Heh, nothing I can do about that, they can create game names whatever they like.

The whole point of putting a URL to this thread in the map itself is that anyone who really wants to check the provenance of a map simply need come here and look.

The other thing is that if you take 2.22 and compare it to 2.24 and 2.32, which one do you think has had greater work put into it? Rebalancing a bunch of units, or an entirely new spawn system that adds new strategy to the game? I'm the only one who fully understands the triggers involved in this map, because I created them. I also have lots of comments in my original version that describe various aspects of the triggers. The complexity of my triggers has actually made the map quite fragile, as evidenced by the number of bugs I put into 2.22 and now 2.32 due to re-working the trigger systems. Anyone other than me, who doesn't have access to my original version (which no one apart from me does) is going to have quite a lot of work ahead of them trying to expand or implement new systems in this map. This means knock-offs are almost never going to be able to make the sorts of changes that I can make to this map, so they'll always be playing catch-up.

One other thing that I've found rather interesting, is that a lot of people (prior to having seen 3.30-3.32) have mentioned or asked if 2.24 and 2.23 were legitimate, of if they were hacked/knocked off. So it seems that this is fairly common knowledge in the DS community. How this became so wide-spread I'm not sure - either a few people have gone around and told others that it was fake, many more people read this thread (and lurk) than I suspected, or people look at the balance and general changes made in 2.23-2.24 and recognise that they're not quite right (all of my protoss building costs always end in 0, terran always end in 5 and zerg is some other number and they broke this scheme in 2.24 by making stalkers cost $195 for example). Probably it's some combination of all 3.

I actually wouldn't really mind if they ripped it off and called it something else, the problem is that they've taken my map, upped the version number and pretended it was one of their own releases. If they renamed the map to "Desert Strike Night Fixored" or just any other name, it wouldn't be a problem, because people would know it was a different map. But naming it DSNight Fixed 2.24 makes it look like one of my own releases, when it really isn't. Basically it's like trademark infringement. I don't consider my version to be a rip-off of DSNight Final for this reason - I renamed it to DSNight Fixed, and I also credited theo_ua and Queengambit in the mission briefing as being the original creators (and I've spent over 400 hours working on it, by now).

Please share any other rip-off versions you come across, especially anything that has been based on 2.30-2.32.

At first I was happy to see a "new and improved" revision but questioned it cause those versions were full of bugs and anomalies. In 2.21 a couple of the bugs were that the timer will stop working (and spawning units) and there was a land bridge where you could get builders into the other ally bases and build more than 6 gas but the full spawn would not be produced. In 2.23/2.24 someone kept playing as Zerg in the Blue & Orange slots and was able to get a drone onto the battlefield and make 1 hatchery, then more drones and more hatcheries, finally 30 drones each doing 1000 damage would be attacking the spawn while under the control of the player. Funny thing was that drone armada caused the player to drop connection or crash every time. I have a screenshot of it on my other computer.

I might see if I can work out how they got the drone onto the field when playing as Orange or Blue. Not entirely sure how they could do it, though, unless ventral sacs was turned on for those players allowing the overlords to transport drones directly onto the field.

Also I've worked out what I'm going to do for that enhancement at 6 gas. Instead of giving an extra boom (which has the potential to make the game go on forever), I'm going to give a powerup item (psi emitter, uraj crystal etc) that will cause your units to spawn on demand. So it'll be in the holding pen where the civilians are, and you can pick it up with a worker and move it to the boom beacon. It will cause your units to spawn instantly (or after 1-2 seconds delay) and will cost $2,000 to do it. If you don't have the money then moving your worker to the beacon, nothing will happen (error message, move the worker away etc).

Not 100% sure how to handle unbalanced teams; if a 3 player team gets to spawn their units on-demand 3 times and a 1 player team doesn't, that seems unfair. So I might make the powerup appear in the base from the beginning of the game, but unable to be picked up until you get to 6 gas. If you start in 3v3 there will be 6 on the map, and if players leave one team then they will be given to the remaining player, like boom ammo is at the moment. If you start a 2v2 game, there will only be 4 on the map to start with. If you start 3v2, then there will still be 6 but one of the players on the 2 team will get 2.

