Level Design Kismet and its weird ways.

[Drecks]

Can some dev share some experience on their adventures with Kismet and its wierd behaviour. And probably shine a light on what might trigger weird errors.
And is their a way to wake up and tell Kismet to do what its supposed to do.
Some sort of reset. Or is just remove all and start over the best recipe ?

I have this set up working for weeks. And yesterday I added some spawnprotection with delays. And now the set up still works fine and the delay works smooth.

But at some moment two objectives simply wont deactivate anymore. The kismet of this is very simple and I checked it and and it looks the same as the setup as the previous two objectives but these two simply decided to stay activated.

 

[®omano]

Maybe post some screens of your kismet, to see what may be wrong, for people to help you.

 

[Drecks]

[QUOTE=

 

[[TW]Swag]

You know the drill, hook us up with some screenies so we can sort you out. if you think it's something that requires a developer to look at, send it my way.

 

[Drecks]

You know the drill, hook us up with some screenies so we can sort you out. if you think it's something that requires a developer to look at, send it my way.

I know but I'm a stubborn idiot and know this set up worked for weeks.
One simple tweak can't destroy that. So al I did was but added a delay in.

 

[-=}WoLvErInE{=-]

If you're talking about the gate, it's screwed up for me as well. As soon as i hook them up to my obj's they go haywire.

 

[Drecks]

If you're talking about the gate, it's screwed up for me as well. As soon as i hook them up to my obj's they go haywire.

No not the gate. But I just solved my problem.

For the gate and the red spawnprotection thing I used a gate in Coldsteel and Rakowice.
They worked but it will get harder when spawns need to move back and forward.
I dont think my latest map will have to deal with that problem.
But a playtest will have to show that.

For this map I added a spawndelay similar as in Rakowice.

As all objectives use two spawnareas I added a delay to one of the active
spawnarea. The one with the attached spawnprotectionvolume and let spawnarea wihout
it work immidiatly

So the objectives and spawns move on. Giving the defending team time to fallback to
the defending positions. Its clear what they need to defend as the game tells them they lost
the objectives and need to defend new objectives After 40 seconds the red screen tells them
they have another 18 seconds to fall back. Every Idiot who by that time still hanging around
a lost objectives deserve to die anyway.

Still we will see players who will tell the red screen caught me by suprise.

 

[[TW]Swag]

The symptom of seeing the spawn protection being "red" is when a volume is "pulsed" on and off in a single processing thread of Kismet. It happens so fast that the server and client get out of sync. The server says, it's on, no wait, it's off .. nevermind. But the client only hears "it's on" and it doesn't turn off.

At TWI we avoid this issue by structuring our Kismet carefully so we avoid, at all costs, that situation happening. Most time we avoid it by using gates so that when an objective(s) is captured, we move spawns, make things happen and activate the next objective - it happens only once - and we never pulse back through. In more trickier situations such as Neutral based or objective clusters that go back and forth between teams, we carefully craft our spawn's Kismet handlers to never pulse through but rather know what needs to happen in each game state and set the state accordingly.

We investigated the issue thoroughly and have found that solving the issue in Level Design is easier than restructuring the engine to behave differently. I hope that helps you deciphering your Kismet problems.

 

[Drecks]

Yeah I manage to solve it in Coldsteel and it,made me realize I have to avoid it in Rakowice. Whats still was there in Rakowice was the spawnprotection activated when a team loose an objective and spawns move on. For that the delay with warning message worked fine.

For the RS map I use a delay again. Tweaked it some and its for now for every set of objectives. I'm curious on howmplayers will experience it.

Did you solve yours Wolvy ?

 

[-=}WoLvErInE{=-]

I'm not using them at the moment. Hopefully won't need them.