[friagram]

The problem here, is that there is no good middle ground.
You go with ff2 and you have perhaps too much on the ff2 centered side, with boss charge and such limiting what you can do and how buttons work.

You go with boss fortress, and you have to write out everything for each boss individually.

Personally, I like the idea of a game mode manager that does the queue, picks the bosses, and manages rounds, etc. Has forwards for only important events like splitting the boss/nonboss game events for ontakedamage, disconnect, as well as stuff like when they become boss. Keyvalues may be just fine here... Have some name of the boss, information about what it does, and some settings for abilities.

Then you can have another layer for buttons, using think or runcmd, mainly only doing what you need when you need it. Perhaps hooking/unhooking touch or whatever. Abilities can be bound here.. Link them to commands, use natives/forwards, use libraries... Whatever.. If you want.

[Cookies.net]

friagram, if anyone took up the Gamma/Boss Fight Fortress combo, it should be fairly simple to allow plugins to allow their own Behaviours to be destroyed at will. I know it's a bit complex getting into it, but it does allow a lot of things.

Bosses are Gamma Behaviours, so if the above is made, it should be fairly straight forward making a plugin that registers arbitrary bosses loaded from KV configs as well as having bosses that are coded entirely as a plugin for heavy or complex things. That would allow the best from both worlds, aye?

I also want to mention, that I kinda wanted game modes to be able to be derived from other game modes, in the case of Boss Fight Fortress, that would be having a base: Boss Fight Fortress (which can't be run on it's own), which declares common things for the Boss game modes. Then have a Boss Versus All, which is the traditional mode, and possibly derivatives like Bosses Versus Bosses. Currently there's a define in Boss Fight Fortress that switches between these 2 modes, but it'd be nice if they could be used side-by-side (can't at the moment).
I never got to that part before I got bored of TF2 and stopped working on it, but it's certainly something that could be interesting.
If anyone ends up picking up on Gamma/BFF, I wont mind answering any questions about them and might contribute a bit, if I find something that might be good to add.

[Powerlord]

The original design plan I had for FF2 2.0 was to have subplugins register a callback (which used private forwards behinds the scenes).

However, that design kinda died when my community lost interest in it. Part of its design still lives on in FF2 1.8+ and part of it still lives on in NativeVotes.

[nergal]

Thx to Cookies help, I've done some major progress to VSHA

Here's the progress

I've removed the stocks .sp and moved that code to the .inc

What's left that I want to do is to make a refined boss selection system instead of a bool function...

Unfortunately, the only way to add companion bosses is through the registration native which also requires to be checked in the refined boss selection system.

Also, I've thought of "Boss Engine" as an alternative name to differentiate it from VSH and FF2

[sarysa]

As the resident negative nancy who pops in once a month, I need to lay the same criticism I did for FF2 2.0, more or less.

You are going to have some major hurdles to leap with this endeavor. VSH and FF2 are not perfect...even the creators acknowledge this. What they are, however, is stable. FF2 has years worth of third-party rages written exclusively for them. Friagram is by far the most prolific rage coder around here, with around 5k public lines of FF2 code and who knows how many private lines of code. I have about 20k lines to boast but most of my code is exclusive to VSP. (about 3k are public) Plenty of others like otokiru have also contributed. Converting these rages to an incompatible system, frankly, is not going to happen. This seems to be far more pronounced with VSH Advanced than it is with FF2 2.0.

Second thing is you're making the same mistake I did in assuming that VSH and FF2 are not really distinct entities, or that FF2 is an upgrade of VSH. It may have been designed that way, but ultimately they ended up catering to two different audiences.

People who seek out VSH want stability and guaranteed balance. An immense amount of effort has been spent on a small number of hales. Except on unbalanced maps (which ironically most VSH maps are), none of these hales are particularly better than any other hale. As Valve adds new content to the game, folks like Chdata diligently implement balanced ways to handle these new changes. VSH is best comparable with default modes of TF2...and it's actually a bit of a shame that Valve hasn't picked up on its immense popularity yet, since it doesn't use copyrighted content. (okay, there's Millionaire's Holiday, but that's easily removed)

FF2, on the other hand, caters to folks like me...those who want rapid changes, wildly varying hale mechanics...are okay with "easy" hales and "difficult" hales existing on the same server, since that's what you're going to get with VSH's more artistic cousin. Servers with a motivated coder contributing to them will have some out of this world mechanics and aesthetics attached to the rages. Unlike your assessment of FF2, the only idiot limitation I've had to deal with is the mandatory ramped speed mechanic that's easily modded out. (thankfully the VSP owner included such a mod so I could implement a two-speed hale) But some of the things I've been able to do in FF2 include reload-toggle abilities, hales that spawn useful props into the world, hales that use a rope-swing ability, hales that turn the arena into water and have water-specific attacks, hales where both teams race to acquire an item that grants their team a powerful attack, and much more. The sky's the limit more or less.

