Slashdot Mirror
Alien Swarm Can Be Played As a Terrifying FPS
AndrewGOO9 writes "With a few simple commands from the developer console, Alien Swarm can go from being played as an isometric top-down shooter to a first-person perspective. Surprisingly easy, it does make the game, which was released for free via Steam earlier this week, a lot more terrifying. But, anyone who is at home playing games like Modern Warfare or Halo should have no problem slaughtering their way through wave after wave of creatures. In fact, it poses the potential to make the game easier for people who would've otherwise struggled with the overhead view."
An alien game that'd be good. I've been playing AS since it was released and am loving it.
Not everyone likes 3rd person view for all games. I think it sucks for when you control a walking/running character and need to aim. That's the job of 1st person view.
My son is playing AS right now with a few of his friends. I yelled over "hey did you know that AS can be...." "yeah yeah, played as a FPS.. it sucks"
All of which were 100 times more terrifying than what I saw in the video.
An inordinate amount of attention for simple game.
In other headline news, Starcraft 2 can be played as anything, thanks to a gnarly editor.
I doubt it, Aliens are constantly coming from all directions including from behind and catch up in seconds or even fractions of seconds, particularly in the harder difficulties.
also constantly maintaining the optimum strategic positions relative to your teammates is a necessarily in Insane mode, and it only takes running in front of your team mate while they file a few times to kill you.
That being said it would be easier to shoot in the z dimension, in the rare instances that it is necessary.
and their is nothing really nothing i have not mentioned about the game that makes FP view harder then top down.
So it would be more then possible, at least at easier difficulties, but I think that insane mode would be near impossible if not totally impossible.
But then some people could just be very stilled at FP squad based tactics and make it work perfectly fine, but then their are a lot more pope playing FPSes then top down shooters.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
...Space Invaders as a first person shooter. The original alien swarm.
I just watched the video. It looks almost as terrifying as Doom.
(uncommonly referred to as isometric view)
Never try to sound smarter than you are, because someone who actually knows what they're talking about will show you up. Isometric view points in a game specifically refer to when the plane is tilted to a certain perspective, usually 45 degrees. It is possible to have 2D perspective that is not at all isometric, since to be isometric, it needs to be fixed that all along each axis, the scale is the same, meaning that there's no foreshortening or vanishing points.
Further, when it's actually applicable, isometric is commonly used. The only reason it would be uncommon is if it's not applicable.
You, sir, are an idiot. Isometric and 2D are not, at all, the same thing. Alien Swarm is neither, regardless of what people who are utterly unfamiliar with both terms seem to think. Believe it or not, these words have actual meanings, although you clearly don't understand them.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
This story has shown me a terrifying game.
But not the one it indicated.
http://thumb-culture.com/2010/07/22/xbla-review-limbo/
What the hell?
Yeah, it's true that 3rd person sucks for aiming, but this is only usually because you cannot zoom in 3rd person. Or for some other reason, like the crosshairs or ironsights being invisible. The camera distance increase only usually has a marginal penalty on accuracy.
For games with a visible crosshairs in 3rd, accuracy can sometimes approach even. It does take quite some getting used to. There are many games where the FoV change makes up-close combat more favorable to 3rd person, and as a result you see all skilled persons fighting in 3rd when close. These guys can turn and headshot another in .1 second when the opponent appears at 270 degrees left, while a person in 1st-person view would not have seen the enemy at all. It also makes rapidly switching between targets a lot easier.
It's easy to tell the difference between the styles of play. Someone in 1st-person might make one kill and take a small moment to locate another opponent that happened to move. A skilled person in 3rd-person will perform three near-simultaneous executions to kill off opponents on all sides. FoV increases really shouldn't be underestimated.
Plus, there is the obligatory "seeing around corners" benefit. It can help in multiplayer. A lot.
I think both of you just need to chill, take a hit or whatever will calm you down, and just let Mr. Taco run his blog however the fuck he wants to :)
...
And we all had to know this why?
1 Get your own blog ...
2 Whine on that
3 Leave this one alone
4
5 Forget profit, I would love it if I could read one thread without anyone having to be modded off-topic or troll.
...
That's one of the reasons that I really like Alan Wake. The aiming mechanic is really easy since the flashlight that you need to use anyway gives you a good crosshair, plus, since the enemies attack from all sides, it would be particularly difficult to handle from a 1st person view.
No... The game really is open source.
You know, however you want to play it. Because you're the one playing it.
Do you work for Activision?
Guns don't kill people, "with glowing hearts" kills people.
It's fun, and surprisingly tough.
Guns don't kill people, "with glowing hearts" kills people.
so your statement means what exactly?
first person is in the game and not exactly hidden.
