[Ðravu]

This will probably be where I throw all the plugin-related projects I'm working on since a few of you enjoyed watching the OBHL progress and I really enjoyed getting feedback from everyone (look at the original banhammer I did and compare it to the finished product after suggestions and stuff were seen and used).

My current project is a trivia plugin. It'll basically be a more formal way for admins to do admin abuse trivia or just trivia questions in general:

The demo was retarded and Youtube ate the quality, but basically, an admin asks a trivia question through a console command. It gets sent to all players. The next thing you say in chat (or team chat) after the trivia question is asked, is your answer to the trivia. It won't appear in chat, but instead gets sent straight to whomever asked the question. If they see the right answer, they simply choose it from the menu. It'll announce it to everyone and then they get to choose what prize the person wanted (I might switch this to let the person themself decide).

Things to do:

• Allow people to change their answer
  
• List the answers by the time they're submitted instead of who connected to the server first
  
• Possibly put who GAVE the answer next to the answer itself?
  
• Add/take-away options from the rewards menu
  
• Clean up the coding and interface a little bit
  
• Whatever else will most likely come up later

Do you guys have any ideas for prizes you might ask for? Right now the only real keepers I have are: Get 2000hp, get beacon (BACON), and drug opposite team. Not sure if the commands that basically slay the whole opposite team will stay or not (noclip might also be one of those things where you get it for like 10sec and then it wears off or you explode). I was thinking that for medics, there can be an option to completely fill your uber/kritz. Maybe throw in some other class-specific things.

[Str8 2 Sn0w]

Dam dravu, that looks so cool. takes all the trouble out of trivia, cant wait till its done. the only problem is that it the way it looks that it takes perfect spelling.

[Ðravu]

Str8 2 Sn0w, on 24 January 2010 - 06:37 PM, said:

Dam dravu, that looks so cool. takes all the trouble out of trivia, cant wait till its done. the only problem is that it the way it looks that it takes perfect spelling.

What do you mean? o.o

The only two things that are manually typed are the questions and the answers. It's up to whoever asked the question if they want to accept your answer based on its spelling. They could have 5 people send in the right answer (right spelling and everything) and the 6th person simply say "dickbutt" and they choose #6 and give them the reward.

[Pr3vention]

It's looking to be pretty damn nice, Dravu!

My only concern with it would be having the answers spammed to the hosting admin. If the server is even half-full, for example 16 players on, during trivia then correct answers could be pushed out of view of the host by people spamming the chat.

I could foresee that as an issue because the difficulty of managing the event will scale up in difficulty as population arises.

[Ðravu]

Pr3vention, on 25 January 2010 - 02:10 PM, said:

It's looking to be pretty damn nice, Dravu!

My only concern with it would be having the answers spammed to the hosting admin. If the server is even half-full, for example 16 players on, during trivia then correct answers could be pushed out of view of the host by people spamming the chat.

I could foresee that as an issue because the difficulty of managing the event will scale up in difficulty as population arises.

hmm. After 7 votes, it puts "Next" and "Back" keys for the menu, so "losing" votes isn't a problem fortunately, but I see your point. What I'll probably do is make it so that each vote is appended to the end of the list. So basically the host will start off seeing the first seven votes that are sent in. To see the next 7, they hit "Next" and so on and so on. That way votes aren't pushed out of the way and it's still a "get the answer first" kind of thing. I might also make it so that people can only revote when the admin issues a command that wipes out all the current votes. That way someone can't vote for something stupid and then change their answer when they have time to think and go "BUT I GOT IT RIGHT!" or something stupid.

Thanks for the feedback though. I'm about to start working on it again and will keep this stuff in mind when I structure it. :3

[Ðravu]

Alright. I'll get a video sometime today, but the plugin is close to finished. It's seemingly bug-free (big thanks to Keonyn for the help testing!) and is easy to use. It all sounds slightly complicated and confusing when you're given it all at once, but when you actually play with it, it's beautiful. Thanks again to those who commented on it, gave suggestions, and brought up some structure points. It really helped to determine the functionality and features of the plugin. Here's some notes, just to document:

Rewards:

• 2000hp for 60sec
  
• Noclip for 60sec 20sec
  
• Beacon (BACON)
  
• Scout speed
  
• Crits for 20sec
  
• Uber for 10sec
  
• Low gravity
  
• Rampage (1000hp+999ammo for 60sec)
  
• Medics: full ubercharge
  
• Timebomb other team
  
• Slay other team
  
• Drug other team
  
• Target a specific user with an effect

Commands:

• sm_trivia <question> - sends the trivia question to everyone and starts the process
  
• redo - if a question is in progress and you want to reset your answer, type "redo" in chat

How to use trivia
Asker
First, open console and use this command "sm_trivia <question>". After that, it will send your question to everyone. As each person sends in their answers, it'll add them to the end of the list. The order the answers appear in the list are the order they were recieved. When you see the correct answer (or your favorite answer), choose it and it will tell everyone in chat and give a rewards menu to the person with the correct answer.

