Blogs - ElementAlien

The clash of the titans has been epic for the past couple of weeks, but Silent Hunter 4, CnC3 TW's, Codmw2, AVP and even a bit of Painkiller has been keeping me occupied.

Problem with gaming is too much modding can really wreck any skill :D

Getting back up there at the moment ;)

In the next couple of weeks I should be working on rebuilding the mod (again), and i'm going to use my increasing skill at WinMerge to add stuff from the tactics/darkness source, one step at a time, till i've got a version thats stable.

I intend to spend the next couple of hours with my eyes glued to a hammer compiler (internal groan). Lets see what I can come up with for Swarm Tactics on Diema. I reckon that I should be able to create 4 seperate spawns near the start that clash at the first hack objective. Unfortunately it means i'm also going to have to do a little displacement editing.

Hammer by itself isnt that capable at terrain generation (I usually use stuff like Terragen for that, 8 bit black and white heightmaps) so I'm probably going to need an hour or two to extend certain areas to add working spawns and even more importantly, propper pathmapping for the swarm so that it doesnt become like a certain l4d area I could mention.

Although not moving as fast forward initially as I had hoped, I went back to basics and created a respawn director of sorts for Alien Swarm. I now have working dm and tdm in both vanilla and darkness modes, as well as darkness coop.

Its been a tough couple of days, I hope no one minds if I play some incubation for a bit ;)

Swarm Tactics 0.5 (Including The Darkness) should be released in a couple of days max.

I'm being held back at the moment by having to compile so many maps with my new spawners... it takes time to do the modification but the compile time by far is the longest delay.

I also made my first tilegen map, before release I intend to make a couple more that are tdm and dm balanced.

Wish me luck... going to go play a bit.