I feel like I owe some explanations.
First, the vent fans. For the bonus rooms, the vent routes may help the attacking team thin out the defenders a bit, but they don't really end up contributing to moving the ball towards the goal that much. There's been multiple demos that I've seen where half the attacking team goes through the vents or camps up on the upper level, while the ball stays untouched in the bottom corner almost the entire minute. That's why there's that pushback. So when the clock reads 30 or so seconds left, maybe you should stop trying to be a cheeky little nuisance and, you know, actually try to complete the objective? The vent fans in the main rink though? Mmmmm, well if I don't remove them I'll at least nerf them quite a bit. The route is long enough.
Bonus room time. I had one person ask to shorten it to 30-45 seconds. I already had that once and people HATED it. So, 60 seconds it is. Also, Sniper battlements on the main rink? Sweet Tezcatlipoca, no. Snipers are already on the cusp of being OP, we don't need to be making it worse.
Now for limitations.
Can't do anything about the ball not being affected by Pyro's airblast, or the general problem of players getting stuck in the ball. It's unfortunately the deal with how func_physbox works.
Also, when you see or hear the overtime announcement or in the HUD, that's not supposed to mean there is an overtime period. When it happens on the main rink, it's because the main timer has run out and players are still capping the points. When it happens in the bonus rooms, well, I'm pretty sure it has to do with the fact that Pipeball Ultra is technically running on Player Destruction, and so when a "flag" is in play there is nowhere to capture it and score points- hence the never ending overtime bug, hence why I needed a way to force the game to end the bonus round and ignore the overtime in the first place. Apparently just having the end of bonus round events fire on a logic_timer won't do the trick- either a trigger volume fires the end of round events (such as when a goal is scored), or the current solution, when a func_tracktrain reaches a path_track. People think that Pipeball Ultra is a masterful weave of entities and game logic, when in reality, it's a jury-rigged patchwork mess that's being held together with duct tape and a prayer. So, unfortunately, there's going to be issues like this that will likely be confusing to players not completely familiar with how it's supposed to work.
Now tell me what you think of this: Medics having their Übercharge rate boosted to 125%. Faster Übercharge build means more people able to use their Über and be less salty about losing their progress when the map transitions. Or Engineer's default build rate being boosted 125% as well. The reason why I hadn't addressed this earlier was, well, I didn't think it would matter. Think of it like this: you're playing Dustbowl or some other multi stage map. When BLU wins a round, instead of all the fanfare and killing sprees and waiting around for the next leg to start, what if you were just all thrown into the next round, all ready to go? That's kind of how I looked at Pipeball Ultra's setup- like a multi stage map, with the fat trimmed off. People didn't complain about their buildings or Übers then, why would they now? Well, apparently I was very much mistaken.
Now, successes.
My idea to draw lines from the spawn to the aligned control points worked exactly as I hoped- much more people ended up trying to cap the goal expander than ever before, and fewer people were trying to cap points that were off limits to their team. So, expect the lines to be a permanent fixture.
Now, for things that ARE there and should work but somehow don't....
There is a sound that plays when a goal is scored, don't know why some people couldn't hear it. Same with the text that pops up and tells players a goal is scored and a respawn is imminent. It's likely due to people using minimal HUD. How I'm going to communicate all of Pipeball Ultra's functions without being overly intrusive or a wall of text on an in-game poster, yeah, I don't know. And no, I'm not doing a pre-round tutorial. That's a bad idea, even by my standards. As long as people get the idea behind "ball move, ball go in hole," that's most of the battle done.
So what can we expect to see from RC1? I'm not entirely sure, but there will be changes, and they will be significant.
