Joined: 16 Jul 2005 Location: Oh god, what year is this?!
Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2006 4:29 am Post subject: Gamemodes, their WADs, and How to Implement them.
So, every now and then, someone does something utterly fantastic within the confines of good ole ZDaemon, and there's maybe a bit of fanfare, but soon after it fades into obscurity and no one notices, but people keep asking for it.
A-therefore, I present to you a list of gamemodes not on the beaten path, with plans to extend, and WAD names also listed where available.
Deathmatch (Free for All)
Telefrag-only
Explored and approximated briefly in Nutty, a Telefrag-only game would be one in which the players, armed with no weapons but their mass, attempt to outsmart their opponents by playing chicken in a room that contains several teleporters, some of which exit onto other teleporters, some of which leave players on top of spawn points. This kind of gameplay is extremely spammy and senseless, but it is quite possible to develop an acute strategy for.
Deathtag is the oldest experimental game mode, going back as far as 1995 for examples of its earliest implementations, and is designed for 2 vs 2 play. One member of each of the two teams must get into the enemy base to press a switch. This switch opens up a radiation suit in the team's own base, as well as a scoring zone. The person defending must take the radiation suit and head to the scoring zone before it closes to score a point, to a maximum of 5 points. (This eludes a lot of people.)
Domination is a family of game types that centres around the capture of unlinked control nodes (not to be confused with Onslaught or Double Domination.) In Exl's implementation, two teams must race each other to a score of 200 points, gaining a point for each control node in their possession once per second. The teams capture a control node by walking over it, causing a recoloured Eye of Evil to change back and forth between red or blue (they start off grey). The code for this is very complex, but reimplementing it is not quite as tough. Examine the ACS code in Exl's test (if he lets you!) to reproduce it. Score counters are represented by large wall panels with digits on them, as in Deathtag. (Since this comes pre-1.08.02, when working hud messages were introduced.)
Something Cybershark came up with, and the oldest of assault implementations. Using a deathtag-like sector based digital counter, the attacking team attempts to press a button within the defending team's base 5 times in the span of 10 minutes. Like AK-01's Stage-Based Assault, it is often remarkably hard for the defenders to hold out with teams of balanced numbers.
Deathball is a quick-and-dirty version of single-flag CTF. In the basic configuration, teams must take the green flag from the middle of the map and bring it into the enemy base to score. However, to prevent people from stealing the flags that are used as a scoring zone, the flags are in a pit, the floor of which is lethal. This can significantly speed up the game in some cases. The choice to have scoring zones in the enemy base is primarily because small teams don't get near enough to one another when simply retreating to their bases. A carrier could get off with the ball before the opponent got there, leaving the opponent waiting at the ball, to make off with it when it respawns, et cetera. (Which may very well prove problematic with the basic configurations of 4-way one-flag when it comes out.)
Two-way Deathball requires three teams to run properly. However, there is no way to prevent players from joining the green team while still being able to take advantage of the green team's flag. If no green spawns are in the map, green team members simply spawn randomly at blue or red teamstarts. To counteract this, a sector off to the side with a green team spawn, sometimes lethal, in it is often used to prevent green players from mucking up the game.
This is Zorro's assault style, which was later the inspiration for Deathball (above). The attacking team's base contains the defending team's flag (the "bomb"). The attacking team must carry the bomb to the defending team's base, where a pit full of the attacking team's flags (the scoring zone) awaits. The floor of the pit is either toxic or outright lethal, preventing members of the defending team from attempting to score. The defending team wins if the timelimit is hit. This is the easiest kind of assault to implement. (And fittingly, Zorro's test map was an MAP01 edit.)
Ignoring the totally plassed title, Rescue the Imp is Worst-vd-Plas's evolution to Zorro's flag assault, although it developed separately. At the start of the game, a player from the defending team is placed on a conveyor belt, which takes her or him through four pairs of flags from each team, giving the defending team 4 points. This means that the CTF end-game screen is more accurate, as it correctly displays and announces the possibility of the defending team winning, and establishes 4 "rescues" = tie. In general, the attacking team must also rescue the imp itself from the opponent's base and bring it home, rather than taking the imp to the opponent's base.
This is AK-01's style of assault, the closest to Base Assault as envisioned by the Unreal Tournament series. It technically consists of several switch assault scenarios linked together. The players spawn in special starting rooms, and are teleported to their proper spawn locations in the map, which advance incrementally as the attacking team breaks down the defending team's barriers (although they only need to score once to advance a stage). When a given team has won, either by, for the attackers, reaching the destination or, for the defenders, waiting out 10 minutes, a pair of flags lowers in the spawning room of that team. Uniting these flags is used as the indicator of victory. (And so a 15 minute setup with a team score limit of 1 is recommended.)
