[Blog] Race 1.1 and voting fixes (by ChrML)

[Brophy]

As you know, and as we've noticed, the voting system in the first release of Race was pretty bad. As everyone can call a vote for a new map any time and it instantly changes, a lot of people abuse it on servers with a lot of players and votes are being initiated like every 5 second.

In Race 1.1 we've been working on fixing that. In Race 1.1, it's possible to disable instant map changes overall and only use map nominations at the end of a map. As all maps got dynamic respawning (unless they specify not to) and a map timelimit can be enforced in the server config, all maps will end sooner or later and hopefully all players can play it the entire time due to the respawning. At the end of a map, the server will call a vote with some randomly picked maps and "Play last map again". The number of randomly picked maps can be specified in the server config and can be from 2 to 8. When that vote ends (everyone has voted or the 10 second timer ends), it will pick the two most voted maps (ie "Destruction Derby" and "Play last map again"), then call a new vote with only those two maps in it. This has been done in other games and appears to work very nicely. The random maps chosen are in a maplist that will rotate when all maps have been in a vote, ensuring that some maps doesn't appear in a vote a lot more often than other maps.

The new voting system is about halfway done. Requires some testing and shortcuts like if only one/two maps were voted on in the first vote, skip the second one, and maybe a realtime vote count next to the alternatives.

Have a nice day .

[Si|ent]

Excellent, much more polished than a simple global vote timer.

It would also be very handy if map order could be specified somewhere in the server, this saves scripts from having to force load a map the instant another one loads to get to the one required.