After some discussion in the log spam thread, Bjossi raised the possibility of an unofficial patch to BW 2.5 to fix some outstanding problems, such as log spam, add a few new features and perhaps change the balance. I'm willing to make such a patch, as long as it would officially supersede V25 in usage, meaning direct support from mod authors as well as widespread replacement of the V25 version.

This thread is so that the community can discuss and come to a consensus about what should be included in any patch, and why. If you disagree with something, please state your opinion in full, as I do not make decisions based simply on the number of people posting in favour of a viewpoint.

I propose starting the discussion easily by going over things which I definitely think should be included and that I do not expect there to be much disagreement upon, and these are the following:

Things which should undisputably be included

- Fix for Limit Double Jump (doesn't work properly online)

- Smooth ironsights - sights which gently zoom in and do not have the motion-sickness inducing instant zoom and corresponding jolt as the weapon moves into its new place of aim

- The removal of the 10% speed boost for pistols and other dual wieldables, on the basis that it causes a bug which causes players to move extremely fast when dual wielding

- Adjusting the Weapon UI to never come up for the Translocator (so that Assault teleporting works) and to not come up when a key for a particular slot (1, 2, 3, etc) is pressed if there is only one weapon in that slot

- Fixing Bloody Hell to no longer slow the player down

- Fixing the log spam produced by BallisticWeapon.Destroyed(), BORT-85, A500 and Dark Star's plasma

- Fixing the bug which causes projectiles to do damage to a player multiple times

- Removing TargetedHurtRadius from the GRS9's laser to prevent the GRS9 TargetedHurtRadius crash

- Reducing InitialParticlesPerSecond of blood emitters to stop Radeon crashing

- Fix for invisible players when deploying a weapon on an Anti TCC server

- Fix for zooming on an Anti TCC server

- Fix for M46 grenades giving a player a free M46 rifle when they are collected

- Option to give a percentage chance of replacing an ammo pickup with a grenade pickup when it is spawned

Please comment.

Sounds good to me.

Some possible suggestions I can think of is maybe an option to make players killed (at least in loadout) to drop only ammo bags, so players are mostly restricted to what they choose in loadout menu. This is primarily a personal suggestion though, as when I play loadout, I kinda like to stick with the weapons I chose instead of having to wade through all manner of weapons to get to the ones I chose. Dunno if anyone else would want it.

Plus those quick weapon use key bindings we talked about earlier would be nice.

The TargetedHurtRadius is necessary for the GRS9 and other incendiary damage types to ignite RX2AA fuel. It's used by at least 5 separate guns, none of which have large scale crash issues. I would recommend finding a different way to fix it.

The issue seems to stem from the fact that the GRS9 is a dual wielded weapon; the log reports Accessed Nones on Weapon followed by a ProcessEvent crash which doesn't occur if the GRS9's TargetedHurtRadius is empty. It's likely going to be too difficult for me to fix or test, given that the crash occurs approximately once every two days on my server, and I don't have much inclination to annoy my clients with testing as I do not regard ignition of RX22A clouds as very important, so I will most likely leave it as it is unless anyone figures out how to fix it.

Edit: After reading up on this, it appears that iterator functions don't handle Accessed Nones gracefully. I added a check for the weapon's existence and removed the TargetedHurtRadius call in DoDamage (as opposed to ImpactEffect) to test.

Before any work begins I think we should wait for a green light from Runestorm. The target is to create a patch that will act much like an official one, only it is not done by Runestorm but by other talents. We could even go as far as 2.6 Complete, with further package cleanup (Merging packages would be time consuming though.) along with bug fixes.

Well, Azarael is still determining if it would be worth it or not to do. We're weighing the effort vs. public enthusiasm and support.

Yeah, RuneStorm need to approve this first as it is their intellectual property first and foremost, and their reputation on the line. Additionally, I agree that this should be a joint effort. The groundwork can be laid, but there are far better coders than I, and others who can contribute much, such as Kaboodles.

Indeed. I dunno how much I could help, but I could animate up an exclusive weapon to the patch or something.

Adding new content should be a low priority at best, in my opinion. We can not easily live up to Runestorm's standards, and there are quite a few loose ends to tie up.

What's the story behind the pistol speed boost bug?

you had me at the title, im all for any fixes you have

Their is a larg verity of player, IMO a player should be able to enable or disable any balancing or it should be a separate thing.
And will slowing down the pistols make them carry like a heavier weapon.

Balance isn't really anything being considered at the moment. If there was to be balance changes, I think it would be on a per weapon basis if the general consensus is it needs the specific tweaks.

