3-4 years ago, I started working on my first Half-Life mod. It was originally called Admer: The Game.
It actually started out as a QBasic text game. I had QBasic classes in 7th grade, and I'd finish my tasks so quickly I'd get enough time to work on a game. It was simple. You spawn in a cave, and for some reason there's a zombie in front of you. I'll write about that one in a journal.
I had an idea to make a single-player Half-Life map pack based on my text adventure. I downloaded some textures from the Internet (stock photos, lol), and I just threw them into Wally after downscaling them. The results were this: There was some dynamite at the end of the cave in the text game, so I thought I'd add it. The dynamite would explode and make a hole in the cave ceiling, so the player could exit. Soon after that, the player would encounter a small hut, with a pistol and a piece of paper. It's not important what's written on the paper.
As you can see, it looked kind of terrible. If you want, you can check out the mod on ModDB: https://www.moddb.com/mods/admerthegame
I once renamed it to An Unknown Game, because I understood that it was bad to call a mod by yourself. (in fact, I was the protagonist in the mod, lol)
The mod was supposed to get released somewhen in 2017. Clearly, it would never get to that point.
I gave up on it in Q3 2016. My programming skills sucked. I didn't know my way around the Half-Life SDK, and my mapping skills were definitely bad, as well as the rest of my skill set (except video editing, my only skill that wasn't under average).
I was lazy. All my ideas were in my head, I was too lazy to write them down and I had no mod design document, no organisation, no anything. I simply didn't know where I was going and what to do, so I half-baked everything. (ahem, quarter-baked)
I had some wacky ideas there and there, e.g. a programmable universe where people spawned things via code (scrapped, won't fit the story of AUAS). That mod is, in fact, the very origin of Jody. (you all remember her, lol)
I've occasionally visited the mod's page on ModDB in the past 2 years. I remembered the old stats, suddenly. It used to have 10s, sometimes 100s of viewers per day, and now it varies between 0 and 1. So I thought "How great would it be to do this again, except with the skills I have now?"
The time wasn't then, however,
I was analysing some progress of my skills. Since 2015, I've improved in mapping a lot, in texturing a lot, video editing significantly (I mean, not much to be improved since I've been video-editing since the age of 8), sound editing a lot, music production so-so, but there was just that one skill that stagnated. That one skill which prevented me from reviving my old mod.
It was programming. In late 2017, I started panicking due to the fact that I knew I'd have programming class the following year. So I wanted to prepare myself.
(little did I know, they hardly teach you anything here in high school when it comes to programming)
I just needed a good start. Something to jump-start my learning. And in November 2017, a guy from the 2nd or 3rd year came into our classroom, recording a promo video for the high school. We were having IT class, and our professor told us to open Dev-C++ and pretend to be typing something. They all pretended. Except me.
I opened up a source file, saw how it's written, memorised the syntax and commands within a minute, and wrote a program. When I returned home, I got VS 2010 Express, registered it and decided to make GMan vulnerable.
It was an unbelievable experience for me back then. I actually understood something for once. And all he was doing was setting his health to 50% of his max health every time he was attacked:
Now that was just the beginning. I called my little brother in and showed him that, and he was so amazed. He laughed in disbelief, because all the time he knew about HL (since the age of 2 or 3), he knew that you just can't kill GMan. Not in my mod.
But then, there was a period of stagnation. I hadn't really touched Visual Studio any more. Instead, I observed. I listened to Shepard's and Solokiller's programming lessons on the TWHL Discord (lol), I've read numerous coding stories from other developers on Quora, and so on. So essentially, I did the same as I did with mapping. First read a bunch of tutorials and documentation, and then try working on it.
In late 2018, however, I got into C++ again after a long period of not doing coding. I got my new PC in July, and that meant I could finally get my hands on Visual Studio 2017, a nice step up from Visual Studio 6.0, 2005 Express, 2009 Express and 2010 Express.
My 2007 laptop simply didn't have enough space for 2012, 2015 nor 2017.
And that meant a new beginning, a new age. I was looking for some libraries that can enable me drawing stuff to a window, and boy I found one: SDL. I learnt quite some C++ for those few months, and coming back to the Half-Life SDK once again, I finally understood most of the stuff in it. It felt amazing to finally understand something that troubled you for a few years. That age was the age of learning something I've always wanted to learn.
I had prototyped a function in AngelScript for Sven Co-op (it was my first time tinkering with AS scripting), and then I decided to implement it in the HL SDK.
It led to the creation of this mod. I'll be working on the technical part for a long time. Once it's done, I'll move onto the actual mod revival itself.
So, what is this thread about?
A Utopia At Stake
Will you save it?There's a world out there. A world where everything is close to perfect. You move because of education, a future brighter here than on Earth, and for the fun of it. Things will look perfect, until a series of events lead to the downfall...
Its fate... is up to you.
Well, I'll just post stuff here about the mod.
Here's a summary of what I've made in the last couple of months:
- semi-auto for the pistol
- env_viewsway, an entity that messes up the player's view angles, useful for drunk effects, rocking ships etc.; is capable of inducing nausea (seriously)
- trigger_valueop, my personal favourite, as it can change any keyvalue of an entity which it targets, it's very powerful
- trigger_difficulty, which triggers something depending on the skill level, which can be easy-hard but also not easy, not medium and not hard.
- util_rotator, something that spins an entity around an axis, but it's not in a very good state at the moment (it rotates things, but eh... I feel like it should use quaternions rather than regular angles)
- util_consoleprinter, a very useful debugging entity when you're developing an entity setup or a scripted sequence series
- a customisable HUD with about 15 parameters, most of them being for the TDTR effect (The Deader The Redder - the lower your HP, the redder the health display)
- vehicle_base, a really, REALLY basic vehicle. It's a chair that you can enter and exit. But the system itself is quite flexible under the hood, allowing for multiple vehicle types, whether it's cars, planes, space ships, boats, or chairs & sofas (why not). I'll describe them more in my next post
- additions to the CBaseEntity class which allow trigger_valueop to work
- additions to the input and client commands, which allow for sprinting (and being able to control the vehicles in a more special way) - and best of all, it doesn't need more bandwidth than 1 to 2 bytes/sec per player (keep in mind that an empty map with one player is already about 27 to 50 KB/s, assuming the netgraph displays it in kilobytes/second, I could be wrong) (thanks to Solokiller for the information about pev->button)
- new view sway, viewmodel bob, you name it (thanks to Shepard for helping me with the old HL WON rotational bob, it's 1 line, but 1 important line)
Oh right. One last thing before the next post. I'm hoping release this mod's source code when it gets to Beta or Release Candidate, maybe even earlier. It's based on Solokiller's fork of the HL SDK, that is compatible with VS 2017. I've already sent versions of the source before the "VehicleAPI" and "ControlAPI" were written, because some people simply asked for it.