| Concepts |
UT2004 provides a straight-forward approach allowing you to add a list of mutators for use in the current game. MapMixer uses different ways of selecting mutators for each map. If you are not launching the game session from the MapMixer Config then you can still use the standard UT Mutator list but you may prefer to let MapMixer handle your Mutator selection.
The following describes the different ways that mutators can be set.
Just like custom map lists, these provide a way of saving lists of custom mutator selections. Before you start a new game, you can select a pre-customised list of mutators to use from the MapMixer Configuration.
Custom Mutator Lists are made up of a number of individual lists corresponding to each game type installed. This way you can tailor a Custom Mutator List for each game type. Note that if you create a Custom Game Type then it can also have its own set of specific mutators.
At the top of the list of Game Types is an entry called [Default Mutators]. This sets the default state of mutators for each game type. This is useful if you always enable one or more mutators regardless of game type. For example you might enable the Bonus Combos mutator here. The individual game type lists have a higher priority, so if you had one game type that you didn't want the mutator enabled in you could set the mutator state to "disabled" for that game type.
Sometimes you may want a specific set of mutators for a map played in a particular game type. For example perhaps a certain map works best with the LowGrav mutator or one map really works well as an Arena map. If you are creating your own custom map list then you can specify the mutators to be used for each map in the list. Alternatively you can set the default mutators for a map in a specific game type using Map Defaults Settings.
Instead of creating a list of mutators to be used - as you do normally in UT, MapMixer instead allows you to specify a "state" for each mutator. The reason for this will become clear in the following. Possible mutator states are:
Enabled
This means the mutator is present. This is the standard behaviour in UT when you add a mutator to a match.Disabled
If you specify a mutator as disabled then MapMixer takes out that mutator if it was previously added (ie Enabled). This is useful when you consider that there is a series of steps that MapMixer goes through to determine mutators for a match. So if a mutator was enabled in one step and then disabled in the next step then it does not appear for that match, unless there is another step in which the mutator is then enabled again.Random (%)
This works the same as the Enable state, except that you specify a percentage chance that the mutator will be enabled at random.(No State, ie "blank")
In this state the mutator is ignored.
For example, lets say that you like using the Vampire mutator and you have it on all the time, either in the game menu or via a MapMixer custom mutator list etc. But perhaps there is one map where you think it messes up the balance of the game play. In this case you can have MapMixer Disable this mutator for a specific map if it was enabled in a previous step. You could do this by specifying the mutator as Disabled as a Map Default setting.
If you set a mutator to Random Enable mode, where the mutator will be randomly enabled for each match, the resultant state is determined when each map is loaded and there is no historical reference to the state of the mutator in the map list, so if you go back to that map in the list, you may or may not end up with a Randomly Enabled mutator.
See Settings Precedence for details on the different steps where mutator states can be added.
This note applies only when you are not starting a game session from the MapMixer Configuration.
When UT loads mutators, there is no way of knowing which order they will be added in, for this reason, MapMixer may have problems disabling mutators on the very first map - this being the one that you chose from the Instant Action or Multiplayer game menu. MapMixer will do it's best on the first map to enable/disable mutators and it might even work correctly but it can't be guaranteed to disable all mutators on the first map: after then it can do its job reliably. One good way to get around this is to take out all mutators except MapMixer from the UT2004 Instant Action/Multiplayer Game Menu and use MapMixer Custom Mutator Lists and Map Mutators. This method works well. However, if you are using the Reload First Map option then there is no problem anyway because MapMixer will reload the first map and take 100% control of the options for that map! Also, if you are starting the game from the MapMixer Configuration then MapMixer will always take full control over mutator right from the word go. For this reason, it is recommended that you always launch the game session from the MapMixer Config Menu (unless you need to start UT2004 from the command line, in which case these settings are valuable).
Every mutator in UT contains a hidden, optional Group Name. Only one mutator of a particular group can be enabled at once. This avoids such confusion as having two Arena mutators enabled at once: the authors of the arena mutators simply give them group names of "Arena". MapMixer adheres to this procedure and if you try to enable two mutators of the same group then the new one gets activated and the old one gets cleared. However, you can set more than one mutator of the same group to the "disabled" state.