Also, anything on that list up for dispute? So far we got some discussion on the GSR9 area damage for laser, reason being that is used for several weapons to simulate area effects for explosive bullets.

If balance tweaks happen they would not be just like any balance mod, they would essentially be unofficial official rebalancing that would permanently replace the old version of BW if you chose to update. Any future mods would be based on that new core. Most of us have grown used to the numbers Runestorm first chose years ago but that doesn't mean they are perfect, there is room for improvement and I'm sure once we'd get used to any changes the memory of the old weapon stats would fade into nothingness.

I for one am open minded to rebalancing, but that stuff needs to be discussed first since people have varying opinions on those matters. I am a casual player at best and would most likely not even notice 3/4 of the changes.

I think we should avoid total rebalancing. While I am not against the idea, I think it would not be necessary, as this patch should be primarily concerned with fixing bugs. As I suggested earlier, I think rebalance should be done on a per weapon basis, pretty much in instances where it unanimously agreed that something might need a certain number tweak.

I am heavily against rebalancing, as that is something that should obviously be handled by the unofficial balance mods. Many people, myself included, like having weapons of varying strengths as well as super weapons.

If this patch is turned into a balance patch, I will not provide modding support for it. My weapons were designed for standard BW balance, and I don't feel like changing that.

Smooth sights and logspam fixing are nice changes.
Bear in mind that things like ironsight hit recoil, colored weapon names, and the UI quickswitch should be toggleable options if they are being considered for implementation.

Guys, I have very strong feelings about balance, but I'd like to point out the following:

- At the moment there are no plans to add balance changes. If necessary we'll come to a dedicated discussion about that, and it will be right at the end after everything else is dealt with. What I would principally like discussion on are the features proposed in the first post, which were selected specifically so that we could get some quick discussion on them and move on.

Speaking of discussion, I must point out the following, citing some policy from Wikipedia's Arguments Not To Make In Deletion Discussions page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... ust_a_vote

- The number of people who support a given course of action is irrelevant - only the arguments matter. Statistical bias is very strong here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... 7t_like_it

- Personal sentiment is irrelevant if unsupported. "I like it" and "I don't like it" carry zero weight - it is the supporting arguments which matter.

- Threats of veto are not discussion. If you must make a threat of veto, please make sure it is completely supported otherwise the discussion is held to ransom at the whim of a single participant.

Okay, back on topic:

A checkbox for no aim knockoff is acceptable, but there is no point adding a checkbox for coloured weapon names or for the UI change. I wish we could get out of checkbox culture - having an if check before every single piece of code just slows the mod down, and lack of a standardised core does more damage than it fixes - this is why UT2004 itself has the ability to turn mutators off in order to keep a consistent gameplay experience. At the moment, with all four active BW servers, each one is completely different in gameplay and it's not really a good thing.

Coloured weapon names are present for UT2004 weapons and make the weapon you're bringing up more easily identifiable. There is no need to add a checkbox for a feature of the default game - no mod in UT2004 disables coloured weapon names. Their omission in BW was most likely because the developers just forgot about them, and I think that masses upon masses of yellow names, the default colour, are quite intimidating. ChaosUT, Weapons of Evil, U4E, you name it, coloured weapon names - no checkbox needed.

I don't see why the UI change should have a checkbox either. Pressing a weapon key for a weapon you only have one copy of is a pointless delay. If I want to bring up the weapon menu I will scroll. Nobody at all has complained so far and they're all quite picky.

Sorry, but we cannot call this an official update.
We do not have the resources to completely oversee an update made by a third party to ensure that it is in line with RS's design and standards for BW. And that would likely prevent you from making all the changes you want anyway. It also may NOT be named BW V2.6 or V3.0 or anything that increments the official version number for BW.

What you can have is the "BW Community Patch" or any other convention as would be used for a sub-mod. "Community Patch" or "Community Update" is more official seeming than the usual naming for mods, similar to the Community Bonus Packs for UT. We would allow it be named the Community patch if it really is developed by the community and involves the general community consensus, not just one designer adjusting it to their personal preferences.
If anyone has better suggestions, you're welcome to share them.

I see no problem with that. This was always intended to be about discussion and consensus - if it were solely to my specific tastes I would have made the thread "Turn BallisticPro into an unofficial patch".

