Talk:ZCatch

Some zCatch history

The first implementation of zCatch which was created by erd (nowadays occasionally seen under the nickname erdbaer) was, at least remotely, inspired by the first fng mod which was closed source and whose servers were called "Blumentopf fng". (vague conversation from around 2009 that I recall where the working title "Super Insta" was used but initially intended to clone the closed source fng mod)

Since Teeworlds 0.5 and at least half of the Teeworlds 0.6 era were focused on the instagib laser rifle variant of zCatch, where your primary weapon is a laser rifle which instantly kills, hence catches, your opponents.

After a long period of people playing the 0.6 zCatch of TT <3 (Teetime), and no real continuation of the mod's development, especially the grenade version of it, Teelevision forked Teetime's GitHub source tree and continued development.

zCatch transitioned from primarily being laser focused to primarily being grenade focused around that time, when Teelevision took over.

There is another variant where every Vanilla weapon can be used but it is more of a fun version which was never seriously played.

Since the dawn of zCatch, the minimal number of needed players in order to be able to win a round was 5. At some point in the grenade launcher era, Savander forked Teelevision's zCatch and introduced a basic ranking system while also increasing the number of people required to win a round to 10 and reversing the color transitions to be from red to blue (0 players caught to 15 players caught). This shifted popularity towards the DDNet zCatch servers. Afterwards Teelevision also introduced a ranking system while keeping the number of required players to win a round at 5.

(iirc, the ranking did give anyone winning a single score point, no matter whether you killed 10 or 15 players to win the round)

DDNet and Teelevision continued to host zCatch servers of both variants (laser and grenade) until the official end of Teeworlds 0.6. During that time most players were playing on DDNet's zCatch (iirc it were two servers).

Sadly, towards the end of Teeworlds 0.6 the number of players on zCatch dwindled, leading to the number of those 10 required players to end a round to be met less and less while the normal zCatch machanics, where you catch players and those players join the spectators until the player who caught them dies, still persisted.

In terms of gameplay, while not being able to end a round, it was usually pointless to catch and keep players caught, thus the term "release game" was born. It is basically gDM without the possibility to win the game where caught players are manually released by the player who caught them.

It was a fair form of a warm up where everyone could continue playing the game until enough players joined the server to actually play and win a round of zCatch. Usually after 10 players joined, the game transitioned to the normal zCatch mechanics where everyone stopped releasing everyone else they caught and started playing the game. Players were still released in case of (unwanted) random kills (term: spray) or spawning players in order to improve fair play. At some point, primarily new players introduced to the mod, started to demand "release game" (short: rls game) to be played even after the required 10 players were on the server to play a proper round of zCatch, basically undermining the whole principle of the mod.

After the release of 0.7 a lot of people still continued to play zCatch on Teeworlds 0.6 but were intrigued to test out those cool new 0.7 features and all of those fancy new skins but did not switch to 0.7 because there was no port of zCatch to be played.

That changed when TeeSlayer released a port for Teeworlds 0.7 with most basic mechanics needed for zCatch, no ranking, just the raw gameplay mechanics (https://gitlab.com/TeeSlayer/zcatch)

Players then slowly transitioned, tho not completely, to Teeworlds 0.7.

That is when I started my journey to implement zCatch from scratch with the reference of TeeSlayers implementation and trying to tackle many of the shortcomings of the 0.6 versions and missing pieces in TeeSlayers version.

• making a warmup mode where players are automatically released until 5 players are met (explicitly not calling it "rls game", because we are zCatch)
• ranking (based on the number of caught player when winning a round)
• spam, spray, respawn protections
• port voteban mechanics from Teelevision's version
• add more moderation tools
• rejoin prevention

to name a few.

Most of the time being alone on my development server with my debug dummies until I gained more popularity and people started playing on my servers, Simply zCatch (Grenade/Laser).

Honourable mentions: hardliner66 also did create a zCatch fork of Teelevision's mod which he still hosts to this day. His server did not get a lot of players, tho.

P.S.: Correct me if I got something wrong, as I wrote this from the top of my head and from my perspective.