[TF2World.SPHinx]

Hi all,

I've long been mulling over ideas for a TF2 meta-game, a kind of TF2-meets-risk. I've put down a few thoughts (most of which will be repeated here) for the game on a project site here. Since I know very little about the limits of sourcemod (and even less about working with it), I thought I would just share the idea and see what you all think.

As I envision it, the plugins would need to do the following:

1. Manage map ownership: When RED or BLU wins a map, the server tracks this and remembers it for when the map is next played.

2. Dynamically select the next map: The next map played depends upon who wins the current map. If BLU wins, the next map is one that is owned by RED and vice-versa.

3. Assign initial spawn locations and CP owners based on the team who currently "owns" the map. (Not important for 5CP or PLR maps, but would be great to have for A/D maps.)

4. Communicate with and update an in-browser map monitor. I have a flash animation of how the map monitor could look here. I suspect it may even be possible to write a script to just switch the map counter and the color of the map buttons of the animation. But again, I know only a very little about actionscript or flash and how this might interface with sourcemod and the like.

5. Handle a player's team registration and then restrict their team selection: To play on the server, a player must first sign up to play for RED or BLU for some set amount of time (e.g., 1 week). They are then prevented from playing for the other team for the duration of the contract.

As I said, I don't really know if all of this can be done or how difficult it would be to write, even for someone well versed in sourcemod. So any feedback, suggestions, or anything of that sort would be great. Or if you like the idea and can write one of these, that would be amazing.

Thanks for reading.

p.s. I know FireSlash (of tf2stats) had written a version of the dynamic map selecting a while back, but I think he has abandoned this. I also don't recall if he did it with sourcemod.

[Jindo]

Hello,

this all looks very farmiliar, I'm not sure if it was you or somebody else who was previously working on the same project but I think it's an interesting idea!

1, 4 and 5 can all be handled by having a database store everything from a plugin, and using that data in remembering map ownership or relaying information to a flash app.

For 2, there are dynamic rotation plugins out there but of course none that do what you're asking; it wouldn't be difficult however to just modify one of the existing ones to have this feature of changing the map depending on which team wins.

3 is the only thing I can see being remotely tricky but I haven't worked with SM for a long while up until now; I'm guessing the ownership of spawn points and control points can be controlled with ease but I'm not sure about spawn areas (which obviously need to be changed to prevent people from dying just for changing classes).

So all in all, Sourcemod is a very possible solution to this project!

[Powerlord]

3 would likely be the hardest part of this. Essentially, A/D and Payload maps are always written so that team 2 (RED) defends and team 3 (BLU) attacks.

In order to flip this, you'd have to override the map's settings on any respawn rooms, control points, team-based doors, team-based blocked zones (the "No" symbol you see when a spawn door is open), etc...

Also... FireSlash never installed anything dealing with dynamic map selection on our servers. Then again, maybe he was outvoted by myself and Bahamut, but I don't recall that either. I know he wrote a stats thing that tracked whether "BLU" or "RED" owned a particular map based on how many teams that map won a particular map, but that was years ago.

[TF2World.SPHinx]

Thanks to both of you for the quick response. This is encouraging. And yup, Jindo, it was me before who was blabbing about this idea. I'm still blabbing.

That makes sense that 3 would be the most challenging, given all of the entities involved. So to get that feature, I take it, would require some messing about with the maps themselves. And then something like a config file for each map that contains the names of the necessary entities and how their values need to change in response to the variable from the ownership database, right? I take the point though: That will be the most complicated task.

Maybe the best thing for me is to set that one aside and try to get the other things up and running first (and teach myself how to write a plugin in the process)? I'll do as you suggest, Jindo: grab a dynamic rotation plugin, mess around with it, and see where I get.

[TF2World.SPHinx]

OK, poked around the web the past couple of days. And from what I can tell I will need the following components to test this out on a local machine:

1. hlds with sourcemod
2. mysql database to record and store map info for sourcemod plugin
3. php to link mysql with flash

Does that look right? I already have 1 and 2, but don't yet have php set up on my local machine. Still not quite sure if that one is necessary.

I also looked at a few of the dynamic map rotation scripts and they all seem to do way more than I need. I think the most efficient (and perhaps also best) system would just be to have a static list (or query the database) and when either RED or BLU wins, the plugin simply choose the next appropriately owned map from that list. (i.e., after a RED victory, it scans the maplist until it finds the next map owned by BLU and then sets it as the next map)

Given that I am not a programmer or web developer, might there be a skilled developer here who could help me get started with writing some of this stuff? I am happy to do the grunt work of plugging everything together, but I am feeling kind of overwhelmed by having to learn sourcepawn, actionscript, php, and mysql.