Death, respawn and revive

Deadlock's respawn time is not one number. It is a ramp that grows with match time, plus a penalty for dying in your own base, plus a penalty for being rich, plus a penalty if your team has nobody else alive. For a custom gamemode you almost always want to flatten all of it, and that takes nine cvars rather than one.

The model, with real defaults

Every default on this page was read from a cvar dump taken off a live server, not from memory.

The override, which beats everything

The ramp

Respawn time is interpolated between a minimum and a maximum, and both ends step up at fixed points in match time. The _time cvars are the game-time thresholds in seconds; the others are the respawn lengths.

The penalties, which are the easy ones to miss

Pinning respawn flat

This is what both gamemodes do. Every ramp end is pinned to the same value so neither the engine's interpolation nor the base penalty can stretch it.

private void ApplyFastRespawnCvars() {
    float t = Math.Max(0.5f, Config.RespawnSeconds);
    ConVar.Find("citadel_player_override_spawn_time")?.SetFloat(t);
    ConVar.Find("citadel_player_spawn_time_min_ramp_1")?.SetFloat(t);
    ConVar.Find("citadel_player_spawn_time_min_ramp_2")?.SetFloat(t);
    ConVar.Find("citadel_player_spawn_time_min_ramp_3")?.SetFloat(t);
    ConVar.Find("citadel_player_spawn_time_max_ramp_1")?.SetFloat(t);
    ConVar.Find("citadel_player_spawn_time_max_ramp_2")?.SetFloat(t);
    ConVar.Find("citadel_player_spawn_time_max_ramp_3")?.SetFloat(t);
    ConVar.Find("citadel_player_spawn_time_max_respawn_time")?.SetFloat(t);
    ConVar.Find("citadel_player_spawn_time_in_base_penalty")?.SetFloat(0f);
    Console.WriteLine($"[respawn pinned to {t}s]");
}

ConVar.Find("citadel_player_death_no_heroes_respawn_penalty")?.SetFloat(0f);
ConVar.Find("citadel_player_spawn_time_rich_nw_penalty_max_ramp_pct")?.SetFloat(0f);
ConVar.Find("citadel_player_spawn_time_rich_nw_penalty_max_ramp_extratime")?.SetFloat(0f);

The events, and the order they actually fire in

Capture the death position in the handler, not later

[GameEventHandler("player_death")]
public HookResult OnPlayerDeath(GameEvent e) {
    var ctrl = e.GetPlayerController("userid");
    int slot = ctrl.EntityIndex - 1;

    // BEFORE the engine moves the corpse, or your marker lands somewhere else
    Vector3 fell = default; bool haveFell = false;
    var vp = e.GetPlayerPawn("userid");
    if (vp != null && vp.IsValid) { fell = vp.Position; haveFell = true; }

    // Anything that removes entities goes on the NEXT TICK, never here. Doing it
    // from inside a game event hook is the shape of thing that has hung this map.
    Timer.NextTick(() => { /* cleanup, win checks */ });
    return HookResult.Continue;
}

Re-read the pawn after a respawn

[GameEventHandler("player_respawned")]
public HookResult OnPlayerRespawned(GameEvent e) {
    int slot = e.GetPlayerController("userid").EntityIndex - 1;
    Timer.Once(700.Milliseconds(), () => {
        // Re-read from the controller rather than trusting the pawn captured at event
        // time. Writing to a captured handle left a Bedwars player stuck out of the
        // world with no log line to show for it.
        var p = Players.FromSlot(slot)?.GetHeroPawn()?.As<CCitadelPlayerPawn>();
        if (p == null || !p.IsValid) return;
        // now it is safe to teleport, set team, set health
    });
    return HookResult.Continue;
}

Life state

Alive = 0   Dying = 1   Dead = 2   Respawnable = 3   Respawning = 4

In practice pawn.Health > 0 is what our gamemodes test, because a plugin usually cares about "can this player act" rather than the exact engine state.

Building a revive mechanic

This is the BattleBox design, which went through three versions before it worked. Worth reading for what was thrown away as much as what was kept.

What did not work

• Punch the marker a set number of times. This needs you to classify light against heavy melee, and you cannot: the game reports citadel_ability_hold_melee for both, and melee damage scales with level and items so an early heavy and a late light overlap. Measured in a real game: light reported around 50 damage, heavy around 99, with the same ability name.
• Count the melees anyway. Replaced with "let the marker take real damage and fire the revive when it dies", so nothing has to classify anything.
• A 35 unit ring to stand in. A hero is about 70 units wide, so the ring was narrower than the player and charging it meant standing on one exact pixel. 140 is the working radius.

What works

1. On death, drop a marker where they fell: a ring of beams, a world text with their name, and a beam straight up so it is visible over cover.
2. On a 100ms tick, test whether a living squad mate is inside the ring radius. Accumulate time while one is, reset to zero the moment they step out.
3. At the required stand time, revive: remove the marker, teleport them back to the spot they went down on, set health to a fraction of maximum.
4. Apply a brief debuff so the revive is not a free extra gun the instant it lands. BattleBox uses modifier_citadel_cursed for three seconds.

Tint the marker to show state without redrawing it

// CBaseEntity.RenderColor is live, so red turns sapphire the instant charging starts
foreach (var o in ring.Concat(beam))
    if (o is CBaseEntity e && e.IsValid) e.RenderColor = colour;

Making players unkillable

There is no "godmode" cvar to reach for. Refuse the damage:

public override HookResult OnTakeDamage(TakeDamageEvent args) {
    int idx = args.Entity.EntityIndex;
    if (_safePawns.Contains(idx)) return HookResult.Stop;
    return HookResult.Continue;
}

Blocking abilities is separate and cheaper, and the two are usually wanted together:

public override void OnAbilityAttempt(AbilityAttemptEvent args) {
    if (!shouldBlock) return;
    args.BlockedButtons |= InputButton.AllAbilities | InputButton.AllItems | InputButton.Attack;
}

Respawn timings for things that are not players