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Abstract: An explanation of custom modes, which are "groups" of settings that persist across map changes.
Modes are an extremely powerful mechanism and actually very easy to use, but they do have rules that must be followed.
Motivation: Servers are generally configured through extensive use of CVARS. Aside from issues with bloated server.cfg files, this scheme is simply not suitable for advanced mods like CPMA that support multiple gametypes, each of which has fundamentally different behaviour and thus REQUIRES fundamentally different settings for optimum gameplay. "Casual" gametypes such as Clan Arena are generally meant to provide newbies with a gentle introduction to FPS play and simplify the game to just one or two elements; more advanced gametypes such as DM are intended to tax every possible aspect of a player's ability, and demand a wider range of "overall" skill from them. Modes provide a simple way for server admins to address these different audiences by localising the rules of each gametype rather than attempting to come up with a "best mix" in a global config instead.
CPMA ships with several standard modes to facilitate competition play. Hopefully, an explanation of how these work will clarify the concept and behaviour before getting into how admins can define modes of their own.
Despite the need for variances in settings, there are certain elements of gameplay that are common across a large number of gametypes. These form the "base" configuration for all modes, and are as follows:
Spawn Health: 100 Spawn Armour: 0 Armour Decay: Off in games with items, On in "arena" games Self Damage: Full Team Damage: Full Falling Damage: On Maximum Damage: No Limit Armour Types: Standard ProMode Starting Weapons: Gauntlet and MG Weapon Respawn: 15 seconds Megahealth Respawn: Wearoff-based Weapon Dropping: Off Flag Dropping: Off Instagib: Off Instagib Reload: 1500 Thaw Time: 3 seconds Autothaw Time: 120 seconds Cessrail: Off Overtime: Sudden Death Powerups: On Powerup Respawn: 90 seconds Holdables: Medkit On, Teleporter Off Warmup: Competition (require \ready) Player Respawn: At end of warmup Fraglimit and Timelimit are set to 0
Note that although things like Instagib Reload and Thaw times are not really "common" in terms of the number of games that they apply to, they are still set here as they don't create a CONFLICT with "normal" play.
To this base configuration, the standard modes apply any changed or additional rules needed to acheive optimum gameplay within the context of their specific gametype.
As an example, for Deathmatch play those rules are:
Timelimit: 10 minutes Overtime: 2-minute periods Weapon Respawn: 15 seconds Megahealth Respawn: Wearoff-based Powerups: Off Holdables: Off
For FFA games, the base rules and especially the DM variants are a little more brutal and complex than we'd really like. FFA is more of a friendly game for fun than a competitive one, so we simplify the gameplay by changing a few more of the rules:
Fraglimit: 30 Overtime: Sudden death Weapon Respawn: Use weaponstay Powerup Respawn: 60 seconds Megahealth Respawn: Fixed interval Warmup: None
Custom modes are on equal footing with the built-in modes. You start with the same "base" settings, and add or change from there. You MAY NOT use the "mode" vote inside a custom mode: while it might be trivially easier to derive modes from each other, it's too prone to people becoming confused and creating cyclical modes. You can't try and replace a standard mode with one of your own: the system will always try the built-ins first. Hence STANDARD modes. :)
There are 3 config/mode only "votes": these can never be callvoted by players, but still exist as a way to manipulate settings that would otherwise be unchangeable:
"ammo", "type", "locked".
TYPE is the "true" underlying gametype for the mode, and MUST be specified in your mode config.
Accepted values are:
-1: HM, 0: FFA, 1: 1v1, 2: DA, 3: TDM, 4: CTF, 5: CA, 6: FTAG, 7: CTFS This underlying type is what determines the maplist used by the mode: 0: ffamaps.txt -1 and 1: 1v1maps.txt 2 and 5: camaps.txt 3 and 6: teammaps.txt 4 and 7: ctfmaps.txt
LOCKED is for MA maps only and allows you to make an arena unavailable (e.g. you want people to only use the CA arena). It requires an argument just for consistency's sake, but the only sensible argument is "1". :) Locked arenas must still be VALID, i.e. have a TYPE entry.
Power comes at a price. The settings in your custom mode are subject to only the most minimal validation: if you try to do something stupid in them it's quite likely that the system will allow it. Be careful. :)
CPMA ships with a few custom modes of its own in the modes/ directory. They can be quite useful as a reference for how to acheive a particular style of gameplay. The "base" settings are always applied first, then the customisation defined by the mode is added in. Modes are matched case-INsensitive to avoid problems on *nix filesystems.
As an example: the RA3 mod uses a form of Clan Arena tailored towards spam and rail-whoring even more than standard CA is. :P To mimic that behaviour in CPMA, create a modes/RA3.cfg like this:
type 5 # Clan Arena derivative limit 5 # first team to 5 rounds wins ammo 200,100,20,50,150,50,100,0 # lots of GL/PG/RG ammo armor 100 # 2 rails = YUO AR TEH WINNAR! items -BFG fallingdamage 1 startrespawn 0 selfdamage 2 teamdamage 0 # no team damage in spamfests
Note the format of the "ammo" line: it MUST NOT contain spaces, since the voting system can only support single tokens as arguments.
US-style Freeze Tag play is another somewhat unusual ruleset: since the penalties for being frozen are quite severe, spawnees are outfitted with extra weapons and a small amount of armour to help avoid simply being spawnfragged and thus refrozen immediately. While Freeze is a team game, certain level control elements are also reduced to make lockdowns less common and harder to maintain.
type 6 # Freeze Tag derivative armor 25 # avoid one-shot spawnrapes dropitems 1 # share weapons/ammo with teammates overtime 1 simplemega 0 startweapon 268 # start with MG, SG, and PG startrespawn 0 # don't thaw winning team after score timelimit 20 weaponrespawn 15 # make weapons more available
MA maps REQUIRE each arena's settings to be specified in a config file, which is always
The format of MA config files is the same as for custom modes, and arenas are initialised to the same "base" configuration that modes use.
Each group of settings MUST be preceded by an "arena n" line so that the system knows where to apply them.
Config files CAN use "mode XX" lines, and this is HIGHLY recommended.
As an example: to configure an arena for 1v1 DA play, you CAN just use:
# Thunderstruck arena 2 type 2 armor 100 limit 1 startrespawn 0
and you'll actually get a rather fun game (ironically, one that's more interesting and skillful than PingSpam Arena). :P It's probably not what you were after though - to get THAT you need to use something more like this:
# Thunderstruck arena 2 type 2 ammo 200,100,20,50,150,50,100,0 armor 100 limit 1 items -BFG startrespawn 0
After a few of those, the config starts to get rather heavy-looking. So instead, you can simply do this:
# Thunderstruck arena 2 mode DA
Quite a bit cleaner and more concise. :) However, since custom modes are just as valid as standard modes are, you can go even further and create exactly the behaviour that you want in a single place, then apply it easily to multiple arenas and multiple maps. For example, to cut down on spam create a modes/MyDA.cfg like this:
type 2 ammo 200,100,0,50,150,50,0,0 armor 100 limit 1 items -BFG items -GL items -PG startrespawn 0
Then in ra3map1.cfg just use:
# Evolution arena 1 mode MyDA # Thunderstruck arena 2 mode MyDA etc.
Once you've done that, you can change the settings for any arenas and any maps that use your custom mode by just changing the definition of that mode itself, rather than copying and pasting the settings into every individual map's config file.
You can also set what gameplay should be loaded on mode vote:
gameplay 0 = vq3 gameplay 1 = pmc gameplay 2 = cpm gameplay 3 = cq3 gameplay 4 = arQons playground
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