Spawns

I recently Downloaded BAR to take a look at it, after appreciating just how much Supperior ZK is. I quickly found a Feature in BAR that up on looking at it seems quite interresting and thats the Ability to Choose costume Spawnlocaitions in the Lobby. Giving Maps a Completly new feel by Changing the Side of the playing field you Spawn on. For Lobpot this probably wouldn`t be the best feature if there is any Community Voting involved but for smaller Rooms/Private Rooms i think this could be a interresting addition for Mixing the game a bit up.

So i wanted to ask what the other Lobsters in this Forum think about "borrowing" this Feature for Zk.

Are you referring to the system where you draw start boxes in the lobby? This is how the engine handles start boxes by default, but we removed it ages ago (around 2015 by the look of it). Boxes were replaced with the map-defined start areas we have at the moment. We did this because the user-defined rectangles were a real pain from a deployment and usability perspective, and because the replacement start areas were more flexible and could vary based on player count.

We can't expect people to set up their own start boxes just to get a playable match (this is an advanced skill), and even advanced players doing so in a large room would be chaos. This means that every map needs a default set of start boxes. But they aren't naturally included in the map. So the server has to maintain a full list of default startboxes for each map, and to make matters worse, offline singleplayer also has to be deployed with this list as well. Map creators would have to get these boxes into the deployment process somehow, which is much more annoying than including a map-side startbox config.

Someone could write a modoption that takes a base64 encoded table that sets arbitrary startbox configs. Nobody has been keen enough to do so thus far. In part this is because I doubt anyone would actually use this modoption unless it came with some sort of UI to draw startboxes on the map.

The existing way to change up start positions is to use 'Start Anywhere' mode under Options -> Start -> Start Boxes, then use the honor system to ensure people start where the room agrees they can. I think this works for the primary use case, which is small or private rooms. The option "Set AI Spawns" (just below "Start Boxes") can be used to make the AIs start anywhere.

Thanks. The wiki would be a good place for a guide.