You are in your server doing your thing. You have a big smile on your face, as you see more and more players join your server. Suddenly features start to drop dead like flies in the california sun. Huh? Shouldn't there be a gunship? Where's my WMD? You quickly check your CFGs and do some tests locally, only to find out that everything is working fine. WTF?
Sounds familiar? This post is to make you aware of a setting in mapcontrol.cfg that could cause this confusion.
The setting I am referring to is:
set ex_indoor_large "1"
The ex_indoor setting is an easy way to automatically switch off features that are not designed for indoor use. By default it is disabled, but for some well-known indoor maps it is enabled. Here is a list of things that will be turned off when the indoor mode kicks in:
ambient artillery
ambient flak fx
ambient flares
ambient mortars
ambient planes
ambient tracers
ammo crate parachute drops
player parachute drops
rank system WMD
Gunship
The ex_indoor setting also proofs useful to switch off features that put an extra burden on the server, especially when there are a lot of players in the server, hence the _large extension. This means that the indoor mode will kick in (and consequently switch off the abovementioned features), if the number of players reaches to "large" mode, which is defined by ex_mapsizing_large in mapcontrol.cfg (default "14").
The var extensions _small, _medium and _large are very cool as they make the server adapt to the number of players in the server, but in this case it might be a bit too much adaptation.
It probably would've been best to release the mod without this setting, but...well... s h i t happens.
I recommend removing that line from mapcontrol.cfg. If you don't, at least be aware of its effect.
Lastly, let me thank GenSherman from the DevilDogz for reported this.
