Mod Ideas/LonelyFlag

Mod ideas for UT 2003 – The Lonely Flag

About Lonely Flag

Played on standard CTF maps two teams compete for a single flag. The flag spawns either randomly on the map, or at randomly selected navigation points tagged with a specific value (indicating a single flag start point). A team scores points by finding the flag and carrying it back to their flag base. For every 5 seconds the flag is at a teams flag base they get one point. The team with the most points at the end of the time limit (or first team to the score limit) wins. This mod will not support extra time.

Since this map is a team game, players will be able to use any Capture the Flag, Domination, or Bombing Run map. In the case of Domination, the A control point will be replaced by a flag base for the red team, and the B control point will be replaced by a flag base for the blue team. When a Bombing Run map is played the scoring hoops are replaced by flag bases. It is left as an exercise for the players to determine which maps play most effectively in this game mode.

It may be possible to support DM maps by determining the locations of two navigation points at the extreme east/west or north/south and spawning flag bases there.

The flag bases must be touched by the flag carrier to deposit the flag. In some BR maps the flag carrier may have to shield-gun jump to touch the flag base as it may hover above the ground in a very realistic and close to reality way.

Other Features

A web front end, and in game menu for easy administration will be provided.
Full bot support for the game type.
Multiple flag skins, selected randomly whenever the flag spawns (if it gets dropped into a lava pool for example). This is more for the variation than anything else.

Game Settings

The following are the customisable aspects of the mod from within the game menu.

Score time. This option allows the amount of time a flag must be on its flag base to gain a point. This can be set to any integer value from 1 to 30. The value is in seconds.
Carry the flag. This option allows players to decide whether they will have to carry the flag back to their flag base, or whether the flag will be placed there instantly when they touch it. This option will be turned on by default (it generally makes for more exciting games).

Map Thoughts

From experience with UT, maps which have open centers and bases that are very hard to defend work best. B3PullTheTriggerBaby is a map that works well. Niven is not a map that works well - unless the team size is small 1 or 2. Generally maps that work well have more than one entrance into the base and are of small to medium size.

Interested Scripters

If you are interested in developing this mod for UT2003 then add your name to the list. Once you start development you should indicate that below (and hopefully include a link to a journal page). Before you start development you should also check this section to see if anyone else has started.

Discussion

EntropicLqd:I'm not going to write a CTF mod that directly supports more than two teams. It generally requires more players than is available and the maps become very large (and laggy in some places). If I can get find a way of tweaking the bot AI suitably from a mutator I may be able to provide the single flag mod as a mutator - for those people dead set on producing a multi-team CTF mod.

One oddity about single flag games is that it inherently copes better with smaller team sizes than a normal capture the flag. As a general rule the entire team is either defending or attacking meaning everyone is involved in the action all of the time. This is the one mod that I really want to write for UT. In my opinion this was the most successful feature of the CTF+ mod I wrote (although I know people that disagree).

EntropcLqd: I've dumped the extra-time option. There really is no point in having extra time unless the score time is set to a large value and neither team can score. In this case it should be a draw. It also means that you don't wind up playing a map for an eternity with no team being able to get the advantage.

I may also drop the extra skins feature. Not because it's hard to implement (under UT it's a snap) but becasue it will increase the download size needlessly. It would be nice to be able to support additional textures though - just not held as part of the mod.

EntropicLqd: An interesting variation of this game type may be to use Bombing Run as the base and have the players hold the ball at their control-point, flag-base, scoring-hoop to score. That way the ball could be thrown between players. Personally, I think the BR maps will be too big.

EntropicLqd: I have come to the conclusion that I don't actually like the UT2003 game to want to write this mod anymore. If anyone else wants to do it that's fine by me. I'll maybe work on something else.

Daid303: We've added a One flag mode in our Ultimate survival mod (UT2003 http://mods.moddb.com/919/ ) it turned out quite nice not as advanced, with all those options here, but it works.