Bit Town

Found an old copy of Bit Town from years back, and got an old crappy netbook set up to run it. The central ideas for the town are as follows:

1) First and foremost the goal was to have a map that could be run 24/7. It is supposed to be something that players can always expect to play on. It's basically a lobby or a hang out spot for people to spend time in before someone says "hey, wanna try my new map?" or "Hey, let's play a game of that geo-wars!". Then they go off and play on a different server. All other aspects are just to make that lobby more interesting.

2) To make the lobby interesting, it is supposed to have a wide variety of little activities for people to do. This version of the map has a little 1v1 arena, a small race track, and a few other little things to explore in addition to the HTF objective.

3) Obviously a very unique part of the map are the Houses and Teams dedicated to players. These are supposed to reflect the most active players of the present day. Obviously they do not currently do that. In the near future I'm going to correct that by making new houses and teams; many of the current houses will be pushed to the "outskirts" (expanding the map). More discussion on that in days to come.

4) The hall of fame is to commemorate past players who don't play any more, or ones that have significantly contributed to the game (I think Wat qualifies there). It's a nice little touch to the town, though it's a shame that loadoutzones now come with gears, so the graphics are a little weird. [About the tree... a quirky little part of Zap history there. In the original version of zap town there was a forest, but it got deleted except for one tree that was kind of out of the way. Two sisters, who called themselves the green sisters went absolutely nuts over this lone tree and wrote poems and rants about how lonely the tree was.]

5) Competitions: The entire span of time that I've been a part of zap/bitfighter, a very popular thing to do was to schedule "parties" and try to piece together some kind of "clan" rivalry. Looking around the community now, this might not be a thing anymore, I'm not sure. But nevertheless, the town was set up for neighbors and nomads to compete (solo or in "clans") in monthly or bi-monthly battles on a very familiar map. The winner(s) got a trophy in their house, and a little plaque near the "nightlife"/pirate area.

So anyway, that's Bit Town in a nutshell.

[Skybax]

I had a Bittown server running for a while with raptor's help.

Here's the thread for it.

It hasn't been up in a while, but I do have a lot of more recent house creations by (mostly) still active players.

I just got on the Bit Town server I'm assuming you have up right now, and it brought back waves of nostalgia lol

Think we could collaborate on this?

Definitely we should! I'm not the easiest person to collaborate with, but I'm trying to get better at that.

[Skybax]

Coolness well let me know when you come up with any ideas

Yeah despite my many many requests I could never get a area for myself in the bittown despite being one of the most active players at the time...

Its good to see bittown coming bak I always had idea for more actitvities to add to the town....

[Skybax]

Are you referring to his Bit Town or my Bittown?

Bolth lol I could never get a area in either one no matter how much I nagged

[Quartz]

A problem I see with making a Bit Town that satisfies everyone is something that has been changed from Zap!.

In Zap!, you could force the editor to have as many teams as you could possibly dream up by screwing with the text editor. Now we are forced to no more than nine. Even if you screw with the text editor to make above nine, the game says "NAH!"

Seems to me like the devs made this intentionally so, since it worked just fine in Zap! and it was something of a silly exploit.

I propose that this number is raised or this forced technical limitation lifted so that it may be exploited by a clever person in a text editor. The latter would be better, since I think nine is more than reasonable for any normal level, but for extreme and strange circumstances such as Bit Town… well.

But I have my doubts anyone will want to do what I'm suggesting. So instead I will suggest that we go ahead and make nine teams like before, but let people make houses even if they don't own a team or whatever. I mean, why not, ya know?

[Skybax]

Amgine, you never asked for one in mine, and if you did, you did so far after all the teams had been taken.

So instead I will suggest that we go ahead and make nine teams like before, but let people make houses even if they don't own a team or whatever. I mean, why not, ya know?

I had something like this going in my Bittown, although it never took off.

People could join existing teams and build additions to the houses. If you got enough members you could have giant mansions.

This was also probably stunted by the game's technical limitations. I.E. the game would crash if a level with too many vertices was loaded.

Yey! But I get to keep my house

In Zap! when I tried to make a level too large (too many characters in the .txt file,) the server would crash, so there were a limited number of houses I could put in. Bitfighter doesn't have this limitation so much so more houses are fine.

I still am uneasy about player made houses. My biggest concern is that it should be easy to fly into and out of the house. (So that no one has an unfair advantage if flags/zones are put into the house).

As far as teams are concerned, I would be fine with people having houses and not having teams; I would prefer having people form teams with multiple houses falling under the same team... while houses owned by old players or those choosing to be unaffiliated, could either be "nomads" or teamless.

[Skybax]

Bitfighter does have that limitation, it's just a higher limit lol
Still easy enough to reach though

As far as ease of access goes, most of the houses are easy enough to get into, but getting out can sometimes be tricky.

