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Total Conversion HL2 Mod
bbzzdd writes "A comprehensive total conversion of the Half-Life 2 game has been released. Crafted by students from SMU's Guildhall, Eclipse is a beautiful change of pace from the average FPS. From the site: 'You play as a young Sorceress named Violet whose father went missing five years back. After learning the secrets of Telekinesis, you are teleported into Auld-Haven, a lush and fertile land where Violet grew up. Your objective is to return to Violet's home where she last saw her father years ago and dig up any clues to his whereabouts. In the broken down tower of her home you discover a journal left by her father. The journal unlocks a handful of secrets that ultimately leads you on a quest to find the ancient teleportation device - the Standing Stones.'"
I haven't kept up with this, but wasn't Valve going to let modders release their stuff on steam? Or does there have to be money involved for that to happen. :(
Steam's weekly update talked about this and another Source Engine mod done by the students at Guildhall, Samurai Legends (same url, but /samurailegends/, link also dead), a couple of days ago. The samurai game was multiplayer and from the screenshots looked very pretty. I couldn't find the link to the Valve page, but I found the relevant text on a bulletin board:
"Next Saturday, Valve's CEO and founder, Gabe Newell, will be giving the commencement speech at Southern Methodist University's Guildhall, a university program offering course work in game design. Two groups of students enrolled in the program will be releasing the Source MODs they produced during their term."
No. One of the Valve guys said they didn't place mirrors in HL1 because they wanted the player to imagine Gordon looks like him. It was probably an engine limitation but it was probably a reason not to include mirrors in HL2 (unless the engine can't do it either). They shouldn't have put him on the loading screen and HL2 box then.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Interesting. That must be why more games get ported to Linux than the Mac, because Linux has a bigger desktop share... Oh, wait...
This is a pititful excuse by game developers who don't want to change their attitudes or outlooks. All that make your game easily portable requires is dumping all the DirectBlah BS and using an API that doesn't make you Microsoft's whipping boy.
Heck, if the API is inadequate, you could even add a bit to it for whatever it is you needed and release the changes back. It might make it easier to make games, which would make a bigger market, which would probably make things better for everybody.
As it is, I tend to buy games from small independents (Garage Games, Guild Software, Introversion Software, the list goes on) instead of the big publishers because the game developers who work for them have minds of their own and tend to make Linux versions of stuff. As opposed to people like you who stick their fingers in their ears and chant 'Marketshare' over and over again.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I love it when people shout out "COMMUNISM DOESN'T WORK!!!" and point at the former Soviet Union, because then I can shout out "CAPITALISM DOESN'T WORK!!!" and point at every single failing capitalist economy and poor-as-fuck country. Let's take a look at one of the countries that has benefited the MOST from capitalism: Haiti. Yeah, capitalism sure works for Haitians.
What people like you don't seem to realize is that capitalism works GREAT if your country is already rich , but when you're broke as fuck it's the equivalent of being a broke as fuck private citizen in a capitalist economy. Sure, you can become super wealthy, but is it more likely that someone already rich will become richer or someone poor will become richer?
Gimme a break, you narrow minded tool. Quit your whining about your one-right-way-to-live.
I'd argue we're still apes in caves, our spears are just semi-balistic now, and our caves are above ground.
No, no it didn't.
Quake was open-sourced three years after it came out and a full two years after Quake II's engine made the Q1 engine financially obsolete for licensing purposes. Releasing the Q1 code did little "work" for id except earn them a tremendous amount of goodwill from the open-source community. Their only financial benefit came from the licensing fees that came in when the dozens of commercial games developed by the OS community and based on Q1's code were released.
Don't confuse your rabid hatred of closed-source software with a sense of how to run a profitable business.
More impressive is the fact that if you stop walking mid-step in Halo 2, your character will actually move slightly as he readjusts into a standing pose. It's a small thing compared to all the bugs Halo 2 shipped with, but we need more things like this in games. Certainly nothing is an funny as the way kneeling characters slide around when they move while crouched in GoldenEye, though :-)
English is easier said than done.
yeah uh hi, it also means the craptacular game houses that basically do the same thing but do a worse job have to compete with people who are probably a lot better, and can tweak the game as it goes on, and sell it for free... so look for this to not happen for any game where the designer gets most of their money from engine licensing fees.
i hate being this cynical, please kill me thx!
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
That explains why they were able to develop it in just five months. :-)
/. expect mods like this to be perfect and have everything ready from the start. Man, why doesn't this .04a version have a full storyline! That's freakin' lame! Waiter, reality check, please.
Excactly. This was probably just a first run, no different than what most game companies and even animation studios do - release something small, get feedback, apply the feedback to a larger project. It seems that too many people on
Now that they have some experience under their collective belt, they should be able to get future mods out with more efficiency. This of course pertains to any mod-maker, not just the Eclipse team.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
http://img61.echo.cx/img61/5208/eclipse5ra.jpg
At first I thought 1 FPS was a rounded-up value, as it was more like 0.2 FPS... but I was proved wrong. I figured I could just wait it out, but then I realized it isn't really worth it. I understand it's promotional, but if they'd spent even 15 more minutes developing a storyline (in addition to the 5 they did spend) then I might've actually played it through. Instead I spent 20 minutes in total ignorance of who I was, where I was going, and why I could make objects float in mid air... that is, if I wasn't spending my time waiting.
Compromising game quality for graphic quality is one thing, but if you're going to go the eye-candy route then do it right and use at least a little discretion, ensuring that the game will actually play on anything other than a particle accellerator. The glow-effect annoyed the hell out of me. I found myself rubbing my eyes and putting my face right against the screen because I thought I was going blind.
I dunno. I didn't find it very entertaining or challenging, unless you consider suffering through long choppy intro sequences full of faeries and flowers a challenge.
Just finished playing it. For any of you wondering if it's worth the download. It very much is.
Beautiful environment, interesting concept, and wonderful soundtrack (I'm hoping to download the soundtrack for later listening after the slashdot effect is over.)
It was created as a school project, so unfortunately the team indicated they won't be able to continue to develop it after they leave Guildhall, but it's still a wonderful work. I've seen recent professional games which don't match up to what these guys pumped out in just five months of college work.
For those of you who didn't notice, you can do the last level as a mini-game if you scroll the 'New Game" menu to the end of the chapter list. My best time so far is a minute and twenty seconds.
The page itself is a case of bad design: Thumbnails should be direct links, so people can quickly quick them open in tabs - as opposed to this where there is a javascript on each link which only allows you to open one - and totally leave out browsers who do not have (or have enabled) javascript.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating