Huge thank you Dandy Boy. I'm indebted to him for letting me bounce ideas off him about SpawnCycles, volunteering to test the feature as I developed it, and sinking a substantial amount of playtest time into several SpawnCycle presets. I would not have been able to include the SpawnCycle=basic_moderate in this release without him. I look forward to adding additional presets in future releases.

Thanks to Mike, for playtesting and especially for setting up a server running CD and inviting me to play; and also to Skell, for sharing some of his Unrealscript wisdom (even though I let a lot of it go to waste in this release).


This feature takes the luck out of what zeds spawn and when. No more guessing about whether you'll get 3FP or just 2SC. It lets you control what zeds spawn, in what squads, on what waves, in what order. This covers everything from big zed squads down to every last crawler. The only thing it does not cover is boss waves.

If you want, you can exercise full control over every spawn by writing your own detailed SpawnCycle in KFGame.ini and setting SpawnCycle=ini. Or, you can use the SpawnCycle=basic_moderate preset included in this release, in which case you don't have to touch KFGame.ini at all.

Detailed documentation on this feature is available here: https://github.com/notblackout/kf2-controlled-difficulty/blob/master/spawn.md

However, to just get started as quickly as possible without reading anything, run this:


After the map loads, type this to see a summary of what you're about to play:


This basic_moderate preset feels similar to a roughly average HOE Long game, with a few tweaks:

* Big zed presence increases smoothly and linearly, so that each wave is a slight but distinct step up from the preceding wave. There are 54 bigs in total over an entire 5 faked (6 player) long game on thi spreset.
* On those same settings, only 47 husks spawn. This is only about two-thirds-ish the normal number of husks. The husks also generally spawn one at a time.

This is not the most challenging preset imaginable, but I think it's a good starting point.

Here's Dandy Boy clearing this preset rather decisively on MaxMonsters=24, FakePlayers=5, SpawnMod=0.25:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQXu_gizKPQ

I made some charts visualizing where the big zeds and husks spawn relative to the trash separating them: http://imgur.com/a/oKVmS


This controls which boss spawns at the end of a game. It can be set to unmodded to keep the default random behavior.


A past release introduced AlbinoCrawlers, but there was no way to control whether albino alpha clots would spawn. The new AlbinoAlphas=true|false option does just that.

As noted in the documentation, activating a SpawnCycle effectively disables the AlbinoAlphas and AlbinoCrawlers options. Whether and when albinos spawn is controlled by the SpawnCycle definition, in that case. basic_moderate has no albinos whatsoever, so you will not see any when playing that preset no matter what the AlbinoAlphas/-Crawlers options are set to.


The old "(GameConductor woken up) ControlledDifficulty forcing SpawnMod =..." message no longer spams once a second into the log. The underlying functionality has not changed, I just removed this extremely noisy log message.

The mod is also much more consistent about honoring bLogControlledDifficulty. When bLogControlledDifficulty=false, the only bits it unconditionally logs are error messages and a copy of the information it prints to console (because the console doesn't support copy-paste, but logfiles do).