Activating Mods on Map Change: Possible?

Benson

Does anyone know if this is in the works?

Being able to activate say, Combat, just by initiating a map vote for a co_ map would do wonders for getting mods played and making them more popular, and I feel is essential for a game like NS2 that wants to strongly support its modding community.

There are already a good number of mods available, but each one needs to be run on its own server, and these servers are much harder to populate resulting in a lot of empty servers.

Also, being able to just change maps mean that there would be no "splitting the community" issues since people would be able to remain on the same server from one mod to the next.

I'm not really sure how this would work, but am just very curious if this is being worked on as I think it would add a lot of variety to gameplay and make modding more mainstream.

Some of the best times I had playing NS1 were on servers that would run combat to populate the server, then let the players choose what to play next, weather it be Vanilla NS, Marine vs. Marine, Siege, GorgeRace or anything else that happened to be on the server.


Anyway, does anyone know if activating mods on map change is being worked on, or even possible?

1dominator1

Other games certainly do it.

BentRing

Yes it is possible but I have no clue how it's done. For a while the tactical gamer servers would run combat maps if < X players and regular NS2 if > X.

Sewlek

it is possible, you can check core/lua/MapCycle.lua StartMap() to see how to do it.

Benson

This is good to know, and now I have to wonder why more servers don't have mods on their vote lists.

IronHorse

I loathed this feature in ns1.

I'll *always* search for the type of game mode I'm interested in, and then specifically click on it - please don't trick me or lure me in under false pretenses just ending up with me looking for a new server.. That puts your server just above those that say 12/16 but are really filled with bots.

You should at a minimum advertise /warn players of such things before clicking to join - if you go through with it

Edit : this is all assuming it's only ever a mod and not an official feature, where its to be expected.

Ghosthree3

Pretty sure it's done in the same way custom maps are loaded, with the mods [ "bla", "bla" ] part in the { } part.

Benson

IronHorse wrote: »

I loathed this feature in ns1.

I'll *always* search for the type of game mode I'm interested in, and then specifically click on it - please don't trick me or lure me in under false pretenses just ending up with me looking for a new server.. That puts your server just above those that say 12/16 but are really filled with bots.

I can understand your feelings about the bots

As long as the server is labelled as sporting multiple modes (NS, CO, MVM, Last Stand, etc.) I dont see any way this could be considered a bad thing, its just more options.

Besides with the server browser being what it is, it should be able to see what game type is currently running and display that accordingly, so no lies.

If the server population wants to keep playing that game mode, then they will vote for it.

IronHorse

@benson exactly, knowing what i'm getting into is more important than the feature itself.

Yes the browser currently displays what is *Currently* playing.. i meant i want to know if there's ever a chance it will switch.
When i click combat servers i want to play combat. Or faded, or more than anything vanilla.. but the point is that i dont want to join a server just to have to leave it a few minutes later just because they didnt mention what kind of server they were in the browser - typically as a ruse to nab more players.

If its officially implemented, (ugh) then i'd know any vanilla round on any server i was playing could quickly become gorge racing next round, given a majority vote.
Its all about what the player expects. Aversion due to destroyed expectations is a reactive and typically negative response that is to be avoided.
See this thread as evidence of that.