Hi everyone. You may know me as a developer of Half-Life mods like Field Intensity and Half-Life: Induction.
While working on Field Intensity, I made my own version of Half-Life SDK incorporating a lot of features that I needed in the mods I worked on or implemented just for fun. A few months ago I've come with a name for the SDK and properly published it on github.
Github Repository
Wiki
Releases
Currently the releases include one map that demonstrates a number of features (but not all of them). I might make more demo maps in future.
Some excerpts from the wiki:
Half-Life Featureful aims to serve as a base for a classic Half-Life mod. This SDK provides entities from various mods and official addons, as well as additional entity parameters, bugfixes and new monsters' abilities and behavioral changes. Half-Life Featureful is meant to be used by modmakers without experience in HLSDK programming, who seek for easy ways to bring more features to their mods.
Feature overview
- All Opposing Force monsters and weapons are implemented, as well as other opfor-specific entities (excluding CTF-related).
- Some of Spirit of Half-Life features merged into the codebase, e.g. the locus system.
- Modeled health and HEV chargers and eye scanner from PS2 version of Half-Life are implemented.
- Introduced many new entities and additional parameters for standard Half-Life entities useful for a mapper. Timers, trigger randomizers. Useful properties for monstermaker, scripted_sequence and scripted_sentence. Precise configuration of some behavior aspects of monsters.
- Improvements to monsters' AI and new abilities for standard monsters.
- A lot of features and behavior aspects can be adjusted specifically for your mod via the Feature configuration files without rebuilding the game libraries. E.g. the unused custom weapons can be disabled and their assets won't need to be distributed with the mod.
- Crossplatform. Support for GoldSource (including old pre-SDL2 versions) and Xash3D-FWGS engines. VGUI and VGUI-less builds. SDK potentially may work on mobile platforms, but it needs to be tested.
Some Q/A
Q: Why is it called Featureful?
A: In the context of this SDK features are adjustable gameplay aspects. Most of the features are configured via text files and don't require rebuilding of the game libraries. In that sense "customizable" or "featureable" would fit more, but "featureful" just sounds better.
Q: You call it featureFUL, but the
SDK X provides more features to me!
A: There're different Half-Life SDKs available, and each of them has their own focus. Featureful may lack some of the features that exist in other projects, but it also introduces a bunch of its own additions and improvements. More features will be incorporated in future.
Q: Is there a roadmap for future updates of this SDK?
A: There's no strict roadmap, but you can look at the
TODO list.
Q: Is it well-tested?
A: The mod
Field Intensity is based on the same code, but the ability to adjust features via configuration files is a recent change and it's not present in the mod, so this particular detail needs to be tested better.
Q: If Field Intensity uses the same codebase, why Featureful SDK lacks some of FI additions like objectives interface and improved squad mechanic?
A: Some of these features were quite experimental and not ready to be merged back into the main codebase. Some of them are made for Field Intensity only and probably won't be merged back at all.