=================================================================== " S t a y i n g W e a p o n s " - G a m e s p y T a b =================================================================== One of the most annoying things in Quake 2 deathmatch is - in my opinion - not the fact that there are no id deathmatch levels yet, or that there are still some bugs. It is the fact that Q2 servers default to "staying weapons" = "off". While this was o.k. for DOOM with its 4 player limit, it gets frustrating rather fast when there are more than, say, 8-10 players. It isn't too much fun to run around with a blaster, wait for some weapon to respawn, only to get killed by some bfg or railgun dudes... And the blaster is weaker than Q1's shotgun, thus making such "fights" more unbalanced. This problem will even increase with more people in the level. Just imagine one of those soon to be released levels with 100 people in it - and about 10 or so weapons... AND, of course: this mode does encourage camping... The problem is, most server admins seem to run the server in this default mode - not changing anything - and we haven't got the big choice of servers here in Germany :[ Maybe some of them are starting it from command line, even not knowing about some of the different dm settings. Because there's no easy way to tell if a server is running in "staying weapons" mode - you have to "analyze" the "dmflags" variable - I've built a gamespy tab which only displays these servers (Hex Editing did really help this job...). As most people seem to prefer staying weapons - some months ago a majority voted for this mode on Planetquake Polls - maybe this will be fixed by id in the point release. But, until then, use this tab to your pleasure... ------------------------------------------------------------------- Update - Version 1.1 Just after I uploaded the first version, somebody told me that the above goal can be achieved much easier: you just have to filter the servers with their "dmflags" anded with 4. No hex editing necessary - and just one instead of 2000+ rules. Man, I felt dumb... So, the new tab is also much smaller now. Enjoy! ------------------------------------------------------------------- what the "dmflag" value means (from: Fahrenheit 176 console command listing) Default: 16 Values: (Integer) 0 - 4095 Description: This value holds most of the settings for customizing a multi-player server. Add the values together of the flags that are to be enabled and use that number in dmflags. This will need to be set before the game is started. No Health - 1 Allow Powerups - 2 Weapons Stay - 4 No Falling Damage 8 Instant Powerups - 16 Same Map - 32 DF_SKINTEAMS? - 64 DF_MODELTEAMS? - 128 Allow Friendly Fire - 256 Spawn Farthest - 512 Force Respawn - 1024 No Armor - 2048 =================================================================== [MAM] Ragnarok E-Mail: ragnarok@lrz.fh-muenchen.de