Let's talk about playing with more than 10 players (maps, servers, optimisation, etc)

Alright then. So at the moment, thanks to PA's great modding community (and the fact that Uber built an engine from scratch that strongly supports modding - yay!), we have the ability to host games on custom servers that allow for more than ten players. We've had fun with that. Hopefully Uber still intend to improve the engine, optimise etc, in order to officially support this.

I have some specific questions about creating maps that support more than ten players (tying in with my other thread about mathematically defining 'fair' spawns, that are equidistant from all of their adjacent neighbouring spawns.

1) Does the game currently support manually defining more than 10 landing zones? I've been trying this lately, and although I am a noob with the system designer, I've done lots oftests now and whenever i host a custom server, players don't land in the zones. If the players are ten or less, they land in the zones. But more than ten and the game seems to just choose random spawns.

2) What is the new "rules" list for in the .pas file?

3) is there any official documentation on the structure of the .pas file format? It seems to be very sensitive to whitespace (e.g. has to be exactly as Uber's parser expects it).

If anybody else has questions on this topic, then put them on here, but I'd like to try and foster discussion on this topic. I think huge free for all and team games, on massive systems, is right at the heart of PA, and I for one would like to try and help make them happen. Even if it is just by helping make some maps with fair spawns and metal distribution that support more than ten players

sensitive to whitspace? isnt it just a json file?

I've no idea what it is mate

It does look like JSON, i'm sure it is, never encountered it until now so had to familiarise myself with it. I just mean that when importing .pas files, i've noticed it has't worked, and so i compare my .pas file with one generated from a system and exported, noticed a discrepancy in termsof whitespace (e.g. two tabs instead of one), changed it, imported again, and it worked. So I think the layout relevant to whitespace is important, which is a little frustrating. Anyway, I really don't know what i'm doing, just hacking my way through the forest so to speak T'is a minor enquiry compared to the others.

Gandalf has tried compiling issues with pas files here. I don't know if maps with >10 spawns works fine, I was going to point to a RR map as an example of something with many spawns, but they too only have 10. >10 players can play those simultaneously with no random spawns, it appears many people are given the choice of the same spawn.
Maybe @reptarking can shed some light.

As for reducing lag in >10 player games, I recommend you try my maintenance mod. It should help reduce lag by countering spam in the late game, without affecting the early game to a noticeable degree.

I just plopped down 100 spawns in a small area and hit save and it works for me. When I test my map I see 50 spawns

When you say 'it works', how did you test it? I've been using a dedicated server I have access to to host the game, I add say 12 AI players if the map has 12 spawns, spectate, and see if they spawn in the spawn zones.

They don't

EDIT: I might well be doing something wrong though, in the system designer or in the PAS file.