Legacy:Mapping For King Of The Hill

King Of The Hill (KOTH) is a team game, similar to Domination. (general explanation here...)

Several mod teams have created implementations of KOTH for UT:

• KOTH2, coded by Gorgor, from which is derived
  • KOTH2 with bot support, by Jason Yu (Captain Kewl), which is used in part or whole for
    • KOTH and Roving KOTH, for Marathon|Rampancy, and
    • M:R KOTH, for Marathon: Resurrection
• KOTH, by the ChaosUT team

General principles

Arena-style maps with a hill in the center tend to yield better gameplay than standard deathmatch-style maps.

Use your creativity to create "hills" (ie frozen pond, bottom of a crater, top of a skyscraper,ect)

Specifics

KOTH2 maps are named with the KOTH- prefix and contain at least one Hill actor. The Hill is a Trigger subclass which is activated when a PlayerPawn or Bot (UT) falls within its collision cylinder. The only stipulation in placement is that it (the KOTH2 actor itself) is reachable by a pathhnode network – this is to ensure proper bot behavior.

Note ChaosUT KOTH maps can use a hill trigger or zone as sometimes a zone is a better choice (non-circular hills). The ChaosUT KOTH also requires defense points be placed inside the hill. The ChaosUT KOTH version also has a team option. You should group your PlayerStarts together and remember to set the same TeamNumber of those players starts.

Related Topics

• Mod Ideas/KOTH
• Mapping For King Of The Hill/CUT2_KOTH - Mapping for ChaosUT2: Evolution (King of the Hill mode)

Links

• KOTH2: http://www.boilingpoint.com/~jasonyu/koth2/
• The Ventcore Project (KOTH2 Maps): http://www.frogblast.com/
• The ChaosUT (KOTH Maps): http://dynamic4.gamespy.com/~chaotic/mapping/mappingguide.php?s=3.1

Discussion

Jb: First of all thanks for fixing my Wiki blunders. Sorry I will get the hang of it. But yes. The KOTH2 was originally coded by Gorgor. His version used triggers but was not compatible with the bots (ie the bots did not know how to play KOTH). The Marathon Rampancy (SP?) team also based their version of the KOTH2 using triggers. However their version was compatible with bots. The ChaosUT team coded their to use hill triggers and zones (as sometimes you want to use a hill zone, other times you want a trigger). They also used Defense points and placed these defense points inside the hill trigger/zone. They did the so that you could place several defense points inside a hill trigger/zone and the bot would move from defense point to defense point to more mimic how a human might play KOTH. Finally this allowed them to handle multiple hill. You can set the defense points fortstand tag for each hill. Thus a bot wound wonder from hill to hill. Finally the ChaosUT was the only one to have a Team version of KOTH as well. The key to making it compatible with bots is base KOTH of TeamGamePlus so you can set orders for the bots.

capt. k.: That's why I specified "KOTH2" in the original page title.  :)

Tarquin: I've rearranged a bit, but as I've never played this there's some blanks I can't write: a general intro to the concept, the general ideas involved in the maps, and the specifics for each version. I take it none of them are compatible with each other?

Jb: The KOTH2 code was intergrated into Marthon Rampancy so yes those are compatabile. Saddly to say that the ChoasUT maps are not. We offered more features for the KoTH game play but we had to do things a bit different in order to add these features (Team version of KOTH, addtion of zone to mark hill areas, a flag to allow for hill time given if the player is not alone on the hill and more control over where the bot defened including moving around on the hill). I have been looking for a way to make them compatibile but have yet to fine one :(

capt. k. Integrated into Marathon Resurrection and otherwise reverse compatible. I think Rampancy just builds on top of it. I don't think there's any way to get around the dependency on KOTH2.u of maps built around it, but as triggers aren't static, one could easily do a check for KOTH2Hill actors after the map is loaded and replace with or add their own hills.

Jb: Capt. K, good point and I know I can do that. However we use Defense points to route the bots too the hill. So I could add a defense point near the location of the KOTH2Hill Triggers that the other mods use. But I would be worried that the bots may run into issues (like would I have to rebuild the paths, putting defense points too close together may cause the bots to get stuck, ect).