After procrastination and victory, I bring you:

V0.4.0 : https://drive.google.com/open?id=14Ah6NvStxPEHLKo7cpRXPlOjHoLubiwc

Changenotes V0.4.0
Area 52: Tech Mechs
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Goal:
Fix lingering bugs
Fine-tune and tweak W1-3
Continue to flesh out and build upon W4-6.
Repacked Icons
Prune un-needed code.
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General:
Buffed mangler soldier's damage to buildings.
Made the support of every last subwave infinite support.
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W1:
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Added a second Shortstop Scout, that follows close behind the first.
Delayed the Mangler/Pyro mix by 2sec.
Made the Giant Soldiers spawn closer together.
Gave giant soldiers a squad of Manmelter Pyros.
Ajusted the spawning of the Giant Pyros and Pyro Support to make a clearer gap between subwaves.
Split the Mangler/Manmelter mix and reorganised it, replacing the 1 wavespawn with 2: 1 spawning 6 manglers every 7.5 seconds, and the other spawning 3 FAN scouts every 5 seconds. Yes, I swapped the Manmelters for FAN scouts, but it's so that there's a gatebot attacking along with the "DPM"
Reduced the spawn times between the Pyro Support from 10 to 5.
Added an additional supporting robot (Shotgun Heavies) to the Giant Pyro subwave.
Doubled the number of Scorch Shot pyros in squad with the Giant Pyros.
Made Pyro Support on Giant Pyros no longer support.
Added a 3rd segment, Giant Demomen with Knights and Demos + Scouts.
Changed the Pyro support to avoid spawning an absurd (16 maxactive) number of pyros at once. Pyros now spawn 1 every 4 seconds, 4 maxactive, 10 total.
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W2:
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Reverted Heavyweight Champs to Fists of Steel, and ajusted numbers.
Gave Giant Heavies 1 Bigheal Medic
Reduced g.heavy spawning time by 5.
Made the Demoman wavespawn faster, spawn more, and hopefully support the bomb better.
Changed G.Mangler spawning to be WaitForAllSpawned instead of WaitForAllDead, with an added wait of 25sec.
Increased G.Mangler MaxActive by 1.
Gave Giant Manglers Soldiers some Banner Bots in thier squads, 1 Conch & 2 Battalions.
Fixed giant mangler airblast knockback & trouble with sentries.
Increased the difficulty of the Banner Bots & Sunstick Scouts from Normal to Hard.
Reformed the Sunstick Scouts into squads of 2 spawning every 5 seconds.
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W3
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Nerfed the difficulty of the Direct Hit soldiers from Hard to Normal.
Added a sprinkling of Buff Soldiers to the Giant Pyro wave.
Reworked the Giant Pyro spawning to Randomchoice, spawning either a Giant Flare or Giant Phlog every 5 seconds to a maxiumum of 3 pyros on the field.
Added an extra spawn to the Direct Hit squads.
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W4:
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Increased the number of Deflector Heavies that spawn at once.
Increased difficulty of the Pistol scouts.
Added engies.
Reworked spawning for the Demoknights and Pyros, so they don't max out the total bots active. Demoknights spawn in large groups.
Reduced the spawn times between the Giant Rapidfire Squads by 5 seconds.
Increased the number of Demomen spawning.
Increased the FAN scout MaxActive by 1.
Increased the number of Giant Banner soldiers from 4 to 5.
Changed Giant Gatebot Rapid Fire soldiers to normal Giant Rapid Fire soldiers.
Reduced the total spawns of the Deflector Heavies.
Reduced the total spawns of the Pistol Scouts.
Changed the Giant FAN scouts to Steel Gauntlet Pushers, and ajusted numbers to be more consistient.
Increased the spawn times of the Giant Buff Soldiers from 15 to 20 seconds.
Buffed the Tank HP from 27500 to 30000 health.
Reversed the Giant Rapidfire and Tank/Buff subwaves.
Changed the Pyros and Demoknights to infinite support
Added Battalions soldiers to the Giant Rapidfire wave.
Changed the Giant Rapidfire's medics from Regen to Normal.
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W5:
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Added spies.
Added 1 more Armored Sandman Scout.
Added more Crit Pyros.
Switched the Giant Burst Fire Demo and Giant Burst Fire Soldier.
Switched Giant Armored Sandman Scouts to Giant Gatebot Shotgun Heavies, increased spawning times, and doubled the number spawning.
Ajusted scout spawning so they spawn in groups of 4.
Heavily reworked the boss rush: It now consists of 1 Giant Phlog Pyro + Giant Kritz Medic, 1 Giant Buff Banner Soldier + Giant Medic, 2 Slow-Barrage Soldiers, and 1 Giant Crit Burst-Fire Demoman + Giant Medic.
Added a subwave: Giant Crit Soldiers + Direct Hit soldiers, Giant Boxing Heavies, and Samurai Demomen.
Added engies.
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W6:
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Changed Manglers & Manmelters to Inf. Support.
Buffed the Rocket Scouts, so they actually do damage.
The deathpit now closes on the final wave.
Reduced spawning of the Manglers and Manmelters slightly.
Increased the formation size of the Heater squads.
Changed Buff Soldiers to 2 parts Buff 1 part Conch RandomChoice.
Added Engies.
Reworked some of the spawning to bring all subwaves more in line.
Made the Giant Pyros Gatebots.

