I have recently been searching for maps for setting up another Nexuiz server. I posted on another thread about the difficulty of finding maps. Part of that difficulty comes from naming the conventions of maps. Right now it's difficult to know whether a map is setup for CTF or DM by the name. Some of them use the convention of ctf_*. But I know of some maps that are CTF that do not use that, such as eggasandbacon and capturecity.

Your thoughts?

Many maps are for more than one game mode... so that is in fact a bit hard to do.

And renaming existing maps would be a bad idea as people would then need to redownload them.

Understood about renaming existing maps.

What about a naming convention that shows which game modes that map supports?

name_ctf_dm.pk3

I dunno, just throwing out ideas.

That could lead to ridiculously long filenames like foobar_dm_dom_ctf_tdm_rune_lms_arena.pk3. That's not a good solution imho...

Is there any difference betwen DM and most of those other game modes? With CTF, I know the map changes considerably and requires a special map design, but what about the other modes? It seems like they are just branches of DM.

Dokujisan wrote:Is there any difference betwen DM and most of those other game modes? With CTF, I know the map changes considerably and requires a special map design, but what about the other modes? It seems like they are just branches of DM.

Domination & runematch require special entities (both modes work without them by using player spawnpoints, but that's not really fun on most maps).

Obviously the solution is boolean flags along the lines of chmod numbers :D

Imo a single .mapcfg would be the best way, its just a bit trixy to do in qc atm (or so im told.)

Fileflags or bsp naming conventions are not a good way since they dont provide nuff info and requiers you to change/rename the actual bsp file. With a configuration file you cam make sure that even if/tho the bsp filename changes the end user see the same name in the menus and so on.

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[general]
author:budda
descipt:....
...
[dm]
fraglimit:20
timelimit:15
image:mymap_dm.jpg
[ctf]
.....


Well, a good idea may be a Perl or shell script that we supply with Nexuiz that analyzes a PK3 and tells you in machine readable format what's in it...

that is, the names of the mapcfg files, the map title, image and game modes supported.

Similar to:

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$ lsmaps basement.pk3
basement.pk3:dm_basement:Basement:dm:maps/basement.jpg
basement.pk3:lms_basement:Basement:lms:maps/basement.jpg

That format would be well parsable by anything, even a shell script (using tools like cut or the "IFS=: read -r PK3 MAPCFG TITLE MODE IMAGE" loop)

Actually, I quite like the idea of adding something like that to Nexuiz... and if the script is readable enough, it can later be adapted to convert the existing mapcfg system to something new.

It MAY also output XML, but I am quite opposed to that as XML is to hard to parse using simple tools like shell scripts or Perl. XML output can of course be optional and more detailed, like, it could also include map descriptions.

Interesting idea. Then we could perhaps add shell like commands to the console too.. so we finally can do some smart aliases