Player Spawn Points

NOTE: This guide uses the terms “level” and “map” interchangeably.

Introduction

Nazi Zombies: Portable expands on Quake’s foundation for Player Spawn entities (info_player_*) to allow for greater creator control over content, and to accomodate the four player co-operative nature of Zombies gameplay. It does this by replacing the legacy info_player_start and similar entities with four distinct spawn point entities per player:

info_player_1_spawn - Player 1's Spawn, often assigned as "'Tank' Dempsey".
info_player_2_spawn - Player 2's Spawn, often assigned as "Nikolai Belinski".
info_player_3_spawn - Player 3's Spawn, often assigned as "Takeo Masaki".
info_player_4_spawn - Player 4's Spawn, often assigned as "Edward Richtofen".

Ideal Spawn Point Conditions

Example of reasonably placed Spawn Points, from Nacht der Untoten — Example of reasonably placed Spawn Points, from *Nacht der Untoten*

It is important to consider the surroundings of any given potential spawn point location. Spawn locations must not be inside of any geometry, and it is recommended to not place them inside of any other entities your level may contain. Spawn points must also be reasonably spaced from one another, not cramped together in a small space – this ensures any AFK players are not blocking others from interacting with their environment when gameplay begins.

Call of Duty: Zombies’s preferred Spawn Order — *Call of Duty: Zombies*’s preferred Spawn Order

Call of Duty: Zombies often follows a strict order with spawn point locations, player one representing the “center” with players two, three, and four surrounding them. This is not a required attribute to be met when designing levels and placing spawn points.

Features

Customizing Starting Weapon Loadouts

Nazi Zombies: Portable allows level creators to customize all four player’s starting weapons and their ammunition amount individually. This is done via three distinct entitiy fields:

weapon : Starting Weapon
currentmag : Starting Magazine
currentammo : Starting Reserve Ammunition

If nothing is provided for weapon, the default loadout is applied (A Colt M1911, with 8 rounds in the magazine and 32 in the reserve).

An example of a map maker assigning Player 1’s starting weapon

Specifying Character Names

A depiction of a Character’s name appearing on the HUD

Using the name key, level creators can specify the name for the Spawn Point’s designated Character. There is a 16 character limit associated with this. Upon spawning, the client will have their Character’s name displayed on the HUD to the right of their Score before fading away.

Targeting

Upon a client spawning, standard Quake targets are fired by the spawn point. This, as an example, can be used to only activate specific AI spawn points on a section of the level, in the same vein as Verrückt. It is important to note that this is also activated upon respawn, so it may be wise to attach the spawn point to a trigger_relay set to activate only once, if you do not want your targets activated beyond game start/client join.

Backwards Compatibility with Legacy Maps

Levels created before the implementation of features showcased here are still fully supported by Nazi Zombies: Portable. This includes maps that use Quake’s standard info_player_start entity and ones that used NZ:P’s previous-and-primitive co-operative info_player_tank, info_player_doctor, etc. entities.

If a level only features less than four spawn point entities, NZ:P will algorithmically generate the other necessary points. It will use Player 1 as a starting origin, and attempt to generate other spawns in the same preferred order as Call of Duty (see Ideal Spawn Point Conditions). It makes 12 total attempts to do so with three different distances between Player 1’s spawn. If all of these fail, the additional spawn points will appear in the same location as Player 1.