Giving players or srv admins the choice: QUAD yes or no

[spirit]

When making a Quake 2 deathmatch map, is there any way for the mapper to offer players or server admins the choice whether or not they want a QUAD in the map?

In Quake 3, you can make the QUAD team-DM only, and it will not show up in normal DM. In SP, you can make certain items spawn or not based on difficulty settings in many games. But is there any way to offer the choice whether people want a QUAD or not in Quake 2 MP?

(In case you care for the reason why I'm asking: in my opinion the QUAD is
* a serious tactical thing on TDM maps, where people will compete for it, and where it will focus the action of the map when it is about to spawn
* a funny item for not-so-serious DM games with lots of players on crowded maps
* a very annoying thing to have in 1vs1, where the non-QUAD player will just run and try to hide, which is boring.
So if I can, I would like to give players/admins the choice whether they want it.)

The only solution I know in Q2 is to have 2 versions of the map, one with QUAD and one without, which may not be that great. Maybe some Q2 servers or MODS support voting QUAD on or off and so I do not need to care?

[Null]

With overrides you can easily remove any entity including quad items. Most servers run r1q2 these days so they already support this neat feature.
On the Whale server we use overrides all the time to do exactly that. They're basically a textfile layer over-top of bsp, that gets read by the server, allowing us to easily create multiple versions of maps simply by editing lines of text. Most map examples in the following sections were created by taking advantage of bsp overrides, and we even experimented injecting model walls to block off areas thus creating map versions with variable sizes: (all based on the same bsp file)

leray.proboards.com/thread/3568/map-tools
leray.proboards.com/board/38/new-quake-2-map-remixes
leray.proboards.com/thread/3577/pirate-fortress-new-tropical-island

P.S. Although not supported across all of Quake 2, Wodx mod provides additional flexibility for level specific ban flags (i.e. dmflags and more) that can be injected via overrides. The mod takes into consideration server load when determining which map rotation to use (small, medium, large, or xxl) Also, one can easily turn any map into rail or grenade only map just by editing override's startgun variable in notepad. In the future there's also possibility to add level specific spawn logic just for certain items (such as powerups) based on server load.

leray.proboards.com/thread/3458/introducing-ultimate-quake-weapons-multi

[spirit]

Thanks for the info, null. So I'll add a QUAD.

[knightmare]

For small or 1v1 matches, it might be a better idea to have a double damage powerup instead. It would be nice if some multiplayer mods would add this, as the code for it has been available for ages.

It's quite easy to either rip or re-implement its code from the Ground Zero source, as it's essentially a copy of the Quad Damage, but just multiplies damage by 2 instead. It has its own model and sounds, but they're just edited versions of the quad damage ones.

[spirit]

After some considerations and playtesting, I decided NOT to add the QUAD.