Defense Spawn Problems

[S7ORM]

Bonus hype: this effects all game modes (I'm excited because in some cases it might improve Survival spawn flow as well).

Exterminate as well? It was annoying having to go to the end, then back to the start, then back to the end to get the last 5 enemies to spawn.

Also,

 

So now that the issue has been fixed, what exactly caused the problem?

 

Because I'm actually incredibly curious.

[[DE]Glen]

Ok so here's the scoop:

 

The background is that enemies spawn from specific spots in the level -- not just closets but actual fixed points in the closets. To spread the spawns out a bit there is a simple reservation system that holds a spawn-point until the last enemy it created is killed. 

 

There were actually two problems working together to break this reservation system:

 

1) Dead enemies held onto their reservation until their corpses were cleaned up (dissolved or whatever). Unless you vaporized the enemy you could have accumulated up to ten of these reservations at any one time (beyond that and we'd speed up the corpse clean-up). This could occur if you had a pile of bodies in view and this could end up forcing the spawns to use closets that were farther away from you.

 

2) Shattering a dead corpse that was frozen solid would leave an invisible corpse behind (it was waiting indefinitely for the melt-down animation to finish). We ended up finding this by running around with Glaxions; once we figured out the trick we were able to choke off all the spawns in Lares by the end of the second wave. Given the popularity of Frost in defense missions it's easy to imagine how you'd be able to get similar problems where their "natural" death was interrupted.

 

Apart from the obvious fixes, changing enemies to release their spawn-point reservation immediately on death is interesting because it should make spawn flow quite a bit better in some situations (in all game modes).

 

I'm looking forward to testing this on the weekend -- I still need some goodies from T3D! Thank you all for your help!

[arKRazor]

This is marvelous news.

[Scottie_Auren]

Ok so here's the scoop:

 

The background is that enemies spawn from specific spots in the level -- not just closets but actual fixed points in the closets. To spread the spawns out a bit there is a simple reservation system that holds a spawn-point until the last enemy it created is killed. 

 

There were actually two problems working together to break this reservation system:

 

1) Dead enemies held onto their reservation until their corpses were cleaned up (dissolved or whatever). Unless you vaporized the enemy you could have accumulated up to ten of these reservations at any one time (beyond that and we'd speed up the corpse clean-up). This could occur if you had a pile of bodies in view and this could end up forcing the spawns to use closets that were farther away from you.

 

2) Shattering a dead corpse that was frozen solid would leave an invisible corpse behind (it was waiting indefinitely for the melt-down animation to finish). We ended up finding this by running around with Glaxions; once we figured out the trick we were able to choke off all the spawns in Lares by the end of the second wave. Given the popularity of Frost in defense missions it's easy to imagine how you'd be able to get similar problems where their "natural" death was interrupted.

 

Apart from the obvious fixes, changing enemies to release their spawn-point reservation immediately on death is interesting because it should make spawn flow quite a bit better in some situations (in all game modes).

 

I'm looking forward to testing this on the weekend -- I still need some goodies from T3D! Thank you all for your help!

 

Interesting! Thank you for hunting it down, and also for the transparency. :) You, and DE, rock. Have a good one!

 

 

EDIT: This also would explain some very frustrating exterminates where I was avalanche-spamming. Awesome fix.

Edited August 20, 2015 by Aurentus

[oceano4]

Ok so here's the scoop:

 

The background is that enemies spawn from specific spots in the level -- not just closets but actual fixed points in the closets. To spread the spawns out a bit there is a simple reservation system that holds a spawn-point until the last enemy it created is killed. 

 

There were actually two problems working together to break this reservation system:

 

1) Dead enemies held onto their reservation until their corpses were cleaned up (dissolved or whatever). Unless you vaporized the enemy you could have accumulated up to ten of these reservations at any one time (beyond that and we'd speed up the corpse clean-up). This could occur if you had a pile of bodies in view and this could end up forcing the spawns to use closets that were farther away from you.

 

2) Shattering a dead corpse that was frozen solid would leave an invisible corpse behind (it was waiting indefinitely for the melt-down animation to finish). We ended up finding this by running around with Glaxions; once we figured out the trick we were able to choke off all the spawns in Lares by the end of the second wave. Given the popularity of Frost in defense missions it's easy to imagine how you'd be able to get similar problems where their "natural" death was interrupted.

 

Apart from the obvious fixes, changing enemies to release their spawn-point reservation immediately on death is interesting because it should make spawn flow quite a bit better in some situations (in all game modes).

 

I'm looking forward to testing this on the weekend -- I still need some goodies from T3D! Thank you all for your help!

Thank you very much Glen!

I do have one question though, what about player that have had to abort missions before this thread was made, and has lost Prime parts to this viscous bug? :O

[ZizWing]

Wasn't that what you assumed at first Glen? Surprising that the bug did not happen during your frost test, oh well, I'm happy it's fixed :)

[ThisIsMyName]

Cool, thanks for sharing Glen. Glad you shattered this bug.

 

Stay frosty.

[Pate8]

Did DE Glen fix this? *Fingers crossed.*

 

This problem was occuring as early as update 16.