Why not script it? I guess you just have to do everything yourself.
Just bind p for a handy point-of-view toggle.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
Alien Swarm gives a laser beam so you can see where you and your allies are aiming.
be played at terrifying frames per second?
Left 4 Dead still isn't available as a Mac title...and now this. Which is completely bizarre, because Alien Swarm was originally available for the Mac; it's based on UT2004...available for, oh, you know, 6 years?
Please help metamoderate.
It is, so the tagger isn't actually misinformed. That said, the source license is still almost completely irrelevant to the story. It's cool to point it out, but that's not what this story is about (to the extent that it's about much at all...)
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Or it could be played.... you know, the way it was designed to be played
Yep. Also, music should be listened to on the CD, and not format-shifted to something the publisher did not intend.
Ahh, yes. That's why they released the source code. To make sure that nobody could ever modify it. And that's why they added a developer's console along with a command to switch to first-person view. To make sure that nobody could ever possibly activate that. And that's why the first person perspective was implemented in the first place. Because developers have nothing better to do than waste their time on features they hate and never want anyone to use.
Yeah, it's true that 3rd person sucks for aiming, but this is only usually because you cannot zoom in 3rd person.
As long as laser precision at infinite range is the norm for FPSs, why wouldn't everything else suck?
These guys can turn and headshot another in .1 second when the opponent appears at 270 degrees left, while a person in 1st-person view would not have seen the enemy at all. It also makes rapidly switching between targets a lot easier.
*sigh* that's whats wrong with games these days. 270 degree .1 second headshot. How is that immersive? Shot to the head is "realistic" but foot, hand, arm, leg, abdomen etc, those are glancing blows. Twitch shooting is going to kill the FPS genre.
Wouldn't you all like games with real life tactics better? Not the aim for the head!, or finish the guy off with a pistol at 300 yds kind...
No, it's first person view that's completely unusable for any game. If I could do 1 thing to improve gaming, it would be to go back in time and murder the guy who created FPS before he was born. Gaming for the past decade would be orders of magnitude better.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
You think it's tough in a game... you should try it in REAL life.
This space available.
No, Open Source actually means something more than source code that you can download and look through. I did look through the SDK source for a license, and the only thing I found was "Copyright (year) Valve Corporation, LLC, All Rights Reserved". I cannot find the terms and conditions of the source code for Alien Swarm anywhere in the SDK distribution.
Bruce Perens once related a story about Steve Ballmer announcing Microsoft's "Shared Source" program. During the Q&A portion of Ballmer's presentation, an audience member asked if Microsoft was going "Open Source". Ballmer's reply was something along the lines of, "Open Source means more than just releasing the source code". In other words, Ballmer had read Peren's Open Source Definition and understood that Open Source was more than just a couple of buzz words to be thrown around for marketing purposes.
There is a very specific definition for Open Source software. The term applies to many licenses. However, that term just does not extend to every bit of source code given away by a person or a company.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
As long as laser precision at infinite range is the norm for FPSs, why wouldn't everything else suck?
Yeah, this is probably true -- although it might make it a bit too easy, some might say -- but I hadn't played a game with this feature. I understand Alien Swarm has it. The camera pullback for 3rd would make aiming at targets a little tougher, but not too difficult to overcome. An eyeball might be hard to aim at, but not a person's head.
*sigh* that's whats wrong with games these days. 270 degree .1 second headshot. How is that immersive? Shot to the head is "realistic" but foot, hand, arm, leg, abdomen etc, those are glancing blows.
I agree. But it bears mentioning that a gaping head wound is usually instantly fatal. A shot to the heart will stun and disable a person, but not instantly kill them. So a headshot might still be preferable. Especially against zombies. Or if the target is wearing body armor. But a headshot is generally much too easy to accomplish as opposed to real life, yes.
Wouldn't you all like games with real life tactics better? Not the aim for the head!, or finish the guy off with a pistol at 300 yds kind...
Well, I pretty much stopped playing all cookie-cutter FPSes back in 2003. That was when I discovered Operation Flashpoint. And it had realistic wounding and ballistics systems, and depended on team orchestrated tactics to survive, and where surviving rather than killing as many enemies as possible, Rambo-style, was the ultimate goal.
Once you play a game like that, you just can't go back. It's much more fun to out-smart an opponent than to out-react him. Choosing a camouflaged location and waiting there while the enemy moves into view, and waiting until he enters a situation he cannot retreat from if you miss -- waiting for that one perfect shot -- that's fun. Outsmarting a dozen human opponents is fun. Blowing them all up with one grenade is not as fun.
