How do you use g_abilitiesGlobal, g_abilitiesSoldier, etc.?

(Smooth) #21

The DLC abilities aren’t ‘forceable’ using these cvars, only the shipping abilities are.

(HugePinball) #22

Hmm… well these were working fine up until the hotfixes pushed out on July 5. I’d thought that might have been a result of me hinting too aggressively about it on the forums, and they would be re-enabled after the DLC release.

But now that I think about it, there probably is no mechanism in place to check if the client has the DLC abilities unlocked before the server overrides them, so players without the DLC (which should be no one for now) could potentially still use them this way.

Will we have the ability to use them in these cvars again at some point?

(egghead) #23

I am absolutely no fan of that “roll multiple chars to see the whole game”-idea that made its way into brink but i could setup my public servers the way i liked with the help of that g_abilities cvars and i was happy again. I really hope that they enable DLC abilities in the g_abilities and/or give us a cvar that enforces the DLC on our servers.

(Smooth) #24

Unfortunately the HugePinball is correct; the server cvars will override DLC ownership checks.

The cvars were used during development for testing and we decided to leave them in for competition purposes. We always figured comp would be limited to using stock abilities, since not everyone will have DLC.

We also can’t guarantee that the DLC abilities will work entirely as intended without the DLC installed. In theory they should, since we had to include the code/media in a base-game patch so other players could see (and be effected by) people using the abilities, but this hasn’t had any testing at all.

(Qbix) #25

Oh great -.-

Well, I guess I will just put in every global ability without the DLC one and let the rest emtpy, so people have at least everything like grenade running and such and the rest is up to their personal preferences.

How could someone just guess what competition would look like after a DLC without at least implementing a simple DLC check ability switch algorithm that grants DLC owners DLC abilities at least. Oh well :confused: A mod is needed :smiley:

(HugePinball) #26

Thanks for the response Smooth.

[QUOTE=Smooth;367957]
We also can’t guarantee that the DLC abilities will work entirely as intended without the DLC installed.
… this hasn’t had any testing at all.[/QUOTE]
I was able to conduct extensive “testing” for about a month :wink:. For myself, some friends, and anyone who happened to join my server, all the abilities appeared to work just as they do now, save any netvar tweaks that may have been made in the meantime that I haven’t noticed yet (the pyro mines seem to burn a little longer, am I right?).

If I may: I don’t think there would be any real issue allowing the DLC abilities to be used with the g_abilities server cvars, regardless of clients owning the DLC. As it is, these server overrides are not generally useful; they’re really only good for testing or for competition-type configs. I had only started experimenting with these cvars when I wanted to try out the Rank 5 Soldier and Medic abilities without having to respec or level up another character first, but I didn’t wish to play regularly this way. Same when I realized I could use the DLC abilities this way. I used them to get a sneak peek and see how they worked, but for regular play I cleared the server overrides or joined another server.

Plus this requires setting up a dedicated server. Even if you were to assume that a significant portion of PC Brink players would do so simply to access the abilities in this limited way, I can’t imagine this would impact future DLC sales once it can no longer be obtained for free. Besides being able to select the abilities when and how you like for each character, the maps are the real meat of the DLC.

I’m not looking for any immediate reply to this, but please consider it if possible.

[QUOTE=Qbix;368023]Oh great -.-

Well, I guess I will just put in every global ability without the DLC one and let the rest emtpy, so people have at least everything like grenade running and such and the rest is up to their personal preferences.[/QUOTE]
You can’t do that. If any of the g_abilities cvars are non-empty, it reads all of them, so you would be disabling all class-specific abilities. This is part of why I say above that these settings are not generally useful. There seems to be plenty of varying opinions on all abilities that no one setup will make everyone happy.

(egghead) #27

I disagree. You can’t make a shoe that fits everyone as well as you can’t make a game that everybody loves. With the g_ability cvars we got the ability to “bend” a game into a direction that we prefer, “bend” it to a balance we like, even on public servers.