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It's far from dead. The Half-Life MOD Natural-Selection is very much alive.
And Charlie Cleveland aka 'Flayra' announced the upcoming sequel about two years ago.
You can read about the undergoing development of NS2 here

Very fun game indeed :-)

Go play http://natural-selection.org/
Marines vs Aliens. In CO mode you "level up" to jetpacks or power armor, as Aliens into a heavily armored rhinoceros sized behemoth. In NS mode one rine is top down RTS, rest FPS. IMO most teamplay oriented computer game _ever_. (Well, I haven't played Eve Online)

I would like to see a MMORPG version for this. Something like Natural Selection mod meets Alien Online (failed miserably). There would be classes, etc. who must keep win the battles from the other species.

You should try out the Half-life mod, Natural Selection.

If this thing fires at everything that moves, how do you turn it off? Approach it stealthily from the back, ninja style? Run in a circle around it to dodge its fire like a skulk?

http://www.naturalselection.pexgames.com/games/hal flife/mods/naturalselection/specials/nemesiszero_1 /index.html.en and http://www.natural-selection.org/forums/index.php? showtopic=81921

Basically wait and see - hopefully it will move across, they're pushing the HL1 engine right upto it's limits at the moment

Whats the word with Natural Selection? This has to be the best HL multiplayer mod there is. I would be thoroughly disappointed if this never came about.

As for the question of how sound might be more beneficial than video for games... Very fast-paced FPS's in particular (eg. natural selection) require players to track multiple enemies at once, at times on the other side of a vent or door, and once you come out shooting, to take all of their actions into consideration at once. Particularly for higher-level players, audio can give you more information about where you should dodge than video can, simply because video can't see things to the side, behind, overhead, or below you, and it can't see through walls. Increasing the accuracy of a 3D wavetracer (likely via hardware acceleration) will provide players more information during a 500 millisecond firefight than video is able to.

There's wonderful other options!

If you computer is decent, UT2004 is great with a GREAT modding community. Lots of good mods out already, but not a lot of players.

Also for half life check out Natural Selection .. My personal favorite mod for half-life (try it, it's awesome)

The DOOM games never really interested me that much- they were a little too cheesy. The really cool game is Half Life, especially because of all the mods that are created based on it (especially Natural Selection).
Does anyone know when Half Life 2 is coming out? THAT is what I am waiting for.

With Natural Selection, Uskaarj, Unreal Annihilation, Warcraft III FPS mod, and Empires all blending or totally converting between game genres and/or engines, there seems to be an interesting trend of "breaking the rules" or using a game very differently than it was originally intended. Is this a gimmick, first notably commercialized by Savage or do you think it will keep its place on the game-store shelves?

NS isn't deathmatch either, it's a team-based RTS/FPS hybrid.

And for anybody wondering what the hell we're talking about, follow the link to Natural-Selection.

The same platform would open up cross-platform integration opportunities, letting PC and Xbox owners play in the same world, though each would have different experience. (PC gamers, for example, could act as virtual generals in a strategy game, coordinating troop movements, while Xbox players playing an action version of the same title would fight the battles.)
Oh you mean like Natural Selection did over a year and a half ago?
Nice innovation there CNN/Microsoft.
(Not the cross-platform bit, the "general" and "soldier" bit)

We've sorta got that already, Natural Selection, a HL mod where a commander views the battle from above while his troops battle aliens. Still, you're limited to 12 units a side, so it's more a FPS with stratagy then an RTS with smart (human) soldiers.

If you haven't played Half-Life yet, it's a great way to try it out (especially since stores still seem to be selling it for $30).

If you are into the online games, that means you can also play Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress Classic, or, my personal favorite, Natural Selection.

I haven't tried it, but you can also try installing steam under Linux, using WineX

The Internet functions like a jungle full of ninjas. If an unsuspecting user walks through there and gets assaulted by a ninja, her complaint might be "But that's illegal!" right before her head is separated from her body. In order to catch a ninja, you have to be a ninja -- you have to swing through the trees with the greatest of ease and slice his head off. To survive without being a ninja, you put on a massive suit of armor so that it's harder to slice your head off. It can still happen, though, so you need to know how to use your armor.

I'm being overly dramatic and overly metaphorical, so I'll make it simple:

You CANNOT stop spam, viruses, worms, phreaks, spyware, hacks, cracks, modchips, reverse engineering, social engineering, or DOS attacks by making them illegal. I'm not saying that all of them should be legal, just that our tax dollars should not go to writing laws about them.