This seems like it has lots of neat mechanics: do you use a boom, or your spawn? You have to be careful when using your spawn because if the enemy team uses a special they can wipe/steal your units, etc.

Experienced a nasty 2.32 bug where I was Green Zerg. Enemy siege tanks parked themselves on the extreme bottom of the battlefield and proceeded to thrash my base killing any building within their range in 1 shot!

Hah, funny. Not sure what I can do about that because once tanks are in siege mode there's no way to order them. I'd have to replace them with mobile ones and force them to move away. Thanks for the heads up, not sure if it'll be fixed for 2.33 or not. I'm going to experiment with the AI script triggers for "set target" and "command unit to patrol" to see if that will force tanks that are sieged to unsiege and move, to stop them sieging along the edges of the battlefield like they do at the moment. Might also try "clear combat data" and see if that helps.

There's some really nasty spawn bugs at the moment with Terran, where if earlier players have science facilities, factories or starports, the latter players on the same team will spawn those units when it is their spawn time (including if they aren't Terran). Eg, if Green owns 4 science facilities they'll spawn 6 BCs on their regular spawn. When it comes to Blue's spawn time, they'll also spawn those 6 BCs in addition to the rest of their buildings. I spotted another nasty mistake that crept in in 2.20/2.22, which is Protoss scouts went from having 120 shields to 0! Turns out I was overzealous when I went through and set values to 0 (this caused the overlord crash as I stupidly set build time to 0, for example) in order to make the map compress better (shaved off ~430 bytes, not really worth the time taken but meh).

So this is a rather nasty bug that I think should be fixed pretty soon, so I might release 2.33 without the 'spawn on demand' powerup I talk about above, because that is going to take quite a bit of new triggering and thought to get it working nicely. Further thoughts on it is that I may not require the player to bring the powerup to their boom beacon, I might just design it so as soon as the worker picks it up, it is triggered and prevent them from being able to pick it up until they have the correct # of gas and money. Might also make it available from 4 gas, rather than 6, to maybe spice up the mid-game more?

Also I've come up with the new stats for Reapers: 110 hp, 1 armor, 14 damage. Same cost and spawn ($195 for 2).

Number of hits for unit to kill a reaper, old and new stats:
Zealot: old 7, new 6
Stalker: 11, 12
Zergling: 20, 14
Hydralisk: 23, 20
Marine: 20, 14

Number of hits for a reaper to kill a unit, old and new stats:
Zealot: old 11, new 15
Stalker: 15, 23
Zergling: 3, 4
Hydralisk: 8, 10
Marine: 4, 5
Reaper: 7, 9

Looking at these stats, we can see that the survivability of Zealots and Stalkers has increased quite a bit (Stalker has -20 shields +20 hp change also), with modest increases for the other tier 1 / 1.5 units. The number of hits required to kill a reaper have also decreased, with the biggest decreases going to the units that were most affected by the previous high armor value of 5, namely the zergling and marine. Hydralisk also got a smallish boost but because it does explosive damage the gain isn't as pronounced. The stalker actually goes backwards here by 1 shot because it does explosive damage and the difference between 5 armor and 1 armor (7.5 vs 9.5 dmg) is outweighed by the increase in HP. So in this light, moving stalkers to have more HP than shields helps account for this, and stalkers can also get the range upgrade to give them 8 range vs reapers 6. Zerg's best counter is going to be lurkers due to their Large size, as well as requiring a detector which is fairly expensive for Terran. Shots to kill Reapers by reaver or siege tank remain the same at 3 due to the explosive damage, although in this case the rounding is significant, in that reapers were previously 2.13 shots but are now 2.78, so this will effectively make Reapers a smidge stronger in the late game as well.

I guess one other side effect I hadn't considered so much, is that with big HP sinks but low armor, Reapers will tend to soak up a lot of healing from medics. Probably a good thing, really.

New version, 2.33: http://www.staredit.net/files/2203/

• Serious spawn bugs for Terran Science Facilties, Factories and Starports would cause higher players on the same team to spawn excess buildings. Eg if P1 has 4 science facilities they will spawn 6 BCs, but player 2 and 3 will also spawn an additional 6 BCs on top of their regular spawn when they should not.
  
• Stupid bug crept into 2.20/2.22 where Scouts had 0 shields instead of 120. This has been put back to 120.
  
