OpenArena Message Boards

There are some great maps that are too vast for comfortable play until large crowd gathers.
There are some great maps that can quickly become overcrowded, only suitable for DM of 4 or 5 at most.

Why not create an auto-ranker? Let the server gather statistics into a 2d table where one axis is map ID and another one is the number of players, and each cell accumulates:

- how many relevant spawn points there are?
- how often does telefragging-by-spawn happen?
- how often callvote nextmap is invoked?
- how often does spawncamping happen?

And then, after gathering this for  a day or two, use this table in combination with fuzzy logic to choose a suitable next map for current crowd size.

In OA3 there should be additional map info files, where mappers may specify additional map infos, such as suggested number of players. Those may be used to determine nextmap in some way, probably (or maybe controlling the number of bots). But I don't know the details about how such things would work, and the current state of their implementation.

Unreliable. People are forgetful and you can't add additional info to every undomesticated map out there.

Also, auto-profiler can deal with the infinite majority of custom Q3 maps.

bot_autominplayers uses the actual amount of relevant spawnpoints to determine the desired amount of players.

If this number was written to the log then a program could scan it and mark how many players a map is suitable for. Openarena could then reroll a couple of time when selecting a new map (currently it only rerolls if selecting the same map twice in a row) with a maximum amount of tries.

I do prefer scanning the maps and making decisions based on the facts. But I would also prefer that such a scanner was external so that it could be adjusted without updating the game itself.

Would parametric controls do ? (fuzziness, weights for various factors and so on) ?

P.S. I distinctly remember telefrag conga line at oa_dm7 in the times of yore, eavery start of a match was marked by sustained meatsplosions due to there being much more players than spawn points  :giggity:

With ExcessivePlus (mod) or Big Brother Bot (external program, no mod) you can specify maps rotation depending on the number of players currently connected to the server. But you have to specify the conditions yourself, it's not automatically scanned from the maps usage.

Automatic scanning of maps could be done with an external tool such as Big Brother Bot but you would need to modify the engine to write in console (and thus log) the variables you mentioned, because they are not currently accessible to my knowledge (eg, you can know the total number of telefrags, but not which spawn point is responsible in particular, so you would have to add the coordinates of the spawnpoint in the engine output).