#garbage mangement discussion

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

brisk barn
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I'll start a thread because this will probably have some back and forth and I want to hear peoples opinions and experiences...

Okay this screenshot is a starting point we can work with.

Questions

  1. Is this our vanilla garbage config setup without modifications? I know there are some mods that touch lifetime and radius, so if those are mis-configured something like that could easily happen.
  2. Conflict with how many players?
  3. Are they constantly all re-spawning at the main base?
  4. Are all other bases clear of items then?

General Info
To give you some info to help you and others understand this better: We had 2 previous versions of the garbage management. The very first that came with beta release was a very aggressive and "dumb" one that only knew lifetime and would delete items, characters and vehicles around you without warning or you having any chance to avoid it. It kept the map very clear but you would see things clean up mid game-play which is not very immersive. Worse than that, sometimes it would steal the very valuable transportation from your squad right in front of you. There were many many complaints both from internal play-tests and from you players.

So we worked on an different approach that had some technical short comings and in the end failed to delete anything at all. Even with nobody on the server. We reverted that, sat down, reflected on those approaches, reviewed the community feedback (especially from modders trying to integrate the system) and made the current version.

Right now we try to balance immersion and not disturbing game-play with the servers need for performance. This was the explicit wish from you players. You wanted things to be aware of nearby players and you wanted more control. Both are very valid and important arguments so we followed through on them. Usually on our vanilla game modes and in the internal and experimental play-tests, after the first few minutes of everyone playing around with their loadouts, they move out and you see people spawning back at base maybe every thirty seconds if there is a large fight nearby, otherwise they are ghost towns for a good few minutes. We expect any large pile up to disappear over time.
Yes, if everyone is dropping items around the arsenal it will clutter up visually and at extreme levels can and will hurt server and client performance.

The ideal situation is you and you squad being engaged in some firefight in a town. There the system will make sure any relevant entities will not disappear until you abandon them and move on. If you are in a house and re-organize you must not worry that we delete your valuable ammo you deposited for a squad-mate that will need another 2-3 minutes till he can make it to the position. Same goes for you holding positions near strategic goals. While even there some things can be tweaked the system behaves as it should and feedback internally and during exp was very positive on this.

People creating this pile of quite literal garbage at arsenals is the exceptional case that needs to be dealt with. Our hope was, as I alluded to before, that during full map wide engagement the distribution of players, how often and where they spawn will implicitly tidy up the map. The configuration right now pauses the lifetime for nearby entities, but in the time nobody is there, it will count down and will eventually disappear. We are of course fully aware of the unfortunate situation if people keep spawning at the same base over and over, and all arsenal items being is a really small radius, so it could take far longer than it should for things to clear out.
If this situation seems to happen a lot more than we anticipated, we will react accordingly. I will be on official and community servers this weekend and have a close eye on this to get a first hand impression of the situation.

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GM clear button
The clear button still works, it still allows you to do the thing you intend, trying to tidy up abandoned entitites and reduce the load on everyone. It will just clear items that were dropped for longer than 60 seconds so again, your squad just having left a vehicle or dropped ammo will not be affected. Clicking this button should clear out most if not all of the items above. Do we expect server owners to be ingame and constantly press t he button? Of course not. The GM clear was intended to be used during GM sessions, not for Conflict or other community modes.

Modding capabilities
A majority of the effort in the update actually went towards giving server owners and game-mode makers the flexiblity to configure and change the garbage system behavior to suit their exact needs. We have exposed new script events you can use modded on, to e.g. create a "reduced garbage time near arsenals" mod. If you are not a script r but feel like your community just needs slightly more aggressive handling to e.g. ignore nearby players at all go into {86E953538A28A98D}Configs/Systems/ChimeraSystemsConfig.conf search for the SCR_GarbageSystem section and adjust the values. If you want to ensure arsenals will be cleaned no matter what, disable Check Player Distance entirely on the InventoryItemComponent rule.
Please read the 1.1 release change log for all the changes that happened regarding the garbage system. They are all mentioned in there. Any questions beyond that you can ask here in the thread or ping me if needed. I am happy to answer them.

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What we already did and will continue to work on
We have already update the garbage config internally to not pause items lifetime, but just avoid deletion at the very last moment while a player is nearby. The previous radius was 5 meters, now it is only 2. This will be shipped as soon as possible. I have attached the relevant config section for any modded server owner wanting to make use of this right now - seeing how we approach this.

