[Feature] BunnyTrack

[Chillosophy]

BunnyTrack

What is BunnyTrack
Bunnytrack originated from Unreal Tournament. It is basically a capture the flag map where a player (or team) has to score as many points as possible. This is not done by killing, but by completing an insane obstacle course, increasing in difficulty all the time. If you make it to the end after a dozen of tries you score a point and you're respawned at the beginning again.
Bunnytrack is strangely addictive. People who like Hay probably know what I mean, although hay has no increasing difficulty.

How is this done in SA-MP?
In SA-MP things will be a bit different, since we don't have flags or custom objects. That's not really a problem. The point of Bunnytrack is "make it to the end", so no flags needed. It doesn't have to be teambased either. Everything else is possible in SA-MP; moving objects (rotating seems to be a bit harder) and insane jumps aren't a problem.

What does a typical Bunnytrack map look like?
A Bunnytrack map is symmetrical, divided in two, or even four parts. This is to prevent annoying players from blocking the way to the end. It starts of easy, you spawn and start off with a few really easy tricks. You have little chance of failing here. If you proceed, things get a bit harder. Moving objects you have to jump on and very small ledges for example. As you proceed further the map one mistake will kill you instantly.

What's the fun?
The fun is becoming better and better. If at first you don't make a jump, and after five times you do, you really want to continue and get to the end of the map. You feel rewarded if you finally beat a hard part. This gamemode is not just about making it to the end, but also setting a good time. Compare it with a race. Getting to the end is hard, getting it done the fastest is way harder. There's always some highscore to beat.

Demo map
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I created this map in about an hour, with some finetuning later. Making a map like this is really easy.
0:06 - Here's an easy obstacle in the beginning of the map. If you fall of, you can just climb back up again. It just costs you time.
0:20 - This object is kind of slippery. If you're in a hurry, this might cause you to fall down.
0:53 - The elevator is a timing thing. It's not really hard. Getting up to the stairs above is a bit trickier.
1:13 - This is really narrow. If you try to run here, or move your mouse a little you'll fall off
1:28 - The little shiprail-thingies (bollards?) are really, really hard.
2:39 - Finally you have to get up the stairs and you're at the end. The last part is easy, but if you screw up you can start over

So this is just an example. It's not really long, but it is hard and addictive. After 42 tries I made it to the end. Then I found out the codec I used for recording was screwed. Another 11 tries and I have this video. I'd love to see this with more than 10 players

So what's your feature request?
One map is boring. I'd like to make this into a gamemode like race, with a lot of maps beneath it. Since this gamemode is really dependant on objects, Jay's world object handler would need to be used for it. Also high scores need to be recorded. My feature request is for a developer to make a handler for this gamemode, making it possible for maps to be simple textfiles (or xml, whatever).

I'll volunteer to create maps. Again, the above map is just an example. It's too short for a real map, but I hope it gives you the right idea.

What do you guys think of this idea I'm really excited about this, but I have no idea how everyone else will feel about it. Could be good, could be very bad

[Rien]

I love this!

[Joeri]

fun!

[tomozj]

Brilliant. Flags are easily possible - you simply attach it to the player. It's smooth and turns with the player. Anyway..

I like this. It's pretty cool, however I'm still not getting how this is a ctf mode? I think As a general race or such it's pretty cool, but lacks the feel of a team point scoring thing. I'd find this frustrating to do many times, as you'd be following the same path again and again - multiple maps would fix this as you said.

Perhaps it'd be a race between two teams, and that each map is a different "round" - 5 rounds in total? So you play loads of maps, and the team with most wins is the overall winner?

[Jay]

I have to admit, I like the idea of this. Whilst where on the topic, and since you mentioned hay, I was actually thinking about doing a haystack minigame similar to MTA's in another world, I even have a handler for it, I guess this is one of those type of games.

Lot's of challenges like this, especially with objects, will really make LVP more interesting in my opinion. I'm defintely in for the idea, I could even help map a few places since I have some experience myself. High scores would be nice, maybe for each course, say, a system where a player simply joins the course whenever they feel like, a checkpoint shows at the top, and the clock starts ticking? We could have different high scores and records for each course that save 

Nice video. That's quite a good map, definitely good enough to use in my opinion and a great start. The only problem with this system, is that since LVP already uses quite a few global objects, on a per world basis it only really supports at max about 130 objects, so we would have to be careful when it comes to limits. Unless, a proper handler was built that streams objects, then limits wouldn't be a problem. However the only problem with such a system is that it could be a heavy load on the server, especially now that it is official. I guess we'll just have to see how many objects we use when making the courses.

