[Doctor Noob]

NoobBalance is a SourceMod plugin for Team Fortress 2 that helps teams remain balanced. It is designed for simplicity and robustness, rather than providing many optional features that many servers will not use.

Features include:

• Player-triggered scramble votes
• Admin-triggered scrambles, balancing, and scramble votes
• Automatic balancing of teams
• Configurable immunity from automatic balancing, including duel immunity
• Locking of switched players to their new team
• Admin menu category giving easy access to commands

There are five admin commands:

• sm_scramblenow: Scrambles the teams immediately.
• sm_scramblevote: Calls a vote asking players if teams should scramble now
• sm_forcebalance: Forcibly balances the teams immediately
• sm_toggleautobalance: Enables or disables the autobalance functionality.
• sm_swapplayer: Swaps a player to the opposite team; displays a menu asking which player to swap if a player is not given on the command line.

There are several ConVars that can be configured; see the sample (automatically-generated) configuration file for more information on these.


Several additional features are planned:

• Ability for immune players to opt out of their immunity by chat command, and store this persistently.
• Make team scrambles (not just autobalance) respect duel immunity (implementing this is contingent on support for duel checking in a released SourceMod version; see the release notes for more on this)
• Make the force-balancer a little less heavy-handed
• Add support for scrambling at the start of the next round (currently only instant scrambles are possible)

Release notes for 1.0.0 RC2:
Fixed stupid mistake on the team stacking check.

Release notes for 1.0.0 RC1:

This is a brand-new plugin, and has received only limited testing on high-player-count servers, though it has been extensively tested on low-player-count testing servers. There will probably be issues; I will do my best to resolve these as they come up, but my available time is limited and I can provide only best-effort support for NoobBalance. In particular, I expect the autobalancer's decision of which players to swap (around line 600) will need some tweaking.

Currently, providing immunity to players in duels is commented out, as the function it requires is only available in SourceMod versions newer than 1.3.6, the currently released version. To enable this functionality, uncomment the relevant code in IsImmuneClient(), currently located at line 1226. This functionality will be enabled in the provided, unmodified source code as soon as practically possible.

NoobBalance is inspired by and re-uses some code from two earlier balance plugins, gscramble and qautobalance. NoobBalance is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later, and modification and redistribution of its code is encouraged. I would like to ask prospective developers to not release any future versions under the same name as long as I am still actively providing support for NoobBalance, but if in the future I am unable to do so, you are welcome to use the name as well as the code (though if this happens, I do ask that you bump the major version number).

Requests for new features are welcome, but I can't promise I will be able to implement them. Feedback (or, Robin Walker forbid, bug reports) from anyone who has deployed NoobBalance or is considering deploying it is greatly welcomed.

[h00x]

lol awesome name

[JasonGauthierDK]

Is there a way to disable the scramble function? Since I already got a plugin for that.
I'll be testing it out soon.

[snelvuur]

look forward to the additional option, if you make immunity then a flag to say which group has immunity would be nice.

[MjrNuT]

Awesome. I will have to update to 1.3.6 and give this some testing good sir.

Originally Posted by snelvuur look forward to the additional option, if you make immunity then a flag to say which group has immunity would be nice.

Maybe I'm missing it, but there is an immunity flags cvar. Or you mean something else?

// Admin flags to grant autobalance immunity // - // Default: "ab" nbal_flags_immunity "ab"

[snelvuur]

Ah yes, overlooked it. I saw the words "feature planned" combined with "immunity"

In that case, great work! :-)

[Doctor Noob]

Originally Posted by JasonGauthierDK Is there a way to disable the scramble function? Since I already got a plugin for that. I'll be testing it out soon.

You can set the cvar "nbal_vote_minplayers" to 0, that will prevent players from triggering scramble votes. This plugin does not do any automated scrambling, so it shouldn't conflict with other scrambling plugins. If it does, let me know what's going on and I'll take a look.

