ARRTI
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Author: Grimlar Download Map: – Authors Map Description –A River Runs Through It This is a conversion of one of the maps included in the community map pack for DG1. Its not a faitful reproduction, there are some minor alterations to the map and the missions and scripts for this map are completely different. Hopefully a different challenge. Explanation. Anyway, I finally made inroads into getting the missions/scripts sorted out earlier this year. Eveything was pretty much done until I ran into the 10Mb save file limit problem on the Super Grinder mission. Hence the delayed release. So, my apologies to anyone hoping for a 100 wave Super Grinder, cutting it down in size was in the end the best way to get the map out to you all to play. I hope that the mission is acceptable as it stands. For more information on the save file issue, please look at the explanation on the Festive Pumpkin map. Scoreboost is not available for any mission. The following missions are included: Note: The Story or Campaign mission does not upload the score to the leaderboards. This is a HPE issue and I cannot fix it. For that reason, this map is considered to be a practice map for players who have few if any Tower Upgrade Items. For everyone else please use Story leaderboards for Comp Hard or Story Ti for Open Elite. All normal missions have been beaten on Competitive Hard. Any TI missions have been beaten on Open Elite by OCD. Thanks must go to OCD & TNTFTB, who have helped with testing this map. All errors, bugs and balance issues are of course my responsibility not theirs. All modes, (ie open, comp no sell etc,) are available for the basic story mission. As scores are not posted to a leaderboard I consider it to be effectively a practice mode. Missions with a TI added after the name can only be played in open modes and the aliens have a lot more health, it is expected that you will need Tower Items to beat them. If you find any mission too easy on Open Elite, then consider trying the Competitive Hard version of the mission, I am told that it is usually harder. If that is still too |
Thank you to everyone for your comments postive and otherwise.
Thanks for this beautiful new challenge. Took me a while but now i know how to do it 🙂
Complex and fun as always from Grimlar. I managed gold on story mode hard – now it’s time for super grinder 🙂
Thanks a lot !
anst
Firstly, thank you to everyone who is playing the map.
However, I feel I should make the point again.
If you normally play open elite (ie with a commander and tower upgrade items) then you will find the normal campaign mission to be easy. it is supposed to be a practice mission as I have explained on this page already.
I dont expect experienced players to play it, I expect them to use either Story Leaderboards if they play competitive hard or Story TI if they prefer open elite.
As such, if you feel the campaign mission is too easy, please try Open Elite Story TI instead. If you still find that to be easy then try competitive (no sell) hard or elite after that.
If you still feel the map is too easy at that point then I can only apologise and applaud your skill.
Really just a tiny little little bit. Great work man!
Ok, please be clear.
Which mission are you referring to?
From your earlier comment I was under the impression that you played the campaign/story mission on open elite?
Got Open Elite Story TI. No cores lost, first try. But just bronze 🙁
And you would like Open Elite Story TI to be harder?
Exactly: First campaign, then Open Elite Story TI. It was really thightly 🙂 Therefore this is a well good balanced map and I like the design very much. Two core houses are everytime a good competition 🙂
Next time I will try Open Elite Story TI competive no sell. And yeah, I get a little idea, this could be very very hard to master…
I guess I can add a second Story TI mission at a higher difficulty level. Hopefully sometime later today or tomorrow.
And I hope you enjoy Story -Leaderboards, Comp (no sell), hard if thats what you mean to try next. I look forward to hearing how you get on.
Sorry, I was a little confused about the 100s of modes. I mean campaign competive on elite. Really hard, I lost my cores after 18 or 19 waves. No chance for me, dude. At the beginning of my commentares I just mean campaign open elite was a little bit to easy. Because this mode is my beloved one on every map. All the othe modes on elite on your map a definetely not too easy, for example campaign competive. It seems to be unbeatable. I got no idea to master this mode, only to defend just one core house and to build mý defenso just for that. But so is it impossible to get bronze, I think.
So thanx for your offer to set Story TI harder, but its not neccessary. Because I just first want to try silver at least. And I know I’ll get it! 🙂
So put your time maybe in a following new map. We need such builders like you! One year ago I’ve tried to build an own one, but the programming of the waves was one point I’m getting mad. I wasn’t able to script it in a right way. Maybe I’ll try it a second time… It is possible to seize the damn small 3D-Window in the Level-Editor much bigger? I can’t see anything on my 15″ Notebook! 🙂
Ok.