You can ONLY stop these things by educating people on how to not get hurt by them. Because they are all a confidence game on the user's computer, and on the user themself, they can all be prevented, but only by intelligent users.

Our tax dollars should go to educating people about how to not get hit by these things. Every school should be given funds to educate children in such things as programming/scripting (the basics of which go hand-in-hand with what they're learning in math), security, the basics of how to generally use software (like how to use any email client, not just Outlook Express or Hotmail) as well as things like open source/Linux (teaches them something they can take home without begging mommy and daddy to spend $20-$200 on a new piece of software)...

Even outside of schools, people should know that you don't just go download some new piece of software just because it looks cool and some friend told you about it. You go online and look it up, find out how many people are using it and what they think of it, whether the company that made it is trustworthy, whether there's an open source alternative, and so on. If you still want to try it and it doesn't look trustworthy, you run it in an untrusted user account, throwaway wine setup, chrooted environment, usermode linux, or throwaway computer.

People should know what a web browser / email client is and why you need to use one that is standards-compliant and secure. They should know how to set up sandboxes to play with potentially unsafe stuff. They should know how to use PGP, or at least why they care. They should know that it doesn't matter who they are or how unimportant their stuff is, someone wants to break into their computer, especially if it's easy.

What's more, We have the money. We just have to spend it on the right things.

I concur. Recently I've been very into Natural Selection (a team-based Half-Life mod). It encourages teamplay like no other game I've played, and is very fun. Get voice going on there with your friends and it really is just as good as any sport. It is also one of the few games where I only care if my team won, and not who on the team was best.

different styles in cheat development. I mean, you can find the classic cheats, and they'll be busted. But if you're a good player, you'll only play with cheats if they're custom-made. and custom made means variation from one region to another. well, i guess i've just been playing that too much now.. happy natural selection :)

Don't forget to check out the original, Natural Selection, a Half-Life mod. I'm not sure if Savage is based directly on NS, but NS has been out for quite some time and has matured in many aspects. NS can be a lot less demanding in terms of pure twitch than Quake/HL, depending on the version you play, and has a focus on teamwork. I haven't have time to play 3.0 yet, but it should still be good.

I have to put in a shameless plug for the Natural Selection Half-Life mod. They've done a beautiful job with it.

Marines vs. Aliens, playable from each side. Combat mode, where kills and experience earn you equipment/ability purchase points and ranking, or Classic mode, with buildable upgrade structures, where one player becomes an RTS commander to guide the Marines against the more chaotic Aliens.

It's a gorgeous cross between the movie Aliens, StarCraft, and the old game Marathon.

It's on Steam now as a third party game, getting anti-cheat all up in it. Current version is 3.0 Beta, available for anyone to play.

Natural Selection is quite good. It's a Half-Life mod that has an excellent player community - very few nubs, and almost zero hackers. Relatively complicated gameplay, but once you learn it, it is very fun.

What I think would finally immerse me in an RTS would be the ability issue voice commands to a virtual lieutenant, set waypoints with the mouse, but otherwise have him control the squad. It would also be nice to just station a squad outside of a target, concentrate on something else for a bit, and without switching your view, just to be able to say, Squad one, attack/retreat, what have you.

I present...

Natural Selection!

Okay, so some of your soldiers tend to wander off and get killed, or occasionally verbally abuse you (and your mother) for leading them into a trap, but you can always reward those who obey with nice presents, like heavy armour or just a much-needed healthpack.

but, what still bugs me, is that they haven't yet implemented a 'html only' version of their page....

Like this?

Its always been there and defaults if you don't have flash installed. If you do, its right under the monitor looking thing at the bottom of the menu: 'html menu'.

Let's take a current example - the Army game. It has an FPS part, and what they're calling an RPG part.

The best FPS/RTS blend I've seen is Natural Selection. It's a free mod for Half-Life that you'll probably like. All but one of the players on the human team are playing a complicated FPS - but there's a commander giving orders with an overhead RTS interface.

It's immense fun. But because so much is going on it can be very difficult for FPS players who just want to shoot stuff. Because the commander is trying to accomplish a goal you can't see, sometimes the orders make no sense in the short term. Simplified example: If there's an alien in the room and the commander is telling you to repair a piece of equipment - do you shoot or obey? The learning curve is steep - new players can be dangerously counterproductive by taking the commander's attention away from the fight. But those who like it, love it.

And I know that the game Savage has a similar FPS/RTS blend, but I've not played it.

