Natural Selection For Half-Life Overhauled

Entropius writes "Natural Selection, a free Half-Life mod that contains elements of both traditional first-person shooters and real-time strategy games, has just gotten a complete overhaul with the release of version 2.0. In a nutshell, it combines the best elements of StarCraft and Counter-Strike. NS 2.0 adds new alien abilities, commander interface changes, changes to the resource model, four new maps, and more flexibility in alien evolutions. It's a whole new game now, and a blast to play... one of the most innovative new mods in a long time. The mirrors are straining to keep up, but here's a list of download links via readyroom.org." Update: 08/01 14:43 GMT by S : Here's a very necessary BitTorrent link, thanks to commenters.

Comments

Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[Joel Carr]

A lot of 'great' mods have come out for Half-Life. Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and Natural Selection immediately come to mind. Meanwhile, not nearly as many great mods have come out for say a game like Quake 3 Arena, which is from the same sort of era. Although lots of mods have been made for Quake 3, the only great one I can think of off the top of my head is NS-CO, but that's not even finished yet.

My question is, why do people seem to prefer creating excellent mods for a game like Half-Life and not so much for a game like Quake 3. Is it because Half-Life is easier to write mods for, is it a better engine, or did it just happen to have the critical mass since it was such a popular game. Or am I just taking crazy pills and just as many great mods have been made for Quake 3 as for Half-Life.

The reason I'm so interested is because I would love to be playing these mods natively under Linux, and I was wondering what the Half-Life engine has that the Quake 3 engine doesn't. Also, does anyone know how the Doom 3 engine will compare with the Half-Life 2 engine with regards to the mods. I've heard Half-Life 2 will be a modders paradise.

Re:Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[ThePyro]

Live player count stats taken from gamespy:

• Half Life : 86807
• Battlefield 1942 : 6872
• Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory : 6601
• Medal of Honor Allied Assault : 5338
• Unreal Tournament 2003 : 4085
• Americas Army: Operations : 3925

Half-Life is beating 2nd place by over a factor of 10 in terms of player count. More players = larger pool of potential modders = more high-quality mods. More low quality mods, too, of course - but you don't really hear about those much :)

Re:Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[ziggles]

Those stats are pretty meaningless in this discussion. Half-Life already has lots of great mods, and everyone already knows it's the most popular online game today. The question is, is it the most popular because it has lots of great mods, or does it have lots of great mods because it's the most popular? Those stats don't answer any questions.

Personally, I think it's a mix of both. HL is a great single player game, everyone who cared about PC gaming bought it. But it wouldn't have lasted without the mods.

CS was the saving grace, after that it was just everyone else wanting to copy it's success.

Anyway, in reply to the original post, there are some high quality mods for Quake 3. Urban Terror, Total Combat, Rocket Arena 3, Challenge Promode Arena(my personal favorite multiplayer FPS), and probably some others I'm not familiar with. Also, I'm kind of glad it's not as popular.. it's harder to find random people to play against, but it's also a lot less free of unexperienced idiots playing online games for the first time and treating it like an AOL chat room.

Re:NS.

[BrookHarty]

The worst is when you get a commander that just builds and doesnt expand the weapons. And you cant get enough votes to kick them out. If the Aliens can morph into better soliders, you cant put up a defense. (Hoping they tried to make it a little more even this version.)

Seems the normal start strat is alien you rush the marine spawn, marine you put up defenses.

The mix of features makes this game fun to play, theres so much to do, and the maps are great looking. I'm wondering how many mods will be ported to HL2, CS and NS would look even better with highpoly skins and gfx effects.

BTW, why would anyone uninstall HL, CS is the most common lan party game. And Day of Defeat, NS is popular too.

Open-source bot for Natural Selection

[clamatius]

A little project I've been working on in my spare time is a bot for this game. It's called WhichBot.

Features include a bunch of fancy AI stuff (dynamic navigation, wall-climbing support, pack-based strategies, etc), Linux support and open-source code on Sourceforge.

You can find it at whichbot.com.
</plug>

Important note: we didn't have access to the NS 2.0 server before release, so the current bot version DOES NOT support NS 2.0. We hope to have a compatible bot version up ASAP.

Re:NS 2.0

[ctr2sprt]

It really is a huge upgrade. It changes the fundamental strategy for marines from "Don't let the aliens get 2 hives" to "Capture as many resource nodes as possible." One consequence of this is that it eliminates two of the most successful - and most hated - NS 1.04 strats, the jp/hmg rush and the 2-hive lockdown. Both strats may be effective at times, but as complete strats they are gone.

I guess the big changes don't really leap out at you as much as new guns would, but trust me, they are there. I think the moment when it really hit me was when I realized the aliens had 3 hives and I wasn't worried. We went on to win that game.