Next version features

Several noticeable features of upcoming version are following:

1. When bHelpMessages is turned on (in Player Setup), each weapon has governing skill displayed, so beginners know exactly which skills to purchase to improve their chosen weapons.
2. When bHelpMessages is turned on (in Player Setup) and server has configured bDisplaySkillMessageForever to true, then "Skills Available" message is displayed very big and centered in the middle of the screen after 10 seconds of not entering skills menu.
3. Added lagometer. To turn it on, write in console: "lagometer 1". To turn it off, write: "lagometer 0". Green bars are ping measured, blue is servers performance (time between ticks), red is packet loss. For best gaming performance, green should be as low as possible (and steady), blue should be steady (with no high blue bars in the middle) and there should be no red bars.

MiniMTL226 available

 Features & improvements:

• fixed spectator switch bug allowing to play as spectator
• added 2 test gametypes:
      * CBPAdvTeam
      * CBPAdvDM
      these gametypes are same as ATDM and ADM, but have
      certain weapons changed a bit to balance the game
• added "CustomRecord" console command to perform demo recording with timestamp inside filename
• added bPerformZoomOnRightClick user side flag
• improved MMNextMap mutator 
• when MMNextMap mutator is used, next map is displayed on end screen
• added bReflectiveDamage option (to get rid of teamkillers)
• fixed grenades disappear bug

Download HERE.

Demo recording improvement

There has been request to improve demo recording, that would automatically add timestamp to demo file and get rid of necessity to write file name each time you wish to record demo.

With simple console command "customrecord", previous recording is stopped and new one started with current date and time implemented into demo file name.

Tip: bind command "customrecord" to a key and you will be able to record easily by just pressing a single key.

This feature will be available in miniMTL226.

Performance improvements

The upcoming MiniMTL will mainly focus on performance improvements.

There are 2 categories:

* Network performance improvements (lower servers CPU utilization, less lag, less bandwidth consumption)

* Client performance improvements (higher FPS in battles)

Network performance improvements

DXMP was very badly scripted. Certain guidelines about network replication were not followed. As a result, DXMP since ever has problems with servers CPU utilization, preventing it from hosting many players. Detailed analysis of scripted classes used in DXMP has shown  that there were following (critical mistakes) being done:

* BloodDrops, BloodSpurts, FleshFragments, ShellCasings, Tracers and so on all being spawned on SERVER side and then replicated to all relevant players. All mentioned actors are not gameplay important - are only visual effects and therefore SHOULD be always spawned only on clients. The server should perform check to see to which clients visual effects are important and then instruct selected clients to perform visual effects.

* All inventory items have bAlwaysRelevant set to true. There are many "pickups" in DXMP (all weapons inside weapons racks, medkits, skilled tools, additional ammo, grenades); due to bAlwaysRelevant=true these pickups are constantly being replicated to all players regardless if being near the player or not. The proper way to solve this is to set bAlwaysRelevant to false once the map loads up with all inventory actors inside. The result is very good - about 50% less replicated actors per player (less opened channels).

* For many actors, NetUpdateFrequency was never set and are using default value of 100.0. That value is recommended to use only for actors like Pawns. Reducing NetUpdateFrequency for certain actors results in lower CPU consumption on server side. This improvement will be included in one of later MiniMTL mods, because it still needs testings.

*  There are skills actors and augmentations actors. These are not needed at all, because every aspect of gameplay can be handled inside SkillManager and AugmentationManager actors, thus reducing number of replicated actors per player by ~30.

Client performance improvements

All applied network performance improvements will have direct and indirect effect on players performance. Less replicated actors can slightly reduce CPU load for networking on clients. Most important added feature is player's decision which visual effects should be spawned. This is now fully possible, since player has full authority over visual effects actors. In User.ini config, there are following variables:

* bSpawnBlood

* bSpawnTracers

* bSpawnFlesh

* bSpawnShellCasings

* bSpawnOtherVisualEffects

Setting all above to false should significantly improve your frame rate in battles. This would work only on servers running MiniMTL225 or higher.

MiniMTL224 is here

Following improvements:
- fixed shuriken bug
- fixed bug in CTF
- fixed join failed bug (not sure)
- fixed bugs with EMP and Gas grenade
- added SpawnPoint (tag: 'Spectator') recognition for spectators starting point

You can create maps now where you define where spectators start.
Just put SpawnPoint somewhere in map and set it's tag to: 'Spectator'

You can download MiniMTL224 here:
DXHOSTING.NET

MiniMTL222

Improvements are following:
- Console checker class is now fully protected
- Added option whether to force players netspeed
- Fixed known bugs from v220
- Increase NetPriority of the flags to fix flag location bug (but was not fixed)
- Increase flag retake time (to 60 sec) to avoid dropflag abuse
- In CTF game, spectators have to wait for respawn interval to join in to avoid respawn abuse
- Added MMNextMap mutator (selects which map to play according to count of players currently in server)

Download here:
DXHOSTING.NET

Bug fixes & info for mappers

There has been first few bugs reported, which I already fixed. Expect MiniMTL222 soon to arrive.

I would also like to share some info on how to do CTF maps for mod. Mod has default support only for stock maps and would crash the server if non-suitable map is loaded in CTF mode.

First of all, you should follow the rule of naming the map: DXMP_CTF_MapNameGoesHere.

Secondly, place 2 actors inside the map (mark where flags are). Actor class must be "SpawnPoint". Then configure each one:
- set Tag to "CTFFLAG"
- set ownerTeam to "0" for UNATCO flag and "1" for NSF flag

If you do not place these 2 SpawnPoints with exact configuration, server would crash and you can check server.log to find out why.

There is another important thing related to Spectator mode. All spectators are started at location 0,0,0 with rotation 0,0,0. If you would like to show some good part of the map to spectators when map is loaded, then you should consider this. I will perhaps add SpawnPoint even for that once in future where you could then configure location and rotation of spectators starting points.