[Quaz and Wally]

Crucial Parts Sentry Limiter

Description:

This plugin limits the way engineers can construct and upgrade their sentries. The original idea was to prevent turtling in Capture the Flag modes, which can quickly become frustrating due to the nature of some maps. Players have to overcome a fortified sentry defense, only to face a respawning wave after having exhausted most of their resources. This prevents the enemy from fortifying such a defense through sentry guns, which can be easy.

Teams are provided a certain number of crucial parts. By default, this value is three. Each level of sentry gun requires a different amount of crucial parts. By default, level 1 sentries require zero crucial parts, level 2 sentries require one crucial part, and level 3 sentries require two crucial parts. This means by default, a team can only have one level 3 sentry and a level 2 sentry, or three level 2 sentries; each team can have unlimited level 1 sentries. All these values can be changed through convars.

A text HUD displays to all engineers, indicating how many team parts are available to them to use. After the engineer's first death, the cost of the sentry levels disappears to minimize the hud to just the available team parts. Through optional convars, users can hide this HUD, or add the values of each level sentry to the display.


Convars:

• sm_sl_version: This provides you the version number of your sentry limiter plugin.
• sm_sl_enable [0/1]: This enables or disables the plugin (Default 0).
• sm_sentry_value [level sentry] [new integer value] (Admins with Cheat Access Only): This changes the number of parts a certain level sentry costs (Default 1 costs 0, 2 costs 1, and 3 costs 2).
• sm_max_parts [new integer value] (Admins with Cheat Access Only): This changes the number of parts teams have available to them (Default 3).
• sm_upgrade_limit [new integer value] (Admins with Cheat Access Only): This changes the upgrade metal limit for guns that cannot be upgraded (Default 100).
• show_sentry_values [0/1]: This determines whether or not to show the values of each sentry level to the client engineer.
• show_sentry_hud [0/1]: This determines whether or not to show the entire hud including the number of team parts available to the client engineer.

Known Issues and Future Plans:

• Upgrading a gun such that you put metal in it, and it goes over the limit, will not provide a refund (eg, gun is at 90 metal, engi has 25 metal, engi hits the gun, the gun stays at 100, engi doesn't get a 15 metal refund, he stays at 0). Implementing this will require keeping track of every gun's metal, which is possible. But as of right now, it is in a fairly stable state, and I'd like to see how well it fairs in a real environment. Besides, this is an issue that does not arise often, and hasn't even been noticeable in all the testing so far.
• Option for vote-destroying sentries that griefing engineers construct to waste team parts would be nice, waiting to see reception.

[pheadxdll]

You can edit: tf/scripts/objects.txt and make the same changes to the game that your plugin does.

You should add admin immunity or something else that makes this necessary.

[Quaz and Wally]

You can make the game keep track of how many level 3 and level 2 sentries are on a team and stop the rest of the engineers from upgrading their guns?

[demm]

Thank you for that plugin. It's really a good idea. Until now we've just disabled engis completely on CTF maps, but of course many engi players complained.

I will try this out immediately.

[demm]

The plugin works flawlessly. Thanks a lot.


Is there a chance you can make the hud a bit smaller and maybe just use white instead of the current color? It's really big right now.

[DarkEnergy]

you should cache the enabled value and hook when that cvar changes

you should get integer value for the cvar, not float

RBGT values should not go over 255

[Quaz and Wally]

I'm not sure of a way to shrink the size of the hud unfortunately, if anybody else knows how, then that would be great.

And you're right, I need to change the RGB values.

As for caching the enabled value, is there some value to doing it this way? Does it consume less resources? Maybe I'll set that up. Thanks.

Edit: I'll also add a command to change the hud coloring.

[DarkEnergy]

caching is a style you should get used to in the computer science world, its faster to access a value instead of re-retrieving it

hud messages cannot be shrunk, its so massive in source

[psychonic]

@'Quaz and Wally'

Please use the safe MAXPLAYERS define (or +1) for the size of your global player arrays or at least a size large enough for the supported game. TF2 can go up to 33 or 34 max players.

Also, please put your public cvar in the plugin post header if you would like the plugin to be tracked (once the query script is fixed).