Punaball

PunaBall is a ball game modification for Turbo Sliders. The original idea was designed by Mirko Paloniemi aka Punatiainen. In PunaBall, two teams of cars try to push special ball car into other team's goal. Originally, this was played so that the server admin manually added the ball player and moved it to start position when needed.

Starting from version 1.0.5, Turbo Sliders has experimental support for many PunaBall features. Clients of earlier versions (1.0.x) can join and play but upgrading to the latest version is recommended to get the full support.

Version 1.0.5 has one PunaBall track included. The original track design is by Mirko Paloniemi and the new graphics have been made by Jussi Kemppainen. The game also includes default PunaBall ball which is very close to the original versions by Punatiainen and Tijny.

When a PunaBall track is driven in a cup, instead of normal racing, people are playing PunaBall in two teams. Ball is automatically added to the game and players begin in special start positions. When a goal is scored, message tells the scorer, passer and current situation. Game can end either by the time running out or either team reaching the required amount of goals.

MAKING NEW PUNABALL TRACKS AND BALLS

To make a PunaBall track, first make it like a normal track but editor F9 mode to change the track type to PunaBall track. There must also be at least three control lines in the track. The first one defines the center line, the second is the goal line in the right (where team 1 scores goals) and the third is the goal line in the left. Remember to put the line far enough since the line specifies where the center point of the ball is supposed to be when a goal is scored. It is also recommended to add some unreachable lines to make it impossible to complete laps with earlier game versions. If you want, you can also tell what the default car for the track is by adding ball car type name after the keyword PunaBallTrack in its trk file, for example like this: "PunaBallTrack MyBall". Ball should have line "ball 1" in its car definition. This way, it won't have engine sound and it can't be selected as a normal car. To see examples, see tracks/punaball/PB-Arena.trk and cars/punaball.car.

SETTINGS AND SERVER COMMANDS

Before a race starts, people can change their team with server command "/team [] [1|2]", so for example by saying "/team 1", player moves to team 1 if not already there. Admins can also change the team for different players. Current teams can be seen with "/team". Server can have automatic team adjustments which causes the teams to get balanced before the game starts. Server may also make the team members to have the same base color (there can still be different stripes to make identifying easier).

Many PunaBall features can be adjusted either in sliders.ini or by server commands. Note that server commands take effect when the next game starts, not during game. Here are the available settings:

  • TimeInMinutes: How many minutes the game will last (0 for no limit) (server command /time [])
  • MinGoals: How many goals to make to win the the game (0 for no limit) (server command /goals [ []])
  • GoalDiff: How big a goal difference is required to win when MinGoals reached (server command /goals [ []])
  • BallCarType: The default ball car type to use if track does not specify ball
  • PointsForSoccerWin: How many cup points players get for PunaBall wins (server command /pbpoints [ []])
  • PointsForSoccerDraw: How many cup points players get for PunaBall draws (server command /pbpoints [ []])
  • AutoAdjustTeams: Whether to balance teams before game starts (server command /autoadjust [])
  • ForceTeamColors: Whether to make players in the same team have similar colors (server command /forcecolor [])
  • TeamColor: Team colors for teams (red, green and blue components) (server command /teamcolor [ ] where color is given in hexadecimal, for example red is ff0000)
  • BallColor: Ball color (server command /ballcolor [])
  • ShrinkSoccer: Whether to have shrink-to-fit always on in PunaBall games.

There is also command /helpball to list all PunaBall related commands. In addition to this, there is also one new special track addition command which allows you to add the same track several times in a single cup:

/tracks /add2 TrackToAdd

You can also change the color of you player (for the duration of the cup) with command "/color [] ". If team colors are active, this color becomes your secondary color. There is also a longer form "/color [ [ []]]" for more complex colors.

When running an automatic server, race idle time is active but it means the amount of time that has gone without anyone touching the ball. There is also a new macro PunaBallCup that is run after Cup macro if the next track is a PunaBall track.