Arcade DM

One plugin. Your bot match becomes a ranked aim trainer.

An all-in-one arcade deathmatch mod for Counter-Strike 1.6 and Condition Zero: 11 ranks, two independent ladders, 22 medals and a five line killfeed, in a single 1,770 line AMX Mod X plugin with no external dependencies.

The ladder · What it does · Install · Bots · Cvars · HUD channels · What this does not do · Credits

Built for playing alone against bots, as a warmup before a modern tactical shooter. It turns a local listen server into something with progression, rewards and constant feedback, without a server, an account or a database.

The ladder

Two ladders run at once and they measure different things. Points measure how dominant you are. Aim measures how well you shoot, and it does not drop when you die.

Rank	Tag	Points	Aim rating	Bonus per kill
Iron	IRN	0	0	0
Bronze	BRZ	100	40	0
Silver	SIL	250	47	1
Gold	GLD	500	53	2
Platinum	PLT	900	58	3
Diamond	DIA	1,500	63	5
Master	MAS	2,300	68	7
Grandmaster	GM	3,400	73	10
CHAMPION	CHM	5,000	78	14
KING	KNG	15,000	84	20
DEITY	DTY	40,000	90	30

Iron through Grandmaster carry divisions I, II and III. The top three ranks swap divisions for a numbered ladder: CHAMPION places you nationally from #15000 down to #1, KING regionally, DEITY globally.

The aim rating is a moving average of four things, not one:

• Headshot rate, calibrated against real competitive CS percentages.
• Time to kill, from first contact to the kill.
• Stopping discipline, your velocity on the shot that kills, which is the counter-strafe.
• Shot economy, hits needed per kill, with a different bar per weapon.

The top three aim ranks are not reachable on headshot rate alone. All four have to be there.

Note

Every threshold in that table is read from RANK_MIN, AIM_MIN and RANK_KILL_BONUS in the source. Nothing here is rounded for presentation.

What it does

Real FFA. GoldSrc cuts damage between teammates to roughly 35%. The plugin compensates so everyone hits for full, removes teamkill warnings and punishments, fixes the scoreboard and clears friendlies off the radar.

Its own killfeed. Five colour coded lines replacing the game's monochrome one: your kills in gold, headshots in orange, your deaths in red, background noise in grey. Every line carries both players' rank tags.

Synchronised combos. Double, Triple, Ultra, Monster, Ludicrous, Holy Shit, Wicked Sick, Kill Chain. The sound, the banner, the medal and the buff all come out of one table, so they fire on the same frame with the same name.

Streak rewards.

Trigger	Reward
4 fast kills	Vampire: every kill heals you until you die
5 fast kills (Monster)	Vampire++: also refills the magazine on every kill
9 fast kills (Chain)	Bullet time: bots drop to 40% speed for 5 seconds
15 streak	UAV: wallhack ESP, one sweep every 5 seconds for a minute
30 streak	NUKE: the map goes down and every kill counts for you

22 Black Ops II style medals with point bonuses, a 32 rival leaderboard that progresses alongside you, a nemesis (the bot that kills you most), a killcam on death, auto equipment, bunnyhop and floating damage numbers.

Install

Requires AMX Mod X 1.9 or newer with the fun, engine, fakemeta, hamsandwich, cstrike and nvault modules enabled in configs/modules.ini.

1. Copy addons/amxmodx/plugins/arcade_dm.amxx into cstrike/addons/amxmodx/plugins/.
2. Append arcade_dm.amxx to cstrike/addons/amxmodx/configs/plugins.ini.
3. Copy the contents of configs/listenserver.cfg into your cstrike/listenserver.cfg.
4. Optional: drop the .wav files into cstrike/sound/AQS/. Without them the mod runs identically, just silent.

To compile from source:

amxxpc addons/amxmodx/scripting/arcade_dm.sma -o addons/amxmodx/plugins/arcade_dm.amxx

Bots

The plugin ships no bots. Use whichever you already have.

• CS 1.6: YaPB is the recommended option and is compatible with the current game build. The plugin adjusts yb_difficulty to follow your aim rank, capped so the arcade pace survives.
• Condition Zero: the native ZBots work with nothing extra.

Warning

On the current CS 1.6 build (post anniversary), old bot packs that replace mp.dll with 2006 binaries crash the game. Use YaPB or ReGameDLL, not those packs.

Cvars

Cvar	Default	What it does
adm_ffa	1	Full damage between teams, no teamkill warnings, clean radar
adm_killfeed	1	Custom killfeed (0 leaves the game's own)
adm_equip	1	Automatic weapons on respawn
adm_bhop	1	Automatic bunnyhop
adm_sounds	1	Quake style voice announcements
adm_damage_numbers	1	Floating damage numbers
adm_streaks	1	Vampire, bullet time, UAV and nuke
adm_adaptive_bots	1	Bot difficulty follows your aim rating (capped at 2 of 4)

Type guns in chat to change your loadout: 10 primaries, 5 secondaries, remembered for the session.

HUD channels

GoldSrc has only 16 message channels, and any plugin using automatic channel selection (-1) can paint over another. This mod pins them:

 1  persistent status        6-9   killfeed
 2  point popups             10    (free)
 3  panels (tables)          11    combo banner
 4  large announcements      12    active buffs
 5  animations               13    damage numbers
                             14-15 (free)

If you add another HUD plugin, give it one of the free channels. Two rules learned the hard way:

• Never use -1. Automatic selection can land on a channel this mod already owns and blank it. Several stock AMX Mod X plugins do this — timeleft, adminchat, statsx — and the symptom is the status block vanishing for a second at a time.
• Do not re-send the same channel more than a few times per second. Re-sending restarts the message client side, which reads as flicker. The status block here is only re-sent when its text actually changes, and at most every 0.35 s.

What this does not do

• It is built for a listen server against bots. Nothing in it is designed or tested for a populated dedicated server. Progression is local, held in nvault, and the 32 leaderboard rivals are simulated, not real players.
• It ships no bots and no sounds. Both are third party, and the sound pack is somebody else's work under its own terms. The mod degrades cleanly without either.
• It occupies 15 of the 16 GoldSrc HUD channels. That is most of the budget. Any other HUD plugin has to fit in what is left, and there is no negotiation at runtime.
• The national, regional and global ladders are flavour, not a network. CHAMPION through DEITY place you on a numbered ladder computed locally. There is no server aggregating players.
• Only tested on the current CS 1.6 build and Condition Zero. No claim is made about ReHLDS variants, older builds, or CS: Online forks.
• The aim rating is opinionated. Its thresholds were calibrated against competitive CS headshot percentages, which is a judgement call, not a measurement of you against a population.

Credits

• Vampire: based on the Vampire plugin by Shalfey (2007), turned into a persistent buff here.
• Wallhack ESP: technique from DarkGL's ESP in AmxX Cheats. The marker projects onto the wall the trace hits, because beams occlude against geometry.
• Damage numbers: adapted from LyesMC's Rotating DMG 6-dir HUD.
• Sounds: the AdvancedQuakeSounds pack by ClaudiuHKS, available here. Files used: doublekill, triplekill, ultrakill, monsterkill, ludicrouskill, holyshit, whickedsick, comboking, impressive, payback, shutdown, flawlessvictory.
• Ranks, ladder, medals, combos, killfeed, bullet time and the aim rating system are original to this project.

License

MIT. See LICENSE. Third-party attributions are in NOTICE.md.