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The Minerva Half-Life 2 Mod
Via GameSetWatch, an interview with Adam Foster. The creator of the Minerva Half-Life 2 mod talks about the reasons he's putting time and energy into a fan-made labour of love. From the article: "Single-player mapping ...does have quite a tradition, and sadly it often seems to be looked down upon by many gamers. It's somehow regarded as 'easy,' with multiplayer maps being the only true form of expression. I suppose the countless fullbright cubes packed with zombies must put off a lot of people, as do the endless bare BSPs which need to be run from the game console..."
... that had "Hot Coffee + Minerva" pop into my head? C'mon admit it ;)
One of the biggest draws of the game was the series of mods I expected to come out in the years following, but I haven't heard of any must-play mods yet. Certainly nothing has happened like with the first Halflife, where we had CounterStrike, Opposing Force, Day of Defeat, The Specialist, etc. I suppose it could just be an issue with how much more complex the Source engine is. It simply takes much more manpower and skill to create mods for this generation game, compared to the last. Does anyone know of any great Halflife 2 mods out there? Is this Minerva one worth a play through?
You should play this mod. It's one of a handful of good single-player mods out there which is something I am much more interested than yet another multiplayer mod featuring zombies. It's played over a single map, and it's not very long. Ehh ok some good points, it's a good difficulty, the map is very well designed and feels very professional, and it's been written into the same world as Half-Life 2 is set, a good excuse to use combine grunts and their familiar technology. It's a sort-of followup to "Someplace Else", a mod for Half-Life 1 by the same creator, but having now played the previous mod I can safely say it doesn't really shed any light on this new episode. I personally can't wait for the second episode to be released. Grab Metastasis and some interesting backstory here: http://www.hylobatidae.org/minerva/phosphenes.shtm l
Another thing I seem to be missing in modern games is co-op modes. Why is everyone concentrating totally on either being alone and bashing the outside forces/aliens/terrorists or bashign each other? I wanna join up with my friend (or friends) to take on the AI.
This is as offtopic as they come, but does anyone else think that the games section posts too many stories? The main page now says "23 more" under the games section and most stories here have noticeably fewer comments that the other sections.
I sure hope this section isn't using up some kind of quota on the whole site.
My 0.02
May the Maths Be with you!
The slashdot member "Ford Prefect" is Adam Foster I think, anyway, give him your love, because it's a fantastic level he's made, and I can't wait for the next installment, bring it on Adam!
This is one of my MAJOR peeves with a lot of new games, such as Battlefield 2. I asked a friend at Valve why so few games have co-op modes anymore and his reply is that it takes a lot of AI coding to make co-op bots. But, really, this makes no sense to me. In single-player mode, the enemy creatures/people have you flagged as an enemy; therefore, the AI reacts towards you with hostility. So, why is it so much extra work to have both you *and* a gaming partner flagged as an enemy so that the bots react against you both in the same manner? This has been the norm for just about all 1st person shooters since the original Doom! So, why is it so difficult to suddenly be able to do this with modern games? Granted, I'm not a game coder, so I'm asking this strictly from a highly filtered point of view, but the AI is already there. I don't understand why it's apparently such a monumental task to implement co-op mode unless there is some nefarious reason that I just am not seeing.
With respect to BF2, you can actually force a co-op game. Start a single player game on your own system, then have your friends start a multi-player game and connect via IP to your system. Suddenly, you have a co-op game. Yet EA still insists that co-op mode of BF2 is not a viable function that can be added and/or it takes too much extra coding to implement such a function; therefore, the trick that I mentioned above is not a supported function -- even though it works. The vehement anti-co-op mode of modern game designers is mind-boggling.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
It's a harder problem to make NPCs react intelligently to groups of players than to single players, especially when you mix in the trend toward NPC squad intelligence. But this isn't the only reason co-op is more difficult.
Designwise, levels are difficulty-balanced for single player. Co-op requires re-balancing, or the development of some algorithmic way of balancing, neither of which are trivial.
If co-op is effectively adding more players to the single player campaign, somewhere you have to find the machine power to run extra player control models, render more characters, do more physics, etc. Not usually trivial since in the interests of making the single player as good as possible you have usually used up almost all of the memory & CPU time available. Particularly, this is why there have been almost no co-op FPS games on consoles.
You might have streaming textures, terrain, geometry, animations, etc - what do you do if the players are physically separated? Also, the enemy encounters are probably controlled by the player entering and leaving trigger volumes. All of this type of logic has to deal with multiple players.
Just a few of the reasons why producing co-op gameplay is nowhere near as easy as (comparatively) empty competitive multiplayer levels. You can also add in the fact that many games have multiplayer added after the single player has been designed and half implemented. Even for games that start with a multiplayer capable engine, the multiplayer game often tends to languish until halfway through the dev cycle.
And that's fine, but I still don't understand the why the development mindset has changed so abruptly that co-op modes are now suddenly so difficult that they're no longer included. Yes, the Internet and broadband make it easier to have network connectivity, but it's arrogant to just assume that people only want deathmatch against other humans. There is still a significant chunk of people out there who get together to be a team against an enemy and don't want to have to deal with immature kiddies that frequent global servers or risk getting thrown to the other side due to team balance. Yes, the Internet makes deathmatch more popular, but Internet connectivity and co-op modes are not mutually exclusive. Apparently, LAN parties want nothing more than deathmatch as well, which is news to me.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
As the chief coder for a singleplayer mod for the first-generation Unreal engine, I have a few things to say about this.
