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Gaming Goodness
Let's shoehorn a few gaming submissions together: tabby writes "For those not in the know here's the most amazing game I've played in ages. Its a Half-Life mod called Natural-Selection. Try to imagine CounterStrike + StarCraft. Its essentially a multiplayer First Person Real Time Strategy game." real_b0fh writes "I'm surprised no one mentioned it here yet, but Silicon Ice Development has released the beta 2.6 for their very cool Quake 3 Arena mod Urban Terror. Have played it a bit and it features cool things like better weapon hit model, some anti-cheat features, improved maps and some new nasty bugs. Well worth a try if you are into FPS games." And on the lighter side, LSDsmurf reports that there's a patch for Doom III Alpha. Yes, you read that right.
Given that school is meant too prepare us for later life and enable us to lead productive and fruitfull lives. When will that start embracing education into gaming mods. Not only would they be touching upon the real world but would also enforce the use of math's, physics, art,creativity, logic, design etc etc as part of the process. I'm sure that alot of mods/maps come from students already who even work in groups, just be a nice fun way to help educate and enforce knowledge though aplication.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44077&cid=4591 655
Though nobody will be reading this since some moderators went crazy on my grandparent.
You know. I just heard about this mod this morning from my brother. He said the exact same thing about the balancing issues. I just thought it was cool that fun new mods are still coming out for Halflife.
Any game devs out there? How do you restrict the ability to rush in games like this?
First, I agree on your comment. I find it extremely cool that a game I bought for such a small price has blossomed into dozens upon dozens of good Mods that are completely FREE :)
In response to the 2nd half though... I am not a game developer but I know my way around the gaming community and I think I can give you a good idea of how it works.
Natural Selection takes advantage of both FPS [First Person Shooter] and RTS [Real Time Strategy] characteristics. Its in essence a hybrid.
To start with the marine side, it has a commander who plays the game more like an RTS [top down strategy] where you dont get to control your "units" [the marines / players] directly but you can give them waypoints and stuff to build or use. The players experience the game like a first person shooter and can ask the commander to drop them weapons and armor, or place turrets for them to build.
The Aliens follow a similar structure except they have no commander. They all have their own resources and have multiple levels of alien evolution. Each type of alien has its own attacks and stats like armor and health.
A major way to prevent aliens and marines from rushing is to adjust weapon damage, or available resources for either side or even both sides. With lower starting weapon damage rushing wouldnt do much damage. This would be undesirable because you would loose resources and time. It could also prove to be hindering to either side later on where their first level marines or aliens would be nearly useless against higher level creatures or equipment.
The other way, to adjust starting resources, could determine how quickly either side could build up defenses, evolve, or research better equipment.
In reality there are many different ways to approach that problem. Its determined more by the problem, the game, and the community that defines the problem.
But I've had problems playing it. Due to legal issues, I can't set up my own server on campus, so I must depend on the servers I can find in the game. So far, it seems that most people are just playing small games with their friends that they password protect.
I like playing as an alien, but it is annoying to try to play by yourself versus several marines. Maybe I'm missing something, but I have not been able to attack a machine gun turret without dieing yet.
Also, if you are a server: Just becuase your crappy PC can run a CS server doesn't mean it can run a 30 person NS server. The game seems to need a lot more umpf per player. They have already issued a patch for the servers to fix this, but it doesn't help when your computer sucks already.
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
I'm still playing wolfenstein. IT's my favorite.
I've got into it over the past few days and it's clear that the mod is in it's very early stages. It suffers from "deathmatch syndrome" like CS... people don't want to work with the team. But I think that at the moment this is mainly because people don't know what they're doing. I think the future of this mod may be decided in a few weeks - if it's players gel to create a community which realises this is a game which needs teamplay, it has a great deal of potential.
Free iPods - now in the UK!
Even John can't possibly turn down the free promotion Doom is getting from all of this. I mean, christ, it was an Alpha that barely worked, and people were going nutso over it! How many games can do that? And get on CNN, Slashdot, and every major news outlet? None. In the end, someone releasing a "patch" for an Alpha of this game is just HILARIOUS. I suppose what might tick John off more than anything is the fact other devs can get a peek at his brilliance ahead of schedule and figure out what he's doing that they're missing in their own games. Outside of that, I will bet anyone they'll be forking over their hard earned cash for Doom3 and a new vid card sometime early 2003 regardless if they've downloaded this, made a patch, or anything else that happens between now and then.
Th designer need to draw a distinction between a "full frontal assault" (FFA) and a "full frontal assault in the first 5 minutes" (rushing).
The FFA should be an acceptable tactic. If you're a marine, it is a good strategy to wait until half the alien team is away from their hive, and then go in with guns blazing. It just sucks when you do it in the first 5 minutes, and the game is pretty much decided from that point on.
So, they key is really to make it relatively easier to defend than attack, during the first few minutes.
How do you do that? Lots of ways
e.g. Give the team a useful defensive weapon that has limited lifetime (pehaps a fixed number of proximity mines), so that they can lock down their base for a short period, while they build up.
Or, make the maps harder to navigate. Have doors that don't open straight away etc. Make it hard to get to the other team in the first 5 minutes.
Now, I haven't played NS yet, but in general the key really is to make it hard to attack at the very beginning. It's not really about balancing the sides, it's about making sure the game last long enough for the strengths/weakneses of each team to come out.
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Was a f-cking awesome FPS with RTS components. Playing in a clan battle with organised and practice offense and defense was unbeatable. It wasn't exactly the most technically brilliant engine but it worked well on good enough hardware.
Unfortunately it is dead, at least in Australia. What killed it was a stupid proliferation of patches and mods. There was the "classic" mod where you ran around aimlessly killing everything - popular with braindead CS players who like to camp somewhere with a sniper rifle and work on their mouse skills. Then there was the latest "patch" which changed the gameplay and also included some bugfixes. The whole community (and servers) split into groups running different and incompatible versions of the game, each of these groups was below critical mass and they all died.
Mods can really, really suck.
:wq
this is a Troll and should be marked as such. The first 2 games are mods for what is the most popular multiplayer game Ever - and therefore its really quite normal that you see multiplayer mods for such. As far as doom 3 - its a single player game, with a little bit of multiplayer thrown in, but the focus is really going to be single.
This post is as foolish as saying "imagine a beowolf cluster of these"... yes i know complaining about multiplayer overpowering single player was a really popular thing to say 2 Years Ago, when quake 3 came out, but in the last year a LOT of great single player games have happened.
This was a tough choice - to mod the 4 down to 3, or to post, hoping people read, agree, and mark down to -1, where it belongs.
People have been modding the heck out of BZ II...there are at least 3 professional quality mods out there and dozens of lesser ones...including all new models, weapons, and even a couple of races. Anyone who is at all intrested in FPS/RTS hybrids should check it out...Battlezone is the grandaddy of em all. When the game released, it was too much for the hardware of the day, but on modern systems it rocks. Graphics are damn good even by todays standards, it has a lot of depth, and the multiplayer is just plain awesome. The main forum can be found at www.planetbattlezone.com, and copies of the game can be picked up dirt cheap on amazon or bigbox stores.
I don't understand why more of the new FPS games aren't supporting Cooperative multiplayer out of the box for the default maps?
Sven Coop ( http://www.svencoop.com/ ) is one of my favorite mods for Half Life.
I like to run around killing the monsters with friends. It's mindless fun that reminds me of the old Doom 2 days.