Because developers have nothing better to do than waste their time on features they hate and never want anyone to use.
Explains why they insist on putting motion controls in games that don't need it.
Obviously. Good thing Steam isn't run by ol' Jobs so they have no problem letting the user decide. Gawd, I love console tweaks. Just wanna thank submitter for bringing this game (and the tweak) to my attention.
/rarely log on to Steam
There was a recent school shooting (in Germany I think it was) where there were 9 people killed, with nine shots fired, and 9 headshots.
No there wasn't...
Funny how Valve w/ sarcasm = Infinity Ward.
I actually prefer top down. If it was first person it would be Left For Dead with aliens.
iburnaga.blogspot.com
Wouldn't you all like games with real life tactics better? Not the aim for the head!, or finish the guy off with a pistol at 300 yds kind...
Absolutely not. In fact I can't stand the trend of shooters trying to be super realistic. It's one of the reasons I still play Quake 3 after >10 years.
I don't think it'll be killing the genre.
:)
Twitch shooting was what made the multiplayer FPS genre popular in the first place (Quake, Unreal Tournament).
If you want something slower-paced and less twitchy, I recommend Operation Flashpoint & the ARMA series.
Or Fallout 3 with VATS aming
http://www.object404.com
I tried it (before this article) with just the firstperson command not the; asw_hide_marine 1 asw_controls 0 commands, the marines head filled most of the screen and the controls were still reacting as if i was in 3rd person so i could barley turn.
http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/8219/lag.jpg
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
FPS games tend to spawn most things in front of you.
Top-down games spawn all around you, because you can see behind you just as well as you can see in front of you.
Looking in only one direction at a time would be crippling.
My Journal
It just comes downstream to the games, as it should.
I especially hate when the TPS game has the character off center of the screen and sniping from behind cover.
Option 1. See the enemy, hit obstacle while shooting.
Option 2. Have line of fire to the enemy, don't see the obstacle
Option 3. Move from behind the cover, get shot.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Valve never said that the game was "open source", just that the source code for the "game logic" is available, similar to how it is with HL2. At some point, people (and press?) got confused and keep calling it open source, despite that it's not really different from the other moddable Source engine games that you can use as base. The intent being opening up avenues of modding, but the game still depends on large binary blobs to compile and is releases under a restricted license.
Valve probably didn't intend to mislead people, unlike the whole "Shared source" crap by Microsoft.
i found it interesting, i might actually go download it now
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
you're right, i've always fucking hated steve colley (that bastard). also just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's bad, live and let live: that's my motto. No wait, it's "when you question your training, you only train yourself in asking questions", forget i said anything.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Seriously? Could we get something remotely interesting for a change? I've not even downloaded the game and I could tell you exactly how to do this, its really, really not even remotely difficult or complicated in any way. I will very shortly be removing slashdot from my RSS feeds.
Your post is hilarious when read out in a posh and pretentious English schoolgirl's voice.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Not everyone likes 3rd person view for all games. I think it sucks for when you control a walking/running character and need to aim. That's the job of 1st person view.
I seriously disagree with you there. I really think a lot of games where you control a walking/running character are much better playable in 3rd person than in 1st person. Games with a first person perspective always seem very outdated and limited to me, especially when controlled with a mouse and keyboard. The biggest problem as I see it, is that in most fps games, there is no seperation between looking and moving. You both look and steer your character with the mouse, while you use the keyboard to accelerate, break or strafe. I use racing terms for this, because it feels to me as if it's controls for a car instead of person. You press W and move forward while looking straight ahead, but if you want to look at something on your left or right (as you would do in real life all the time), the entire body of the character moves along with it. If you want to keep on going in a straight line while looking left, you have to use an akward combination of W and D, so you are sort of half-strafing. Doing these sort of manoeuvres make me feel like a complete idiot and I can't imagine it looks good from other people's perspectives. The fact you're constantly looking at your own hands, so apparently are walking around with your arms in front of your body doesn't help with this.
Good games to me are not just about shooting. There's all other sorts of actions, and most of 'em are an awful hassle from a first person perspective, while being easy yet fun from a 3rd person angle. Jumping and climbing is really akward and hard in most first perspective games, not to mention moving down a ladder while walking backwards. Just look at how smooth your character jumps into ropes and climbs buildings in games such as Assasin's Creed or the new Prince of Persia games and compare that to how you move around in Call of Duty or Half-Life. Some smart folks may point out that Mirror's Edge is a first person game and jumping and climbing in that game is a really nice experience. The fact that that's an achievement really says a lot about the first person perspective. It's just not suitable if you want control over your character and be aware of your surroundings.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Congratulations on making me laugh with the verbal equivalent of smashing a zombie around the head with its own severed arm. I would also like to bear your children.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The thing that I will be interested to see(and to see Valve's reaction to) is A)whether alien swarm's modding options are sufficiently aggressive to do fairly radical total conversions(as opposed to just more alien swarm-ish; but on a different map, with different guns, or whatever) B)If A is true, whether people come up with anything particularly interesting. C) If B is true, does alien swarm, being free as in beer, become the preferred 'base' game for source-engine mods of all kinds?
