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Half-Life 2 Mod Creation FAQ Released
blue2k writes "The VERC website has released a new official FAQ containing plenty of new information pertaining to the forthcoming, eagerly awaited Half-Life 2 SDK, and development with the Source engine." The FAQ answers such questions as how to get lip-syncing working in your mod ("To start with, you'll need to author keyshapes, or morph targets for each of your characters. Our facial animation system uses 34 keyshapes, 14 of which are required for proper lip-sync animation."), and co-operative gameplay in Half-Life 2 ("..we aren't doing a co-operative mode, but the mod community.. [particularly] Sven Co-op has expressed great interest in this.")
is if Source uses Direct3D or OpenGL.
One has to ask, is there a definitive answer from the CS team as to them porting that mod to the new HL2 engine?
CSNation reports that it will.
Half Life, the original, was designed mainly as a single player experience. That is what the devleopers focused on. But they took great pains to ensure an active mod community could exist, and it did, and it helped make Half-life, and it's offshoots, the success that it was.
You could wait an extra three months while they add co-op play to Half-Life 2, or you can get it sooner, and in three months (or less), co-op play will exist from the mod community. The developers aren't saying they don't WANT co-op. Just that they know that they aren't necessarily the best ones to provide it. They want to provide (again) a ground breaking single player experience.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
This isn't a HL2 question specifically, but I'll post it here since there is bound to be someone here that knows. Why has there never been a first person shooter where you can look down and see the rest of your body? Is there something in the bible about your character needing to be a floating head with an arm attached? When a game such as half life 2 is so incredibly realistic, it seems that being a floating head that can climb ladders while reloading would take away from it slightly. Is there some sort of problem game designers run into while trying to implement this?
Hacker Media
It's just you trolling. Half Life 2 WILL have multiplayer implemented by Valve. They're just incredibly tight lipped about it. We know there will be a multiplayer thing supporting (as of the latest news) up to 32 players per server. Any other details are a complete mistery.
Overcaffeinated. Angry geeks.
Tribes 2 had this, it worked great. It was a real anchor into the sensation of "being there", I was overjoyed when I first discovered that they'd done this, look down, see your legs & torso. It was especially cool when you landed after a jump / firing the jetpack.
:(
A visible legs & torso were just one of the many things that made Tribes 2 one of the greatest multiplayer games ever. Now I'm playing Planetside regularly I miss that feature.
I think the very first instance of this was the game "Trespasser", but that was a very weak game and the less said about the "health meter" the better.
(Oh alright, the "health meter" was a red heart-shaped tatoo on the breast of your [female] character, that you had to look down to see.)
Shame they're not using a scripting language. I'm no stranger to C++, but it's a hell of a lot easier to mod a game with scripts. The best, IMO, was Jedi Knight's COG language.
Still, looks great! Can't wait to play with the SDK!
here are a few things that stayed on my mind after watching the 650 megs video, which i found incredible at the moment:
-it will work on a pIII800.
ok, this one didnt leave me wondering. I just laughed. I have a pIII600 and the radar map in ennemy territory makes my computer crawls, just because there is a lot of grass. Can you imagine the same on a pIII800 with LOTS of shaders, physics and ai as they showed in the video? That is a joke.
-the physics system:
look closely at the video.
In the physics part of the video, the melon breaks some time after having been shot.
In the gameplay part (with the booby traps), when the player destroys the wooden logs barring a door, they break before he actually hits them.
In the same part, look at the huge swinging iron bar, it stays swinging and it's in no way slowed down by hitting things or just by time. It looked like a scripted event in fact.
I have some doubts that the explosion which hurls the car is also scripted and not a "physics" event.
-multiplayer aspect of the game:
Watching the video made me shivers at the thought of the multiplayer games that can be made. But then, what can of connection can handle this.
Look at the "physics" scene, when the barrels come down and the wooden logs are being shot, now imagine 32 players doing the same, throwing fumes and hurling objects at the same time. What can of connection can handle this amount of datas flow? internet2?
If we're talking about degrading the size of the data flow, then we're talking about "killing" the physics system, then we come back to the regular old type of game.
-the mod scene:
If all i wonder above is in fact true, and they found a way to actually make all this work on a pIII800 and on regular dsl connection. Who is going to be able to actually make mods? Apart from a few really big and very well organised pro-like mod teams?
The models look like killers to do. And the map will need a terrible amount of work. Right now, some quake3 maps, which are quite simpler to do in terms of textures or modelling, take one year of work to their authors.
Look at the people who did q3f (and some of them did ennemy territory afterwards, if i'm not mistaken), they could do wonders with such an engine. But look at the time between the releases and now imagine that with an engine such as what they showed in the video. Can you say a lot of years between releases?
(*cough* team fortress2 *cough* has probably been in development for years and they are the authors of the engine)
Or maybe we're talking about mods not using this engine in its entire scope? Which would be a change since mods usually go beyong the engines they are built upon.
A troll they may well be, but they are also correct. Valve are not implementing the co-op mode that many people love. It is apparently being implemented by a third party. Multiplayer does NOT automagically mean co-op.
The Wavelength. Been arround since the beginning of half-life 1 and lead the community in modding! No doubt they will continue the tradition with HL2.
If they'd planned for it in advance, cooperative play would have been easy.
What you're describing is not co-operative gameplay, it's two guns shooting instead of one. Even that is non-trivial to implement - should the monsters scale with the increased number of players to keep the difficulty normal?
Anyway, I have not yet seen any FPS implement truly co-operative gameplay, it's usually just running around together shooting stuff, you never really depend on the other person. Sven co-op has got this depending in some places - one guy pushing a button while the other uses a deployed machine gun to hold off the critters, or pushing two buttons at the same moment etc. Also, Raven Shield and other tactical shooters (including many multiplayer ones) have got it in the sense that each player has to specialise in one way - CQB, assault, recon, sniper and so on.
But I've yet to see any meaningful co-op FPS. Not surprisingly, since that takes a lot of extra work and is only of interest to a relatively small amount of people (compared to single player).
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Although it seems very unlikely to happen, a petition to get Half-Life2 ported to linux has been started. Please sign it!
The creator wants to reach 5000 signatures before he sends it off to Valve.
Valve doesn't say anything about Team Fortress 2? Guess I'll have to develop it
Splinter Cell has a 3rd person playing perspective, ergo it is not an FPS.
Try a 4 player game of Project Eden in first person mode.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.