Alien Hunter MOD! (Worths the reading! I swear!) Thread

(Sorry for the long post, but people told me to write more details...)

Ever wondered what does Freeman do on his free time? He takes a few friends and his old shotgun and goes on ALIEN HUNTING!
Here is some info about the MOD:

Game type:
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Multiplayer hunting game.

The environment:
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Instead of the boring old cities and combine bases, the players will find themselves in huge open maps with hills, lakes, trees and ofcourse, lots
of Xenian wildlife!

The Gameplay:
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The players can play alone or in small teams of up to 4 people.
At the beginning of the game, every player gets 1000$ for the basic weapons and every team gets a jeep with 4 seats.
Now its time to catch yourself some headcrabs. (Don't try killing anything big at the beginning, because the aliens are very powerful.)
Every time a member of a team catches/kills an alien, he gets money and points according to the size, strength and preference of the animal.
The points of all the players in a team are added to the team score, but the money stays with the player who earned it to buy their own stuff.
The more powerful and preferred aliens you catch, the more points and money you get.
The team with the biggest score (points) wins.
Using the money, players can buy more poweful vehicles, weapons, ammo, traps, baits and more special stuff wich will be listed below.

The equipment:
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When a player gets money, he can open the 'Buy' menu and buy whatever he wants, no metter where he is. (Unlike in CS.)
Thats one of the ways to get equipment.
So what can you buy?
You can buy:
- Weapons (Handguns, SMGs, sniper rifles, shotguns, tranquilizers)
- Vehicles (Jeeps, boats, mini helicopters, hovercrafts)
- Security chips (Prevent your own car/helicopter/whatever from being stolen by other players.)
- Baits (If Muhammad won't come to the mountain, the mountain will come to Muhammad... Or whatever... You got the point...)
(You can buy bait, you can put an alien you captured as bait, you can put dead players as bait.)

- Hounds (Not a dog. An houndeye. They have very good hearing and will bring you to any alien in the radius of 1KM. Just keep him out of trouble...)
- GPS (Every living creature in the radius of 1KM is spotted by your Global Positioning System.)

Another way to get some equipment is to steal it from others.
That can be prevented by the 'others' by putting security chips in their vehicles.

The monsters:
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Most of the Xen wildlife from Half-Life, Opposing Force and Half-Life 2 will be included, (No. No Gargs. They aren't wild creatures.)
But there will also be some monsters wich were planned in HL1 and HL2 and weren't included and some monsters unique for the MOD.
The monsters are also going to be in different sizes. Even those who are of the same kind.
I mean there will be smaller headcrabs and bigger headcrabs. Smaller bullsquids and bigger ones.
There is going to be a whole ecosystem of monsters.
I mean that every monster has its favorite food (other kinds of aliens) and most hated enemies (if they see each other the start to fight).
The monsters will also do some basic things such as seek for food or water and sleep.

This is the formula used to calculate the score you get when capturing an alien:
New_score = Old_score + Al_mass / 5 * Al_Pr * Al_frags * Al_status

Al_mass - Mass of the alien.
Al_pr - Preference of the alien. (Ex: Headcrab's preference is 1 while Ichysaur's preference is 10.)
Al_frags - How many players did the monster managed to kill. (If you capture a powerful alien wich others failed to catch, you get more points.)
Al_status - The situation of the captured alien.
The last one is pretty important.

If the status is 2, that means the creature is alive.
How do you capture while its alive? Lower his health till its lower then 30 but bigger then 0 and tranquilize him.

If the status is 1, that means you killed the creature. No metter. You still get your points.
(Health is lower then 0 but bigger then -30.)

If the status is 0, that means the creature is gibbed and his guts are all over the place. You won't get anything for that.
(Health is lower the -30.)

Strategy
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Theres lots of strategy needed to play and win.
Use your money correctly, choose the right weapons, use your bait in a wise way and try to avoid the catches, caus there are lots of them!

Hope you like it!
Good comments so far...

I'm going to need coders, mappers and modelers.
The coding part may be a little complicated, but no major will be needed since most of the features already are in HL2.
The mappers have to know how to build nature maps.
The modelers have to be able to build aliens and weapons.
If people will be interested i'll set up a website.

Edited by (in order): GunMan8, GunMan8

Sorry to dissappoint you but it sounds like a map that would be more realistically and easily achieved in Sven Coop 2.

HL2 readily supports these maps, although for frame rate purposes, you'll probably have to limit the visibility a fair bit or at least break it up with trees and big hills so you're not trying to render too much at any given time.

I'm getting some info from General Timothy C later also, about how to make larger maps with lower frame drops so I can help out a bit later on with that.

As for the game, basically it's Deer Hunter except remove the deer, insert aliens? Sounds like it could work though I wonder if theres a large base of fans for this type of venture.

I player Deer Hunter 2005 alot so it interests me.. But I'm just one person admits millions of HL2 players so who knows?

I've never played Deer Hunter, but it sounds like fun.
Anyway, I will be very thankful if you'll manage to get huge maps work with low FPS, but I think HL2's hiden face removal system will do the job. (But anyway, if really will be able to do that it'll be just great!)
And about the opinion of other HL2 players, well, I asked a few more people and they said its a great idea and also gave me some more ideas.
I think it'll be fun for all the people who like to kill big nasty aliens and a specially for people who like Serious Sam style wide open maps.
And Sickre, GET LOST!

Edited by (in order): GunMan8, GunMan8, GunMan8, GunMan8

Yeh whats good about it is it sticks to the killing aliens part in general that we're familiar with in HL1 but craved and didn't see in HL2, so in my opinion, it could work. You'll be providing something very different in the source engine thats for sure.

Good luck with it and I'll get back to you on how to minimize frame drops once I find out.

Thanks.
Would you like to help coding more parts of the MOD too?

Edited by: GunMan8

I can code but 1) I have my own mod to attend to and 2) I doubt I'm anywhere near the skill required to modify HL2's code.

Oh well.
Good luck with your MOD!

No more posts?
Does that mean this thread is dead?

Be patient, as said so many times before not everyone is in our timezone. Give it at least 24 hours and people will put up their opinions if they feel it's worth the effort.

I've had a few threads on these forums and haven't had a post for about a week, patience, young padawan, patience.

Comeon!
I'm trying to keep this thread alive!

Telling people who helpfully offer that perhaps you'd be better off starting by mapping for sven instead to fuck off isn't going to get you a lot of popularity.

Nor will bumping your own posts, nor will the fact you're an ideas man with no coders mappers or modellers.