Which I think is kind of part of the flare. If it's too easy to steal the flag then there's no point in trying to defend it.

As far as ease of access goes, most of the houses are easy enough to get into, but getting out can sometimes be tricky.

True

[Skybax]

As far as ease of access goes, most of the houses are easy enough to get into, but getting out can sometimes be tricky.

True

Your house is the most annoying of all

Flare is nice, but we have to consider the "costs" of that flare.
Here are two guidelines I currently think we should consider:

1) limit the number of characters in the code allowed per house (because it's easier to limit it now than scale back when we run out of space)

2) set a reasonable limit on the in/out flight time. Say "In a Zone Control competition, the flag will need to go in and out of this house every lap, and so we need to consider the maximum amount of time we would want to "force" people to spend in each house." So how much time is acceptable to allow per house, and how do we measure that. Well, the good news is that measuring it is simple: we fly in, we fly out, and see how long it takes us. Figuring out what our goal should be is more difficult.

Below is some math so you can form your own informed opinion.
(Or you can cheat and skip to the end to see my own conclusion ).

  Code:

Take a moment and visualize the ideal Zone Control Tournament in a Bit Town environment. Imagine it being friendly, but competitive. When you think you know what that would be like, answer these questions about it:

How long do you think each lap should take to score a touchdown? (t, in seconds).
How long should it take to fly between the houses? (y, in seconds).
How many houses would be participating? (x, in houses).

and based on previous experience,
How much slower do players in "move" towards their objectives when fighting? (z, a fraction, like 1/2 or 2/3).

-->Now, using these numbers we want to find p
(the "time trial" speed per house)

Consider these questions and how you would answer them.
When you're done, remember to convert your lap time from minutes to seconds, and plug your answers into this equation:
tz/x-y=? (the question mark is p)



My example is below.

  Code:

Say we want a lap to be 3 minutes (180 seconds)
3 seconds travel in between houses.
there are 8 houses,
Say we go at half speed when we're fighting (because presumably we are dodging and charging sideways/backwards periodically).

180*(1/2)= 90 seconds
divided by 8 houses= 11.25 seconds per house,
minus 3 seconds per house for travel = 8.25 seconds per house.
8.25 seconds per house; just flying in and out.

Conclusions---
Therefore I think a house is reasonable if:
1) It has at maximum, a number of code characters below the set limit (to be determined).

2) I can fly into the house for the first time in the match, not use the booster module, touch the goal zone, and fly out of the house, in 9 seconds or less. (And hopefully, hopefully, I don't have to deal with more than one forcefield or turret, because those require more dodging/shooting which we didn't calculate for)

I disagree a little bit the maxumium item limit for a level is somewhat hard to reach and the distance limit is impossible to hit. notabley if you use a plguin to turn all the bariers into polywall then mergge them all significnelty will reducce item count.
If I remeber right the max item count for a level instalty being able to load is 1024 or 2048 items which with our small player base is non likely to be a issue atm.

True, but we can't forget Quartz lawn...

I mean, there should a limit. What the limit is, that's the question-- if there is a high limit for a level then it will be a high limit per house. Anyway, I wanted to highlight the in/out time limit more.

[Quartz]

I disagree a little bit the maxumium item limit for a level is somewhat hard to reach.

True, but we can't forget Quartz lawn...

Quiiiiite easy to reach.

the dinstance limit for quartz holuse should be 0 pixels and 0 items then

But seriously not likely to run out of room.

[Quartz]

the dinstance limit for quartz holuse should be 0 pixels and 0 items then

But seriously not likely to run out of room.

Pretty much, rofl.

Do people want to start BitTown all over again? I think we should go for a clean slate. And I rather like the idea of multiple players belonging to one team/area of the map. I'm cool with being on team amgine or whatever =P

Like... clans?

A shame they patched the Teams limit.....

Im going to bug raptor to change it to a max of 100 teams for bit town

[raptor]

Teams have never been greater than 9 the entire time I've worked on Bitfighter. Changing it is non-trivial as it affects *large* portions of code.

there was a exploit in Zap raptor that was fixed in a early version of bitfighter that let you exploit the team count and go to infinity

I personly cant remeber what it was but If anyone does remember post it!

[Quartz]

there was a exploit in Zap raptor that was fixed in a early version of bitfighter that let you exploit the team count and go to infinity

I personly cant remeber what it was but If anyone does remember post it!

Literally all you did was edit the text inside the .level (at the time, .txt) file to add a multitude of teams. In Zap! days, there wasn't even a "add teams" page in the editor -- you HAD to add teams that way. But you could just keep going and going and going if you were a madman.

Like... clans?

That'd be pretty legit, yo. Let's just be less retarded than .rs, .niff, [BOT], NESA, please.

