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Well, I hate teamspeak too, why force me to use proprietary junk when we have Mumble? But there are, in fact, games where stopping to type, even "rudimentary" things, is a competitive disadvantage, and strong communication is a massive competitive advantage. Natural Selection (not 2) finally made me get a headset for gaming.

There are lots of game companies that don't use DRM...and what's more they have come out and made a point of it. Examples: Wolfire, 2dBoy, and Unknown worlds, just to name a few.

I totally agree.

Counterstrike (pre-source), or CS, was the first community-driven mod that turned into a huge commercial success. Based on the original HalfLife 1 engine, the now classic war between Terrorists and Counter Terrorists ran smoothly on even an old 300 MHz Celeron with a 3DFX graphics card. In a way CS is "the mother of all 3D mods" (that is to say: the first serious mod for a 3D FPS). Read more on Wikipedia.

Day of Defeay (pre-source), or DOD, was very much like CS but was the first mod to bring deployable weapons and player-classes to the world of modding, in a WW2 setting. While not as successful as CS in total number of players, it was the first 3D FPS mod to achieve huge success in a relatively short period of time. Read more on Wikipedia.

Natural Selection (pre-source), or NS, is the first game to mix FPS and RTS gameplay, by allowing a "Commander" to order his "troops" (all other players on his team) around the map using an FPS-like interface - a concept many games has since copied. Set in a sci-fi horror world, Natural Selection tells the story of the good and friendly aliens with big sharp teeth vs. the evil-evil Space Marines with their big and nasty guns... To my knowledge it was also the first FPS mod to allow multiple "game modes". Having a rather advanced gameplay which demands a lot of cooperation from players, "combat maps" where introduced as a means of teaching new players the basic concepts of the game. Read more on Wikipedia or on Unknown Worlds homepage where you can also read about the progress on Natural Selection 2.

- Jesper

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 :-)

You might want to check out Unknown Worlds http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns/ NS2 is on the horizon. Ahh... creeping infestation makes me feel like sticking a shotgun down the gullet of and Onos and show those acid driping freaks what hot lead can do.

There's an open source copy of Guitar Hero called Frets on Fire. There's tons of songs for it, I have about 1000. You can even program your own songs into it. You can use the keyboard to play it or you can pick up a Guitar Hero controler like me and get a USB converter.

I'm pretty much a strict PC gamer myself, meaning the consols I have are the SNES and NES. The current games I've been playing are Orange Box, Audiosurf and Natural Selection . The last which is my favorite game of all time, it's a cross between FPS and RTS, best of all, it's free. The 3 games listed here are cheep (or free) so it won't cost you much to get some good games.

Does this mean HL2 might go from FPS to RTS?

OCRemix was mentioned in another thread (a great site), it's worth noting that Jeremy Soule himself contributed a remix of Final Fantasy 6's main theme.

I liked the theme Soule composed for Natural Selection (the Half-Life mod), especially the end-of-round theme (about a minute in to "ambient1") http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns/audio/

Maybe try Natural Selection (free HL1 mod) http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns/

Many artists will make things for money ONLY. The altruistic spirit of OSS does not translate well to game art (with a few exceptions). Usually, the artists doing things for free are usually the bad ones, and the ones demanding lots of cash are the real deal. But without the latter, any game looks and sounds 1995ish, no matter how good the code is.

If they want Aliens done right, they should talk to the Unknown Worlds team that created the Natural Selection mod for Half-Life. If there was ever a game that captured the mood and excitement of the Aliens movie, it's NS.

http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns/

No Predator. Please, god, no Predator.

I could go either way on that. The Predator at least had some interesting weapons. If they used some kind of 'code of honor' to encourage unusual gameplay, it could work. It'd take some careful thought, though.

Give us a plot that hopefully doesn't involve yet-another-mad-scientist-trying-to-control-the-Al iens

From your lips to the developer'r ears, please!

Hell, let us do the whole "fortify an area and then defend it" thing

Bingo. They might take a few cues from Natural Selection. Not all of them, mind you - but a few.

a little more tolerance of brute-force solutions than we saw in the AvP games would be extremely nice

Another consideration - these days all the rage is destructible environments. The acid blood in the games would hurt enemies but not, say, the floor. That could easily be part of the Marine campaign - you have to kill enough aliens to burn through to an inaccessible area, or you have to not kill aliens near critical equipment, etc.

If you have any other strains that fit the plot, then use them. Just be sure to keep the look and feel of anything you add consistent with the original setting.

It's more-or-less canon that the aliens take on at least the rough outline of whatever they 'infect'. It'd be interesting to see some other creatures as aliens. An elephant? A snake? A bird?

Yay Lua! Go team!

Depending on audience I tell people that Lua is JavaScript as designed by Scheme people. (Partially true; at least one R5RS author was involved in design discussions.) For an older audience, I say "imagine Algol crossed with Self"...

Speaking of WoW, the Natural Selection mod for Half-Life has been using pie menus in combat for a few years now. Mostly works, although they never really tweaked the timing between pops as well as you've done for your stuff.

