Playing Maps

From Armagetron
Revision as of 23:38, 25 October 2005 by Dlh (talk | contribs) (Mac OS X paths)

So you've made your map and now you'd like to play it? Unfortunately, at this time the game doesn't have a nice graphical interface for choosing maps from what's installed. So you'll have to get your elbows a little dirty and hack into config files to do it. Luckily it's not that hard.

Place Your Map

First you need to place your map. Each platform has a different place for you to put it, so you need to make a decision about it right away. The first decision to make is "Should this map be playable for all users on the system?" If the answer is "yes", then you need to install it in the game's system resources directory. If the answer is "no", then you need to install it in your user's resource directory for the game. The actual locations of these files is system-dependent and on some platforms depends on where you installed the game.

You generally want to create a new directory underneath your resource directory to hold you own special maps, such as mymaps or custom_maps. When you browse the directory you'll notice there's a special directory called automatic. You shouldn't fool with it. If you've played a server with a map you particularly liked, and you'd like to use that map for your own local game, then you should copy the map from it's location in the automatic directory and put it in your own directory underneath resource. Examples (Linux given, others requested):

  • /home/Lucifer/.armagetronad/resource/lucifers_maps/crack_pipe-0.1.xml

System Resource Directory (default)

  • Linux - /usr/share/games/armagetronad/resource
  • Windows -
  • Mac OS X - Armagetron Advanced.app/Contents/Resource/resource

User's Resource Directory (default)

  • Linux - ~/.armagetronad/resource (ex: /home/Lucifer/.armagetronad/resource)
  • Windows -
  • Mac OS X - ~/Library/Application Support/Armagetron Advanced/resource

Setting the Config

The file you need to modify depends on whether or not you want the map to be available for all users of the system. If you want the map available for all users of the system, then you need to modify the file settings.cfg in the appropriate directory (paths given below). If you only want you to be able to play the map on your system, or if you don't have administrative privileges on your machine, then you'll need to modify user.cfg in your home directory.

The modification you need to make is to add a line that looks like this, based on the example given above:

  • MAP_FILE lucifers_maps/crack_pipe-0.1.xml

That's it. Note that the path is relative to the resource directory. The game will scan the system resource directory, then your user's resource directory. If it doesn't find the map after scanning those places it will try to fetch the map from a web server. If you happen to have a URL for the map, you can put it in like so:

Since you're most likely working locally, this shouldn't be necessary. It is, however, possible to leave off the MAP_FILE directive and only provide the MAP_URI. This will be particularly useful once the central resource repository is up and running. More information will be provided here when that happens.

System Configuration File Paths (default)

  • Linux - /usr/etc/games/armagetronad/settings.cfg
  • Windows -
  • Mac OS X - Armagetron Advanced.app/Contents/Resource/settings.cfg

User Configuration File Paths (default)

  • Linux - ~/.armagetronad/var/user.cfg
  • Windows -
  • Mac OS X - ~/Library/Application Support/Armagetron Advanced/user.cfg