Very sorry to hear about your father! Hope he didn't suffer too much, but I know that's asking a lot.
Lowell wrote:I also was trying to rewrite a couple levels because of that dreded Start Pylon. The answer to getting it to work was a naming thing again...I hate that because I cannot rename several levels with the same darn name. So I may just leave the earlier levels as is for the most part.
You're probably making this harder that it needs to be. You only need one hidden generator level for the whole mod. Then each level that needs a working start pylon needs a trunkport that links back to a working trunkport on the generator level. (I'm doing this from memory so you may have to experiment a little bit here.) The gen level will need one trunklport per pylon level since trunkport links come in pairs. You'll have to add lines to game.txt to make these (and the generator) all online from the start (or somehow make the story bring them all online before needed).
The names of the start pylon levels don't matter. It's the online trunkport back to the online generator level that enables the attached pylons. Multiple pylons can be attached to a single trunkport in your target levels. Simple!
Free power anywhere & everywhere!
Lowell wrote:When you played through the Hadron level...what was you frame rate like? That map was a tricky one to get set correct. It spawns reds as you start the map...so the longer you wait to get to the outer islands the more reds that get spawned.
Ummm... why aren't you using spawnpop locks? They do work, even though TGF didn't like them. They have some hidden global rules which cause overpops in one lock to shut down other poplock areas which are not in overpop. Basically, the amount of any overpop is subtracted from the limits of all other poplocks and this lowers their thresholds to shut down the spawners covered before expected.
Also, there are what I call "undergod rules". I mean "underdog rules".
When red vs green fights are covered by a single poplock, the pop limit becomes flexible to ensure a lively fight. So if your lock is set to 100 total DGs, and there are 100 reds already spawned, the green spawner is *still* active even though it will exceed the lock. When several mutual-enemy spawners are under the same lock, the limit floats somewhere between 150-200% of what you set (maybe up to 300%, I never pinned it down). If your lock covers only same-team spawners, then the lock limit is a hard number. You can get a feel for this by using an officer to guide a large group of DGs into an active lock area -- to see if that overpop condition shuts things down or not.
Lowell wrote:A force field fence that really works and they cannot get through...
A few hints about fences in 1.4x engines. They are very sensitive to nearby buildings (includes trees) and other nearby fences. If you separate fences by a fair distance then you can twiddle their positions and get them to behave as expected. You can use water areas (low flatten areas) to cover the spaces between fence poles -- it's the proximity of the poles (or the real fence intersections) that cause the overlap problems = holes.
I've noticed that on grids of overlapping fences (tic tac toe style grids), one set of fences (horiz or vert) will all be impermeable, while the other set will all be full of holes. This has to do with the order the fences appear in the map file. IIRC, the first set listed will work, but the second set will fail (or vice versa). There is no way around this, except to break up long fences into short segmants, place water holes around the posts, and separate the neighbor posts by a fair distance of water.
The size of the internal laserfence coord grid is independent of the map cellsize, so there are really no guidlines as to where to place the posts for best results.
Trial and error.
Perfectly orthogonal fence segments seems to have a better chance of working along their whole length. You have to hand edit the coords to match in a text editor to accomplish this.
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