives packets (I guess thats the terminology for it) and now holds up much better in coop mapsets. Has there been any stress tests with that source port yet? How did the last levels of Scythe 2 do on Odamex Saturday Nitro? Any ghost monsters? I ran into that problem quite a bit when testing UAC Ultra 2 on coop but I think I was using an outdated version.

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