Based on feedback we will look into reducing the default GM clear safety time from 60 seconds to something like 30 or 20 seconds.

tawny pewter
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how can server owners configure the system?

mental bane
brisk barn
tawny pewter
brisk barn
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There is no way to change the system without mods.

tawny pewter
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ah ok I thought it is since you said server owners ... flexibility to configure

mental bane
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Besides the mission header bug is still present, so no point in exposing it in the server config anyway 🙈

tawny pewter
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anyway I've already pointed out the issues earlier, junk on the ground and the 60s timer means you encourage things like spamming smoke grenades on spawn to ruin people's frames

brisk barn
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The task for the garbage system is not to prevent trolling of this kind, smoke grenades are automatically removed after they are out of smoke. What you mention is related to a GM action either way, where you might as well remove the player from the game or TP him into a corner of shame.

tawny pewter
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we used to be able to remove those active smokes with the clear button immediately, so this is a downgrade

lunar fox
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My suggestions is that the basic parameters of the garbage collector should be configurable in the server config.
More advanced changes via mods.

tawny pewter
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those configs cannot be modified during the game or can they?

mental bane
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We had that discussion before. Removing active smoke with the clean button is unintended behvior in my opinion. It's disturbs anyone that uses them in a legit way.

tawny pewter
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you could solve this without depriving us from the ability to get rid of them immediately

brisk barn
tawny pewter
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obviously it is a good change for legitimate smokes, and bad for troll smokes

brisk barn
# lunar fox My suggestions is that the basic parameters of the garbage collector should be c...

It is not that this thought did not cross my mind, however doing it is complicated. Mods can change the config significantly with multiple rules affecting the same entity based on rule proprities etc. So while for the default setup in theory you could give a few options, those would never be enough to do all the things server owners might want to do. And as soon as they use a mod that touches on the same config it becomes a mess to try and combine those values. But again, ideally a server running default conflict should not run into the need to touch these values at all.

lunar fox
knotty mango
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.

tawny pewter
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flush cannot be modded, and how do I get a list of all entities submitted to the system?

brisk barn
# tawny pewter obviously it is a good change for legitimate smokes, and bad for troll smokes

Lets not continue that topic please. I explained that any GM anti smoke sanctions you mention are not needed as the GM could just as well get rid of the player doing them. If you want instant clear of everything, you can still call flush with e.g. 1 second lifetime via script. The GM button is for Gamemaster sessions, not for anti troll.
If you think this is such a common problem and have some solution in mind that does not affect normal use feel free to either a) make a mod for it and or b) send me a DM with your idea and we can discuss it further to see if there is some vanilla tweaks we could adopt

brisk barn
tawny pewter
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okay so not much in terms of scripting the garbage system yet

ocean token
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Ill take a look at this info and see if it’s something I can atleast adjust in the conflict mod for my server based on what I’ve seen. Although I’m not much of a scripter

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But I’m hoping this helps and the next update coming with it helps as well

mental bane
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Are you going to make an updated version of your GC tweak mod bacon?

ocean token
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Would be nice or you kex

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I would love to provide input

mental bane
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I think the timings were great for Conflict

ocean token
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Indeed I use to utilize both when they were both applicable

tawny pewter
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I don't think so. I've shared what issues I'm experiencing and a green name guy tells me that it's not an issue so I guess I have no issues anymore

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I can't bring my ideas about smokes to life since scripting support is not there yet

mental bane
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Let's be realistic. I mean it's impossible to choose a default setting that fit all game modes. Conflict has other demands than something like Overthrow that I would put on the opposite spectrum on the required aggressiveness of the GC.

tawny pewter
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I am not demanding anything, I am simply saying that a feature had a certain use does not have that use anymore, do with this information what you want

mental bane
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Fine, I'll update my GC Patch then instead 😅

brisk barn
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What do you mean no scripting support, we added new events that you can mod so you can do anything you want with the system ... bacon what are you talking about

tawny pewter
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how do I implement a button to clear only specific type of entities? I would have to keep a list of entities you've advised against

brisk barn
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If you only want to keep smoke granades that would probably work fine, i feared you wanted to iterate all the hundrets of entities tracked by the system at times

mental bane
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You override the action and add your additional logic to it. I think my GC Patch could provide some pointers, since the original version did remove active smokes as well