The reason I recommend that you dont play on campaign/story is 1) HPE broke it, by refusing to allow the score to be uploaded to the leaderboards, 2) it is essentially impossible to balance a map so that it is entertaining/challenging for people playing with tower upgrade items and those who play without tower upgrade items.
The extra damage offered by the tower upgrade items is so excessive that the only way to balance the maps for challenging play is to make two versions of each map. (Each of which has to be tested seperately before release.)
This is why, (for all of my recent maps,) I have provided Story -Leaderboards and Story TI as alternatives to campaign/Story for people who like to play competitive hard and open elite respectively.
The Story TI aliens (open elite) have approximately twice the health of the same aliens in Story-Leaderboard (comp no sell hard). And I know some players would still consider Story TI Open Elite to be easier.
(If anyone wants to request these modes on any of my earlier maps please post a comment on the relevant page and I will try and get them added.)
So if you play on Open Elite with tower upgrade items then you should be looking for the TI missions, if you prefer to play on competitive hard/elite then ignore the TI missions.
As such, the best way to think of the campaign/story mission is as a practice mission for people who play on competitive no sell mode or who dont have many tower upgrade items yet.
You mentioned 100s of modes.
There are in fact only 5 mission types on this map.
Story, Fixed, Flood, Hvy5, and Super Grinder.
There are two versions of each, TI and non TI.
Each mission has a short description in the menu describing some of the main differences of that mission type.
If you are interested in more variety then have a look at Quad which has at least 12 different mission types, plus 1 TI mission and of course the campaign/story mission. Most of those missions are aimed at comp no sell hard.
The point of all the different types of mission is to give you the player a different kind of challenge, play slightly differently, to hopefully give you more entertainment.
Basically the map is tested on two difficulty settings, open elite for TI missions, and comp no sell hard for non ti missions. All the gold medal scores are set on those difficulties, usually without using any of the command shuttle options and always with no aliens escaping and no cores lost.
As regards the map editor , you can increase the size of the window by closing the other windows around it, but you will probably need at least some of those to modify item properties, select objects etc. Probably your best bet is simply to plug your laptop into a larger monitor.
As for creating scripts it may seem confusing to start with, but you do soon get the hang of it. I suggest that you send me a friend request on Steam (Grimlar) so that we can exchange email addresses and Ill help you get started with it.
Or, you can try the command station tool available on this site, I believe you can automatically create a script with it. I dont know how good a script it comes up with though.
Thank you for the full explanation. Now I understand the principles of the modes much more. And sorry for my imperfect english, I’m not a native speaker. But I really try my best. Should I write in my language? Because of the not so bad translating function of this site. However, thanx for the hints!
Maybe I’ll try to construct a new own map with the editor in the next days. Thanx for your offer to help! I’ll coming back to you when I really need help, probably on steam.
Well, I wasn’t lazy the last days and began to build. The level loads succesfully in DG2. Yeah!
Of course, there are some problems. First: the exit and entry spawns won’t work. I got 2 spawn points, one marked as entry one as exit. In DG2 the timer starts and the waves running correctly but not one alien is viewable. Maybe there running in the wrong direction? A second problem is that the mousecursor stops in DG2 at a unvisible border before he could reach all constructions.
Because of my Steam-limitation I can’t send a request to you. But you can. My name is “srkimmi” on steam.
Im sorry I cant find a srkimmi, but I can find a paul.lauter. Is this you? http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198307906187
In order to change how far the mouse can travel you will need to alter a set of values named as follows, MaxXBound, MinXBound, MaxYBound, MinYBound. MaxZBound, MinZBound will affect the height the cursor can go to.
Note that this is seperate from how you adjust the camera height and angle, where you specify Max Zoom Out, Intermediate and Max Zoom In settings. I suggest that you leave the FOV at 60, and you keep Pitch between about 55 and 85, try and select the minimum height so its just above the highest point of the map and the maximum height so that the player can see all of the map on screen at once, set the intermediate to be about half way between.
As for aliens not appearing, there could be several reasons for that.
When you launch the map, do you see the path highlight, ie the orange chevrons leading to the power core and blue ones leading away. If they are missing then its likely that the pathfinding code cannot find a valid path from the entrance to the exit via the core. If that is the case it probably means that one of the junctions has become bugged.
Once we get hooked up on steam, you can send me a copy of the map and I will try and nail down where/what the problem is.