Good luck with this endeavor, but it's going to be quite the uphill battle.

(edit: ok, I'll admit, I also have issue with FF2's auto-tripling low damage. really, really annoying. luckily, it's also worked around fairly easily for the most part, since it's base damage tripled and not actual, random range damage.)

[Chdata]

Funny, I use VSH for my 'limitless boss design'. Why VSH over a plugin that has a whole system dedicated to adding new abilities and bosses?

Because FF2 from what I can tell is/has been super unstable. Now it could be that I just have bad experience with only seeing relatively poorly designed bosses and rage ideas (never have seen any one of sarysa's bosses), or just bad experience from looking at its source code...

And a friend of mines reformatted all of VSH to be K&R and have better spacing for readability, and it's been relatively much more stable, and has the 'better' (subjective I know) super jump physics.

I'd much rather add on to VSH and make it modular. Of course, when I was newer to sourcepawn I was more concerned with adding weapons than adding bosses.

All that really matters is that one is able to code and edit plugins to do what they want. I know War3Evo and I both like to do live maintenance of our VSH branches for our servers.

The limiting factor with VSHA is that only people who are experienced with SP will have any use for it. And people like me or sars who already have heavily modded vsh/ff2 files won't be able to easily switch over. And there isn't many bosses made for it yet.

[sarysa]

Haha, I was told by some loyalists that those were the reasons they preferred VSH. But since I've invested my efforts into a community that's been using their fork of FF2 since long before I joined them...that, and the fact I've written so much FF2 rage code just means I'm not motivated to do anything else for any other juggernaut-themed game mode.

BTW, some of my boss code (the ones I mentioned in this thread):
- The hale with two speeds (my first hale ever, back when his viewmodel was broken): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr7Loi37KJA
- The rope-like ability (note the -like in there): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnMOt0NPiKE
- The boss who has to find an item on the map before the mercs do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVt4ljSmkkI
- The boss that spawns props into the world (it's the one in my sig): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV2laac5w5w
- The hale that turns the arena underwater: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gON6Rdpo18E

[nergal]

Originally Posted by sarysa Haha, I was told by some loyalists that those were the reasons they preferred VSH. But since I've invested my efforts into a community that's been using their fork of FF2 since long before I joined them...that, and the fact I've written so much FF2 rage code just means I'm not motivated to do anything else for any other juggernaut-themed game mode. BTW, some of my boss code (the ones I mentioned in this thread): - The hale with two speeds (my first hale ever, back when his viewmodel was broken): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr7Loi37KJA - The rope-like ability (note the -like in there): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnMOt0NPiKE - The boss who has to find an item on the map before the mercs do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVt4ljSmkkI - The boss that spawns props into the world (it's the one in my sig): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV2laac5w5w - The hale that turns the arena underwater: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gON6Rdpo18E

That pipsqueak boss would've been better as Aquaman....
Rope ability would've rocked for an Indiana Jones boss....

[friagram]

Most large communities maintain their own version of vsh or ff2, and have for some time. Most likely based off of really old versions. I've got some 80+ bosses now with various abilities, so there is no way that I'd go and port all of those abilities to a framework when the current one works just fine. That's all fun and what not when you have 4-6 bosses, but there is just too much that can (and will) go wrong when moving so many. To make a new framework worth it, new features would have to be available.. And they would have to be needed fewtures... That's just not here yet.

The closest I can thing is the boss vs boss type thing, or allowing 1 boss on each team (like vip or for cp).. Or multi boss vs group (mvm). Cookie's thing eould be your best bet.. But you'd have to finish it, and learn 2 new apis.

[sarysa]

Originally Posted by friagram The closest I can thing is the boss vs boss type thing, or allowing 1 boss on each team (like vip or for cp).. Or multi boss vs group (mvm). Cookie's thing eould be your best bet.. But you'd have to finish it, and learn 2 new apis.

Jug actually his own Boss vs. Boss thing going, and it's pretty impressive for someone who's learning coding as he goes along. Will probably be private, though.
(it's actually more like (a few bosses + many mercs) vs (a few bosses + many mercs), and it uses game modes that allow respawning)