• Upgrades were not properly shared between human players on each team (correctly went to CPU on the battlefield though).
  
• If P1 was not present when the game started, geysers would be incorrectly left on the playing field, causing the prison cells not to spawn.
  
• Random heroes would not properly spawn during the cinematic battle.
  
• Unit sounds (from the cinematic battle essentially) would be muted at the start of the game, this is no longer needed due to the rip-off alert screen at the beginning.
  
• If you move a worker out of your base while you still have flags, it will be destroyed regardless of your ally's flag status. Previously if your ally was absent and you had flags and moved your worker out of your base it wasn't destroyed. By and large this won't really affect anyone, but it seemed a bit quirky so I fixed it up.
  
• Mentioned earlier in this thread, the units spawned by the warp prism could sometimes not be properly moved to the field and would clog up their spawning pen, with the eventual outcome of preventing new units from spawning for the warp prism. This should now be fixed, although I haven't directly tested the new trigger logic as this is a bit of a tricky issue to reproduce.
  
• Tanks should now not clog up the edges of the map (see notes below)
  
• Reapers nerfed to 110 hp, 1 armor, 14 dmg. Retain the same cost at $195 for 2 from Turrets.
  
• Immortal +1 dmg to 14
  
• Stalker -20 shields +20 hp, to help them counter Reapers more effectively.
  
• Reavers +5 shields +5 hp, just to give them a nice round total of 300 instead of 290.
  

Read above post for discussion on the reaper changes.

As you can see, a bunch of important bug fixes. The tanks on the edge of the map should be alleviated, but I haven't thoroughly tested the new trigger changes. So if it isn't fixed now, I should be able to fix it properly in the future.


Changes to come in next version:
- Prevent CPU players from destroying player buildings (mostly affects Green and Yellow). This requires a few tricky trigger changes and so wasn't included in 2.33 which is mostly serious bug fixes that only took small trigger changes to fix (therefore low risk of regression).
- Intend to tweak lurker AI a bit. At the moment you can have a bunch of lurkers burrowed firing at the silo, and when an enemy comes into range they un-burrow, run to a new location and attempt to burrow and attack, often getting themselves killed in the progress. Hopefully I can make it so that if the lurkers are in their ultimate target zone, they will ignore the presence of new enemy units and stay burrowed.
- Introduce new 'spawn on demand' mechanic as described above. Interested in feedback and ideas if anyone has anything to add.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 22 2011, 11:47 am by Lanthanide.

Check your PM......

So I was looking in my dl folder and was curious when version 2.32 and 2.33 ended up in the middle of earlier versions and 2.23/2.24. Upon closer inspection I noticed the filename was slightly different. Yours was : "DesertStrikeNight Fixed2.32" and the other ones were "DesertStrikeNlght Fixed2.23" look closer. DesertStrikeN l ght Fixed2.23. Here are the files as you requested. The phony 2.23 and 2.24 versions idk if you already have them.

Attachments:

Ahh, I thought something was a bit funny with that map when I got it as it wasn't where I expected it to be in my maps folder when I opened it up.

I got a copy of 2.24 already and not really interested in 2.23 since I'm assuming the same bozo did that one too. Thanks though.

What I found slightly amusing about 2.24 is that several of the changes to the prices of buildings was often just $10-20. Such minor changes barely change player behaviour at all, unless you're trying to stop a particular building from being spammed a lot and it is quite cheap. Normally I only make small changes in price like that if I've also made some changes to the unit stats, both as a slight levelling factor and as a way to alert players that the unit stats may have changed. Seems like that person was making changes purely for the sake of it (similar to the changes in special price - $6750 for protoss MC instead of $7000, big woop?).

hey Lanthanide,

Thanks for your edition

Bug to report (already??) : tank can attack our base. Can you just ally peach and green to every players???

Can you remove the "preserve trigger" for unshare vision? Sometimes, i just wanna show my base to ppl i play against at the end

We need something to know if we play double or not, special or not. Can you add 6 locations next to boom beacon, and put neutral unit like critters and change their name. Kill them (or not) when we choose the mode.

And we need ban mode : 2 ppl of the same team to ban the 3rd, or 1 ppl of the same team + 1 of the other team to ban a mate. You can use : 2 forces team 1 needed, or 1 force team 1 and 1 force team 2 to activate the trigger.