Singleplayer and coop support are a lot more feasible for developers than people would expect, compared to multiplayer. For one thing, MP is usually implemented on top of the SP infrastructure anyway, meaning that coop is not really a big stretch after basic multiplayer is added. In many cases, it would actually be more efficient to implement coop MP first, and then build competitive and team-based MP on top of that. The decision to do otherwise is a marketing strategy, rather than a technological one. SP usually sells the game, and competitive MP keeps it alive and builds a community around it. Coop has less success with this.
As far as design is concerned, it splits into two major fields: netcode and AI. First, your netcode must be as efficient as possible, which means being VERY selective about what type of data your game server spends bandwidth on, which means using a lot of simulated stuff. For example, I personally believe that trying to get map data a piece at a time while the player is playing the map is a serious no-no. The client should be forced to download the map and supporting files such as sounds and textures (preferably from a dedicated mirror), have them verified, and then run this local copy before he is allowed to log into the server as a player.
Netcode must also be built into each object created in the game, which is probably the hardest part. For example, the client doesn't usually need to know a monster's health unless the player has the ability to ask. It's the server's job to keep that information. If a monster's behavior changes because of an increase or decrease in health, then the player is sent THAT information rather than the health. Also, as far as explosions and gratuitous special effects are concerned, the server should usually just say the equivalent of "A rocket just exploded at these coordinates. Render it yourself." to the client. And one player doesn't need to know that another has a shotgun hidden in his inventory, unless he pulls it up as his active weapon.
Then there's the matter of relevancy culling, to decide what is not a priority for transmitting. The monster you're fighting right now is relevant. The flags in a CTF team game are always relevant no matter where they are. The appearance of your teammate's HUD is not relevant. The guy who just got himself fragged on the other side of the map is probably not relevant, unless you saw it through the scope of your sniper rifle at the time. The straight-flying rockets you just fired are not relevant except as they first spawn, because their physics is simulated on the client, and the server will tell you if/when they hit something.
The second part of this design is the map itself, mostly relating to AI. The policy of "stupid code + smart data" has never been so important here. If your bots don't know how to use a weapon, then it's usually the WEAPON that's badly coded, not the bots. The same is true for maps. Only the most bare minimum AI code should exist in the code for bots and monsters (though this is still usually quite a bit). Anything "special" that they need to do should usually be a feature that is scripted by the mapper using custom or preexisting actors, rather than hardcoded into the game's AI by the coder. As an example, the Unreal engine has always relied on AI navigation of its maps through a network of "PathNodes" that mappers place throughout all the reachable areas in the map. This is what enables a bot to concievably navigate a maze-of-the-minotaur style map better than a typical Human player could. (I do not know enough about other gaming engines to comment on them.)
As a result, reasonably selective netcode combined with gametype- and map-centric AI is the most effective way to design a game engine. The kicker is that most of this is not really even a programming endeavor, but is better considered to be an extension of the d
But isn't that what next-gen games should be capable of dealing with? I'd rather NPCs and AI that can handle co-op play than fluff like being able watching a basketball player sweat towards the end of a game.
A lot of next-gen ideals really seem to be a poorly hidden excuse to shift more units of periphery stock, rather than advancing gameplay in any real shape or form. I know that economics plays a huge role in this but I still don't see the balance between selling games and making games fun.
Co-op play is a *lot* of fun, it's also a really simple way to add some emergent gameplay since you've got twice the number of humans invovled. It really is mind-boggling that more games aren't exploring this area.
Suttree, a weblog about casual games development
He mentioned Garry's Mod, which is single and multiplayer, although it's fairly unusual. It's basically a physics sandbox. You're given a menu system that allows welding, spinning joints, ropes and pulleys, thrusters, and the ability to spawn any object in the game's massive library (and a lot of other stuff, but you get the idea). Build yourself a catapult, or just cram 700 watermelons into a concrete pipe with a bomb and see what happens. It's the most fun I've had with a game in years-- it's open-ended stupidity with all the beauty of a reasonable simulation of actual physics.
In addition to the special "arena" maps they add, you can also jump into any level in the single-player HL2, and play through with your newfound physics powers. Clearing a level with a homemade rocket-powered tank is so much more satisfying than doing it the right way.
I'd much rather play through a "single-player" type game *with* a couple of friends, rather than shoot at them. Unless your friends are all nearly identical in skill level, playing twitch games online against them always ends up being really lopsided. Somebody's gonna clean up, and somebody's never going to get a kill.
More network co-op, game companies!! Pretty please!
I enjoyed the first released portion of the Minerva mod, but I couldn't help but feel annoyed by the AI that would tell me what to do in key parts of the map. It seemed like the AI was trying too hard to be a wise-ass and/or esoteric and it didn't really blend in with the overall mood of the rest of the mod. I did like the music picking up towards the end when the enemies really started running at me, though.