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Up Topic Community / Player Creations / [Project]Base Melees
- - By Maikel Date 2014-05-06 20:59 Edited 2014-05-12 19:58
Hello community,

I am starting a project to create a Base Melees scenario folder. In short: It will be made for the OpenClonk game content
and I hope to be able to merge both settlement and melee game play into a fun experience.

Checkout the github repository for more details!

Goal


The goals of this project are easiest presented in a list:
* Develop fun scenarios based on all aspects of OC game play.
* Provide a consistent setting for scenario development, but also for the player.
* Interact with OC development to improve the OC game content into the direction of base melees.
* Provide a package with scenarios suited for league and tournament play.

Development


For development I am using a github repository, which has a nice overview of the project. I am working according to the
release often principle which allows for fast bug fixing. Currently the content is developed for the tutorials branch but this
will change to master as soon as the controls branch has been merged into master. And of course development is open
and any one is invited to join/contribute/test, the whole project is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 so you can reuse it as you
wish.

I am at least looking for someone who is willing to translate the project into German, and a few beta testers (at a later
stage). It would also be nice to have someone to do some small graphics and of course some scenario designers would
be welcome as well!

Future Contents


Some content I am planning to add is:
* 12 base melee scenarios, all in different settings.
* Allow team leaders to place a small settlement on round start.
* Awarding medals for special achievements (incentive for unorthodox gameplay).
* Specialized scoreboard using Zapper's new GUI (might get ported to OC).
* New rules: Domination (elimination on base loss), NoBorders (connected map borders).
* Messaging system for: medals, kills, destroying of bases.

FAQ


Let me also answer a few frequently asked questions (I might add more later).

Why don't you add this directly to the OC repository since you are an OC developer?
Mainly because I want to keep control of this project, also because I want to be able to release more often and provide
players with bug fixes faster. Moreover, it not being part of OC also allows new developers to join more easily and I want
to be open to other people in the community, especially fans of (good) base melees.


I wan't to join development/I have ideas/I want to play - How can I do that?
Ideas and feedback can be posted directly in the forums, I am trying to make the scenarios as balanced and entertaining
as possible, so all feedback is highly appreciated. If you want to join development, just pm me here in the forums. Currently
development is on the OC tutorials branch, which makes it a bit hard to join, but I will switch to master as soon as Zapper
is finished with the controls branch. Playing until then is next to impossible :) so be patient.


More Details


I attempt to add more detailed posts later when development is progressing, I will provide links to these posts here.
* Base menus
* Extra rules
* Medals

Thanks To


Pitri: inspiration for the medal system.
Gecko: inspiration for skylands scenario.

Discussion & Suggestions


I am open for discussion on all topics and suggestions are also very welcome. Also pointing to good base melees in CR from
which one can learn a lot is useful (and I like to play them as well!).
Parent - - By Armin [de] Date 2014-05-10 21:27
For my part, the normal towers are the most important part in base melees. E.g. in KaC, some popular Eke Reloaded maps like Oilwars, some from the Melee.c4f etc. I wonder whether plans exist to remake them? I would agree.
Parent - - By Maikel Date 2014-05-10 21:35
I don't know how and if they will appear in the OC content, but I agree with they are important, if not essential, to base melees. So if they don't make it to the original content in some way, I'll put them into this project as separate objects.
Parent - By Pyrit Date 2014-05-10 22:17
Maybe the scaffolds from Sky Islands could work?
Parent - - By Armin [de] Date 2014-06-01 16:45 Edited 2014-06-05 18:57
btw I made a somehow working testtower without graphic and without stairs if someone is interested. But making the battlements fatter is not enough. A new tower graphic should be higher, too. Because of the vertical jumps, clonks can already climb on towers by standing on a 2 pixel higher ground than the tower basement.

I hereby license the following file(s) under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license
Attachment: Tower.ocs (12k)
Parent - By Maikel Date 2014-06-01 16:51
I'll have a look :)
Parent - - By Maikel Date 2014-06-05 17:41
Is it okay for you if I take this tower and modify it a bit?

Then please license it under CC BY-SA 4.0 :) You'll be credited for it of course (the license makes me do it)

I'd like to have the tower and make it a bit higher indeed and make the doors work automatic if you open them. And then I will add it to the base melee repository, and it might get ported to the OC repos.
Parent - By Armin [de] Date 2014-06-05 18:57
Ofc, added it.
- - By Maikel Date 2014-05-07 21:36 Edited 2014-05-07 21:44

Base Menu


The first thing I am working on are menus for the team leaders to place structures and vehicles during the start-up phase of
a round. The two screenshots below show the menu and the previewer for structures which moves with the mouse cursor. The team
leader is allowed to place the structures shown in the menu, while the other players already start building up the settlement.
The structures must be placed inside the red rectangle, which will be set by the scenario designer at some location suited for
the team. The menu entries also show how often the structure may be placed and what contents it will get.