Originally posted by what a nerd gamer:

I don't think you really need the Quick-Fix to have very high heal rate

In the docs it states the attribute "HealRate" only works for items that already use healrate as an attribute. The Quickfix has healrate as an attribute, but the Kritzkreig does not.

I would think there's some workaround, but the docs say no.

UPDATE:

I tried chaging the demo name to the name of a demo that DID work, but arbitrarily replacing one of the numbers.

The demo loaded fine, so it MUST be a problem with the demo name!

EDIT 2:

After some tinkering, it seems that "." is not a valid character, and causes the demo to be unreadable.

Originally posted by Hydrogen:

The name of the demo file does not matter one bit. It's just a naming scheme used by the server to ensure it doesn't make 2 of the same demo files (hence overwriting one by accident).

You can name it whatever you want, then load it in your client and it should work.

If it doesn't work you need to provide more information such as error logs, name of the demo file, etc.

(FYI: Demos before June 2018 are stored away on an offline backup drive due to the large disk space usage. If you want a demo from back then you need to manually request them.)

Well, the only thing that's changed is the demo name, and all it says is "CdemoReader, can't load demo", so I don't have much to work off of.

All of these names did not work:

mvm_area_52_rc3_1.0.3.0
MVM_TM_V0.3.1
mvm_area_52_tech_mechs_v0.3.0

After my previous post about not being able to open demos with long names, and being told to rename them, I went and cleaned out my demos and renamed them to only have relevant information to the demo in the name (compressed map name, mission name and mission version). However, I can no longer open these demos. Help?

Originally posted by what a nerd gamer:

Link is broken. (Steam filter flags it as malicious due to double https://)

Originally posted by Sir Metaladon:

Are you not forcibly splitting your defenders?

You mean Tanks (that aren't Fedex packages™), random gates opening and random bot spawned at a random area that is very behind the front in a regular wave?

Sorry, and yes.

After long days thinking, looking, and testing, I THINK I have a fairly comprehensive set of "checks", that when applied to missions, weed out almost ALL un-fun scenarios.

The basis for a Good MVM Mission satisfies the following:

1: Difficulty
Is the effective difficulty, health, and damage of active robots relativley similar between all subwaves?
Are you equalizing types of incoming damage by resistances?
Is no specific wavespawn accounting for most of the difficulty in a subwave?
Are you not limiting player choices?
Are players getting between 400$ and 750$ per wave?
Is the money at the beginning of the final wave less than 5000$?
Is the wave's difficulty balanced for cash, map geometry, and difficulty label?

2: Quality
Is the length of the mission correct for the difficulty?
Are waves and subwaves unique in robots, spawns, and formation?
Are your subwaves under 90 seconds in length?
Are you not forcibly splitting your defenders?
Are players actively destroying non-support robots at all times?
Is the mission's theme and robot naming conventions consistient?

Satisfy these questions, and you've made a good MVM mission!

With that said, 2 other golden concepts are worth mentioning:
Design for maximum fun.
Design to have missions beaten.


This is, of course, a statement without a proof, but that proof is relatively fractured and jumbled at the moment. Still, for the benefit of the reader, I will put a pastebin here https://pastebin.com/NRF2AABJ so that you can reference it if you're confused on where I get my ideas.


How to ask a question:
Point out a specific part of the above rules, and an example of somthing related to it in an MVM mission.

Thanks for reading, and PLEASE logically refute what has been said!
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I just (tried) to download a demo of when I played with some of the Potato crew yesterday, and when loading the file in TF2 it says :

CDemoFile::Open: couldn't open file mvm_spacepost_b4_symphony_of_space_machines_152849.dem for reading.

Some demos do this, others don't.

I'd like feedback on if this affects everyone and if I can fix it.

My mission now crashes the game when I load it? Help?