Looking for help creating a mod...

Savant

I brought up a suggestion over in the general forum (thread is here) regarding a simple balance mod based on player counts. In short, it would allow a server to alter max player counts per team to account for the current state of balance favouring aliens. A simple example is that in a 16 player game the server would enforce maximum teams of 9 marines and 7 aliens. (less than that it would be +2 players for marines)

Since NS2 is an asymmetric game, this seemed to be an interesting proposal. Hugh, one of the developers, was actually very intrigued by this idea and suggested I pop in here and see if anyone was willing to make this into a mod.

Strayan (NS2HD) wrote: »

That's an interesting idea Savant! Asymmetrical team sizes would certainly not be out of place in an asymmetrical game like this. Perhaps you could recruit a clever programmer to make a mod, and see how it plays?

It doesn't sound complex to make, but since I'm unfamiliar with the modding process, I'm not in a position to make the mod myself. So is anyone interested in exploring it?

The concept is simple. A server operator would be able to define a team imbalance of X number of players for a given team. So if X=1 for marines, then the server would not allow someone to join the alien team if the marine team didn't have a 1 player advantage after that player joined. Same if it was 2 players. (autobalance would need to be taken into account as well.)

Now I'm not suggesting that this is a 'solution' for the balance issues in the game, but given the asymmetry in the game it could be used a s a means to 'handicap' the teams to bring the game into better balance in the short term. Then after a balance patch is released it can be disabled until the new level of balance is ascertained.

It should also be noted that this could work either way, giving aliens an advantage should balance ever swing the other way. Especially on large 24 player servers - if balance favours marines, this could be set to give the aliens an extra player or two. It could also be set to scale, perhaps only becoming active at certain player counts etc. I know most server operators want to keep their players happy, and I think this has potential to do so.

So is anyone interested in exploring this?

Ironsoul

Hey man, I completely agree that you should try to find a "clever programmer" to help you out. At the same time I encourage you to learn some lua, just learn a bit every day. That would be a backup plan in the event no one wants to code your mod. I can't do it as MY BRAIN DOESN'T COMPUTE... anyway.

Savant

I just wish I had more free time. Learning it isn't the problem, finding the time to do it is.

SquishpokePOOPFACE

If I were to do this, I would scour all the lua files for functions and variables needed, and implement an algorithm similar to:

void teamTweak() // call this function anytime server.numPlayers changes
{
     if (server.numPlayers() >= 12 && <= 18)
     {
       server.alienActiveSlots() = server.marineActicveSlots()-1;
     }   

     if (server.numPlayers() >= 18)
     {
       server.alienActiveSlots() = server.marineActiveSlots()-2;
     }
}

Just make it lua and you may have to define alienActiveSlots and marineActiveSlots yourself, and modify the autobalance class/function/whatever to reflect this. I recommend trying to use already implemented functions/classes though.

Probably would take a decent coder 5 hours to complete, test, and publish.

Rio

I made something up real quick:
https://github.com/myrio/ns2-balanceteamsize

At the moment, you can configure the team with an advantage and the size of the advantage in a config file on your server.
Also auto team balance should work with the new team sizes.

Let me know what you think.
I probably need to add some messages, to let the players know, why they can't join a specific team.

Savant

The other LUA that might need to be adjusted would be the random team join variable (in TeamJoin.lua) - which looks at team sizes and always directs a player to the team with less players when teams are uneven. That would need to take into account the imbalance as well.

Looks good though. If we can get a working mod of this, all that is needed is to find an interested server OP to test it.