Ideas to give players things to do:

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    • Ideas to give players things to do:

      So here are some drafts. Basically players need something to do. RDM is a problem, partially for this reason. So, ideas:

      1) Quests. Dare I fucking say it??? Basically the player has to do a certain set of things and will receive an award for it.
      - Quests may or may not involve the player getting crime
      - Can be challenges, such as maintaining a certain amount of crime for a certain amount of time, or could involve going between NPCs and doing various tasks
      - Players receive money in return
      - Difficulty to implement: Easy
      - Time to implement: Low-to-medium

      2) Player Youtube sharing. Players can pay money to play a Youtube video to everyone in the server.
      - Players can disable having Youtube videos played on their motd
      - Playing a Youtube video costs 10K
      - Forcing a Youtube video on every single player in the server regardless of if they turned off youtube playing costs 250K
      - Difficulty To Implement: Easy
      - Time to Implement: Low

      3) Advanced NPCs:
      - NPC citizens that walk around the map
      - GTA Style
      - Shooting will make them run away
      - Killing them will increase your crime, and some will even drop money or drugs.
      - Some will rob NPCs like a player would. Cops could actually jail them.
      - Will occasionally buy services from strippers, medics, etc.
      - Some will occasionally attack players, but usually if they are a rare npc that gets shot. Most of them would run away when shot at, but on occasion one might fight back. There might even be a rare NPC that decides to do some very light RDM. Like killing 2 or 3 players, but not targeting anybody with 10 hours or less.
      - Difficulty To Implement: Relatively High
      - Time to Implement: High

      Anyone have other ideas? The problem is players just like to be fucking AFK all the time. We need more shit to do.
    • I wouldn't mind seeing Quests. I don't feel spamming youtube videos is going to stop people rdming at all. Advanced npcs sound bad to me because Zombies, antlions and other npcs seem to cause crashes. I don't see why citizens wouldn't.

      Why doesn't anyone bring back features the old rp plugins had. It feels like every year hl2dm rp loses features. Servers had casinos, respect, job levels and exp, heck 1 server had pets another had 25+ jobs. If some things were removed for balancing issues, work on re-balancing them or adjusting them over removing.

      Jobs once again pay best for just being afk. Like what was mid progress on the old plugin, robbing was becoming more of a main job. It requires you to be active as a robber and gave high crime, good money and let cops actively cuff on the streets.

      There still is only printing and weed as a profitable job which are afkable. Refilling paper etc doesn't make you more active it just means you go into your inventory every 20 minutes and go afk again just requiring more work. Players are going to use what makes the most money, the most money is made by being afk while also being more complicated creating an unneeded learning curve for new players especially the guys that need to be taught who hardly speak English.

      Though well before this if it's not already a goal, the stability and data loss issues need to be fixed. There are 2-3 refund requests a week, server doesn't get high uptime often and I've seen doggy work to fix things and bring in things far more than any developer I've seen in the past 2 years (excluding you rewriting a new plugin of course) so while the server really needs new stuff, you guys need to work together to polish what is already there. Jobs as mentioned being one of them, the issue that the best money = being afk has yet to be resolved and cops not having anything to do hasn't been resolved. People being active is very much tied to cops and money making. When there isn't crime for cops there are no cops and when there are no cops players don't do high risk things with high crime as much and it's a cycle that eats at itself.

      The post was edited 2 times, last by BobVeka ().

    • Quests seems fun and something that could get more players on the streets.

      YouTube sounds alright but only seems like a side feature not something to really get players out of their homes unless they are broke. How long would the video play? Some ass hat could spend 250k on a 10h loop YouTube video and just piss every person on the Server off. Then we could have the case of many players all spending 10k on different videos at the same time unless there would be a feature to only allow 1 at a time, if so cool but still see 10H loops.

      Advanced NPCs sound awesome but Bob brought up a great point with the crashes we've had from Antlion Guards ect.



      What about that Idea Syle pitched with a Town Mayor?

      For the PD I'd still like to see the Confiscated Evidence Room that was talked about so long ago. Basically when a Cop takes Drugs from a player instead of just getting $100 for (Drug number doesn't matter) they get the $100 and then those drugs are transferred to the Evidence Room(Or possibly an NPC in a Room with a Menu). Cops would have to defend it for X time to get bonus cash while Rebels could break in and try to reclaim their Drugs or anothers. This would give more of an incentive to Raid the PD. Maybe have the room auto stock X Drugs or even weapons after X time as like a mini event to promote the raids.

