New Gamemode: Siege
Siege is a gamemode designed by myself using repurposed components from the insurgency system made by Jayman and Bose. I realised that a base defence public mission would actually be fairly simple by modifying the existing infrastructure and changing how the AI works slightly.

The game works like this: you’re in base, and there are enemies coming at you. The start of the game is a big wave and the end of the game is a big wave, and there’s a steady stream of contact in between. These missions tend to take just under an hour to complete, but it automatically adjusts the intensity for player count as well as how much firepower the players are using. The enemies come from the various towns in the area. You’re allowed to move around within 400m of base, but go outside of that for more than a minute and you’ll just die. This is only while the fancy stuff is WIP, in future there’ll be a basic enemy logistics system so that a group can take vehicles on a fighting patrol to an enemy held town, clear it out, and then enemies won’t come from that location for a while. For the moment though it is a simple base defence mode, so stay in the vicinity of base and the vehicles are locked. This is currently only on takistan, with a combat outpost on top of a mountain. This has proven to be a very reliable cause of psychological trauma, and testing was done for two other maps as well but the enemy spawn numbers weren't perfect with one being too difficult and one being too easy.

Due to the nature of the objective, this is the only mission on public you can actually fail. If enemies get within the base/camp boundaries and remain there for 60 seconds the mission fails and will go back to the mission select screen. This also means it's not persistent like the other missions, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Victory is achieved by holding the area until enemy reinforcements run out, which you can see an approximation of by looking at the mission status option of the self interact menu.

There is a different ammo spawn system, also due to the nature of the objective. Testing showed that unlimited ammo from the big box just doesn't cut the mustard, so it was removed in favour of a modified version of our crate spawn system. Now the sl/tl/2ic spawn crates as usual, but there's a cooldown. This won't be implemented in insurgency or domi, but in siege it would effectively be unlimited ammo if the crates could be spawned without cooldown. This is dynamic, and decreases from 5 minutes to 2 minutes as the player count increases from 1 to 18 players (though obviously there are more slots than that on the server). As an example the uk box has 22 mags minimum and adds more for every player in the server, so if you’re going through that every 2 minutes then you need to chill. The spawner tells you if it’s on cooldown when you request something, and it tells you exactly how much time you need to wait until it’s ready. If you request something while it’s on cooldown then the system also instantly notifies you as soon as it’s available again, so you only need to register your intent and then go back to shooting without needing to spam the spawner.

The base cleanup script has been updated. Dropped items will now wait 5 minutes before deleting themselves, which should give people a chance to sort stuff out without bringing the server to its knees. It’s worth noting however that I already have a record of people that intentionally cheat the system to steal extra scopes and other special kit just to make the game easier when it's not necessary, and instead of strikes or any formal warning that breaks immersion I’ve used my own methods to make sure the game remains challenging. You may not have made the connection yet but things start exploding and people start getting sniped when you break rules.

Other News
There was a brief crossover between me implementing the unconsciousness for AI and ACE implementing their change to AI unconsciousness where unconscious AI would be treated as civilian, so our own systems would think you were killing civilians if you shot them while they were down and would deduct points. This is no longer the case, so impersonate marine A all you want. The reward system for bringing captured insurgents back to base will still be done in future, to encourage occasional humanity.

A little note on the VIP objective (the one with the civilian hostage), you need to cuff him, get him back to base, and then there’s an option to ‘rescue VIP’ on his interaction menu. In future I’m hoping to make him cuffed by default just to make life a little easier.

I’m also still working out the loadouts. Some units aren’t spawning with the short range radio, despite it being in their code, so I’ve been going through each one and sorting them out for each config. The same thing has been noticed for the earplugs in certain cases, so that’s been dealt with as well. While I do this I’m also adding NVG’s into the inventory of everyone, so that people can attach them to their helmets if they spawn in the dark and can’t see anything. The goal here is to never have a situation where someone spawns in the dark and can’t find the ammobox, which actually happened in a testing session tonight (10th) where I spawned less then 2 meters away from the ammobox but I couldn’t see it because I spawned in pitch black without NVG’s. Note to self, never use light sources that players can turn off.

Also, the taki mountain mini mission has had it’s victory condition dropped to 30 points. At 50 there’s too much running involved unless one of the situations happen to spawn close by. I have plans to update this in future by making sure the situations spawn close by in these missions.

Future plans
In future there will be more siege maps, 3 more are already in the test phase. Once I get the town system sorted of patrolling to a town and disrupting the supply route you’ll also get access to command det claymores, since extended defence of an ingress route will be a very real tactic if the town itself proves resilient. Enemy mortars and vehicles will also make an appearance in siege mode in future. Insurgency will be getting some love too, we discovered recently that the hvt objective despawns when you get close to it so I'll be looking at that. 

I will also be putting together a system for enemy rpgs in friendly hands. You're having a laugh if you think you can fill a bloke with holes and then expect to use his rpg with 100% reliability, in future there will be a chance of them self-detonating when you pick one up and also when you fire it. My ethos regarding this type of immersion type stuff is 10% theory and 90% practical; we've had the rule to stick to your own kit where possible since long before I was around but lots of people don't follow it, so now there will be a practical reason to only consider taking and using them in dire situations that is still realistic. I have some ideas for small arms too, obviously not involving large explosions. I’m also aware of the minor issue where the mission will complete, and then it will complete again, and then again several times. This is because the script to end it is called every time the points change and the points can be changed several times in the seconds between calling and ending. Should be a simple fix. More difficult however will be the repair vehicle functionality, but in time I’m sure we’ll figure something out for them.

Minor supplemental update, leaders and subleaders can now spawn claymores in siege mode, but the amount that you get decreases as the playercount increases to try and stop it from getting ridiculous. In future I'll be adding specific cooldowns for these types of boxes where they have no need to be spawned as often as regular ammo, just so that there aren't 5 claymores being spawned every 5 minutes as a worst case. Don't deploy these within 20m of your spawnpoint, the game will simply delete them and you'll look silly.

Also the hercules in domination has been changed to the one that can paradrop infantry, thanks to jayman for porting it over from the ops section. Now if you've got more than 14 people on a server you can look sweet as you fall out of the sky on a static line chute. This will be coming to some of the insurgency maps as well in future, but for now I require sleep.