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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.
Is it me, or does that seem really stupid that they're doing a half-assed job and expecting an (unpaid) 3rd party to implement co-op play for them?
Is this merely so they can say "yeah, we have co-op" when they don't out of the box. I mean, what gives?
If they'd planned for it in advance, cooperative play would have been easy. It's not like Doom 1, Doom 2, Quake, Quake 2 and even Duke Nukem didn't all have coop from day 1 - because they'd thought ahead and not artificially restricted themselves to single-player.
A single-player game gets played (most) of the way through once. A multiplayer game gets played repeatedly.
One has to ask, is there a definitive answer from the CS team as to them porting that mod to the new HL2 engine?
I do it wrong
Laying here in the shadows of my room, I squint up at my love. My Ms. Portman. I am sore and tired after fucking her for eight solid hours. My chapped and aching dick is soaking in grits to relieve the pain. She gets on her knees and starts lapping the grits up out of the bowl. She places her beautiful hands on my penis and starts to lick the grits off my achy piece.
Massaging my nutsack she....
WAIT, I DO IT WRONG!!!!
Yanking my dick out of her mouth I throw her to the ground and shove it in to her gaping freshly fisted ass.
"OH BIG ASS SPORK!! Fuck my ass, fuck my ass good. DEEPER, my stallion, deeper!! Make a Beowulf cluster of sperm on my back!!"
"Imagine a Beowulf cluster of this baby!"
I DO IT WRONG!!!!
I continue to hump her alabaster form. Glistening with beads of sweat, she bites her lip in delight as I tear her ass open with my engorged dick.
"Queen Amidala!!" I shreik as I near climax.
She looks up at me and screams, "You are so alive in me, unlike *BSD or VA Software!!! Fill me with seed!! Yes, Yes, Yess!!!!"
"For me you are calling, hhhmmm?"
"YODA?!? What the fuck, can't you see I am using the force here?"
He savagely kicks my Natalie aside, he pulls out his large green penis and impales me...
I DO IT WRONG!!
All your sporkz are belong to the dead homiez!!
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CSNation reports that it will.
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
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.
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.
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.