    • The new plugin is coming soon. I'm just battling school work and doing the last bit of bug fixing.

      1) I think I will bring back the respect system, but have it work on more than just killing players and cops. It will work for various job things as well.
      2) I'll bump up the amount of money one can earn from robbing any particular npc by a factor of 1.5x. I will also remove the scaling crime and just have it be double of the base crime for robbing.
      3) I already increased the amount of money in the new iteration for the drug runner job. It used to be that you pay X as a delivery deposit and receive 2X for completing a delivery (profit = X), but I changed it so you get 3X when you complete a delivery (so you receive a profit of 2X for completing a delivery).
      4) Back when there was 25+ jobs, most of those jobs involved player interaction, and there just wasn't enough of it for players to want to do those jobs. Either that, or the jobs were just there as titles which served no purpose or had special features.
      5) Great idea that just popped up into mind, which combines being active and AFKing:
      Display Spoiler
      The "Walter White" job. Basically if you have this job, you make meth using various equipment that you can buy from whatever NPC normally sells medical supplies. However, you must obtain sudafed by going around and robbing NPCs or buying from them. If you rob an NPC using the "Walter White" job then by chance you will receive anywhere from 0 to X packages of Sudafed. Robbing an NPC also means no purchasing sudafed from that NPC until its rob recharge time goes back down. If you choose to purchase sudafed, then you must purchase it one at a time. It's expensive, therefore your profit margin shrinks by a lot, you must buy one at a time through the menu, and after buying a certain number (randomly chosen from 0 to X), you will trigger the NPC to be "robbed" meaning you can't rob it for more sudafed. That is the active part. After that you need to use two pieces of equipment to prepare the sudafed, and then one to finish cooking the meth, which could then be sold at a drug buyer NPC.

      6) Because of how cops earn money (promoting them to leave players in jail or make them bribe), I don't want to just scale up crime majorly. I think instead it's best to have the cuff crime reduced. I think it's been reduced to 1200, but 1800 (the previous amount) was definitely too high. I think having a lower cuff crime (maybe even bringing it down to 1000) will help balance that aspect out.
      7) Eas tried adding exp and job levels. It just didn't work for this community and was promptly removed.
      8) Pets are a wonderful idea, but I believe they promote AFKing, and even then you have NPCs which you seem to be against doing.

      Also bob, do you know anything about why Zombies cause the server to crash? Is it the same issue as with antlionguards where left clicking on them with the grav gun too many times causes the crash? I think I can fix that by just having the server cancel any events like that where the player left clicks on an NPC with their grav gun if they are looking at an npc.
    • Maybe respect can count for the town mayor idea. In fact it could also work for reducing RDM.

      - Performing various job operations: +respect
      - Performing job operations, specifically for more active jobs: ++respect
      - Killing a player with a bounty: +respect (++respect if hitman)
      - Killing a player: -respect
      - Killing a cop: No gain or loss of respect
      - Getting sent to jail: -respect
      - Getting killed with a cuffable amount of crime: -respect
      - Completing a quest (if ever implemented): +respect
    • Cave Johnson wrote:

      6) Because of how cops earn money (promoting them to leave players in jail or make them bribe), I don't want to just scale up crime majorly. I think instead it's best to have the cuff crime reduced. I think it's been reduced to 1200, but 1800 (the previous amount) was definitely too high. I think having a lower cuff crime (maybe even bringing it down to 1000) will help balance that aspect out.
      7) Eas tried adding exp and job levels. It just didn't work for this community and was promptly removed.
      8) Pets are a wonderful idea, but I believe they promote AFKing, and even then you have NPCs which you seem to be against doing.

      Also bob, do you know anything about why Zombies cause the server to crash? Is it the same issue as with antlionguards where left clicking on them with the grav gun too many times causes the crash? I think I can fix that by just having the server cancel any events like that where the player left clicks on an NPC with their grav gun if they are looking at an npc.
      Lowering cuff crime to 1200 will be interesting.

      EXP and job levels actually worked well, players were willing to make less money to increase EXP faster. The issue that I was aware of, was that you got exp for collecting with no limit to how much drugs or printing money was needed for experience. So players would have a cop friend help them /print and /plant and steal it and get 3000 exp in a single day. But they were willing to throw away 100k+ for those levels. Now it appeared to me that instead of fixing that, the idea got tossed and never finished.