tawny pewter
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I would like a couple separate buttons that delete separate things, one of them being, for example, immediately delete smokes

ocean token
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If anyone works on a patch mod please lmk I would love a spot for feedback and suggestions atleast from DarkGrus viewpoint

tawny pewter
mental bane
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I haven't tried to modify the new system yet, so I dunno

tawny pewter
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also not strictly related to the garbage system, what is the method to tell me if an entity is visible to the current camera? I would love a "clear visible smokes" button

mental bane
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I guess something like a distance check to the camera and whether the position can be projected on the screen

tawny pewter
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the game has frustum culling, there has to be a simple method somewhere that returns a boolean

mental bane
tawny pewter
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yes sorry

mental bane
tawny pewter
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it's a bit disappointing that those configs cannot be modified during gameplay because server owners could have sliders for those settings, in the GM scenario settings menu

ocean token
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Copy would be neat to have left vehicles let’s say further away then 50 meters be also on a 5-10 mins timer

ocean token
tawny pewter
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some server owners would like just a shorter lifetime, others would like to get rid of the distance to player check

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one mod could do all that if all those settings could be modified during the game

mental bane
lunar fox
tawny pewter
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The onbeforedelete method could check if its destroyed or unoccupied

lunar fox
lunar fox
tawny pewter
lunar fox
tawny pewter
lunar fox
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Sounds like a big ask.

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Some might even say illegal

tawny pewter
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oh no

mental bane
ocean token
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Oh wonderful using both of these now lmao

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@craggy kestrel

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@lunar fox @mental bane @brisk barn thank you guys for releasing some hot fixes and thank you Arkensor for the transparency! This is a good Win for the day!

mental bane
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Keep an eye on vehicles. Destroyed vehicles being subjected to distance check as well might turn out problematic at locations like the main bases.

craggy kestrel
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Thanks!! @ocean token @lunar fox @mental bane @brisk barn

ocean token
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The only thing now is I need to hope the guy that made our scripts mod can reupload his mod so we can have the civilian vehicles removed of the map and all the MG emplacements

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Which is taxing for conflict but what a win for today this was productive love to see it

brisk barn
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I jumped on a few official and community servers and it seems images such as the thread main posts are not that frequent when looking at the overall server population. It seems to be a bigger problem for high pop high customized modded servers - which do have the option to adjust the config and or script logic to their needs. There are limits where we can ensure stability. If you choose to push the game beyond our "tested" capacities things can get tricky. I'd like to support everything out of the box, but as explained in much detail here already, I can not make it super agressive while at the same time ensuring gameplay is unaffected. It is a slider between two extremes and we moved it a little bit by default now, while providing those the option to move it back or further than we ever did if you really want to.
We will continue to monitor the situation and as I said some immediate reaction is already on the way. I'll probably have an eye on this thread but replies might be slow over the weekend.

tawny pewter
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yeah tell the xbox server admins to just mod it in

brisk barn
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One aspect I forgot to mention is that perhaps some tweaks to how players remove/refund equipment they want to replace at the arsenal could help not having them dropped there all the time in the first place. We will of course also look into that direction and try improvements to get rid of the root case

mental bane
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Ofc, with the distance check in place for items by default, high pop servers have a good chance to end up a huge pile of garbage next to the main base's arsenal.

tawny pewter
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that came out a bit harsh 😭 sorry

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not just the garbage manager system, but editing configs from script would be helpful, could make mods where server admins could interact with a whole bunch of settings

lunar fox
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Yeah it should be a default with many systems that you can always override the config values in the script itself

ocean token
craggy kestrel
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@brisk barn Thanks for creating this forum, and quciky helping us finding away with this "garbage". 😉

But, I'still think we need to discuss this one aswell:
Specifically, the ease with which vehicles were previously spawned has been compromised, necessitating extensive remodeling and editing of vehicle prefabs. This not only poses a challenge for seasoned players but also creates a barrier for newcomers who may find the process overwhelming.

One of the most concerning issues is the inability to set a rank higher than sergeant in the prefab. This limitation greatly impacts the progression system within the game and hampers the sense of achievement for players striving to advance their characters.