I dont think it would be hard to unpatch this jsut so it can be used only for bit town is it I have yet to see anyone here complain other than the devs about it I think we should do it!

[Quartz]

I dont think it would be hard to unpatch this jsut so it can be used only for bit town is it I have yet to see anyone here complain other than the devs about it I think we should do it!

Much as I loved the "feature" (read: oversight), unfixing that is clearly backwards progress. Sure, with the community as small as it is, no one is liable to exploit it. But should we ever grow larger, it could be pretty obnoxious to see people abuse it.

I think the way forward for BitTown is forming small groups/clans so that the team limit of 9 doesn't bug anyone.

bobdaduck: There was a [BOT] clan?
Quartz: Yeah there were like 3 of us, including myself.
Quartz: It wasn't really a clan, just some losers.
Quartz: Oh wait, that's every Zap clan.
bobdaduck: rofl

It bugs me and actully I see it the other way around if there becomes more poeple (which is VERY unlikely but not impossible) poeple will want more then 9 clans so I see no issue with it.

maybe jsut implemt some sort of offical clan system would solve the issue have no teams....

[Quartz]

Cripes. Can we just focus on Bit Town instead of turning every little issue into a "LET'S CHANGE THE GAME" discussion? I remember in Zap! days when we had no developers. We actually got more done, because we couldn't run crying every time something didn't work exactly as we liked. We had to improvise, and it made for a lot of creativity.

Rant over. Let's revamp Bit Town.

Post Removed by owner.

[Skybax]

Agreed however I will point out that bashing other players feelings and ideas rudely are not appreciated and if you're not going to be constructive and just say something like thats a bad idea then its not a good idea to post it....

I Cant wait for the new bittown it will be fun!

Amgine, YOU'RE the one who started talking about something that was different than the topic of the post, and YOU'RE the one getting offended when people react negatively to it. This is the internet.

Seriously almost everything you post annoys me.

No I am pointing out instead of saying "this is a bad idea" and dropping it that people should say WHY its a bad idea I didnt mean to offend you If i came across as rude im sorry

[Quartz]

people should say WHY its a bad idea

Already did:

Much as I loved the "feature" (read: oversight), unfixing that is clearly backwards progress. Sure, with the community as small as it is, no one is liable to exploit it. But should we ever grow larger, it could be pretty obnoxious to see people abuse it.

Agreed however I will point out that bashing other players feelings and ideas rudely are not appreciated

Definitely not targeting you alone. All of us are guilty of what I ranted about, I was bashing all of us collectively (except the devs and maybe a few odd exceptions) -- read:

Can we just focus on Bit Town instead of turning every little issue into a "LET'S CHANGE THE GAME" discussion? I remember in Zap! days when we had no developers. We actually got more done, because we couldn't run crying every time something didn't work exactly as we liked. We had to improvise, and it made for a lot of creativity.

Sorry if it came off the wrong way, amgine.

maybe increase it to 12 14 16 18 or 20 teams and see if it works at all ?

Like I said Its very hard to reach the float zone in distance as for item count thats a slightly different matter im not 100% but if I remeber right there is a 1028 item limit before you start getting the slow loading level green bar of doom.

No. We'll have the 9 teams. That's fine. I'd rather people form teams than not.

Idea!

I wonder if somehow you could exploit BM as each player is a team add a levelgen and......idk

[Quartz]

maybe increase it to 12 14 16 18 or 20 teams and see if it works at all ?

It doesn't. There is quite literally code within the game now to say "no, it's nine." I've tested.

I like the team idea better anyhow.

Im not to familiar someone experiment with levgen for me I dont know how to program..........yet

Sorry amgine, it seems as though no one thinks this is a good idea except for you. You could try to learn to program, or just let the subject drop. Those appear to be the only two options though.

Would there be limits on the amounts of each different item poeple could use cause we dont want people all having asteroid spawns near there houses....or Way to many rotating speed zones....

Yeah, there will be pretty strict limitations on how a person can construct their house. In my last version of Bit Town I actually made the houses for people and it went really well. I wouldn't be opposed to doing that again if most people were okay with it.

Its fine I guess though I would prefer that players could make there own "house" and then submit it for approval..

That way players would get the design flexibility they want wihout having to worry about it not turning out the way they wanted.

[Quartz]

People will give tragically few shits about BitTown if you make the houses for them.

But what is the point of having a Bitown is everyone must conform and have the exact same design Isnt Bittown supposed to encourage creativity and diversity?

[Little_Apple]

Isnt Bittown supposed to encourage creativity and diversity?

No. That would be map contests.
Bit Town is about messing around playing Bitfighter while not actually playing Bitfighter.

Idk it seems like it would be better to just let people design there houses as they want since your not playing or anything I dont think that matters does it or is it just me ?

Any word on how long before we start building this thing?