📢 Attention Battlefront Mars Commanders:
Welcome to the 5th installment of the Battlehouse Dev Blog, a place where fans of all Battlehouse games can enjoy regular behind the scenes peaks into the minds of Battlehouse Developers. Last week, bh-nirgal took a deep dive into some of the current projects he’s working on for Firestrike, and this week he’s giving Battlefront Mars some love. So without further adieu, here’s bh-nirgal:
Battlefront Mars Developments
Battlefront Mars has been a “problem child” behind the scenes here at Battlehouse, but those problems led to improvements in all of the games.
We had a dedicated hacker who kept making alt accounts in order to destroy rivals of his clan using a weapons range hack. Our hacking detection system detected each of these, but required an admin to pull the trigger on a ban. On the plus side, this helped us refine and improve our alt detection systems and the hacker eventually exposed his main accounts and received a ban on those accounts as well. Eventually, we implemented criteria the hacking detection system is allowed to use to ban an account without admin intervention. Admins still review any automatic bans, but this allowed our systems to stop the damage caused by an unleashed hacker destroying other players when an admin wasn’t available to monitor the servers live.
The next round of troubles came from speed hackers. The CS team and I were both under the impression that our hacking systems could detect and defeat speed hacks. Upon further review, we found that previous members of the dev team had deployed our speed hack countermeasures only to Thunder Run. After a round of tests in Battlefront Mars, this got deployed to all of our games.
That covers the recent history for Battlefront Mars. What’s next for this game?
Currently, whenever I have a spare dev cycle, I work on porting the turret mounting system currently in all of the modern military games and in War Star Empire. This is taking longer in Battlefront Mars because unlike the other games, it only has two resources instead of three. With no Prometheum in the game, I can’t simply port over the turrets from War Star Empire.
When a turret converts, it also has to change a lot of the player’s game file under the hood. In the modern military games and in War Star Empire this only needs to account for ten levels of three turrets, but in Battlefront Mars there are twenty-eight levels. This means a lot more values to manually account for.
It isn’t an unsurmountable project, it just needs more time. I’m hoping to deliver a converted turret system by the end of the first quarter of 2020, at which point I’ll start enabling new levels for content already in the game.
Like what you see in this Dev Blog, or have suggestions on things you’d like to see Nirgal talk about in the future? Let us know over on our Thunder Run Discord Server (for Thunder Run players), or on Clan HQ (for all other games). See you all next week!