Official addons

Paintball

An addon for RP Engine: a plugin that installs into the engine and adds one thing, rather than a pack you author yourself. Drop it in beside the engine and it brings its own content with it.

This one is paintball, red against blue. Hold right-click to fire a paint marker, left-click to aim down its sights, and throw a paint grenade round a corner. One hit splats you, you are back three seconds later, and the team with more kills when the clock runs out wins. Everything on screen during a match is drawn by a full-screen HUD, and one command builds a whole field to play on.

Installing#

It needs:

• Spigot or Paper, 1.21.11 or newer. The marker is held with item components that 1.21.11 added (hold to fire, no swing when you click, no reach to punch with).
• RP Engine 0.2.3 or newer. Paintball checks the engine's version as it starts, and on anything older says so in the console and disables itself.

1. 1

   Drop it in

   Put RPE-paintball.jar in plugins/ beside RPEngine.jar and start the server. Its content (the marker, mask, grenade and paint models, the sounds, the HUD and the scoreboard) installs itself into plugins/RPEngine/content/paintball/ on first boot, and the engine reloads once so the resource pack it serves carries all of it. That folder is yours: edit anything in it, and a new version of the plugin updates only the files you have not changed.

2. 2

   Build a field

   As an op, stand somewhere flat and run /pb arena generate main confirm. It builds a field around you and sets the arena up on it. See Building an arena before you do this anywhere you have built.

3. 3

   Play

   /pb join, then /pb start. Alone is fine: you play against nobody, which is a good way to try the marker.

If you run Multiverse-Core, Paintball loads after it, so an arena in one of its worlds is found.

Playing#

The lobby#

/pb join (or /pb on its own) puts you in the lobby: on the field you generate, a glass box over the middle that looks down on it. Your inventory and where you were are put away and given back when you leave. The hotbar holds:

/pb team red|blue|auto does the same as the two team items. Sides are kept within one player of each other: if too many people pick one, whoever picked it last plays for the other and is told so. Anybody who did not pick fills in where they are needed. Somebody who joins once a match is under way goes straight onto the smaller team.

The field has five spawns a side. That is not a cap: more players simply share them.

In a match#

Every match opens with a three-second countdown, frozen in place, then a whistle. You carry a marker, a paint grenade, a mask and a suit in your team's colour.

Every ball lands on the crosshair. It drops and slows as it flies, and it is fired so that, drop and all, it arrives where you are looking. From the hip it strays a little, by the spread the crosshair's ticks show: a little standing still, more on the move, in the air or sprinting, and half of either crouched. Down the sights there is none. Changing slot, sprinting or reloading brings the sights down.

The grenade goes off a second and a half after it lands and splats every enemy within three and a half blocks that it can see: a wall between you and it is cover. It stays in your hotbar, greyed out for fifteen seconds after a throw, and being splatted does not bring it back any sooner.

One hit splats you. You watch as a spectator for three seconds, then come back at one of your team's spawns, protected for a second and a half: a ball that hits you in that time does nothing. There is no friendly fire. Enemy name tags are hidden, so you find people by looking for them.

The match ends when the clock runs out (three minutes) or, if the server sets one, when a team reaches the kill limit. The result has the screen to itself for three seconds, then everybody gets the scoreboard, and a few seconds later it is back to the lobby for another. The paint comes off the walls between matches. It was never blocks: every splat is a display, so the arena itself is never changed.

What you see#

There is not a title or a boss bar in the game. The whole screen is one HUD:

• Top centre, the score strip: both teams' kills and the clock.
• Top left, the kill feed: the last three splats, who by, and with what.
• Bottom right, your weapon: the grenade's card, filling as it recharges, and the ammo panel with its bar.
• The crosshair, with its spread ticks from the hip and a hit marker when you land one.
• The middle, which carries every moment of a match: the countdown ring, GO!, the paint on your screen when you are splatted and the ring counting you back in, SPLATTED and who when you get somebody, and the result on its band with the final score.

The scoreboard (F, /pb scoreboard, or the lobby's item) is a dialog with both teams' tables, the top five of each, best first: each player's face, kills, deaths and accuracy.

While you are playing#

In the lobby and in a match alike, you take no damage and get no hungrier, and you cannot build, break, open doors or chests, pick anything up, or move or drop what you carry. Commands are limited to /pb, /msg, /tell, /w, /r, /reply, /me and /list, unless you have paintball.bypass.commands. Walking out of the arena's bounds during a match puts you back where you last stood.

/pb leave always works and needs no permission, so nobody can be stuck in a match. Disconnecting, or being teleported to another world by something else, counts as leaving. If the server goes down mid-match, everybody gets their things back the next time they join.

Running matches#

Matches do not start on their own: somebody with paintball.start runs /pb start. Players who can start a match are told so when they join the lobby; everybody else is told the lobby is waiting for an op.

• /pb start starts a match now, on the arena you are in. If you are not in yet it joins you first, which is why it works alone. /pb start <arena> names one.
• /pb stop during a match ends it the ordinary way: the result, the scoreboard, then back to the lobby. In the lobby it sends everybody home.