[MjrNuT]

Gave this a try tonight and every non-admin was not able to join a team.

"player is trying to re-stack the teams. For shame"

And actually...haphazardly, there was one occassion where the plugin was loaded even the the cvar to "load" was set to off/0.

// This file was auto-generated by SourceMod (v1.3.5) // ConVars for plugin "noobbalance.smx" // Display an entry in the admin menu containing team balancing commands // - // Default: "1" // Minimum: "0.000000" // Maximum: "1.000000" nbal_admin_menu_entry "1" // Players in duels have temporary immunity to the autobalancer // - // Default: "1" // Minimum: "0.000000" // Maximum: "1.000000" nbal_duel_immunity "1" // Load the plugin // - // Default: "1" // Minimum: "0.000000" // Maximum: "1.000000" nbal_enable "1" // Enable automatic balancing of teams; requires the built-in autobalancer to be disabled // - // Default: "1" // Minimum: "0.000000" // Maximum: "1.000000" nbal_enable_autobalance "1" // Admin flags to grant autobalance immunity // - // Default: "ab" nbal_flags_immunity "bs" // Punish clients who try to return to their old team by adding this many seconds to their lock time (0 to disable) // - // Default: "15.0" // Minimum: "0.000000" nbal_lock_extend "0.0" // Immune players can be locked to their team // - // Default: "0" // Minimum: "0.000000" // Maximum: "1.000000" nbal_lock_immune "0" // Time to lock autobalanced players to their new team (0 to disable) // - // Default: "90.0" // Minimum: "0.000000" nbal_lock_time "90.0" // Maximum number of seconds teams are allowed to remain imbalanced before an automatic force-balance (0 to disable) // - // Default: "45.0" // Minimum: "0.000000" nbal_max_imbalance_time "45.0" // Block autobalancing if the round has less than this much time remaining // - // Default: "60.0" // Minimum: "0.000000" nbal_min_round_time "60.0" // Reset the setup timer if a scramble occurs during setup // - // Default: "1" // Minimum: "0.000000" // Maximum: "1.000000" nbal_reset_setup "1" // Minimum number of players required for the votescramble command to be enabled (0 to disable votescramble) // - // Default: "5" // Minimum: "0.000000" nbal_vote_minplayers "5" // Fraction of players asking for votescramble needed to call a scramble vote // - // Default: "0.30" // Minimum: "0.000000" // Maximum: "1.000000" nbal_vote_threshold "0.30"

What is in front of me that I'm missing?


Edit: Found out its b/c of the "s" flag. Can this be resolved? We are going to just have "b" flag in there.

Edit 2: Nevermind. It just does not seem to be working consistently. It still blocked ppl from joining a team.

[Doctor Noob]

Originally Posted by MjrNuT Gave this a try tonight and every non-admin was not able to join a team. "player is trying to re-stack the teams. For shame" And actually...haphazardly, there was one occassion where the plugin was loaded even the the cvar to "load" was set to off/0.

This is not surprising: the best way to disable the plugin is just to never have it loaded. The disable CVar can never be as reliable as just removing the plugin, since it still relies on plugin code running to load and process the CVar; by this time, it's too late to disable everything.

Edit: Found out its b/c of the "s" flag. Can this be resolved? We are going to just have "b" flag in there.

No idea what's going on with the s flag; probably this is a red herring, and the real problem is the one below.

Edit 2: Nevermind. It just does not seem to be working consistently. It still blocked ppl from joining a team.

Well, this is embarrassing. In one of the last (and thus least tested) changes I made before release, I added more CVars, one of which affected the team lock code. In doing so I screwed up and flipped the lock test: on line 361 the less-than sign is supposed to be a greater-than sign. 1.0.0 RC2 has been put on the main post, with this corrected.

I'm really sorry about the screwup, and thank you for testing my plugin.

[stephengillon]

can you add buddy immmunity too