Adding Maps to your Server

Not everyone wants to play the default map on their server. Some servers run fun maps such as the ag_texture series or the all time classical scout_knivez. Adding these maps on your server and allowing people to play them is not actually as difficult as it may appear. With any FTP client you can very quickly and easily upload the map of your choice to your game server and start playing.

This quick guide works for any game server not just those hosted by Invision-Gaming.

I will assume you already have the map that you want to install on your server. If you do not you can easily find many maps by using Google and searching for "CSS Maps" or "Counter Strike Source Files". FPSBanana is one of the most popular resources for sharing and download server files such as skins, textures and maps.

Step 1

To start with, when adding any maps you should stop your game server. This is not essential but is definately recommended when making any alterations to your server. It can help with troubleshooting if you ever change configs or install any mod because when you restart your game server again you will know exactly why the server is not responding, rather then finding out two days later when the server automatically restarts.

If you are an Invision Gaming client you can stop your game server by logging into the control panel and pressing Stop on the Game panel for your game.

Step 2

Connect to your server through FTP. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is the easiest way to upload files to your game server. When installing maps on your server you shouldn't use any web interface or file manager. This include our web file manager that is inside your control panel. This is because of the way the files are uploaded through the module and also because the maximum web server POST size is restricted at 2MB which means any files larger then that are not received and your page will most likely hang.

For those of you that do not know what FTP is, we have written a guide to show you how to download and run a FTP client. There is only one FTP client that I recommend and have been using this since I started web developing many centuries ago. Smart FTP is very versatile and manageable and is suitable for personal use or large scale developments. You can download the client from the SmartFTP website.

The guide can be found here: FTP Guide

Now that you have connected to your server we can move onto the next step.

Step 3

Navigate from your home directory to the folder that stores all your maps. Each game type will have a different folder for this, but for Counter Strike Source the folder will be found in:

/cstrike/maps

Once you are in this folder drag all of the maps you want to upload to the server. Wait for the upload to complete and you are finished.

Its really that simple. From in game you can now change the map by using RCON to change it. This is an example RCON command to change the map.

rcon_password "your rcon password to login"

rcon changelevel my_map

This will then change the map to your desired selection.

Step 4 (Optional)

Editing the mapcycle.txt and maplist.txt

You have the option of also editing the mapcycle and maplist configs. These are found in the main /cstrike directory for Counter Strike Source and control the maps that are listed on the server and the order by which they are loaded. If you download them through FTP you can open them up and add your map at the bottom.

This is also useful because you can select the order of the maps that you want to be loaded on your server. For instance I change my mapcycle to remove cs_assault from the config to stop it from being loaded on the game server.