Yes, it’s me paul.lauter. Steam shows me 2 names…
Thanx for your answer. I’ll try to fix the coursor range. There is no blue or orange path, so there is an error by the pathfindung. But I didn’t see any mistake by the alien path. Did the level editor show me where an error could be? This would be nice but I fear there is no showing…
So it were very nice of you to have a look at the map 🙂
Unfortunately, the architect doesnt help much in these circumstances.
When I get a copy of the map what I will do is move the entry and exit points until they are right next to the power core housing and check that things work like that, then I will move those points a bit towards the original entry/exit points and check again. Doing that repeatedly will allow me to identify where the bugged junction is. Once Ive figured that out I will take the junction apart and rebuild it making as little change as possible to the rest of the map.
There are a few other things that may affect the pathing, but i wont be able to tell exactly whats gone wrong until I see the map.
Invite sent by the way.
DG1 and DG2 the goal has always been not to just get through and survive but also achieve gold which would mean that the numerous variables in game play have been strategised and elite gold level achieved.
So if its purely difficulty and score isn’t a concern then competitive is the way to go but gold is still the goal.
Competitive Elite will sort out all players.
You’re right. Nothing counts but gold :-).
Exactly it’s all about gold 🙂
Here’s an analogy…..If you play a racing game and get to the finish line ‘last’ was it too easy and have you succeeded?
🙂
Hi again,
Just some quick thoughts, don’t know whether my thinking goes into the right direction.
Looking to the number of downloads I see about 100 players.
Looking to the entries in the leaderboards I can see about 15 different players in total.
My conclusion:
– most of the players failed?
– I cannot see every player in the leaderboards?
– most people play campaign (first mode) which doesn’t have a leaderboard?
If correct assumption is the last case, maybe campaign should be made more difficult to challenge the majority of the people?
And all the other modes just nice add-ons?
Hey Jolly Roger,
There is a bug in DG2 which deletes players scores.
“• one issue with DG2 it has a bug that has never been addressed where players scores dont register on leaderboard….I am one of them, so no matter what score i get it wont show….i have a work around to fix it but couldnt be bothered as this will be about the 10th time i have had this happen.”
This map I have played all Ti modes numerous times and gotten gold open elite and I dont show up on leaderboard. If I go to previous maps that I have played I also don’t exist. I have 2415hours in DG2 and over half of that play time I don’t exist on any mode.
Some maps that have over 500 downloads, if you check leaderboards there might be 20 players max show.
I have contacted HPE numerous, numerous times in the past about this bug to get a zero response.
HPE have one of the best tower defense games out there and they put zero after care into it. zero.
Whilst your speculation is possible, I suspect rather that most people who downloaded the map simply havent played it yet and possibly never will.
For example it has been estimated that nearly 200k copies of DG2 have been sold, yet only 150k people have played the game. Of those, only about 100k have posted a score on open normal, adn by mission 10 that figure is down to less than 50k. Just because people have access to something doesnt mean they will play it.
Here is some alternative speculation that you may or may not wish to consider.
1) there are bugs, possibly to do with corrupt player profiles, or corrupt save files that seem to prevent some players scores from being uploaded at all. OCD is currently one such player, Ive been in the same situation too. Whilst it is possible to ‘fix’ this, there are side effects that are time consuming to overcome.
2) I believe that players who attempt but fail the mission still have their score uploaded to the leaderboard. Everyone should be able to see eveyone elses score on the main leaderboards.
3) The current state of the campaign mission in custom maps is unfixable, it is a game engine problem, deliberately introduced by HPE to restrict custom map functionality.
Putting the practice mission in place if the campaign mission is done partly as a courtesy to the people who play the map, and partly because I refuse to release something that is broken when I can do something useful with it.
This is the best compromise I can provide. The difficulty is reasonable for people who normally play one of the competitive modes or who do not yet have many tower items. As such it is open to the widest audience, making it ideal for a practice mode.
The only alternative I am prepared to consider is to provide a 1 alien mission to fulfill the mandatory technical requirements and make it clear that the mission is not intended for serious use. I am not prepared to put more time or effort into something that cannot be fixed no matter what I do.
4) I have already provided campaign mission alternatives for both competitive hard and open elite players at a suitable difficulty.
These are clearly indicated both in the description on this page and the mission summaries in the in game menus. It only takes a minute to read the guidelines or scroll a couple of entries down the in-game menu.