      Not sure how pets promote afking. But at the time they had to be fed or they would die, they would follow you around and such but really it was just like a special skinned sprite that followed the player around at a slow pace.

      No idea why zombies crash, Eas had originally hooked damage so I turned that into antlion guards paying out based on damage dealt, I then made zombies with extremely high hp and high damage in "event zones" generally in front of the pd where 6-12 would spawn in the general area.

      The original zombie invasion just paid out cash pre damage hook

      Source Code

      1. public ZombieDeath(const String:output[], NPC, Killer, Float:Delay)
      2. {
      3. decl String:ZombieAttacker[MAX_NAME_LENGTH];
      4. GetClientName(Killer, ZombieAttacker, sizeof(ZombieAttacker));
      5. CreateTimer(0.2, HeadcrabAI);
      6. CPrintToChatAll("{cyan}[RP]{default} A Zombie has been destroyed!");
      7. CPrintToChatAll("{cyan}[RP]{blue} %s{default} Has been compensated $500 from the Cold Community Anti Zombie Association!", ZombieAttacker);
      8. g_iCash[Killer] += 500;
      9. CashState(Killer, 500, false);
      10. return;
      11. }
      Display All

      Source Code

      1. public Action:HeadcrabAI(Handle:Timer)
      2. {
      3. decl String:Class[128];
      4. for(new NPC = 1; NPC < 2048; NPC++)
      5. {
      6. if(IsValidEdict(NPC) && IsValidEntity(NPC))
      7. {
      8. GetEdictClassname(NPC, Class, 128);
      9. if(StrEqual(Class, "npc_headcrab", false))
      10. {
      11. SetVariantString("player D_HT");
      12. AcceptEntityInput(NPC, "setrelationship");
      13. }
      14. }
      15. }
      16. }
      Display All

      I remember talking to you and eas about players spawning and dying causing server crashes and I noticed when headcrabs from zombies and antlions died it seemed to cause crashes as well.


      Perhaps it's the AcceptEntityInput(iBoss, "Kill"); acceptentityinput kill causing crashes even though it's supposed to be the safest way. If your plugin used that too, what happens if perhaps we didn't kill the entity we just left it there? Where destroying of weapons and npcs seem to be crashing, it's either an engine bug or something else. I know npcs used to cause crashes and people released fixes on alliedmods but I doubt they work anymore.

      I also know if npcs "biting" items held by the gravity gun and the gravity gun itself can cause crashes . The only fix I know for that would be writing a metamod extension that blocks the bite completely. This has already been made, but I can't verify if it works forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=238878

      Now what you could do is spawn combine and give them weapons, make the players the enemy and if combine actually work and interact properly, it may not crash because they aren't attacking gravity gun held items. They are shooting instead. If the "biting" is the crash cause, then perhaps citizens or combine wouldn't crash. But i'm not positive it is.

      My only other idea would be the old coop hl2dm servers seemed stable but npcs were built into the map. What if you guys edited maps with entspy to add npcs off map, without having to recompile the map. Then, you teleported them into the map for events. Sort of like your idea to transfer gold bars in and out of the map. It would only be 2-3 extra ents at most and you could check their health, teleport them off map when it gets low and reset their health again. That way they never die if it is deaths and respawning of them causing crashes.

      OR a really shitty but maybe doable method if this doesn't cause crashes, what about disabling switching to grav guns during events, enabling after.

      The post was edited 1 time, last by BobVeka ().

    • Idk, but I think I fixed some stuff.

      I think I fixed the errors that players encountered when I tested my plugin yesterday:

      - All cops spawning with pistol regardless of rank
      - PD Doors resetting (with the new plugin, I'm ignoring the old plugin doing that right now)
      - Cops now get more ammo for the guns they get in their rank
      - Players >10 hours are given normal skins rather than being forced to have the box skin regardless of hours

      Tonight I think the plugin will likely be ready for deployment. There are a couple issues in the legacyjobs module, but that won't be hard to fix, and it can be done without reloading the core plugin.
      One rule that is important is that if the core plugin or any of the object classes get modified, then all modules must also be recompiled. If only a module is modified, then only that module needs a compile. But modifying any plugin class include files (such as BEntity, BClient, etc) does warrant a recompile of all modules and the core plugin.