[KZMOD] Kreedz Climbing

Originally posted by rekt

And what happened to the leaderboard that was in beta? I think there was a way to check everyones time in a certain map from a website.

Heyho!

I think KZMod would be a much nicer place if there would be more people that'd be willing to develop things for it. Its not like KZ/Climbing/Surfing plugins for CS 1.6 happened in one day.

I am hosting the Ethereal Movement servers on KZMod - we have a small but very active, friendly playerbase. I can see how some things are still missing like a really good LJ Stats Plugin ( but i think this will be done officially soon-ish. I talked to him about it at some point ) - but these things can also, just like in 1.6, be playermade at some point.

KZMod has some upsides to it - especially for mappers. Raptor is constantly making mapping and sharing maps easier and better via the workshop functionality. Auto-packing maps, faster compiling times are few of the many upcoming and existing features. Also a separate FastDL isnt needed anymore for Workshop maps. Yes - these things dont matter for some people, especially those that just want to play the game, but it makes the life of content creators better and therefore its in my opinion a step in the right direction. Also server-management is a bit easier when you dont have to upload anything but a simple map-ID to add a map to your server.

Global Toplist:

I've been a supporter of the global toplist idea for an incredibly long time now, but after reading raptors post on it i can actually see how it could be a bad idea. Have you guys ever played a random steam-game with people that're having insanely high / impossible scores on the leaderboard? This or similar things could/would probably happen to KZMod if a global toplist was a thing. So yes: It'd need to be moderated by (probably multiple) administrators. And since this would be an unpaid thing it'd require a loyal and trustworthy community like XJ behind it that is actually up to spend their free time on it. After all its supposed to be a hobby - not a job. Even hosting servers is supposed to be at least a bit fun at the end of the day. Managing your own server, and removing invalid/illegal times just from my server alone occasionally when people report them to me can sometimes be quite a bit of work. Admittedly, using AOKIs toplist from like 1945 doesn't make that task that much easier ( manually editing them out of the SQL Table on the server ) - but otherwise its a great toplist "base" plugin which can be extended. We also managed to fix 1 or 2 issues because the code is open source ( Thanks AOKI ). And we're still trying to make it even better. Other servers developed their own toplist implementations, and they're great too.

I mean in the end it's never been different for any other game, or am i wrong? I come from a Unreal Tournament 2004 trials background - every server has always had their own toplist there - and something like a global toplist or even a "merged toplist" between servers has always been an insanely bad idea. It can go really good for a couple months or even years, but sometimes things just get out of hand because people that are having access to it abuse it.

Whitelisting servers might be an ok idea, but then there'd be no more reason to play on ANY other server out there. And even then - who do you even approve as absoloutely trustworthy? Could any community just come along and ask for a permission to use the global toplist? Why or why not? Why would they even host at this point? That'd kill the server and game faster than anything else. So what has worked so far? Servers earning their trust and honesty-levels simply by hosting and keeping their community active, with an active administratorship and a selfhosted toplist which doesn't look manipulated or biased, and: simply a server that is somewhat up2date - with a few new things occasionally - and of course all the new maps ready to be played.

Last but not least:

Momentum Mod.

The last time i talked to the developer of Momentum Mod which was a bit more than a year ago he told me its not actually a multiplayer game. You can check the times of other people, you can download their demos. But you can NOT actively play and chat with other players at the same time. This might be ok for some of the people that just enjoy their quiet rec-grinding sessions but where's the fun in that? I've never been deeply involved in the 1.6 stuff, and i think many 1.6 people prefer grinding recs on LAN, but there's some thing to the "online/social" side of the game that i'd definitely miss playing momentum-mod. Its definitely not made for someone like me - I've always played Trial/Climbing games that allow interaction and actually seeing your competitor live.


All of this is of course my humble opinion and my 0.02$ - I am coming from a different background - the whole XJ community thing and cs1.6 "culture" is definitely much different from what i've learned to love in UT2004.

[blockquote]In momentum mod, gocnak told me that they actually can and they plan on making it to a certain extend customizable.[/blockquote]

Aight i guess i was a bit outdated when it comes to that then! Thanks for clearing it up.

Back on top thread

Originally posted by KraXXXel

I still playing KZMod from time to time and the lack of a Global Leaderboard still piss me off. And yes i understand why Raptor don´t support it! But what if..... a simple GL every time will saved in a
colour just say red,trustworthy communitys (whitelist...etc) times will saved in blue.

Just to clarify since some points I've made before are being missed, just checking client and server cvars isn't where the problem is, the problem is people hacking the anticheat code that checks for that kind of thing, to fool the game into thinking your vars are valid when they aren't really.

Consider client-side hit detection (where your game tells the server when you hit someone), that would give perfect hitdetection to matter what, but you just can't do that because no matter what anticheat you put into the game, since it's running on their computer, it's vulnerable to hacking eventually.

In kzmod terms, that means the only place you could guarantee a server isn't reported a hacked, cheating time, is if it's an official dev-run server where we can be 100% sure there isn't bad activity going on. If we do that, why would anyone go to a community server like XJ if the only place to get a leaderboard times is on an official server?

I also said in my previous posts that whitelisting isn't perfect because if a whitelisted server assigns a less than honorable admin, you might find cheated times appearing that are barely detectable, like someone being bumped and so on. The people who really want to ruin leaderboards and so on don't make it obvious, it's always - half a millisecond and so on. When plugins are running, they have a lot of power over many of the game's internal vars.

And finally, say you whitelist a server, everyone will go to that server because the others aren't whitelisted. That means that other servers become depopulated because they physically can't offer the same competitive experience. How do you decide if a server can be trusted or not? They could pretend to be trustworthy just to mess with things. It becomes a massive trust headache.

As for Momentum, nothing said here for so far explains how they are going to deal with ensuring that servers don't report times that bypass their anticheats. The steamworks lobby system is a method for finding and connecting to servers, but the servers still have to be hosted by someone. If they host their own developer run servers it would work, but if they are relying on 3rd party servers the same way kzmod does, they are also going to encounter the same problem.

It's difficult to easily make a mac compatible version (same with linux) because testing it is difficult without another computer to run mac on, which is something I can't afford right now. If I can afford things like that, and the tools to make cross-platform compiling of the game easier, I'll definitely provide support for those platforms.

Thanks KarLi! All of this is really helpful feedback, and I pay close attention to all of it, I'm always trying to think of ways to get stuff like this into the game properly. The best way to help the game right now is to just play it more, that way there will be a sense of community and there will be competition in that regard.

KZMod was updated, fixing the bhop differences between kzmod and CS 1.6. Happy Climbing

U are not even playing it anymore