Slashdot Mirror
Unusual Source-Driven Adventure Game MODs
bengal0 writes "Two new HL2 mods created in six months by graduating students at the
Guildhall at SMU are available for download.
Both games are single player adventure games, with mouse-driven interfaces focusing on exploration and puzzle solving. Weekday Warrior is a comical game set in an office environment, in which a bored office worker daydreams to escape his normal life. In Shantytown, a girl and her robot companion explore a towering, futuristic city in search of a way to stop the trash that is falling on her house. BitTorrent links: Weekday Warrior, Shantytown."
For a second there I thought it meant "source" as in source code, until I saw the part about Half Life. Talk about confusing – who'd have thought a proprietary game would be called Source? And even the name Half Life kind of gets confusing if you try hard enough (I remember in geometry class, our teacher was showing how to work our TI-83's, and everyone was so disappointed when she explained her "HALFLIFE" program was to determine the half-life of a radioactive atom... I think I'm the only one in the class who even knew what she was talking about). Who knows, maybe it's just me...
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreedz_Climbing Kreedz Climbing, a mod devoted to trick climbing/jumping in levels to reach odd places. Now that's unusual!
Demented But Determined.
The office modeling, texturing and character scripting is nice, and the voice acting is well recorded and surprisingly well done. Unfortunately the camera angles are so god-awful that the game is rendered nearly unplayable. I spent most of my first 15 minutes just wandering around blind corners and bumping into things. Its a shame that that a project which clearly has a lot of polish on it, is so hamstrung by such a poor technical solution. Instead of the game being challenging it ends up just being frustrating.
Too bad. Its clear that many other members of the dev team did an excellent job.
Looking forward to 2.0
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I'd have to say this is the first Slashdot article in YEARS that's given me stuff that matters! These'll be fun to play. :D
...if they don't move fast enough for you:
http://students.guildhall.smu.edu/~weekdaywarrio r/SetupWeekdayWarrior.exee s/ShantytownSetup.exe
http://students.guildhall.smu.edu/~shantytown/fil
But before you slashdot their servers, please, think of the poor college students trying to pay off college loans. Don't make them break into their savings for bandwidth!
There are many reasons the school keeps choosing Source for its senior projects. First, there is a history of successful projects at the school using the engine. The faculty and staff are familliar with it, they know both its strengths and its flaws, and that allows them to better guide students through a project. Second, if you look around at job postings you'll find a lot of companies want new employees to have familiarity with the Source engine, sometimes regardless of what the project would actually use. Thus, even though I personally would have preferred a more open / cross platform solution, in the end, having knowledge of Source will help me get a job, and that's ultimately why most students (including myself) came to the school. Finally, Source has a lot of tools developed by the community that save a lot of time on the projects' tight schedules.
As far as the other engines you mentioned, they have been used at the Guildhall for various other projects. Unreal Tournament 2004 has been repeatedly used for students' first 3d team game, and usually ends up being some sort of team based multiplayer game. DooM 3 and Quake 4 have been used for individual assignments given to level designers.
Ultimately however, as short as development times are in the school - these two projects above were built in 6 months while we had other individual projects running in parallel - there would not be time to test across multiple platforms anyway. Heck, it's difficult to find time to fully test the game on graphics hardware that we're not using in our development machines.
-Amich
I just recently started playing half-life two and it's freaken amazing. The gameplay possibilities with that engine is pretty awesome. The water hazard among other portions of the game were simply amazing. It was refreshing to play such an immersive, realistic, and fun game. Then came ravenholme which was almost like survival horror games and gameplay was improved through the use of the gravity gun. Nothing like smashing zombies by picking up ordinary stuff on the ground.
I've been to dissapointed as of late with numerous highly rated titles (God of war for the ps2, that game is freaken awful, nice graphics but it gets old watching your avatar take 2-3 seconds on the same cool move 200 times a level).
Hmmm... Pie...
