Cordon — battle royale

Cordon is a 64-slot battle royale with staging, equipment collection and a moving exclusion zone. Solo, Duo and Squad formats share the same match rules.

Source: open77_cordon, open77_cordon_hud.

Joining and controls#

The current lobby is Afterlife. Staging players can move and sprint; combat and placement are owned by the mode. Joining an ongoing server leaves you in staging until a later match.

Queue, map and consumable actions use the key mapping system. Their HUD hints show the effective binding, including changes made in Settings. F remains the world interaction prompt's key. F6 and F7 are perspective controls, not consumable defaults: the perspective resource uses F6 and the native client uses F7. Rebinding an action to an occupied key can trigger both functions.

Match flow#

staging → deploy → live → extraction → resolved → staging

• Staging: the queue determines participation. A minimum human count and a countdown gate deployment; bots do not satisfy the human requirement.
• Deploy: use the map to choose a landing pin. Ground placement is the default (drop=false), not a ride in an aircraft.
• Placement confirmation: the match phase may already read live while an individual is still deploying. The HUD says DEPLOYING while the server waits for the exact native placement acknowledgement. Loot, cordon timing and live participation start when the deployment wave completes. Failed placements return to staging without inventing a death or ranked finish. A match needs at least two confirmed squads to proceed.
• Live: loot, fight and rotate toward the safe area. Dead players with a living squadmate may have a revive window; eliminated players watch from staging.
• Extraction and results: the surviving contestant or squad receives the match result, followed by standings and the return to staging. The implemented extraction is a match/result phase. There is no proven playable Trauma Team AV pickup or passenger flight.

Default source tunables are Solo, Watson, standard pacing, minPlayers=16, staging 105 s and deploy 45 s. Development profiles override some of these. The standard cordon budget is 45 s initial grace, 300 s of closure and 25 s final phase; this is about 6 m 10 s of zone timing, not an 18-minute default match. Early wins can end a match sooner.

The moving cordon#

The authoritative safe area is a continuously shrinking rectangle intersected with the map's original allowed cells. Excluded cells and holes stay excluded. The chosen final cell varies between matches, with recent finals avoided; the phase endpoints still follow the map's block geometry.

During a closure the rectangle moves continuously. A partially covered cell is partly dangerous: an entire cell does not remain safe until its last sliver closes. The final refuge remains until the terminal phase ends, then the safe area is empty. There is no collision wall and no forced teleport back inside.

The server evaluates the same geometry for containment and damage. The tactical map draws the moving outline over its coarse cell overview. HUD guidance shows the time until the boundary reaches your position, the danger rate and a direction toward safety. Guidance to a nearby safe cell is not a street-level pathfinder; buildings and elevation can require a different route.

The world edge uses moving native game VFX driven by that shared sweep. It replaces the old static post/concrete-wall description; the legacy renderer is suppressed while an authoritative sweep is present. The current work does not establish a uniformly legible 300 m boundary in every street or a 64-client GPU performance claim. See docs/research/vfx-sfx-runtime.md for actual asset, distance and budget measurements.

cordonEdge=world enables world effects; hud removes them in favor of HUD feedback; off removes the optional edge effects. Core outside warnings and safe-direction guidance remain. These switches do not disable server damage. An unreadable position does not establish that a player is outside.

Loot and consumables#

Cordon owns its inventory and validates pickups on the server. Containers have physical visuals and nearby world prompts; seeing a prop is not proof that a pickup or weapon assignment completed.

Consumables require a living participant with the item. Damage interrupts the action. Full health, full armor, missing shield and empty inventory can refuse it. The progress bar starts only from the server's action state; FINISHING means completion has not yet been confirmed. One player cannot use a consumable and revive simultaneously.

Weapon pickup success is reported after the assignment succeeds. The container stays claimed while the grant is pending. Explicit refusals known to have made no inventory change can restore it; an uncertain timeout does not blindly reopen it and duplicate a weapon. The player receives an uncertainty notice.

The shooting arbiter accepts weapons through the verified inventory path. Operator weapon.give or an unrelated resource's loot command is not a substitute for a Cordon pickup. Death releases the mode's carried equipment according to its death-drop rules; successful revival returns the player without the old kit. Supply drops and other unused design tunables must not be interpreted as implemented world events.

Squads and revival#

Duo and Squad assign teams at deployment. The current fill iterates queued players by id and fills available squads; party invite codes are not implemented. Do not promise that /br.party will group friends. The tactical map and squad panel carry squad-only positions and revive state.

A downed squadmate has a default 30 s revive window while a living squadmate can answer it. The prompt is anchored to the captured three-dimensional body position; the dead player's current movement snapshot is not its source.

Face the body and approach until its F prompt is active. The interaction must be on screen even though exact reticle focus is not required. Its 2.5 m activation range is measured in 3D to a prompt normally 1 m above the body, so 2.5 m horizontal separation can still be out of range. About 1.5 m on the same floor is comfortably inside. The server independently checks healer-to-body reach and squad identity.