As DC says, the best route from here would be the "BW Community Patch". Get input from everyone in the community, ask around for problems, changes, etc, and send out the release like that. The community patch would, i believe, generate enough interest, more than just "Joe Soaps BW Mod v2.779". This way, you can add any changes desired without us breathing down the necks of the patch developers

You guys can just test it out yourselves and give it a Runestorm seal of approval if it is stable and a clear improvement over 2.5. It doesn't need to be touted as a Runestorm release but rather could be an endorsement thing. Without proper exposure and advertising this effort would be a waste of time unless your target audience was the regulars of this tiny little forum.

I don't see how using the example that UT2004 is necessarily a good reason to add the colored weapons, as UT004 is one of the only games to have it in the first place. Adding it in for the sake of keeping things consistent seems contradictory to making a mod in the first place.

As far as identification goes, how could you use the color to quickly identify one weapon from another when we have 40+ weapons using the official weapons alone? You could give them a color matching the weapon's own color, but there are plenty of weapons who's primary colors are black/grey/silver.

I would like more information on how exactly you plan on implementing it before I could agree with it, as right now I think it'd look tacky and not terribly pleasing aesthetically.

Also, since this would primarily be a preference based change (as far as I can tell) if someone does want it in, I feel it should be a check box in user preferences.



Well, the weapon UI is already a toggle-able user preference, making a more streamlined UI another preference will hardly change the base game play any bit. I have no personal aversion to the changes though. Though I am used to pressing 3 or 4 simply to bring up the menu and then I can scroll through the weapons at my leisure, I could probably live with the changes. I think translocator button skipping the menu to fix the Assault teleport is a bug fix and not a personal change.

Well, I did this in BWPro and it has helped me, when I've made an incorrect weapon switch, to know it even more quickly. It is also very useful if you have the Weapon UI off and are scrolling through guns - I have my weapons hidden in UT2004, and the colour allows me to more quickly identify when I have reached the weapon I wish to use by the colour rather than the text. In BW, if you try to do this at the moment, it's just one great blur.

As for the colour matching thing, there's great variance in primary colour. A73's blue, M50's grey, SAR's green, M46's orange, E-23's purple, etc etc. Even among weapons which are predominantly white or grey, secondary colours exist - SRS's scope is red, XK2's body has green, M353's sight is red, thus allowing grey to be used for only a few weapons.

I also think it's just a nicer touch. While it is true that doing something because everyone else did it is no argument, I do think that they did it for a reason - it shows more attention to detail overall. Consider that the elaborate and variable crosshair designs of BW were not strictly necessary either - may as well go all the way with this.

Is is possible to have a mutie that removes/ adjust aim jolt when we are shot solely so we can benefire of it with any pack and other stuff ...
Other than that I agree with kelly on GRS 9 laser

Please remember that a discussion is not a vote. I'm happy you agree but it doesn't advance the discussion. Additionally, if you wish such a mutator, the place to discuss it isn't here.

People are discussing the issue by voting with their opinions. You're not going to get 10 page replies from people who are just logging on before going out to work.



When it's an issue of personal preference, like colored weapon names, it is entirely based on whether or not a large amount of people "like it". I personally think it's tacky, and it's certainly not a bug either. I would not even call it an improvement. Last I checked the other realistic mods like YARM did not use rainbow names either.

Personal sentiment may also carry 'zero weight' in your eyes, but if personal sentiment is going to lead to a veto then perhaps zero weight is an understatement.

This site is not WikiPedia. The "supporting arguments" on this site are/can be far more relaxed, and I see no need to enforce authoritarian rule upon discussions here. You can personally disregard statements you see as having no weight, but it's not the rule of this site.

And since this is a community patch, i think any and all input is necessary for it to reach it's full worth.

On colored weapons, I agree with Sgt. Kelly.
I think Ballistic Nerf weapons would be unappealing. Maybe a text description on the screen as you scroll through the weapons, but that might be annoying.

I said it in another thread (my log file one I think): Any balance changes you want to make are good by me as long as there's a check box for them. You said "balanced weapons don't mean weak weapons" but what else do you call it when you're removing the laser from the G5, making it do less damage, and making it only fire mortar style, and making the staves "normal weapons" by killing off their power that makes them powerful? They are not normal weapons, clearly, they're artifacts. And the Nova Staff DOES heal health online, by the way, it works for me as the client on the LAN. So killing off the passive abilities of the staves because "they don't work online" isn't a valid reason. I suspect it's more that they just didn't fit in line with what a "normal weapon" "should" be.

Whatever you want to change needs to be optional, just like everything else in the mod is optional. If you do that, I'm cool with whatever you want to do. Otherwise, I don't want no watered down "balanced" Ballistic, and I'll be perfectly happy with 2.5.