Historically, modders have been somewhere between tolerated and celebrated because they voluntarily add value to commercial games. Now that Valve has a free and moddable game, using basically the same engine as their big guns, will modders just swarm around that, or are most of them too tied to working with modifications of the asset sets of the game they start with?
Not really. I don't actually derive pleasure from playing games, just from feeling my graphics card's suffering(like an audiophile; but for graphics), so Alien Swarm FPS was much more enjoyable...
Doh! thats what I get for not RTFA and fact checking.
Syndicate was one of my favorite isometric games back in the day... I must have brought those five floppy disks to so many friends' houses.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
No. They put motion controls in because they're porting it to the Wii, and they have to.
PERL:
All of the power of Voodoo with most of the understandibility!
Yeah, saying the durian is a unique food is silly when its mechanics are the same as any other fruit, only it looks and tastes slightly different. You could actually simulate the style of a durian by filling an empty sea urchin with custard and almond, eating it while on the toilet after eating a ton of beef to recreate the pungent smell, etc etc etc.
Seriously, what kind of philistine are you? :(
But I forgot, this is slashdot. We are great at commenting on things we have never tried ourselves.
There's a lot to be said then, for just how effective viewing the world from the eyes of your character is, if all you said is true yet Half-Life's refusal to use cut scenes or go into 3rd person in any way was hailed as a revolution in gaming. No matter how pretty your character's animations are, no matter how much you perceive your sense of spacial awareness to be greater in 3rd person, the fact that you are seeing the world from a camera floating above your character will always be less immersive and less real than a first person perspective.
You say that "Some smart folks may point out that Mirror's Edge is a first person game and jumping and climbing in that game is a really nice experience. The fact that that's an achievement really says a lot about the first person perspective", 3rd person games have barely innovated beyond placing the camera behind the character's shoulder since their inception. I find 3rd person games to be clunky, I find their environments to be unrealistic (as they often must be scaled up to meet the requirements of a 3rd person view, see Max Payne dream sequence or World of Warcraft) and the sense of detachment from the main character too great to warrant any advantages in 'spacial awareness' they may bring. Furthermore, a game with good 3D audio will allow you to sense the area around you almost as well as being able to see everything around you, with the added effect of engaging your other senses rather than simply allowing you to see everything.
That's a false dichotomy. Format-shifting music doesn't change the inherent nature of the music. It is still (mostly) similar to its original and intended form.
Changing a third-person game to a first-person one is a considerable change, and many of the design decisions that are made for one type of game are flat-out incorrect for the other.
A better comparison would be cutting up Pulp Fiction or Memento to show the scenes in chronological order.
Don't think World of Warcraft when you think 3rd person perspective. It's just 1st person with the camera pulled back a little. Think Robotron 2084. If you feel any detachment from your character, you won't be alive very long. Well, you won't be alive very long anyway, but achieving zen like oneness with your character is quite possible, and necessary to make any sort of real progress.
If anything, it's the games that try to be "real" and "immersive" that fail. An abstract game allows you to forget all that and just get into the zone. Can you imagine playing Ikaruga from a first person perspective? Tetris? When I play an FPS, I never forget that I'm playing an FPS. When I play a good 2D shooter, I forget I exist entirely. That is immersion.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
No, it's first person view that's completely unusable for any game. If I could do 1 thing to improve gaming, it would be to go back in time and murder the guy who created FPS before he was born. Gaming for the past decade would be orders of magnitude better.
How exactly do you murder someone BEFORE they are born?
Also, if you type the konami code...
Professionals aim center mass for a controlled pair. Only when controlled pairs fail (failure drill) do they do 2+1.
THL phish sticks
I don't know about German shooters, but "gaming caves" (or "man caves" for adults) are not uncommon. It's not actually a cave, it's just a decorated room or basement.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Not everyone likes 3rd person view for all games. I think it sucks for when you control a walking/running character and need to aim. That's the job of 1st person view.
So very this.
I hated the disconnect between 'WASD moving in perspective' to 'full on strafe, with mouse turning'. It was jarring.