I can help you to do that but im sure u don't need (I made the add on on poker nova def 2 to 4.1 , exepted 3.xx)

1 more thing

Can you change the filename like this : DesertStrike Night 2.33.scx

Or anything else, but shorter : like this we can see the version in the game list. Too many characters, we never see the numbers

cya

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 24 2011, 2:47 pm by topblaireau.

No problem. I'm glad the map is popular.

Already reported above. Not sure why people are seeing this more than they used to, unless the removal of the preserve alliance has somehow allowed this to happen more? Doesn't make much sense though.

Yes, I intend to fix this, but it means checking and changing all of the triggers used by the CPU players that rely on Ally's and Foes, which is quite a lot of work. Hopefully this will be in the next version, 2.34.

I don't believe there is any preserve trigger for clearing vision. I've played a couple of games recently where the enemy team showed me their base and didn't have any issues with it. I'm at work so can't check the map, but I'll look at this later.

If it were possible to change unit names dynamically, I'd definitely do this. But unfortunately it's not, I'd need to use 4 units here to cover the different possibilities. All of the critters are already used for other game purposes. I could potentially use the powerups for this (data disk, uraj crystal etc) but I'm really not sure it's necessary. It's pretty easy to tell if the game is in 2x mineral mode or not - you're getting minerals at twice the rate. Also if you click on a geyser the amount of gas in it should show you the current mineral rate (although from unrelated testing I did, I suspect this may not be working for 2x mineral mode like it should). So that only leaves specials. IMO players should just remember what mode was selected at the start of the game, or you could always ask other players. Someone should know. That game hasn't really been designed for specials disabled and in my experience not many people play that mode.

Hmm, yes, the problem of banning a team mate when there are only 2 on a team is semi-solved in this case. But really if your team mate is a jerk and you want to ban them, can you count on the enemy team actually helping you ban them? The enemy team might prefer that your jerky team mate stayed in the game. So I'm not entirely sure adding a banning mode will achieve much, although in a team of 3 it is quite easy to see how it would work.

This is fairly low priority, but I guess I'll have to add it eventually. It is somewhat problematic on exactly where I'd put this on the map however, due to the locations currently in use (the entire middle area is considered 'battlefield') so it's actually not as straight forward as it initially seems.

I'm pretty sure the name in the game list is the map name, rather than the file name. I already shortened this so that it will show up in the game list - it shows up for me, anyway. Maybe if you're using some foreign language it won't show properly? Don't know how that would work though, since the name is in english.

The bases are 1 - 2 tiles closer to the battlefield than they are in 2.22, that is definately a contributing factor as buildings are now in range of un-sieged tanks too. Also in older versions (that had the same problem if sieged tanks or guardians were near) the buildings could take multiple hits before being destroyed.

Right, good points. I guess the 'in range of mobile tanks' is what causes them to go into siege mode and start attacking, whereas in the past they usually wouldn't do that.

The buildings used to have 500 HP and drones/scvs/probes did 1000 damage. But when I made the probe a playable unit I had to drop the damage to 9, and so made all the protoss buildings 5 HP. Then I figured I'd make it consistent and so changed SCVs and drones as well, and made all their buildings have 5 hp.

I guess it probably goes the other way too, with turrets now more able to attack CPU units that fly too close. Less of an issue for protoss and zerg as their base defense are heroes so you can only build 1 each. Guess I should put their damage down to 0 as well.

i have encountered a truly strange glitch.


Yellow left exactly while he was spawning (the reinforcements), and his units just stayed there for the next one or two spawn cycles.
Then they spawned afterwards together with orange's spawn, which was fairly strange.

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. I've known that that's a small loophole in the triggers, but I haven't taken the time to test what would actually happen in such a case because the chances of it happening in a game are quite rare.

Little surprised that they ended up as Neutral units and sat there for so long, though. Units are created for the player, in this case clearly yellow, and the trigger that gives them to the CPU belongs to P4 and P8 who are the CPUs. In this case the units were created by P7 (yellow) and in the same trigger cycle should have been given from P7 to P8 and carried on as normal.