Additional Work
* The menu can be closed by opening another menu or changing clonk, fix this.
* Improve the menu, by showing a bit more information about the structure for the team leader.
Parent - - By Zapper [de] Date 2014-05-07 22:46

>* The menu can be closed by opening another menu or changing clonk, fix this.


I think in the controls branch you can somehow set the menu as permanent and then it will reject closing and then you won't be able to select another Clonk or open another menu. Maybe when you call clonk->SetMenu? Is there a permanent parameter?
Parent - By Maikel Date 2014-05-08 17:22
Thanks, still by clicking one of the crew members in the GUI switches the clonk and closes the menu :(
- - By Maikel Date 2014-05-09 20:01

New Rules


OpenClonk is still lacking some rules necessary for functional base melees so I created three new rules (most of them are
already known in the CR community of course). Let me describe them briefly.

No Borders
The famous CR rule which connects the left and right border of the scenario to allow all objects to pass through the scenario
border. This is an absolute necessity for all base melees with more than two teams, so that some teams are not in the middle of
the combat.

Domination
Teams or players are eliminated when they loose their base. In OpenClonk the base currently is defined by a flagpole, marking a
certain region in the map. If you loose all flagpole you will be eliminated. I believe that in base melees the focus should not
be on killing clonks or keeping clonks alive per se, but should rather be fun and destructive. So about attacking bases and
defending them rather than to hide with your clonk in some hard to reach place in the landscape. In combination with the next
rule I hope this leads to more fun game play.

Base Respawn
This rule respawns a clonk for the player when his or her last crew member dies, as long as the team still has the clonk as base
material and there are still sufficient funds available. I have in mind to make clonks cheap and readily available so that players
will take risks with their clonks and engage in combat faster and in more experimental ways. Especially since the clonks are much
more agile than in CR I can see base melees become more aggressive and fast paced than in CR. Possibilities are flying over to the
enemy with a boompack and then dropping a few flints, hop on a catapult in the enemy base and fling back to your home. A single
attack which can be done in a 10 to 20 seconds. But which is of course risky and I would have never dared the equivalent in CR.

Team Materials
Of course teams already share their clunkers, but I also intend to let them share their base materials, this is more or less
obvious I suppose. This rule is not available yet, but will be implemented in the OC main package soonish.

Suggestions & Discussion
I am open for any suggestions on this topic, since I think there are probably more interesting rules for base melees which can and
must be explored!
Parent - - By Clonkonaut [de] Date 2014-05-10 18:08
How is the No Borders rule done?
Reply
Parent - - By Maikel Date 2014-05-10 18:09 Edited 2014-05-11 10:12
Like this. I semi-stole it from some CR script, there are several around in CR. I don't know how well it functions yet. But it seemed to work quite fine.

Edit: it needed a fix after all, so only the latest version works.
Parent - - By Clonkonaut [de] Date 2014-05-11 12:03
Ah. So no peek-a-boo to the other side before going there? Time to dig lava lakes!
Reply
Parent - By Maikel Date 2014-05-11 12:14
Maybe that is necessary in general, for these skylands scenarios I think it does not matter really.
- - By Maikel Date 2014-05-12 19:54

Medals


First of all let me thank Pitri for inspiration and allowing me to implement medals in OpenClonk as well. So what are medals?
Players can earn medals for special achievements like making three kills in a row, or blowing up an enemy base. Medals are in my
opinion a good way to make players do more fun and crazy things, especially in base melees I want to reward players for such actions.
So every medal comes with a small clunker reward so that more weapons and materials can be bought. So far I have implemented a few
medals and a basic rule which keeps track of the medals per player. For now the medals are stored in the player data locally. In
contrast to Pitri's system the player can earn more medals of the same type, so that in the end you just increase your collection.

Medals in the League
The medals are already stored in such a way in the player data, that this can be translated directly to the league storage. However,
there are still a few technicalities in the league processing which are annoying me... But in the future if there will be a base melee
league, there will be also the storing of medals in the league. And if someone codes an interface these medals might even be associated
to an account on some web site, so that you can keep track of which medals you already earned and compare with friends, etc.