Tap F once to begin the 5 s action. Releasing the key does not cancel it; tap F again to cancel. Moving away or damage to either party also interrupts it. There is one target per healer. During native recovery confirmation, the HUD says WAITING FOR RECOVERY and additional taps cannot undo the submitted recovery. Only the canonical recovery acknowledgement restores alive state and credits the healer. Default revived health is 30%, with short spawn protection and no old kit.

The complete squad phase gate also includes looting, fighting and extraction. A working revive alone does not close that broader gate. Ghost-flying spectators and an observer-visible authored revive animation are not established features; the supported spectator experience is staging watch.

Bots, holdouts and unfinished world work#

Bot contestants use engine AI, occupy the match roster, are labelled BOT, and can win. Any match containing a contestant bot is unrateable. Default fill policy is threshold: below 24 humans, fill toward 40 contestants. off disables fill; always fills toward capacity. Bot movement requires a client simulation lease; a headless phantom is not an engine-driven fighting NPC.

Gang holdouts are separate from contestant bots and spawn at high-tier loot clusters. They are disabled by default (holdoutsEnabled=false). Camp kills use GANG GUARD in the feed and do not affect rating. This opt-in policy does not change ordinary NPC behavior in other modes.

Passenger-following AV flight and playable extraction flights are experimental. Boss templates, weather arcs and supply-drop declarations are not supported gameplay guarantees.

Running a server#

Use the tracked server/server.cordon-local.jsonc or server/server.cordon-listed.jsonc, and inspect their resource lists and startup overrides. The mode lives in resources/gamemodes/open77_cordon; its HUD is resources/gamemodes/open77_cordon_hud. The setup template is templates/cordon, but older descriptive text there may describe prior design.

The local profile uses game 11808, downloads 11809 and Warden 11810. These are local profile ports, not the production Cordon endpoint. Launch from server/ after building with the repository's documented build procedure:

./src/Open77.Server/bin/Release/net10.0/Open77.Server.exe --config server.cordon-local.jsonc

Keep the mode's declared dependencies and the profile's shared resources. open77_worldui and open77_interactions supply the physical revive/loot prompts; weapon and loot APIs underpin inventory; the HUD supplies match/combat/map views. Do not combine Cordon with a second gamemode that also owns spawn and death. Do not put laboratory resources or test control-file hooks on a public server.

Use Warden tunables or commands for runtime changes. Editing a watched resource can reload the match; reconnect-policy client resources need a reconnect to receive the new pack. Test snapshots belong outside the live resource tree. Preserve the server's signing identity, database and environment during updates.

Capacity and transport#

Set network.maximumPlayers=64. The tracked simulation configuration uses 30 Hz ticks, 20 Hz snapshots, a 500 m player-interest radius and 60 m hysteresis. Do not reduce interest below the supported combat range: an unseen remote player cannot be hit correctly by the client.

Keep these transport environment settings for 64-slot operation:

OP77_GNS_SEND_RATE_BYTES=4194304
OP77_GNS_SEND_BUFFER_BYTES=8388608

Interest culling saves bandwidth for spread players, but clustered rosters still need the increased per-connection send budget. The reproduced failure is send_failed:LimitExceeded in the client's net.state; the server can continue running and counting that session.

Three final headless 64-session cycles completed with the continuous geometry and bounded state publisher. All 64 players were covered by state-send invocations in each cycle, including outside-state coverage. This measures server behavior; it does not prove client receipt, UDP/encryption capacity, 64 real HUDs or GPU performance. Historical measurements and harness limits are in docs/research/battle-royale-and-scale.md.

Useful tunables#

Defaults below are declared source defaults. A profile or persisted override can replace them. A value reaching the resource immediately does not mean an already computed match schedule is rebuilt.

gridSize is a retained unimplemented tunable: actual grid geometry comes from the active map. Use /br.map for map authoring, not an unimplemented size knob.

Commands and editor#

Use the ACL-protected tac-map EDIT commands to record positions on walkable ground. Map data is stored outside the watched resource tree. Validate geometry with /br.map.check before deployment.

Rating#

Progression is placement rating and career history; it grants no combat power. Ratings are format-specific. Under-populated matches and matches containing contestant bots do not update the ladder. Persistence is optional for play; without a database, history is volatile. Database availability alone does not mean a match was rated.

Capturing spawn orientation#

/br.map add spawn "Spawn" captures the current character position and body orientation from the latest server snapshot. Turn the character toward the intended direction before capturing; rotating only the camera is insufficient. /br.map add spawn 0 "Spawn" explicitly overrides the heading with zero degrees. The visual editor's PLACE HERE action uses the same capture path.

Vehicle and staging anchors also capture orientation when the heading is omitted: /br.map add veh Vehicle.v_standard2_archer_hella_player and /br.map add stage. /br.map move spawn 1 and /br.map move stage recapture position and orientation; append an angle to override it. /br.map paint spawn 6 captures the current heading at each point, while /br.map paint spawn 6 0 keeps an explicit zero heading. Positions older than two seconds remain unavailable. Older hosts without snapshot yaw retain the existing "heading not captured" marker instead of claiming a capture.