[Wesley]

This is brilliant. I love it 100%.

[Chillosophy]

Brilliant. Flags are easily possible - you simply attach it to the player. It's smooth and turns with the player. Anyway..

I like this. It's pretty cool, however I'm still not getting how this is a ctf mode? I think As a general race or such it's pretty cool, but lacks the feel of a team point scoring thing. I'd find this frustrating to do many times, as you'd be following the same path again and again - multiple maps would fix this as you said.

The CTF thing is a long story. In UT it had only one reason; you could score with flags. If you're at the end of the map, you get your opponents flag and run to your own flag to score. The two teams are completely separated from each other. The opponents team picks up your flag in the end and brings it to their own flag to score. UT has a few other benefits; you could boost other players with your instagib rifle to help them make difficult jumps.

I really just shouldn't have mentioned the CTF thing, because in pawn it's no problem at all. You could just enter a checkpoint and your score goes up. Let's forget about the flags

The nice thing about Bunnytrack is that, yes it is annoying, but it's also rewarding if you finally figure out how to do a jump. You have to be very careful and watch your steps. If you do manage to make it to the end, your new goal is to do it faster and faster.

Perhaps it'd be a race between two teams, and that each map is a different "round" - 5 rounds in total? So you play loads of maps, and the team with most wins is the overall winner?

Sounds good, but we could just leave it not teambased. In GTA there's not really anything you can do to help your teammates. If we do figure out something (for example: player A presses a button, an object comes flying towards player B, player B gets on and the object moves back to it's original position) it could be fun teambased. Teambased should be timed, like 15 minutes for every map and every win is 1 point for the team and for the player (so you can see who's the best player too).

Lot's of challenges like this, especially with objects, will really make LVP more interesting in my opinion. I'm defintely in for the idea, I could even help map a few places since I have some experience myself. High scores would be nice, maybe for each course, say, a system where a player simply joins the course whenever they feel like, a checkpoint shows at the top, and the clock starts ticking? We could have different high scores and records for each course that save 

Everyone is welcome to map ofcourse And I like the timing idea too. It could be both teambased and singleplayer. If you feel like practising or setting a highscore, just select a map from a menu similar to race. You can try as much as you want, every time you die the counter is reset to zero. If you're bored or if you want to try another map you can /leave. If you want to have a competition, there could be a 15-20 minute timer (maybe depending on the map). If the time is up, (a) winner(s) will be declared and given some bonus cash and the game will be over.

Nice video. That's quite a good map, definitely good enough to use in my opinion and a great start. The only problem with this system, is that since LVP already uses quite a few global objects, on a per world basis it only really supports at max about 130 objects, so we would have to be careful when it comes to limits. Unless, a proper handler was built that streams objects, then limits wouldn't be a problem. However the only problem with such a system is that it could be a heavy load on the server, especially now that it is official. I guess we'll just have to see how many objects we use when making the courses.

We should be careful with the server load. Some of our minigames are an entire gamemode on other servers. 130 objects shouldn't be a problem. The map I made is just objects, but we could use everywhere on the GTA map as a starting point for a map. I'm more concerned about timers. In the example map there's just one timer for the elevators, but some really challenging maps could have lots of moving objects, would that be a problem?

Something completely different; would it be possible to create a simple RotateObject? Since there's no such function yet, I guess it would need another timer for every object, that could be a problem.

[Jay]

There is a SA:MP callback - OnObjectMoved. This could replace timers and detect when the elevator has moved to the top, and to start moving back down again. 

RotateObject would be possible, but I'm pretty sure a small timer would be necessary for such a function. I guess it could be done from LVP's main timers, but it wouldn't be very smooth as the smallest one runs every second.

[HaZe]

damn chill, great idea and great map. i think it's fuckin' incredible. 

[Chillosophy]

New map, skyscraper Quality is really bad, but the original movie is about 200MB, bit pointless to post it.

[youtube=425,350]58y9dNIyG3k[/youtube]

I mess up a lot in this video, but it took me a lot of takes to get it right, then I found out I used the wrong codec and I could do it all over again. But anyway, this should give you the right impression, ignore all screwups