Question about gametype respawn zones.

There was a prevailing wisdom in forging for a long time that you needed a single strong zone covering the whole map. The reasons were apparently these, as far as I could tell: 1. it makes it highly unlikely you'll spawn outside the map (say a stray spawn point placed and forgotten about, or one of forge world's built-in, invisible spawn locations); 2. It creates a basic dynamic spawn system out of all the map's respawn points, which you can then carve up with various smaller weak and anti spawn zones. Some people were convinced for a long time (and probably still are) that stacking and overlapping weak and anti zones, within a larger strong zone - which is required for the other zone types to work - created an awesome spawn system that worked better than just having one or two strong respawn zones and nothing else.

Personally, based on everything I've read about Bungie's spawn system from people who actually tested it, as well as Bungie's info, as well as my own testing experiences... the complex system with all those sub-zones shouldn't really be any better than a simple system of either no respawn zones at all, or team-specific zones for static spawning. I think people misunderstood how the zones behaved and when they saw test results they liked, they attributed it wrongly to zone behavior that doesn't really exist. I'm sure there are occasionally reasons to use a few weak or anti zones, but all the stacked/overlapping zone maps make no sense to me. And the single map-encompassing hard zone doesn't seem to really be needed as long as you place spawn points only within the map boundaries, and plenty of them.

 

I set mine different but uses same principle. The zone the size of map is that on koth and oddball it is better to spawn on team or random places rather than setting a specific zone to spawn as that makes play boring and repetitive.

 

Spawn points are what determine where a player will spawn. A respawn zone tells the spawn engine which of the spawn points are acceptable/preferred places to spawn a player.

What you're describing is a single, neutral Respawn Zone that covers all spawn points. This allows players of any team to spawn at any point. While this might seem redundant (since players would still be able to spawn at all points if no zones were present), oftentimes maps will have two team-specific Respawn Zones (one red, one blue) covering each team's respective half of the map, which creates what is called static spawning (where each team can only spawn on their side of the map). This is the preferred setup for gametypes like CTF because teams have a static base they must defend.

In highly dynamic gametypes like oddball and KOTH, however, it is often preferable to allow players of any team to spawn anywhere on the map depending on game conditions. A neutral Respawn Zone that only shows up in these gametypes allows you to leave your team-specific zones where they are (preserving you CTF spawning) while still allowing dynamic spawns when you want them.

 

Ah yes, that's the other thing, I forgot to mention that. I've done this before when I wanted dynamic spawning just for a couple specific gametypes; you end up using fewer zones sometimes than if you used gametype-specific respawn zones for all the gametypes you want to be static.

 

The proper way to have teams spawn on their side of the map for a set of games is to have a respawn zone for each team for each game type, thus allowing them to spawn anywhere on the map for all other game types. While even I thought to allow dynamic spawning across the map for one or two game types by using an all encompassing neutral respawn zone, I found out that Stock Pile actually turns every Respawn Zone on regardless of their game type label. Thus, any neutral respawn zone would be active for Stock Pile and break the game play (you don't want dynamic spawning for stock pile or any other objective game).

Having said that, bungie maps have been known to exhibit features in the forging of those maps that demonstrate clearly the forger had no idea how spawning worked. SwordBase is one example and had four bloopers in it alone.

So if stock pile is not a game you want to support, you can use any approach, even the economical approach of neutral respawn zones for those games you want dynamic spawning for.