Nope, Natural Selection has been around for about 5 years now (though it is pressumed dead at the moment)

http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns/

Yeah, it's so cool it's been done twice before, at least.

Just how is this any different than Natural Selection or Tremulous?

Oh, right. 10 hour matches.

Sure, not everyone is playing the same game anymore, but the market is much bigger as well. The important thing is the community, and if you have 3 friends willing to play with you, that may be all the community you need.

Sure, not everyone is playing the same game anymore, but the market is much bigger as well. The important thing is the community, and if you have 3 friends willing to play with you, that may be all the community you need.

I would like to see a MMORPG based on ALIENS, but humans vs. aliens only. The controls and vision would be like Aliens vs. Predator games. There also should be multiple places, classes, etc. Maybe something like Natural Selection mod, but in a bigger place. Add more elements from the Aliens franchise as well. Each mission would be like instance/quests.

I think it would be neat if players can customize the missions as well, and of course has to be approved by the game company.

on my G5 I find it better to go to 2000 when I am running around looking for enemies around corners/behind me/whatever. I drop to 1100 dpi for general fragging purposes then I swap to 400-800 for finer control when accuracy counts. I play Natural Selection, which is imo one of the finest mods for Half-Life. I play primarily on the nukedgames server. My handle is Pookie, say hi if you see me.

Oh yes and currently porting to HL2 http://www.unknownworlds.com/

It's not legal to sell them. Valve's license specifically prohibits people from selling anything that's developed with their tools, or interfaces with their software/engine.

But that said, if it becomes popular (aka CS), I'd imagine they'd work something out.

I'm still fairly surprised that Valve hasn't picked-up Natural Selection yet. It's far more fun than CS and actually requires real teamwork and strategy.

Hopefully when NS 3.1 (or NS-Source) comes out, they'll make it available on Steam.

If you want to try something that's a little more satisfying than the "run around and shoot stuff, round after round in CS", pop over to the Official Site and give it a try (It takes some time to learn how the game works, so reading the manual [the wikipedia entry is pretty good!] will help you look less like a newb).

N.

I would like to see a MMORPG based on FOX's popular science fiction franchise. I don't care about Predator (Aliens vs. Predators). I know FOX had a game like this before MMORPG was known.

I would like to see something like World of Warcraft, Star Wars: Galaxies, etc. with various missions (quests) in various places. There would be different classes as well like Natural Selections including commanders, ships (medic, weapons, etc.).

When you have a group of people acting as a unified squad, each aware of the other's actions, it's completely engrossing!

Natural Selection can be pretty cool for this, especially when playing as Kharaa (aliens). With all the hive-sight and whatnot (basically a wallhack to locate all your teammates and enemies they can directly see) there can be some amazing, unspoken teamwork emerging - it's great when a horde of skulks burst from cover without warning and annihilate a heavily-armed bunch of marines, without a single word spoken or prompt typed...

I'm not a very good multiplayer gamer - I usually get shot within seconds by some hyperactive twelve-year-old with ultra-fast reflexes. But add a bit of teamwork, and I can actually become useful. :-)

Has been done, in fact. For instance, the HL mod Natural Selection started doing this years ago, if I recall correctly.

I'm wondering the same thing, but it isn't so hard to believe. The NS team did go and found Unknown Worlds Entertainment, and their jobs page does not look like your typical MOD. The Half-Life community has spawned games off of MODS before and no MOD is more deserving then NS.

I personally would love to see NS developed on a better engine; I only feel it could enhance gameplay and the NS experiance. I am curious as to why they would consider another engine other than the source engine for the game though. It looks like a marriage made in heaven.

Furthermore, there are plenty of "total conversions" of existing video games that involve completely new models of everything.

Yes, let me list a few of the more memorable ones:

* Counter Strike - the most popular mod ever, a counter-terrorism mod ("modification") for the game Half-Life. The developers are now working at Valve Software, having released several commercial versions. Their follow up "Counter Strike - Condition Zero" is due on shelves next month.

* Desert Combat - the premier mod for Battlefield 1942, voted best game mod of 2003 and 2002 by Gamespy. The team (Trauma Studios) just signed a contract worth $.5 million with DICE to develop a commercial project for a future Battlefield product.

* Natural Selection - the #2 Half-Life mod, the Natural Selection team has formed their own studio and are looking for publishers to take Natural Selection to retail.

* Team Fortress - the ancient Quake then Half-Life mod who's employment by Valve meant that TF1 was included with the official Half-Life patch. This project spawned the now infamous (for the wrong reasons) Team Fortress 2.

as open source provides better tools engines and better graphics tools

I don't see that happening. Commercial games typically take 18 months to complete. An open source project will take longer than that if it's worth playing. I can't see unpaid virtual teams sticking together for that long - it's too much effort for too little reward.

And games are much more of an artistic endeavour than a purely technical challenge of writing an operating system where there's often a provable "best way" of doing something. Operating systems are a means to an end - games exist only for the sake of the game, hence everyone wants things to work their way. Expect infighting, splinter groups and a lot of projects not getting finished.

Remember, open-source software is an anomaly in the world of commerce. As a rule, nobody provides work or services for free - at least, no work or services that you'd actually want.