I have also responded to the comments on this page to reiterate that information and explain why it is the way it is. If you still cannot or will not use the alternative missions then Im sorry to say there is very little else that I can do to help you.
5) I do not play open elite, for a variety of reasons, but I know that many players do. As such I make maps that I can play, which is kind of a given since I will be the person who spends most time testing them. It should therefore be no surprise to say that all of my maps are made with competitive hard in mind. The only reason that there are TI modes at all is due to the efforts of OCD and TNTFTB and other players who help me test them. Without them the entire map (for all of my maps,) would be aimed at competiive hard with no concessions to open elite.
6) If you want a map that works differently then you should have a word with a different map author or better yet have a go yourself. There is a certain amount of information on the Hidden Path forums and on this website to help you get started. http://forum.hiddenpath.com/forum/hidden-path-forums/dg-architect/17061-dgarchitect-tutorials-tips
Best of luck. If you run into any problems feel free to get in touch on steam and I will help if I can.
My way of playing DG2 is to play on hard mode and just the open modes with tower upgrades. I only compete against myself and often I play without thinking about the score at all – just making fun paths for the aliens and inventing new ways of dealing with them. I like to try to get gold on hard mode but I don’t like to fiddle with adapting my setup to fit the waves perfectly, so I will never get really high scores.
I have a lot of fun this way and thanks to Sharky and Gimlar and others I will have fun for many more years !
Thanks !
anst
P.S. One beautiful day I might even try Elite mode 🙂
Thank you for the comments.
It is always useful to know how other people play. I like to try and make the maps playable by as wide an audience as possible and that wouldnt be possible if players who use the maps differently didnt tell me how they play.
I have to be honest I feel much the same as you have described, though I only play comp hard. I too am not really bothered about the score. Get the gold medal, kill all the aliens, dont lose any cores and Im pretty much done.
I know there are better players than myself, so I try to leave a little space, ie Comp Elite for them if they wish to try it. I cant guarantee it is beatable the way the other difficulties are because im simply not good enough to test it in any kind of reasonable time frame.
From that point of view I would prefer it if Open Elite players played on Open Hard instead, which would leave Open Elite as an extra challenge for those who wanted it. But everybody seems to gravitate towards Open Elite and since I dont play it myself, I go with what the players want.
As for why I dont play with the tower items, at first it was because it felt too far from the way DG1 played, and for some reason I didnt get too many to start with. (Probably because I spent too much time with DGArchitect instead.)
After a while I came to believe that the tower items were a mistake, (as implemented, the concept is fine,) and not something I wanted to spend any time using. (Which was an easy decision to make since I didnt play with them anyway.)
Thats why my earlier maps are all relatively easy on open elite, I didnt play it and I didnt test it. Fortunately OCD came along and was willing to test TI levels. So I have added more of them as time goes on.
A huge thank you! A very good map. A relative balanced competition and a very nice design. I’ve worked hard at Campaign Open Elite not to lost just only one core. Ok, I’ve done it by the first try and so it is right the map could be a little little bit mor harder.
Thanks for the new map Grimlar and also a Merry Christmas 🙂
Thank you very much for bringing this to live!
(unfortunately a but too easy, even on elite – succeeded the first try)
Merry Christmas to everyone!
Is that Story TI Open Elite?
Campaign Open Elite
(honestly don’t know the difference between all modes; I always play the first one only)
Very well.
Some of this is covered in the explanation above, but just to be clear I’ll cover it again.
Open missions mean that you can choose a commander (orbital weapon) and use Tower Items (the upgrades you get given after a mission) and you can sell towers to reclaim a % of the resources.
Competitive (No Sell) missions dont allow any of that, and for that reason are considered to be much harder.
For custom maps, HPE decided to not allow player scores to be uploaded to the online leaderboards. Fortunately they made a mistake and so only the main campaign/story mission scores are not uploaded.
It is worth noting that it is depressingly easy for cheaters to hack the leaderboards. As such, taking screenshots of the map showing your final build and the score sheet helps confirm what you have achieved in case anyone asks.
For this reason there are three ‘story’ missions in my maps.
The basic Campaign or ‘Story’ mission has to be present for every map (otherwise it wont work) even if the score doesnt get uploaded. As such I consider it an easy/practice mission. I believe that this is what you have been playing.
‘Story – leaderboards’ is aimed at those players who prefer to play on the competitive missions, specifically competitive hard. Scores are uploaded.
