Spirit of Half-Life 1.5 - Alien Grunt is Created 9 years ago2015-11-16 11:24:29 UTC by Mr Gnang

Hello everyone! I really hope someone can help with this problem.

I am quite far into the mod I am working on, and have been using SOHL 1.5.
http://www.moddb.com/mods/spirit-of-half-life/downloads/sohl-v15-with-no-source-code

I used this version due to the description "SoHL v1.5 with no Source Code is highly recommended because of its stability and numerous features." Who knows how true this is, but alas, it's a decision I made a few years ago. At this point it's probably too late to change the codebase without breaking everything!

My issue is with Alien Grunts. I have just put them in my mod, however they do not play any hornet gun attack noises, and possibly death noises. All other effects work fine. It's not an issue with the model, I have tried the default low-def Valve one to be sure. I also moved all related agrunt sound effects into my mod and this did not fix it.

I am not too familiar with the coding aspect or compiling anything, however I looked up the agrunt.cpp file and there is code to trigger the relevant sound effect. I am at work and don't have the exact file name sorry, but there are three sound effects involved, and all when the grunt fires the hornet gun.

Furthermore, this issue has made me think another one might be related, when I spawn any enemies with the monstermaker, they are propelled in a random direction, but I have specified no velocities or speeds, and also they take 3-4 seconds to be alert to what is going on, which can ruin some ambush situations! Is this something anyone has come across

Does anyone have any clues? Thanks for your time!

<Edit - Sorry, somehow I screwed up the title, should read "Alien Grunt issues" !>

There is indeed an issue with the alien grunt attack sounds in spirit. Furthermore, if you plan on changing the player movement sounds, bear in mind that the ladder sounds are used for alien grunt footsteps.

We had these issues with The Core. I would send you our fixed DLLs but, we have made... other changes

Both issues are resolved by finding the following in agrunt.cpp:

void CAGrunt :: InitialiseSounds()

Then, adding the following to the bottom of the list

pStepSounds[0] = "agrunt/ag_step1.wav";
pStepSounds[1] = "agrunt/ag_step2.wav";
pStepSounds[2] = "agrunt/ag_step3.wav";
pStepSounds[3] = "agrunt/ag_step4.wav";

pFireSounds[0] = "agrunt/ag_fire1.wav";
pFireSounds[1] = "agrunt/ag_fire2.wav";
pFireSounds[2] = "agrunt/ag_fire3.wav";

I should point out that none of the above files actually existed in the agrunt sound folder. I added them to keep them all in one place.

As for the monster maker velocity issue, I'm well aware of it, but never looked into it. All I can suggest is that you enter a low value such as '1' in the velocity field of the entity.

As for the alertness, I have only seen this when the entity already was in place prior to switching to Spirit. I resolved it by remove the monster_maker and recreating it.

If the monstermakers keep giving you trouble, I recommend teleporting in the enemies instead, it gives you more control.

Slight issue there as well I'm afraid. I dunno if this is an old spirit bug, but teleported NPCs don't always appear right away.

They are there, and can attack you, but their model doesn't render for a few seconds.

To be honest, I would love to see a Spirit 2.0 release with all of the bugs ironed out. They broke a lot of stuff in the later versions. There are even a couple of errors in one version due to a couple of sections of the code not being closed. Hammer seems to be OK with it, but JackHammer and Sledge can throw out errors in the console.

Oh wow, I wasn't sure anyone would know what I was talking about, but here I get an instant fix! Just need to read up about compiling this all now... and resist the temptation to dabble with the code. I am too far in to try anything too new, but maybe on my next (definitely shorter) mod

Thanks so much for that Urby!

Regarding the monstermaker issue, I have been using spirit from the beginning unfortunately. I haven't had an issue with teleporting npcs or monsters in other parts of the mod yet, so I will give this method a go, thanks Unq!

To add to this - are there any other major issues you have come across with spirit that you had to amend?

loads. Sparks appearing on top of most monsters, some scripts not working correctly. Personally I felt the Spirit changed too much of the original HL's code, and theres some unstable stuff because I remember it freezing my game lots of times. Of course they released their source code so one can go in an fix these problems

I think that Spirit was a neat addition as long as it worked of course.
It's pity that version after version more bugs appeared in favor of new features which later also bugged out. Guess the main dev set the wrong priorities. Never the less the Spirit mods that got released were usually at high quality and fantastic to play.

For me personally I'd say some of the best features of spirit were the monster skin swap idea. The improved path finding and Fog & Snow effects. The rest I never really bothered with though there were countless fantastic entity additions which made mapping without a doubt a lot easier.

If Spirit would contain the op4 entities as well (rewritten) I would swap right away to it instead of having a hard time in Gearbox Op4. But it doesn't and I'm to stupid to code em in myself (tried it 3 times) so ya I've got to stick with what I've got.

The sparks that @2muchvideogames mentioned are due to the spirit code doing that when a debug flag is set. The sparks happen when an AI doesn't have a schedule to run. The problem is that nobody documented that debug mode, so they compile their final release without removing the debug flags, and they get the sparks. The code for the AI sparks is here.

Spirit is a cool tool but as everybody has said, it has plenty of other issues just like the sparks. There's a lot of undocumented stuff, and just poorly built stuff. It doesn't help that the file structure of the HL SDK is pretty terrible. I always think that it'd be a cool project to pull in spirit and the 2.3 SDK and re-implement the code in a more sensible (but still compatible) way. But who has the time to do something like that? Not me!

Always wanted to do something cool with the locus system in Spirit. I think it had a ton of potential but was poorly explained and the examples of it were kind of humdrum so people didn't really play with it a lot.

I wasn't sure anyone would know what I was talking about

You've come to the right place, my friend!