Anyone still interested on 'safe' combat?

That would be kinda cool too. I have the hosting for it, I just don't know programming to well. I kind of always wanted a way for entire factions to sign up for a game, play, keep score, etc. But first you need framework. HTTPr gives us alot more options for that now

The rub there, Burke, is that a fully engaged response only further encourages their meddling. However, the AR is rather unsatisfying.

blasting them with our own uber weapons isn't particularly satisfying either. Their avatars don't fragment or anything .

Anyway, not part of the system, and at worst it would put game combat on hold while combatants move to a new location, or the asshats get board and go away, or banned if there were any justice. In that game dev competition where the goal was to make a gridwide game were were going to try and do this type of game/capture the flag, but we gave up because of communcations problems.

There was Chinatown - and Abraxas, too.

ah ya, those are the names I was trying to remeber. I confused Chinatown and MC for a while too. Both night, both city, and both well done. Chinatown focused more on lighting and special effects though.

Right. Capture territories and engage the enemy, use resources to build up your armory and vehicle stock. downed players are down for settable period of time before they can engage, etc.

yep, sounds about right. Only remaing hurdle is how do you dissallow things like non-game vehicles and shields. We had planned on penalizing people for them, but reporting wasn't deamed particularly valid, we wanted to automate detection. Having every bullet phone home with what it hits didn't seem particularly feasible and still really doesn't.

That is a problem, we could have referees but that's just more of a headache, dock points and ban teams for using crap like that.
Only certified weapons, armor, vehicles, etc. You can design your own thing but we'd have to check them first.

well, we could have vehicles phone home periodically and append a tag to the beginning of their names, if a bullet impacts a moving object of a certain size without a valid tag it assumes it's an illegal vehicle and calls it in. who to penalize though, the owner? Easy exploit there, use someone's vehicle who's not part of the game.

Right. It's always kind of tricky like that.

too bad a collision with the object an avatar is sitting on can't be detected by an attachment on the sitting avatar.

Yeah. We'd have to rig the vehicle with it's own hit counter.

ah, I have it. the game attachment and weapons won't work if you're sitting on a non-game vehicle. In fact just sitting on the non-game vehicle will cause you to recieve a penalty.

Now to deal with shields.

Hmm. We can detect the use of shields, but it any way I can think of would be pretty runtime heavy. I know a certain mad scientist has a rez detector for certain bad things we might be able to employ, but if we wanted on-a-whim skirmishes, it would be pointless.

well given a sensor in the combat attachment, we can look for shield prims, but how would you recognize them?

dunno, I mean, if we detected by name, they'd change the name, we could update the counter's lists, but it'd be an arms race. It's one of those problems we'd have to work out.

Or, start working on small group engagement and scale our way up from there?

I always like to put things in motion on a small scale and look for the misalignments once the start button has been pushed. That's what all the burn marks are from

Question: Is there an incentive to game the game? In other words, why should the Arms Race Factions even want to bother with this?

I was thinking I could write some code that would detect multiple identical objects owned by you at close range, but that could then be beaten by not having shield prims be identical.

I don't think it's possible to detect shields accurately. We might just have to provide an easy report mechanism and then investigate. I think I can write a report function into the combat attachment, which can do things like provide a timestamp and a list of avatars in the area, location and avatar locations. using that info we can verify a screenshot. So for reporting, hit your screenshot button, then type "report shield use by so and so" and the attachment will send in the report to be followed up by the screenshot. Not perfect but it should provide some accuracy.

That's a good question. I mean, the only real prize is rank, which is enough for some.

Same as with any game, we keep score. Why would anyone play any game? to win.