New Game Mode: Multi-Payload

[Ploomutoo]

You've tried one payload, you've tried two payloads, but how about three payloads?

This game mode has two teams, attacking and defending. Blu, as always, will be attacking Red, who must defend.

But what a twist! The attacking team must escort multiple carts to separate goals at the same time!
Blu Team is entrusted with pushing several smaller explosives to checkpoints, with each detonation giving them a time and strategic advantage! Blu may destroy Red respawn rooms and force their opponent back, or open up shortcuts and passages as to easier access other carts.

In addition, some carts may start disabled and be enabled by completing other carts' objectives.

The HUD will display the progress of the cart you are currently pushing, or have most recently pushed. On entering the map, after 20 seconds of not pushing, or by pressing a certain key, (maybe "o" or something), the HUD will default back to several symbols, each representing a cart, that will either appear as a Blu Cart, meaning that they are not finished, or a Red Explosion, representing a cart that has completed its journey.

What's the downside to this game mode? I cannot code this for the life of me. All I can contribute is some maps designed around the game mode, but without the coding, and maybe some art assets.

 

[Egan]

In addition, some carts may start disabled and be enabled by completing other carts' objectives.

This might be pretty confusing to players unless the carts took a different sort of representation, like 'mini carts' and were easier to find in the map.

Having a map split up teams is generally a bad idea because unless the objectives are in close proximity, the population of the alive-actively-fighting-players on a team cannot sustain spread apart objectives and the players get lonely. That being said I think the mini-carts could work - something where players go looking for the next objective, and can find it unintentionally, quickly, and begin fighting again. Look at cp_standin's connector distances, it's like the width of one small room between each A B C point area.

To make it is going to be hard - hard to make look good. You should try to find a concept that could work with an existing HUD type, like maybe if you can hack some representation out of the PD HUD since it's pretty moddable, or do what @Kill_the_Bug did with his 2-payload attacking map with modified a PLR HUD.

 

[Kill_the_Bug]

Thanks for the reference Egan A thought occurred to me reading this and it might be a different way of doing it - Exact same level design, but different stages control different carts and different paths but to the same end cap point (4 stages) if all 4 carts meet at point X (i.e. each 90 degrees around a circle) then conditional logic applied vor victory - if abcd then victory = yes.

Decompile lost horizon from the workshop - I'll still have to fix the links in my signature - as soon as I figure out how

 

[EArkham]

I could see this working if all the carts were all easily visible from each previous cart's location or final destination. And each cart next in the line would require a progressively longer track to push.

For example, let's just say you have a long prop train with flatbed cars behind it, and each bomb was just pushed onto the flatbed cars, one per. The first one gets pushed on in more or less a straight line, the next one is further up but requires maybe being pushed up and over a small bridge, then down onto the train car. Then the next one is much closer to RED's spawn and has to go around the front of the train and be pushed on from the other side. From each train car, you can see the next bomb cart -- or maybe you can see all the bomb carts right from the start, visible through fences or windows or whatever.

That's a boring example theme, but I think it illustrates how you'd have to set the progressions within close proximity of one another while also making each one more difficult. It does mean a built in limit to how fancy you can get with your layout.

Can you even have multiple carts on the same team have highlighting at the same time, btw?

 

[Jekyllson]

IMHO, map objectives should be easy to understand. After all, most people like jumping into TF2 and fighting casually, not so much hopping onto a server and worrying about strategy and team splitting. The purpose of objectives is merely to guide the conflict between the two teams, which is why I firmly believe in making the objectives as unobtrusive to the experience of a map as possible. Player Destruction might be the most complex game mode of any official map, and even it can basically be summed up by "Kill fools, put beer in Beam."