My guess at the sequence of events is that P7 quit on the exact same frame as his units spawned, and that P1-6 triggers run, then P7 triggers run which created the units. Then P7's leave request was processed, which gave all of P7's units to Neutral. Then P8 ran, and because all of the units in the holding pen belonged to Neutral and not P7, the "Ally's units in spawn pen" condition was not met and so the units were not given to P8 and not moved to the battlefield.

Not sure why they would be subsequently given to another player to spawn, though, unless the bottom team used a boom. In that case any enemy units in the holding pen are given to neutral, and then back to the CPU again, and that could've cleaned up the remaining yellow units by giving them to P8.

If I change the Ally status things of the CPU players, then I'm going to have to re-design the spawning system (as I'll no longer be able to rely on 'Ally' meaning human players for the CPU's side as it will also include the enemy human players), so likely whatever I come up with will fix this issue naturally, but if not then I will make a special exception for it.

Thanks for the heads up, very useful to document this rare event.

Hmm, was playing a game a while back and there's a bug in version 2.33 with a mineral gain. I have a replay if you require. I just don't want it to spread on how to do it before you fix it.

PM me a description of what happened if you know. If the enemy team did it and you're not sure how, a note of which race did it would be helpful.

I've tried looking at replays of DS Night games before (back around version 1.80 or so) and it completely bugs up after about 5 minutes, so it's not useful for detecting issues.

UMS Replays don't bug up if you don't speed above Fastest.
FastestX2 and above makes UMS triggers go insane.

Can't remember if that's what I did or not. But I did mess around with the replay for a couple of hours or so and I think I would have tried just leaving it at fastest speed to see what happened. Like I said, it was bugging up after only about 5 minutes, so it wouldn't take very long to reach that point at Fastest without increasing the replay speed.

It was pretty clear cut too - at one point the zerg player appeared to make a bunch of drones and moved them to places where it was illegal to place buildings. It all spiralled out of control after that.

Just found a fake 2.25 being hosted. Looks like it's based on 2.24, did note that the scout shields have been put back up to 120. Didn't notice any other changes, but I'm not particularly familiar with 2.24 anyway.

I've found there's a spawning bug with Void Rays. It says 1.20 per building but it actually acts as if it is 1.50 (up to a point) - 2 observatory's will always spawn 3 void rays when they should spawn 2, 2, 3, 2, 3 (= 2.40 average).

Got a few more balance changes that I've made for the next version:

• Cyber core will continue to spawn 1.25 stalkers, but the 0.25 will actually be the Fenix dragoon. It will have the same HP/shields/armor, but do 17 damage instead of 20. Fenix has a 22 frame cooldown instead of the default 30, so his DPS will end up being higher than a standard dragoon. This should give Protoss just a bit of a nudge. They have a particularly hard time vs void rays because the shielding requires focus firing from fast cooldown units to effectively kill them, and Dragoons are some of the slowest firing units in the game. They also start with the range upgrade by default.
  
• Zealot -15 shields +15 hp. This will increase their damage reduction from -3 on the shields to -4 on their armor. Being small, Zealot HP takes only 50% damage from explosive (siege mode, reavers, hydralisks) so this will increase their durability somewhat. At the moment zealots often die before they can get any hits in, making them a poor unit choice. I'll probably make the leg speed upgrade cheaper too. In the past (~1.70 or so) Zealots were very cost effective, but with the other balance changes since then they really look a bit underpowered.
  
• The 2 zealots from a robotics support bay (1x collosus + 2 zealots) will be changed to 2x Fenix zealots, similar to the dragoon change above. They will have -30 shields +30 hp compared to regular Zealots, same armor (4) but do 2x12 damage (24) instead of 2x11 (22). They'll also start with the leg upgrade for free. So this will just make these zealots a bit beefier.
  
• Warp prism - will tweak some of the existing zealot/stalker spawns to spawn the new hero versions instead (but they'll spawn with a longer cooldown).
  
• Banshees -1 armor, wraiths +1. Probably also +$10 for banshee and -$10 for wraiths. Terran players like to build banshees and valks and seldom build wraiths, even though wraiths are much better at AA. I suspect this is because banshees at 275 hp with 5 armor simply take a long time to kill compared to wraiths at 215 hp with 3 armor. This should tilt the favour back towards Wraiths.