In fact, someone's already made an attempt:
http://videos.apnicommunity.com/Video,Item,322728528.html
The visual style is pretty much exactly the same as limbo as I suspected could be done, though the guy that made it isn't great at designing level layouts by the look of things.
which is totally what she said
But since it switches to 800x600 without actually resizing the graphics to such, I can't play it. Nice going Valve.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Going back in time is really the impossible part.
(Abortion arguments aside if that's possible:), A person is alive and can be murdered - before they have been given birth too.
Some DA's have entered murder charges for cases where pregnant mother was murdered.
Really a petty point though, killing ones mother or father in the past has same effect, again with the ludicrous idea of time travel though
Not everyone likes 3rd person view for all games. I think it sucks for when you control a walking/running character and need to aim. That's the job of 1st person view.
Except there is a reason perspectives are designed that way. I can't use an external view in something like Halo because it would allow you to see around corners and things like that.
In the case of Alien Swarm, it only takes 1 or 2 shots to kill a standard alien. As it stands, its already pretty easy and its got a well built learning curve - But its also very teamwork centric, like L4D - you'll only do as well as your team can work together.
Because of that, the top down view is designed to make you have a tougher time not hitting team mates. Taking this challenge away from the game essentially cripples the game.
to take them out even if they were wearing body armor.
These days, unless you are wearing almost video-game body armor, professional weapons (e.g., police or military) will generally be able to go right through the armor and still be lethal.
For example, weapons that fire 5.7x28mm ammunition are becoming more common in professional use precisely beause the projectile can penetrate kevlar while still having more than enough power afterward. In theory, this ammo could even pass completely through body armor and the chest cavity (assuming it didn't strike bone) and go out the other side. This would be unlikely, though, as there tends to be a lot of tumble after impact.
http://www.thelocal.de/national/20100506-27017.html
I guess "recent" is a loose term, but it did happen. He may be confusing it with an axe/molotov cocktail attack in march.
http://www.thelocal.de/national/20090917-21985.html
I think the ratio of headshots is better explained by the fact that he was executing them at close range, which has little to do with Counterstrike.
Fair enough; my comment was mostly an off-the-cuff remark. But a major part of any work of art or creation is what the audience brings to it; that includes the way in which it's enjoyed. While there might be a way in which the creator *intended* for it to be played, there's nothing that says it *should* be played that way. (Even though frankly, I don't understand why you'd want to play it differently... but to each his own. Which is ultimately my point...)
First Person Tetris
I'm with you, actually. I played Dr. Mario against a friend for at least two hours a few days ago, and once you're in the zone it's almost a pure contest of wills as opposed to getting the good gun or the high ground.
Your brain is not a computer.
Very Cool, and thanks for sharing...but...
Not really First person Tetris: For me True First person would have you Inside each Tetris piece, as if it were a vehicle, or creature, with "eyes" that you were seeing first person from:
This is following the orientation of the tetris piece, but not its perspective: To be truly first person your view ahead would be first that of a blank wall, then of stacks of blocks, looking like rooftops.
A) You would not be able to see gaps under pieces, and would have to use depth perception to tell how deep or tall each stack of blocks was (is that hole two deep or three)?
B) Even worse your perspective would rotate when you rotate the piece, and you would have to face - away from the bottom of the screen, and loose sight of where you were going, you would have to line up, and determine the number of turns, and then turn and "back In" blind. (Bonus though, when you face up, you should be able to see the next piece that coming down, (though you could only see the bottom of it)
No, it's first person view that's completely unusable for any game. If I could do 1 thing to improve gaming, it would be to go back in time and murder the guy who created FPS before he was born. Gaming for the past decade would be orders of magnitude better.
Absolutely, I completely agree. The problem is that a first-person view has no connection with how I perceive things in reality.
See, I was born with no eyes, and at a very young age I was fitted with a shoulder-harness camera that sits about 30 feet over my head, as well as slightly behind (about 30 degrees) and to the right. This makes it virtually impossible for me to play a first-person game because I have never perceived the world this way, and it just looks strange and alien. I feel right at home playing a top-down isometric game, as I watch myself play the game from a top-down isometric view.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
"Execution-style" typically refers to point-blank shots, not "whipping around" and hitting multiple targets in a short amount of time.
Spend some cyber modules on the psionic 'Enhanced Motion Sensitivity' ability.
I bought it a while back while trying to track down the last of the damned red eggs in the Von Braun nacelle. It's amazing how quickly a radar screen turns one of the most atmospheric games of the late 90s into a rather pedestrian shooter.
You sir, have replied to the wrong post.
...and not all games are designed for everyone. If you don't like the top-down view, there are hundreds of FPS games out there for you. Play one of them instead of trying to turn Alien Swarm into something it's not.