CaptureStrike is a variant of CTF, the goals of which are to prevent players from rejoining after the game has started. To accomplish this, players spawn in a special spawning room with four teleporters per team, each behind bars. Once a player approaches one of these teleporters, the bars begin to lower, giving the players time to get into position. Once the players go through the teleporters to enter into the map itself, another set of bars raises up behind them to prevent the teleporters from being used again. The spawning area also contains an exit, to end the game early in the case of all players dying, which remains closed behind bars for several minutes after the map starts. (The delays are generally implemented via very slow elevators that start off very far down.)
I will be posting more, including my much-hinted-at plans for Honest-to-UT2k4 Onslaught.
Last edited by [n00b]Adereth on Fri Aug 04, 2006 6:41 pm; edited 6 times in total
I thought of a possible way to work out a game of Zombies in TeamDM - give me some time to work out the ACS scripting that makes the zombies very powerful as far as health goes.
Great work on the gamemodes (Deathball being my favorite).
As for how the gamemode actually works, I think that perhaps many gamemodes could be created as having 1-flag CTF as its base.
Also, heh, I just noticed that you used the O RLY song for map01 of the Deathball wad
Hey I was thinking that an interesting game would be simple 2 flag assult mode. All you'd have to do is switch the spawn points of red and blue. I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but I've played this with great entertainment. The only trick to it is that you'd need to disable touch return, so that it's more challenging to defend.
What did people think if this has been mentioned before?
Joined: 16 Jul 2005 Location: Oh god, what year is this?!
Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 12:43 am Post subject:
As I noted, there's a major gameplay problem with 1-flag, because if players just have to take the flag back to their base, especially on small maps, they never really get very close to the enemy. Special levels would have to be designed for this mode of play; every map that's been modified for 1-flag so far would be uninteresting and unplayable because players would spawn so distantly from the action.
1 flag ctf is boring unless you have a very open map with lots of players. Now what you should again do is assult. Take the one flag to their base. same premis as Deathball, without the ball and death at score.
The way oneflag shoud be implemented is so that there are 8 more objects.
4 new base objects; one for each team. and 4 new flagonly (cant be used to score at; can only be taken to score elsewhere) flags. If it is done so just one flag shows up (so it can be played on existing maps) I will scream. This will take away the flexibility we want with 1 flag
Not forgetting the yellow 'neutral' flag if it works right now or ever will. I never experimented with it. The neutral flag would be used for multi-directional deathball.
ALSO: this will allow for the type of CTF where you only need your enemy's flag. For that thoug, something built into the engine so it can be done with the existing maps would be more useful
Joined: 16 Jul 2005 Location: Oh god, what year is this?!
Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 8:12 am Post subject:
Screw that! Let's have 16 teams! Yeah!
Most four-team games are already chaos, with too few players. Although the idea of five teams is a logical suggestion, there's no point and it's not fun.
Doom's color pallate barely allows for 4. if we want more we're gonna have to get rid of the color pallate and MANY MANY people would complain (oldschoolers, and many not-so-oldschoolers. this - I think - would upset more people then the 3D floors would.)
and 1 player per team CTF seems kindof.... boring. We need to get 256 player games
Joined: 16 Jul 2005 Location: Oh god, what year is this?!
Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 6:18 pm Post subject:
Actually, you can get away with eight quite nicely: blue, white, gold (orange) or yellow, violet, grey, brown, green, red. However, contrary to popular belief, Kilgore once mentioned implementing 24 or 32 bit colour for ZDaemon as a definite objective, if for far in the future.
You can't have 256 player games until you have 256 players on at once.
Haha, nice. I needed a few laughs for today. By the way, Adereth, you should get ahold of me on IRC sometime, because I have a new game mode in production. I'm just trying to get at least 3 finished levels put together for a public beta. Also, no mention of racing or rocket jumping? Not exactly new game modes, but they do require special servers/wads. Also, instagib?
lol Transparent... People would be sending all kinds of demo's to admins about 'invisble players'. You want more people? Just play Battlefield 2 or something...
Joined: 16 Jul 2005 Location: Oh god, what year is this?!
Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 11:22 pm Post subject:
EarthQuake wrote:
By the way, Adereth, you should get ahold of me on IRC sometime, because I have a new game mode in production. I'm just trying to get at least 3 finished levels put together for a public beta. Also, no mention of racing or rocket jumping? Not exactly new game modes, but they do require special servers/wads. Also, instagib?
I'll do all that and more once I pass out and wake up again, since I completely neglected to do either last night. It sounds quite promising, and, yeah, I mean to cover everything, including racing and rocket jumping and (ugh) HQs.
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