‘Story TI’ is aimed at those players who prefer to play on open elite. Scores are uploaded.
In terms of difficulty.
Easy= 75%, Normal=100%, Hard= 150% & Elite=200% health.
I believe that the general consensus is that Open Elite with Tower Items falls somewhere between Comp Easy and Comp Normal when played on the same mission. Which is why i include TI versions of the missions so that i can make them a little more challenging.
As far as my maps are concerned, Gold medal scores aren’t intended to be a target so much as an indication of completion, ie getting a reasonable (ish) score on a map, with all cores remaining and all aliens dead. For Open Elite players I think the challenge tends to be more about beating the scores other players achieve on the online Leaderboards.
Story mission types generally are a normal length, say around 30 waves give or take, and usually have few if any restrictions.
Fixed resources missions tend to be similar to the story missions except that you start with a set amount of resources and you dont get any more, so you need to be careful with what you spend.
Flood is one of my own mission types, again it tends to be around 30-40 waves in length, it tends to start with a relatively normal number of aliens and ends with an awful lot of aliens on the map.
Hvy 5 is another of my mission types, as the name suggests there are only 5 waves, but they are all large. You do get a lot of resources to allow you to build a lot of towers, but with so few gaps between waves it can be diffcult sometimes to pick what to upgrade next without weakening your defence.
Grinder missions are normally 100 waves long.
The basic Grinder mission consists of a single alien type, walkers.
Super grinder includes the full variety of alien types.
Unfortunately due to a problem with how save files work, larger maps, (more waves, more towers, more aliens) can run out of save file space. This was a serious problem with the Festive Pumpkin map that I released earlier in the year, and a problem for Super Grinder on this map, as such I cut the Super Grinder mission down to 74 waves to compensate.
Please feel free to ask questions about anything ive missed, that you dont understand etc, although if the question relates to someone elses map you should probably ask them about it first.
Hope thats all a bit clearer now.
My apologies, Easy=50% health
Hi Jolly Roger,
Can you please play ‘Story Ti Elite’ and post a screen shot of your set up and end score showing Gold medal as I checked the leaderboard and I couldnt find you on any mode.
Once you complete it then the challenge is ‘Story Competitive Elite’.
I think you will find Story Competitive Elite a big challenge.
Cant wait to see it
Cheers
Ok, now I played “Story – Leaderboards”, competitive, normal. Succeeded with gold and 32,470,142 points.
But what about a table of scores to compare with other players??
Where can I view this? I never noticed anything like this anywhere.
(or maybe my account doesn’t have the properties)
on the leaderboard it will show your score compared to who has played that mode so if you check out competitive hard grimlar is there with a gold if you want to challenge him and on story ti elite i see you with a silver. good work 🙂
• one issue with DG2 it has a bug that has never been addressed where players scores dont register on leaderboard….I am one of them, so no matter what score i get it wont show….i have a work around to fix it but couldnt be bothered as this will be about the 10th time i have had this happen.
Now 35,575,896 points.
But unfortunately I still don’t understand where I can see the table of players.
Where do I have to click??
Or is it in the web browser? Any link?
Or do I have to make the other player(s) a “friend” before?
Isn’t there a global table where I can see all the players?
I wish you well on the leaderboards.
One word of caution though, some of the scores would seem to be fake/hacked. And others may be achievable only with Juggling.
As such I would advise you to get a feel for those players whose scores are legitimate and concentrate on beating them, rather than aiming for the number one score on every leaderboard.
Its a sad situation but unfortunately the way things are at the moment.
The global leaderboards are accessed from the stats and options column of the main menu.
Screenshot here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1245410215
Sounds like you are comfortable with Competitive normal now, you should probably move up to Story-Leaderboards – Competitive (no sell) Hard or Story TI Open Elite for a more suitable challenge.
(Which are also the difficulties that the gold medal scores are set on.)
Thank you very much, now I found it.
Very inconvenient (because I understand that you have to leave the map you are playing to go home to the main menu – and then clicking through all the options instead of selecting in drop down menus), but anyway interesting.
Let’s see whether I can find some time in the next days to enter the top in all of the different modes. 😉
Hey Grimlar,
Thank you for putting the time into making another great map for us to play.
Merry xmas, hope you have a good time.
Cheers from Australia 🙂
Thank you and Merry Christmas to you and yours.
Likewise, Seasons Greetings and Best Wishes to all visitors to this page.
THANKs and Merry Christmas ;-))