List of medals
* Kill              Awarded when you have killed an enemy (todo: make this a bit more special, maybe three kills in a row).
* Marvelous Miner   Awarded for mining at least one thousand clunkers during a single round.   
* Decorated         Awarded when you get awarded with more than ten medals in a single round.
* Kamikaze          Awarded when you kill yourself and an enemy clonk simultaneously.
* Pyromania         Awarded for setting 100 objects on fire in a single round.

Ideas and Graphics
Unluckily I can't just copy all medals from Pitri's rule since lots of the medals were tailored for CR and magic gameplay. So I just
started from scratch and am now adding medals continuously. So if you have any nice ideas for a medal, please share or code it. And
I will happily put it into the repository if a minimum quality is present :)

I have one request regarding medals, I need a template graphic for the base medal (128x128 pixels) from which the actual medals can
derive by overlaying existing images. If any person with graphical skills would be willing to do this, I'd be very grateful.
Parent - - By Clonkonaut [de] Date 2014-05-13 10:28

> So if you have any nice ideas for a medal, please share


Long shots (resulting in hits) using bow or musket are often useless but fun to watch and satisfying. I want Eagle Eye Medals! Maybe with bonus points if the other clonk is definitely offscreen (i.e. so far away that with even max zoomed out you couldn't have seen)?
Medals for constructing / destroying X buildings in a round (whatever number is hard to reach). Call destruction whatever you like, construction should be the PeterW Medal!
Reply
Parent - - By Maikel Date 2014-05-13 11:37
Nice ideas,

How would the Eagle Eye work? I like that one as well, but if I have two clonks and with the one I shoot an arrow (he was far away from my enemy) then the arrow hits the enemy. Now the medal script knows which player shot the arrow dealing the damage, but not from which clonk it came. So if I use GetCursor the second clonk might be too close for Eagle Eye. A way to circumvent that is of course appending to the arrow and leadshot, but for now I want to keep medals rather general and not item dependent, as items might still change.

How do you define construction? Placing with the hammer? Adding most materials? Adding last material?
Parent - - By Clonkonaut [de] Date 2014-05-13 11:48

> How would the Eagle Eye work?


Yes, would only work with appending stuff to the ammunition definitions.

> How do you define construction?


Definitely not placement on its own. To keep it simple, last added material. To make it complex most added materials. To make it rather widespread, everyone that contributed (placement, material adding).
Reply
Parent - By Maikel Date 2014-05-13 17:17
I will probably go for all contributors, and then set the building count rather high. That also enforce cooperation a bit! If you cooperate on building structures you get awarded medals faster and more, and get more clunkers!
Parent - By Maikel Date 2014-05-16 19:20
I started a wiki on the medals system for OC, with a nice example on how to create a medal, feedback appreciated.

Also made the outline for BaseMelees wiki, where I hope to explain in the future what the folder is about and maybe also share some strategy hints for new players.
- By Maikel Date 2015-09-04 20:26
Good news: the controls branch has been merged! This means the basemelees project can be tested using the snapshots.

That is why I released an alpha version in which you can test the current basemelees. Let me know if they work and if you would be interested in testing with me.
Attachment: BaseMeleesAlpha1.ocf (2302k)
- - By Maikel Date 2016-03-28 17:09
I have finished a first beta version with two rounds which works with the latest snapshots.
Attachment: BaseMeleesV0.4Beta.ocf (1280k)
Attachment: MedalsV0.4Beta.ocd (615k)
Parent - - By Sven2 [us] Date 2016-03-28 21:34
Does it still crash randomly when players surrender? Also, wallkit stucking needs to be removed for these melees :)
Parent - By Maikel Date 2016-03-28 21:57
Probably that crash is still there, wallkit is on the todo.
- By Maikel Date 2017-06-18 15:08 Edited 2017-06-18 15:11
Some activity after a long break. The goal is to have a few scenarios ready that are fun to play when OC 8.0 is released (i.e. some unknown time from now). For now just a small update.

Yesterday I played Pump Pressure with K-Pone, and as with all base melees you need to destroy either the enemies base or all their crew. However in this round you can attack by pumping as well, all the liquids pumped in the basin above your initial base are delivered as rain to your opponent flooding their bases.

As it turns out playtesting is quite essential (see screenshot) as we ended in a stalemate where K-Pone was stuck but I could not attack him either. This I will fix by replacing the basin with a drain you can connect drain pipes from the pump too, so that the enemy is not automatically safe above his basin. Looking forward to some more playtesting.
Up Topic Community / Player Creations / [Project]Base Melees

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