Official Competition Mod Beta This Week

With 1.4 out of the way, we are currently working on the next game update, and breaking with all known naming and moral conventions, we were thinking of code-naming it “1.5”. This is going to be a smaller release and fix the remaining issues that cropped up in 1.4, such as ranks not being displayed correctly and Personal Bests being tracked on a per-campaign basis rather than globally (those two issues are actually related).

More immediately – and perhaps a bit more exciting – we are also wrapping up work on our competition mod. If you’re not familiar with it, the main purpose of the mod is allow tournament organizers to easily implement and enforce specific rulesets. To that extent, we’ve stuffed quite a lot of cvar customization options in there and creating a new ruleset is as simple as putting the values you’d like to adjust in a config file on your server.

Barring any major international incidents, the beta will be released to the community at large within the coming days. We are hoping to squash any remaining stability issues and major bugs you might come across, so that the final version of the competition mod is in as a good a shape as it can be. To help out mod makers, we are also releasing the full competition mod source code at the same time as the beta – that way you can use bits and pieces of it in your own project, or add your own features to it.

With the technicalities out of the way, let’s take a look at the major features of the mod:

• Added cvar-based limits for classes, weapons, deployables, and mines.
• Added ability to permanently enable XP unlocks such as Faster Sprint, Grenade Launcher, Reduced Weapon Spread, Extra Clip, and Scoped Assault Rifle.
• Added pause functionality: Teams can call time-outs, and Admins can pause and unpause the game.
• Added ability to toggle camera between killer and nearby medics when unconscious.
• Added ability to automatically record demos and take screenshots of scoreboards.
• Added ability to scale pitch and yaw values for every vehicle to fully customize mouse sensitivity.
• Added “Auto-join” button that joins the team with less players.
• Added setSpawnPoint command with several options to allow keybinds for selecting spawn points.
• Increased Technician health to 100.
• Reduced Radar range.
• Increased vehicle spawn times.
• Added map-specific changes across the board to improve gameplay for competition (including number of vehicles).
• Added various Spectator improvements:
• Names displayed above player’s heads.
• Time remaining on planted charges.
• Pressing use while looking at a player spectates that player.
• New “spectate” console command to switch spectator players, jump to players currently constructing the objective, or jump to a preset angle and position on the map.

Please note that this is by no means a complete list. Additionally, we’ve got a couple more things planned for the final release that didn’t make it into the beta – we’ll include these in Known Issues form when the Beta is released.

To make the competition mod as easy to use as possible, we are currently documenting all of the relevant cvars and topping them off with a quick how-to guide – look for the whole affair to end up deliciously formatted in the Splash Damage Wiki.