First Person Shooter meets Real Time Strategy.

To top this off, the two sides (Aliens and Marines) play completely differently; the Marines require a commander (who plays from an overhead view) to build structures and acquire weapons, each Alien chooses their own role: builder or fighter. The depth of this game is simply stunning, the maps are amazing (and this is on a 5 year old game engine) and there are lots of servers to play on.

Lastly, if you own Half-Life (and who doesn't these days) you can get it for free.

http://www.natural-selection.org

_f

Natural Selection is done by a seriously cool group of people. Flayra (the head developer / producer) has some great philosophies on how the good of the group is the good of the individual, and some roles on the alien side are to protect the other players. It's all very wholesome in an incredibly fast paced violent way.

Link: Natural Selection

In fact, they've been updated fairly recently in fact.

They're fairly well supported, the Kyro2 I'm still using runs everything from Natural Selection under WineX to Enemy Territory natively under Linux without a hitch.

Unsupported? Hardly.

We, on the other hand, owe Valve a big thank you for making a mod friendly game, and for supporting it for so long, thereby allowing us to play quality mods for free. And we owe the mod makers big thanks for taking the time to create cool mods.

One which should be mentioned more often, by the way, is Natural Selection.

I find it a glaring oversight to see an article on PC game mods not even mention Half-Life, a game which has had a ridiculous shelf life powered almost solely by the bevy of mods released for it.

And no discussion of Half-Life would be complete without a discussion of Natural-Selection, a mod that turns HL into an FPRTS with marines fighting aliens and a focus on resource control (and now, with a level-based team FPS that's leagues beyond other mods dedicated solely to team FPS).

You can also play on the alien side, where there is no commander. Different alien subspecies have different roles. I like playing the 'gorge' and 'lerk' subspecies that have support roles like healing and building new alien structures. Other players enjoy the front-line combat alien subspecies.

-m

Or what about the HL mod Natural Selection?

The genre is not descending, it is evolving - though not primarily through the main commercial channels (yet). Just look at the popularity of Natural Selection, a truly innovative approach to real-time strategy: Replacing the dumb computer-controlled units with online gamers.

This idea seems so good to me that I find it surprising that we haven't seen more games of this type yet. (Or maybe someone have? If so, please shout :-)

This meme about online gamers being dicks is really getting to me. I've been playing online since quakeworld (not the first generation, I know, but older than the majority I suspect), and the opinion I've taken away is that people playing online are generally really nice.

Every now and then you run into someone having some fun disrupting a game; I can picture plenty of times someone grappled their spy in the exit of the 2fort spawn room on a MegaTF server. But I can also picture plenty of times when people were communicative and friendly and cool; willing to organize some teamwork for a little while; willing to point newbies in the right direction....

There's some fun to be had being disruptive, but far from negative consequences deterring most people, most people derive much more fun from playing the game.

Maybe (and I think the article addresses this somewhat) MMORPGs are poorly designed when the situation is that theres LOTS to be gained from looting corpses. This is different from people who are getting a kick from causing some chaos. Those people can easily be avoided, and with many games, voted off the server. Or just let them goof off for a bit, they'll get bored eventually and move on. Corpse looters WANT to play the game, and are just taking a shortcut; one frowned on by the community for being unfriendly.

Modern mods (game modifications -- made by players to change the gameplay of an existing game; someone was asking in a recent /. thread) generally offer a lot more incentive to play well, and to encourage others to play well. Also, often the communities are small. Speaking from my experience, Navy Seals:Q3 and GloomQ2 both have very tight knit communities, with celebreties and common faces to get to know, as well as a need for teamplay in order to succeed. You may be less likely to run into the same people over and over while playing Natural Selection just due to the number of players and servers, but people generally want to win, and winning takes cooperation.

Yelling at the newbies won't get them to play any better, and making friends who like doing things that you like doing is always a positive situation.

You mean something like this? Not quite Homeworld starships, but close... well, at least sci-fi.

As a Natural Selection junkie and Homeworld lover, I have to say that your idea does have me salivating.

-m

Many of your ideas have been implemented well. The idea of formation, terrain and maneuver have been the very foundation of the Myth series. It becomes very much a tactical game rather than a strategy game.

Combining the RTS elements within other genres has also been covered. The half-life mod Natural Selection puts one player in a commanding RTS style view, while other players act as their peons.

... at a conference full of transvestites. It was good for the five minutes of entertainment it provided me and my three brave Tech Crew companions faced with hosting a party for drag queens in scary outfits.

