Hi everyone!

I've been working on a quite a big mod lately which has an aim to bring tournament -like gameplay to Cortex Command. By tournament I mean gamemodes deathmatch, capture the flag, domination, king of the hill, and what ever other modes one could come up with.

Right now, lets start small. But before that I'll tell about the mod I'm making.


It will be called Ballistic Weapons: Mercenaries.

It will feature over 35 weapons raging from sidearms, melee, artillery cannons, rifles, machine guns and grenades. There will be also one universal actor aka the mercenary that will be the one that the player controls. He will have a completely overdone gore system which will leave a hell of a mess if he gets blown to bits.

This mod will function as a faction mod, a new gametype mod and as general addon mod.


Now as I said: Lets start simple. I dont know much about Lua and I defenately cant script anything yet. I do know that its fully possible anyhow.


Im requesting a simple script template that can be used to turn a map into a deathmatch arena. It should include the following:
-A variable number of kills needed to win.
-A variable timer to define how long a match will last.
-When a player's mercenary is killed, a new one will be dropped on the map via custom droppod that is also part of the mod.
-A spawning mercenary will have a pre-equipped random sidearm weapon
-Weapon spawns that will give you a random primary weapon when you walk over a certain area using areas. And prevents you from having another one for the next X seconds.
-Alternative to weapon spawns, make that weapons will drop from the sky with a custom area integrated activities.
-A message that show's the kills of both players when a mercenary(Either P1 or P2) is killed.

The brains on each arena map will be preplaced beyond the map area where they are out of reach.


Please, if you can cook up a script that will do these things and add comments how to use them, release it here or PM it to me and I will do the rest. Suggestions to make the deathmatch mode better are warmly welcome too!

I'll be soon announcing the mod itself, so you'll see what I've been doing all this time. I just need to get some content ingame first though.

cool, I'd help, but I don't know how to mod.

Sounds cool. Although a tad ambitious. But then again, this is you, numgun, we're talking about here.

I was working on a ctf map, but it didn't really pan out, because I got too busy with school to learn much lua.

I suggest you take a good long look at fort maglar, it's got some of the things you're looking for. Lives, scripted craft entry, random weapons, variable messages, probably some other stuff.

All that could be done by slicing and dicing up Fort Malgar,
except getting the "How many killed on Each Team" variable.

Good luck on this.

i think that's essentially in there too, as the live counter thing.
dont have time to look over all the code and find it, sorry.. ;-;

Geti, not really, it just sees if you die and lowers the live count variable by one, while printing the live amount. But hey, you could do that in reverse, when you die, the other one gets a +1 to his kills.

Hm, maybe you could assign all the guys that deliver a certain Lua name,
and only one copy of those guys could exist at a time. And you could assign
them certain glow effects for the names hovering above their heads for names.

That way it'd feel like you are playing against bots of some sort. And it'd solve
the team death count issue.

I'm completely willing to do this for you. The second to last makes no sense, though. If it's only an alternative if the one before it is not possible, then that's fine. The one before it makes 100% sense. But by primary weapon do you mean you want the gun to be active in his hand as soon as the actor receive it? Is this going to be AI vs Player? Player vs Player? Are the only units on the map going to be player one's and player two's(OR AI's)?

Yeah sorry, I meant its an alternative way incase the first one fails/is impossible.
The first one is really the desired one though.



If its possible to put it in the actor's hands, then that would be great! But by primary I just ment any other than the starting weapons (Melee and Sidearms, you get one of each randomly when you spawn).




Both, the general rule is that a human player controls only 1 unit at a time while an AI uses an activities.ini and spawns as many as it wants like in a default skirmish game.

If its going to be P1 vs AI, it will be like skirmish survival mode, but rest is the same, you only have one guy to use, but the AI has as much as it wants. This is just basically how long can you survive and how many kills you get.
The thing is that the AI wont be searching for you but the off-map brain so it wouldnt hunt for you. That sucks, but maybe a workaround could work that the mercenary you control is a brain unit and the new enemies that spawn, will hunt you to the location you last were.

Although this can be worked on to make something more interesting though.
I have no ideas right now, but this is the default I came up with.


The best fun is ofcourse in the P1 vs P2 game. Each team has only 1 unit to control and when he dies, a new one is shipped to the battlefield with a droppod that will be included with the mod. Im talking about this mod: BW:Mercenaries!


Also just though, can you also make a suicide command that would gib your current mercenary? It would useful if something as unfortunate as a mercenary getting stuck underground. Its not important, but could be useful.

Hey wait, I'm pretty sure most of the scene Lua only works in Campaign. Ex: Why all the scenes have to be run from campaign. I haven't tried anything outside campaign myself. But that would mean there can't be a player two.

I'll get started on a player vs AI. You can set AI hunt modes, so hunting shouldn't be a problem.

Crap I didnt expect that. Well if it works like that, there should be more hunters then just one because the AI just sucks against humans right now. 1 on 1 would be unfair.

Oh, ok. I was thinking of this completely differently. Do you want the NPCs to spawn places in the map? Or delivered by a craft? Before I had it just deliver an endless stream of them via craft. But you want specific npcs, as if they were players. I can do that, and have a variable you can change to set the amount of them every time.

Say, is it possible to have both? Or atleast be able to choose right delivery method by uncommenting the right block of code? So we could either make them spawn from preplaced teleports around the map or deliver them from the sky. Or both if thats possible.

I could make a bunker module that looks like a teleportation area, and these could be useful when you want to spawn some mercs deep in underground bases.




That sounds great, do you mean it would be like skirmish in waves with a kill limit?

No, it'd be like a standard quake DM with AI players. They'd always be the same actor, have a random gun, etc. The variable would be setting how many of those there are.

Well that sounds even better! I guess it will be easier to make a P1 vs P2 script from that.
but yeah, sounds good to me.