Edited August 20, 2015 by Pate8

[Tenarsha]

Nice post-mortem Glen ! Love that !

[DiosGX]

Y'know, I had some trubs a while back and Glen is the dude who helped me out with it. I think I'm in luuuurve. o 3o

 

When I do void defenses as Mesa, I tend to stand... how to describe this... when you spawn in, just keep going straight forward, past the pod and between the laser panels on the other side. I stand there specifically because what ends up happening is enemies will eventually only spawn from the zone-in area where players drop in at.

 

This allows for the other team mates in my squad to fire straight down a pillar of enemy heads and balances the affinity spread out from being mostly frame-based affinity. I'm wondering how that's going to play out in the future now.

[Boydkarrys]

I´ve had this problem too, and it is agonizing. 

 

We were playing T3D and around 32 or 33, the enemies took too much time respawning, like 20 min per round until we all just died : /

 

We were: Mesa, Nova, Frost, Trinity. The host didnt migrated. As far as i know we didn´t do anything out of normal. 

 

My only guess is Frost, since MOST people from this threat had a Frost on their team. Maybe you should check him out

[ZizWing]

-snip-

Dat moment you get 12 notifications from a single guy in a single topic because you forgot to un-follow... O.O

[-AR.WolfFlight]

Thanks Glen. Enjoyed being able to watch the stream of the testing and provide feedback during the testing runs. The constant flow of information to/from dev/players was an encouraging thing.

 

Glad you found the issue.

[UltimateSpinDash]

I love how you actually make threads about the problems you are working on, specifically asking the community for help, keeping us updated and even explaining the problem once you found it.

[Lord_of_Lords]

Ok so here's the scoop:

 

The background is that enemies spawn from specific spots in the level -- not just closets but actual fixed points in the closets. To spread the spawns out a bit there is a simple reservation system that holds a spawn-point until the last enemy it created is killed. 

 

There were actually two problems working together to break this reservation system:

 

1) Dead enemies held onto their reservation until their corpses were cleaned up (dissolved or whatever). Unless you vaporized the enemy you could have accumulated up to ten of these reservations at any one time (beyond that and we'd speed up the corpse clean-up). This could occur if you had a pile of bodies in view and this could end up forcing the spawns to use closets that were farther away from you.

 

2) Shattering a dead corpse that was frozen solid would leave an invisible corpse behind (it was waiting indefinitely for the melt-down animation to finish). We ended up finding this by running around with Glaxions; once we figured out the trick we were able to choke off all the spawns in Lares by the end of the second wave. Given the popularity of Frost in defense missions it's easy to imagine how you'd be able to get similar problems where their "natural" death was interrupted.

 

Apart from the obvious fixes, changing enemies to release their spawn-point reservation immediately on death is interesting because it should make spawn flow quite a bit better in some situations (in all game modes).

 

I'm looking forward to testing this on the weekend -- I still need some goodies from T3D! Thank you all for your help!

 

 

Ahh the indirect Draco buff

[Candengard]

Ok so here's the scoop:

 

The background is that enemies spawn from specific spots in the level -- not just closets but actual fixed points in the closets. To spread the spawns out a bit there is a simple reservation system that holds a spawn-point until the last enemy it created is killed. 

 

There were actually two problems working together to break this reservation system:

 

1) Dead enemies held onto their reservation until their corpses were cleaned up (dissolved or whatever). Unless you vaporized the enemy you could have accumulated up to ten of these reservations at any one time (beyond that and we'd speed up the corpse clean-up). This could occur if you had a pile of bodies in view and this could end up forcing the spawns to use closets that were farther away from you.

 

2) Shattering a dead corpse that was frozen solid would leave an invisible corpse behind (it was waiting indefinitely for the melt-down animation to finish). We ended up finding this by running around with Glaxions; once we figured out the trick we were able to choke off all the spawns in Lares by the end of the second wave. Given the popularity of Frost in defense missions it's easy to imagine how you'd be able to get similar problems where their "natural" death was interrupted.

 

Apart from the obvious fixes, changing enemies to release their spawn-point reservation immediately on death is interesting because it should make spawn flow quite a bit better in some situations (in all game modes).

 

I'm looking forward to testing this on the weekend -- I still need some goodies from T3D! Thank you all for your help!

 

While you are at it, there is a bug that is related to this "body and death" code that prevents you from extraction in exterminate mission. On rare occasion an enemy (not appear to be frozen however) stands or floats (if it's an osprey) stationary in the world but should have already dead. You can't "kill" it with weapons, sometimes a damaging ability can "kill" it or get rid of its body, but sometimes even abilities can't do the trick if it has no target info. The root problem of this unkillable enemy bug may lie somewhere else, but maybe the fix can make game to think all enemies are eliminated to allow extraction.

 

I think this discovery shows a lot of old codes are not robust enough to interact with new stuff. The speed of updating old code base needs to catch up to the speed of content, or it will take longer and longer to debug, and we've already seen this, a lot of bug fixes are not old problems that people have been waiting for, but new bugs that used to be non-existent before content update. Previous problems will keep accumulating.