Custom Map #1933: Red Rings of Death. By: Void

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This topic is for discussion of map #1933: Red Rings of Death


Author: Void
Size: 500x500

Desc:
The particles come and go too swiftly to overcome, the enemy ships are far too large to to fight, and they're aggressive. What do? No PRPL, just clever tricks.

[toolforger]

Hm. Three attempts, and the game crashed on me before I could even lathe the first ring.
Anybody got an idea what's happening?

Update: I tried the right rings and the left center ring. Always the same effect.

Spoiler

I warped the HQ inside each ring. Which I guess is the first trick the author intended us to do.

[close]

Update 2: The problem seems to be associated with zooming or panning.

Update 3: Nope. Starting with a full view and letting the HQ do its lathing crashed the game even quicker.

Update 4: Zooming out too far after running the mission for a while recreates the crash.
Maximum zoom-out initially does not seem to be a problem.

Update 5: "Initially" also includes the situation immediately after save-game load.
I.e. you can lathe something, save, reload, look where the HQ should go next, lather, rinse, repeat.
The downside to this approach is that you don't see where some thread builds up and when it will hit, so this is a bit of a try-hard, not-so-fun approach, but at least it's workable, though I'm not sure how to deal with incoming aggressive ships yet.

First idea:

Spoiler

Maybe a flipped ring will help.

[close]

Working approach:

Spoiler

Start building a ship, and once it has the first few packets, stop it. A ship with an unbuild bridge is not targettable, but the enemy ships will fly to it anyway, and they won't change their objective until they die, which they don't if you don't keep fighting ships around.

[close]

Update 6: Ultimately, it will always crash as soon as soon as I have the left middle rings in view.
Or maybe one and a half ring plus the long bar.

I suspect it's draining some resource in the GPU faster than it can be reclaimed.
This might be some bug in the GPU itself, or in the graphics driver, or in Steam, or in the application, I don't know.
Whatever the exact circumstances, I am giving up.

Also, the combination of lag and long HQ respawn rate makes it non-fun, I get around two minutes of doing nothing while waiting for the respawn, and that's just not worth the wait if you get crashed afterwards.

[toolforger]

Okay, a OS upgrade later and an essentially-complete level later, I'm stuck at "Collect all items to complete mission", and I can't find the pickup that's somewhere hidden despite having lathe ships near all suspect places.

I really don't get it. What's the point in hiding important stuff so people can't approach the mission strategically, but they have to blunder into them, and risks frustrating them because some overlooked pickup prevents the mission from finishing?
That's just frustration, and going to lower the rating.

[toolforger]

Yeah. Found it. Two ship pickups placed just under one of the rings of death.

It's really a shame so see how a good map is ruined by such unnecessary frustrations.