Modifying the Respawn Time
By default, there is a delay of up to 20 seconds between death and respawn in Team Fortress 2. However, the level designer can designate a custom respawn time for a map, and can even set different respawn times for each team. Remember, spawn time can make or break a map!
Dealing with Spawn Times
Some things you may want to consider before making spawn time adjustments are:
- Make sure the entire layout of your map is complete. It makes no sense to do this until everything is finalized.
- Measure the time it takes to reach a goal with every class. While this takes time to do, it can make spawn times much more realistic based on the goal the team should be after.
- Balance out the time it may take for a goal to be captured, based on the time it takes for the opposite team to re-spawn, and then travel to the goal. Your ideal solution is to have the spawn time based on half of the goal capture time. However this might also change based on how far a team might need to travel to actually get to a goal.
- Always make it fair! It's almost never a good idea to have one team spawn faster then the other. If so, make them work for it.
After considering all this you can adjust your spawn times to better match how each team should spawn and handle a goal. Whether that be a flag or capture point, the ideal spawn time should always start off low and become longer if a team loses more of it's objectives.
Editing Spawn Times
To start off you'll need a tf_gamerules in the map. Its exact location doesn't matter. This is the entity that controls most of how the gameplay in your map plays out.
Note: If you already have one of these, you won't need to place a second one!You can also edit the respawn time based on which mode of gameplay your map will incorporate. A good example is modifying the respawn time based on capture points, which is briefly discussed in the next section below.
Capture Area
Based on a capture area, much like a control point, you can then edit the spawn time based on a team capturing a control point.