In light of these issues, we kindly urge you to consider rolling back the recent update to restore the previous functionality of vehicle spawning mechanics and address the rank limitations. By doing so, you will not only enhance the overall gameplay experience but also demonstrate your commitment to listening to the feedback of your dedicated player base.

brisk barn
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On a closing note for today and entirely personal remark: The garbage changes had to be done quickly and with little time budget because there are many other tasks for way more exiting systems and content to be worked on. Maybe I can spend some more time on it for major changes such as server config settings, maybe not, we will need to see. I tried to squeeze in as much functionality as possible and many new config options over the old systems. Our feedback was "stop removing my vehicle and ammo stash while i just went 5 meters away to fight for 5 minutes". Now we update this, we had a few weeks of experimental release phase where we got 0 complaints or questions or remarks about the system that I would be aware of. We give modders more tools in their hands only to be met by what reads as very negative/hostile comments as long the lines of "you devs intentionally made the game worse". This is honestly quite disappointing. I welcome any suggestions and feedback, this is important for the game to be balanced and well functioning, but those can be expressed without painting the people who tried their best as fools.

mental bane
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If you do have a look at server configs, make sure to have a look how it behaves when the scenario gets reloaded 😉

brisk barn
ocean token
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I just think we should figure out a way to keep you guys in the loop without having to force a server to experimental to have the player bases real view. With the predominant amount of conflict players being on modded servers I don’t think the experimental player base really has the voice of the overall player base. I would be more than willing to figure out a way to get more community members involved in these.

tawny pewter
ocean token
mental bane
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I mean they do ask for our feedback on experimental, but if we don't bother to make use of it 🤷

tawny pewter
craggy kestrel
ocean token
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And at my current sizing it would be useless to run experimental at lower numbers for valuable feedback

ocean token
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Considering I’ve been making it work somewhat reliably for a long time despite being told it shouldn’t work

tawny pewter
ocean token
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I think a big thing for vehicle spawns too that isn’t talked about enough is a limiter to limit said vehicle in the session

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So like only 2-4 helis instead of 5-10

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I would think it would be helpful to have a handful of larger community owners to have a place to leave feedback on a more connected platform like a discord roled chat so it’s alittle less formal

mental bane
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Still that would also require said owners to check out experimental to gather concerns in the first place

ocean token
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No not really

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They could convey the changes and we would provide input

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I would even be willing to swap one of my 128’s over to experimental for better testing if I felt like we would have a better chance of being heard

mental bane
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That sounds like a fair compromise

tawny pewter
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Idk I feel like you can tell me what you like and not like about the garbage system on main branch

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Testing experimental has value too

mental bane
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Yeah, you got a point with the GC. We already came up with fairly good parameters for the pervious system. Something like the vehicle spawning overhaul is much more complex to convey, especially with the modding part in mind.

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And on top of that some of the behavior could actually be bugs for all we know

lunar fox
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I am wondering if there is a possibility to disable automatic garbage collection on certain entities by doing this but still have the Game Master clear entities button work.

image.png
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I have a faint recollection that at some point in experimental this worked but now it doesn't as the Game Master button calls garbageSystem.Flush();

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Other than this the new GC system fits our communitys needs pretty much perfectly but we play private GM sessions only.

brisk barn
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If you disable collection then yes it will not be even inserted and then it won't be rated to flush at all

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You can also use the script API to blacklist entities. Or handle their insertion from the callback.

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You can not and never could press clear on GM but have no garbage collection at all

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If for some reason you need this behaviour, change only the lifetime to be it's max value. That will keep them for a long while.

lunar fox
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Okay I must have either messed up the configs or something then when the GM button still worked 😄
The max value for the lifetime is 3600 which is 1 hour right?
In many cases our events last 6+ hours and some items just should not be deleted at any as they are important to the story/mission.
So I guess I have to look into the script API then 👍

I am guessing if I turn the processing interval to 0 it doesnt actually stop the automatic processing from happening, but it makes it happen constantly without delay?

brisk barn
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Yes. The system is not designed to be manually operated. If you want to ensure task related entities are not deleted you can blacklist them. But things can get complicated if they are inside other items. Our scenario framework handles these things. If you setup your mission using it, and disable garbage collection on the slot via attribute it will work out if the box. We do this for gather and deliver intel item in Combat Ops

lunar fox
mental bane
static meadow
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@lunar foxRegarding your junk file cleanup mod, it automatically cleans up junk files every so often. How can I turn this off?

lunar fox
static meadow
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OK

brisk barn
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Disabling the garbage system will lead to unplayable performance after an hour or less of server uptime with players on it