And after that, I went and played a REAL game! Yeah! Natural-Selection. Just promise me you want /. it :)

On the minus side, I was wrong on one point: built resource towers no longer take time to activate, it was taken out in the last couple of days of testing.

On the plus side, here's the complete changelog for NS 2.0.

It's basically "Starcraft in action".

PS. v.2 is coming out on July 31

---there hasn't been anything truly new in the FPS genre since CounterStrike came out ages ago.---

Have you tried Natural Selection? It definately feels pretty darn new, and I personally really enjoy it, even though it currently has some bugs (the huge update v2.0 is coming out next week). There are tons of people trying new stuff. As much as I hate the WWII battle sims, you have to admit that they are fairly new gameplay as well: huge battles with vehicles.

It always surprises me when people talk about machinima, they always mention stuff from machinima.com, but the thing is, their stuff isin't really that good at all.

Whats even more surprising is that nobody ever mentions militia 2 by The_Family_God. It's the 2nd part of a 2 part movie based in the map cs_militia. This is the by FAR best machinima I've seen on the net, and arguably better than Red vs. Blue.

TFG has started working on Pre/Selection a machinima in the Natural Selection universe which also promises to be a great movie.

Militia 2: definitely worth the d/l... so D/L it now! :-)

Ah, I see. Well, risk-taking games appear once in a blue moon, and they're often cloned to death. The notion that Japanese developers as a whole are more innovative is an unproven illusion.

I play games from Japanese, American, European, Australian, and other companies, and it seems to me that the creativity factor is average across the globe. It is understandable that some people confuse cultural oddity (from their perspective) with innovation, and it is very easy to fall in love with one particular society, but taken too far it will only deprive you of great experiences from elsewhere.

In fact, you've really got to keep your eyes wide open, or else you'll miss some real gems. Stuff like Combat Mission, Moonbase Commander, and Natural Selection, right off the top of my head.

Actually, you could even say that Japan's slow adoption of the PC platform has put them in last place when it comes to innovation, since tons of innovation comes from independent and small-time developers. After all, it takes a huge budget to put a console game on the market, but anyone with a little skill and a dream can make their own PC game and put it out on the Internet. Those three games I listed above would never have seen the light of day on a console, for instance.

I work for a wireless telco, and we have some techniques in place to guard against spammers. Nothing is 100% perfect, but we make it easier to catch.

1. Using subscriber ID's that are 16 digit long, phone+random number. (To protect against that type of subscriber ID spamming, numerical increasing.)
2. Intelligent email servers, that flag large requests and put them in queues that our NOC can monitor. Thou they have to trip the threshold.
3. Corporate customers who use SMS for dispatch, use dedicated connections. (No public connection for spammers to exploit.)
4. You can opt-out from telco originated spam, which is very few a day. (And opt-out works, not like spammers.)

Nothing is perfect, SMS is just like any other messaging system that can be abused, IM and Email. You dont want to filter to hard and block valid requests, yet you dont want spammers to eat your bandwidth.

I myself use SMS for trouble tickets, email alerts on systems, and escalation notifications. I finally directed most of my SMS to a pager instead of my phone. Dont want to mix IM's with work. And I can turn my pager off when I'm not on-call.

-
WC3+AVP+CS=Natural Selection A free half-life mod.

Three gorges?! oMg! n00bs!!!oneoneone11.. *cough* oh right. Not that kind of gorge :)

Engines like Half-Life can go a long way from what they were originaly built for. Take a look at Natural Selection where the gameplay is nothing at all like the original Half-Life. It has elements of RTS, top down commander views, structure building, classes, equiptment, etc.

When an engine is exposed to modding, many many interesting things can be done with it.

Best to think of it as a multiplayer-first-person-shooter game with the strategic and tactical elements of a RTS. Simply put, Natural Selection is multiplayer FPS Starcraft.

Check it out here: www.natural-selection.org

If not, I'll have enough fun with the "Aliens versus Marines" Natural Selection Halflife Mod, I think. It runs really well on my machine and I think being an Alien is almost as much fun as being Charlie.

All 206MB of them :-)

http://www.natural-selection.org/forums/index.php? act=Attach&type=post&id=416938

Natural Selection is another professional-quality but free Half-Life Mod which more/less combines the RTS and FPS genres in a very interesting way. Best way to describe it would be: Imagine playing Starcraft, but your marines are controlled by real people. Truly focuses on team strategy, instead of individual frag counts. The team is currently in final beta for the 1.1 release, very exciting times indeed.