Responder
If you see a question asked that you want to answer, simply open chat or team chat, even if you're dead, and type your answer. It will tell you in chat that you answered and what you answered with. If whoever asked the question chose your answer, you'll get a rewards list. If nobody gives a good answer and you have time to change your answer, type "redo" in chat and it'll reset your answer. Note though that it'll send your answer to the bottom of the list. Some notes: don't accept a reward when you're dead, the menu goes away after a certain amount of time so use it ASAP, if you use scout speed and change weapons it'll revert your speed back to default for your class, and if you get healed while having the crits or uber it will turn them off (stay away from medics bitches).

[SilverSoul]

I think all the rewards but one seem cool; I'm not so keen on the noclip for 60 seconds. I fear that it would kinda break the round a bit and distract too much from the game itself.
I think what you've done so far is awesome though, Dravu.

[iKill]

Maybe reduce it to thirty seconds?

And where is that invisibility (or at the least, semi-invisibility)?!?!

Very nice work Dravu!

[Ðravu]

SilverSoul, on 26 January 2010 - 06:01 PM, said:

I think all the rewards but one seem cool; I'm not so keen on the noclip for 60 seconds. I fear that it would kinda break the round a bit and distract too much from the game itself.
I think what you've done so far is awesome though, Dravu.

iKill, on 26 January 2010 - 06:03 PM, said:

Maybe reduce it to thirty seconds?

And where is that invisibility (or at the least, semi-invisibility)?!?!

Very nice work Dravu!

Very true. I think I'll actually reduce it to 20sec since if you use it, you're most likely going to do something very rude to the other team as fast as you can after you get it.

The invisiblity reward was just too much trouble for now. I might add it at a later time, but I wanted simple rewards for the moment and changing the alpha of players is bleh, especially since you have to make their weapons invisible as well (might just leave that off actually).

I tested the "fill uber bar" reward for medics and while it worked perfectly locally, it crashed on my linux server with me and Your Mom. I think I'm just going to remove it as I don't really care for class-specific rewards unless there's one for every class anyways (maybe add those later on?).

Another note is I was wrong about the scout speed. It actually resets your speed if you change weapons at all as any class. There's no time limit on it however, so as long as you survive and don't change weapons, you can run as fast as a scout as heavy or whatever you're using.

Your Mom gave it her seal of approval and once I do more checks to be sure it's stable, hopefully I can get Riu's approval as well so we can test it out on San Jose or something.

[Str8 2 Sn0w]

Will this work for only a certent admin level or can you make it work for other people who have trivia questions? (ME)

[Ðravu]

Str8 2 Sn0w, on 26 January 2010 - 07:05 PM, said:

Will this work for only a certent admin level or can you make it work for other people who have trivia questions? (ME)

Well what I think I'm going to do is make it so that any level of admin can use it, but a captain has to enable it. So if you're there by yourself, you won't be able to use it. You'll have to have a captain come in and enable it and they'll be responsible for making sure you don't abuse it and disabling it afterward. This is a powerful plugin and while it's usually non-captains who want to ask trivia questions, non-captains will probably abuse the hell out of it by themselves.

On another note about my previous post, I'm going to put back the Invisibility option, but your weapon will stay visible.

[iKill]

[Ðravu]

So with the Trivia plugin finally done and out of the way outside of some live testing, I've started on my next project: Rank. It's a big one and will definitely be a nice learning experience. A rewrite from the bottom up. Swift did an amazing job on the previous one (2100+ lines of coding to back up that statement), but the updates brought instability with it. Keeping that in mind while I write it, hopefully we'll be able to bring Rank back in the near future.

Since I'm working on the structure right now and no real functionality, I'll make my first news a rant:
Valve is fucking retarded. They didn't come up with a good naming structure until the unlocks came out and even that had its problems. Like they call the normal rocket launcher "projectile_rocket", while the directhit is called "rocketlauncher_directhit". The directhit was named nice, but then they gave the pickaxe the name "unique_pickaxe". What's so unique about a weapon most people have nowadays? >>

[Ðravu]

So tonight, I've been working on setting up the special points. Non-kill points that make you wonder why you have such a high amount of them but have a KDR of 0.000005. Outside of the normal building, destroying, and removing engineer buildings, there's a new one that grants you points as medic for healing a certain amount. I believe you actually don't get heal points for continuing to heal an overhealed player (even though it still adds to your uber). I'm hoping this will slightly help reward those who go around healing everyone a lot instead of sticking with just one person. I'm also toying with the "dropped uber" option where you get partial points (or maybe even losing a point?) for having an uber ready and dieing with it. Not sure what I want to do with it at the moment. I'm thinking of giving random points for other random stuff as well such as heavies sharing their sandvich, pyros and sniper extinguishing teammates, etc. While the bulk of the plugin is about kills, I'm all for adding incentives for teamwork as well. We'll see what stays and goes as the plugin coding matures. Soon I'm going to come up with a concrete idea for how I'm going to store all this information and I've been dreading that a bit. It's easy to do, but finding the most efficient way to do it is a bitch, especially since I need the plugin to be able to handle new weapons that come up in future updates that it doesn't know anything about.