Job Description:
Innovative, independant new generation of game creators to revitalize a stagnated and over-marketed medium.
Necessary Qualifications:
Must know how to make promotional content for FPS genre kings. Must be willing to work at home, and for free.
By the time students graduate and get a job the engine is probably obsolete already. Hell, Source was pretty much obsolete when it was first released, the Doom 3 engine was/is more future proof than Source. Unreal Engine 3 would probably make more sense since it's actually being used and it's still an upcoming technology so the dev jobs now would contrbute to games using it and it won't be obsoleted for a longer time than source. Also, judging by the comments from professional developers regarding the two engines Source is a PITA compared to even Unreal 2.0.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Have you looked at the Source engine, and Half-Life 2's source code in particular?
The Source engine is popular among modders for two reasons: accessibility and history. People saw the likes of CS and DOD come out from the HL1 engine, and generally assumed that the Source engine would be just as easily moddable. For the most part they are wrong.
Having seen source code for Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2K4 (though not the C++ source, the UScript source), I can say that HL2's code is 100% pure spaghetti. The design is atrocious, obfuscated, and a royal pain to work with. By comparison Quake 3's straightforward code is a godsend, and UScript's strict OO design, while not 100% intuitive, at least makes logical sense. HL2's code has neither.
What HL2 does have in droves is existing artistic content that is generic enough to be adaptable to most mods' needs, where Q3 and UT fail. But from a code perspective, Source is in short, a really stinking piece of crap. Sure it runs and looks cool, but you haven't seen pain until you've had to work with it. Ugh. Documentation is practically non-existent, and Valve's wiki, while commendable, is quite inadequate. HL2's code was hodge-podged together to WORK, and that it does, but take a look at a well-designed engine like Q3 and UT, both of which where designed to be extensible above all else, and you realize what a turd Source is.
As for companies demanding Source experience: there are only a small handful of Source licensees. I would argue it's FAR more useful to know the Unreal engine, given that it has a VASTLY greater number of licensees - and has for a long time. Even discounting already-published games, UE2 and the upcoming UE3 together (or even apart) have a much greater domination of studios than Source can shake a stick at.
That said, I would personally discourage students form getting too tied up with any one particular engine. The dominant 3rd-party engines in the industry are all, for the most part, well designed and learnable. To tie yourself to a particular engine is to doom yourself as a lowly scripter. A game coder needs to go far beyond scripting, and more in-line with general development and theory. There is a lot more to game code than mere feature implementation that is involved in light modding.
It's good to see people thinking outside of the box with what is available with Source, due to the market domination of CS:S and Day of Defeat it seemed as if that engine was doomed to only seeing mods based on that kind of FPS multiplay. It seems like most of the mods since those two gained popularity have been very similar except for a number which have become well recognised for their own achievements, hopefully these two can live up to the growing market in the mod community for things that are different (shown in the popularity of Sven Co-Op, Science and Industry and Garry's Mod) and become successful. I, for one, will give them a try with an open mind.
Business Voyeur
I've also been working on a third-person-perspective adventure game mod for the Source engine as part of my studies.
We built Absence over the last few months of our degree at the University of Salford. There were 7 of us who worked on it, and like the folk at Guildhall, we found the source engine to be very flexible to work with - hammer in particular is a wonderful tool.
There were a few problems, however. As we were left up to our own devices, we had to rely solely on the modding community for support. This was good in that there are a number of friendly and helpful modders about who are willing to give advice - but there are rather massive gaps in knowledge with the source engine - particularly the coding side of things. When you've only got a short amount of time to come up with something the tech can quickly become a significant barrier.
Also, getting the game out to people that don't have the game is a pain. Yes, I know this is a totally obvious thing to say, but when you're trying to get an *adventure* game out, using a *shooter* engine means that your immediate audience is expecting something with guns/cars/boobs/etc, and you tend to not get much of a sympathetic ear when discussing your game.
That aside, tho, source is great fun - and for the purposes of our school project, it did the job admirably.