Team FNG ShootMania: Storm Royal Server - Logo to Be Seen By All

Last December I told you about how Thundr figured out the way to get our Team FNG logo to appear on the poles and spawn points of ShootMania Storm (including Team Modes).

The problem was, we had to manually place the correct "Emblem" files in the ManiaPlanet file structure where user data is kept.  It worked like a champ, but there were two problems:

1. Only the players that manually went through this process could enjoy it.
2. The Emblem not only showed in our own Team FNG servers, but in every server we played in.

We wanted a way for everyone that joins our servers to see our Emblem, and only when on our servers.

I'm happy to report that with the help of a few friends (MrBob and community members on the ManiaPlanet forums) I was able to successfully make it so our server would show it for everyone when they play on our servers.  

DISCLAIMER: To be perfectly clear, I only know that this works for non-team based script modes.  I will have to experiment on some team mode scripts and see if it's possible there, but I wouldn't recommend it; because Nadeo is working on a cooler way to have team modes show clan specific logos when competitions between clans happen on those servers.

With that out of the way, let's discuss how it is done:

Steeffeen explains "Club Links" (which have to do with my disclaimer above), "NeutralEmblemUrl" and emblem requirements in response to my question on the ManiaPlanet Forums.

Our server uses a customized version of the Royal.Script.txt that was used in Storm before the Royal mode was moved to its own Title pack in prep for free-to-play availability at launch.

Because of that, the following from Steeffeen's response are important to our server:

• Emblem images are required to be 512 x 512 pixels
• Emblem images are required to be in the DDS format (with mipmaps)
• The NeutralEmblemUrl must point to a valid URL that will serve your Emblem image.

I started digging to try to find how I could change that and discovered a variable in a base script for all modes called:

NeutralEmblemUrl

So all I had to do (since we already had the DDS image ready and had been using it for months on our own systems) was add the following line to my custom Royal script:

NeutralEmblemUrl = "http://path.to.emblem.com";

So, for those of you that would like to do the same... here's what you have to do:

• Create an emblem image with the following requirements:
• 512 x 512 pixels
• DDS format with mipmaps
• Upload your Emblem to a valid URL you can point the game mode script to.
• Add the following line to your game mode script:
• NeutralEmblemUrl = "http://path.to.emblem.com";

I imagine that this will work in the Team Modes too while poles aren't captured.  Once a pole is captured it will reflect the proper Blue or Red team logos since the pole is no longer "neutral."

I hope this helps others who wish to customize their server a little more.

Also, please note again for team game modes... Club Links are being developed right now and will be a better way to customize how these show up in your team mode server.  Use this if it works until that is available (there may be Red and Blue EmblemUrl variables you can assign in your scripts too, but I don't know what they are or if they exist at the time of this writing.)

Good luck.  Have fun!