[Alex]

For the trivia plugin, why not add another criteria, where the first correctly typed response gives the player their reward?
i.e. sm_trivia "<question>" "<answer>"

It takes the work of picking the right answer, and still lets the admin pick the answer the other way if it's close enough or takes too long.

As for a new rank system, giving points for everything you're already given points for should be good, as well as adding them for a few things that matter. It's just a matter of remembering them all. Medics get a point for a charged uber, and for healing 500 HP, as do heavies to themselves and engies. Another question is if you wanna give half points, and adjust the values of some actions to enourage teamwork, as you said. Assists should add to the KDR so that medics don't get an abysmal KDR.

[Ðravu]

Alex, on 29 January 2010 - 07:01 PM, said:

For the trivia plugin, why not add another criteria, where the first correctly typed response gives the player their reward?
i.e. sm_trivia "<question>" "<answer>"

It takes the work of picking the right answer, and still lets the admin pick the answer the other way if it's close enough or takes too long.

As for a new rank system, giving points for everything you're already given points for should be good, as well as adding them for a few things that matter. It's just a matter of remembering them all. Medics get a point for a charged uber, and for healing 500 HP, as do heavies to themselves and engies. Another question is if you wanna give half points, and adjust the values of some actions to enourage teamwork, as you said. Assists should add to the KDR so that medics don't get an abysmal KDR.

For the trivia, I thought about it, but decided it was too much work for too little gain. You have to take in mispellings and such and I thought it was best left to the admin asking the question. As you said though, it's optional, so who knows. I'll think about it and might add it in. No problem with options if they don't degrade performance. :3

While I want to keep medic KDRs from being murdered by being...well...a medic, I'm not sure putting assists towards the KDR is the right answer. That'll lead to inflated KDRs across the board. What I might do is either make medic deaths exempt from the KDR or be worth less points (so 5 medic deaths = 1 normal death). I'll probably talk to Riu and see what he wants. Thanks for bringing it up though. I never even thought of that.

[Alex]

Shoot, I didn't think of inflated KDR. I suppose you'd want to keep close to a 1:1 KDR across the board. I suppose you could count medic assists only, reducing the costs of medic deaths would just encourage battle medics since a KDR of 1 would end up being 5.

Problem is, how many points for an assist? Half? One? 3 for every 4 assists?

[Ðravu]

Alex, on 29 January 2010 - 08:14 PM, said:

Shoot, I didn't think of inflated KDR. I suppose you'd want to keep close to a 1:1 KDR across the board. I suppose you could count medic assists only, reducing the costs of medic deaths would just encourage battle medics since a KDR of 1 would end up being 5.

Problem is, how many points for an assist? Half? One? 3 for every 4 assists?

Well the problem with giving medics credit for kills on assists is then the KDR of medics will get TOO high. They basically leech off someone and when they die, they leech off another player. It'll also make medics want to pocket skilled players. D: Medics might just have to deal with getting a low KDR. There's no perfect solution.

[Ðravu]

So today was probably one of my most productive days on the rank plugin. I finally decided on a table layout for holding the user information and think I worked out most of the kinks of entering and taking information from said table. I decided to do everything one way and then figured out that in the end, it was a horrible idea. So I had to revert a lot of the shit I did and recode a bunch of stuff, but now it's clean and easy (it let me clean up most of my sloppy coding) and I'm happy. Here's a screenshot since I know some people like visuals instead of walls of text:
 koth_sawmill0006.jpg (103.37K)
Number of downloads: 12
I've still got like 14 events I have to handle and connect to the point system. So far you only get points for kills and every kind of kill is worth 2 points.

With the way I decided to work the new system, rank is actually going to get updated on the fly on the server. Everytime something happens, when you check your rank, it'll reflect your stats up to that point in time. The server itself will handle all the rank information on yourself and then send a collective update when you disconnect or when the map changes. This has a couple of pros and cons:

Pros

• When you type "rank", it gives you your exact rank info
  
• There are less updates sent to the database server, meaning less load on it
  
• I have all the rank stats there to play with for various stuff, including possible custom achievements in the future

Cons

• Uses slightly more memory due to having to keep all the rank info on hand for the people in the server
  
• If the server crashes 29min into a 30min map, all the data for that 29min is gone (honestly not that big of a deal in my opinion) unless you disconnected during it
  
• Will cause tiny spikes in traffic and cpu load as it sends all the information in larger chunks to the database server. This should cause zero problems but I'll still put as a con

[iKill]

Yet again...Very nice Dravu!