/pb as <player> <subcommand> runs a subcommand as somebody else, for NPCs, command blocks and anything else that can only run console commands: an NPC that runs /pb as <player> join for whoever clicks it is a join button. What the player runs is checked against their permissions, not the sender's.

Building an arena#

An arena is a waiting spot, at least one spawn for each team, and bounds: the box a player cannot walk out of during a match. Arenas are kept in plugins/RPEPaintball/arenas.yml. An arena id is lower-case letters, digits, - and _, up to 32 of them; its display name can be anything.

Generate a field#

/pb arena generate <id> confirm [name]

Builds a speedball field centred on you and sets the arena up on it, open straight away: a floor paint shows up on, a netted fence, a base at each end, inflatable-style bunkers placed with point symmetry so both teams play the same field, and a glass box over the middle to wait in. Without confirm it only says what it is about to do.

Running it again with the same id rebuilds the field where you now stand. From the console, name the place outright:

/pb arena generate <id> at <world> <x> <y> <z> [name]

Set one up by hand#

To play on a map you built yourself, stand in the right places and run:

1. 1

   Create it

   /pb arena create <id> [name], in the world the arena is in.

2. 2

   Where players wait

   /pb arena setwaiting <id> where you stand, facing the way you face.

3. 3

   Spawns

   /pb arena addspawn <id> red, and again for blue. Up to five a team; past five the oldest goes. /pb arena clearspawns <id> <red|blue> starts a team's over.

4. 4

   Bounds

   /pb arena wand hands you the bounds wand. Left-click a block for one corner, right-click another for the opposite corner, then /pb arena setbounds <id>.

5. 5

   Open it

   /pb arena enable <id>. If anything is missing it says what.

/pb arena list shows every arena, its world, and whether it is open, ready, or what it still needs.

Managing arenas#

A closed arena cannot be joined or started by anybody, however they ask: /pb join <id>, /pb start <id> and /pb as all say it is closed. Closing one sends its lobby home, and a match being played on it ends the way /pb stop ends one (the result, the scoreboard), after which everybody goes home rather than back to the lobby. Deleting an arena does the same. Staff can still tp to a closed arena and change it.

Spawns and bounds cannot be changed while a match is being played on an arena: /pb stop <id> first.

Commands#

/paintball, or /pb for short. /pb help and tab-completion only offer what you may run.

Permissions#

One node per command, so you can hand out exactly what somebody needs: a referee who can start and stop matches but not touch arenas, say. paintball.play and paintball.admin are shorthand: each grants every node listed under it, and nothing checks them directly. /pb leave needs no permission at all.

Configuration#

plugins/RPEPaintball/config.yml. The numbers:

match-seconds: 180
# End early when a team reaches this many kills. 0 plays the whole clock.
kill-limit: 0
freeze-seconds: 3
respawn-seconds: 3
spawn-protection-seconds: 1.5
# How long the final scoreboard stays up before everybody is back in the lobby.
end-seconds: 12
 
marker:
  # Ticks between shots while the trigger is held (3 = about seven a second).
  fire-interval-ticks: 3
  hopper: 40
  reload-seconds: 1.6
  # Blocks per tick as the ball leaves the barrel, and what pulls it down.
  speed: 2.4
  gravity: 0.022
  drag: 0.992
  spread-degrees: 0.7
  moving-spread-degrees: 2.4
  # Left click aims down the sights: no spread at all, and slower on your feet.
  aim-spread-degrees: 0.0
  aim-slowdown: 0.55
  # How far out the crosshair finds what you are aiming at.
  range: 96
  lifetime-ticks: 60
 
grenade:
  # Greyed out for this long after a throw. 0 for no wait at all.
  cooldown-seconds: 15
  fuse-ticks: 30
  throw-speed: 1.1
  radius: 3.5
 
paint:
  # The most splats one match keeps on the walls; the oldest go first.
  max-decals: 1500
 
# Which marker each team carries: ember, tide, toxic, sunset or gold.
teams:
  red:
    marker: ember
  blue:
    marker: tide
 
hud:
  kill-feed-seconds: 8
  kill-banner-seconds: 2.5
  hit-marker-ticks: 6
 
update-check: true

Every word a player reads is under messages: in the same file, in MiniMessage: chat, the lobby's hotbar, the player list, the scoreboard's heading and the HUD's text. The words drawn as pictures in the HUD (GO!, VICTORY) are art in the content folder rather than config.

The HUD and the scoreboard are RP Engine content like any other, so ui.hud and ui.scoreboard can point at a HUD or dialog of your own to replace either. A replacement has to show the same values.

/pb reload rereads the file, and arenas.yml too unless somebody is playing. Options a newer version adds are written into your existing file when the server starts, with their defaults, and nothing already there is touched.

Update check#

With update-check: true, Paintball asks SpigotMC for its current version a few seconds after the server starts and every six hours after that. While you are behind, it says so in the console, and to every player with paintball.update (operators, by default) on each check and when they join, with a link to the SpigotMC page. Set it to false to turn that off.