Comments - ppittle

Hi NightFury14! No this is a single player mod only. The reason is the dynamic level generation is not synced across the network between players. You could technically play the 1st level together, but afterwards the game will either crash or quit out.

Or view in a web browser: Assembla.com

1000+ Downloads! Thanks for everyone that took the time to check out ASDM.

If anyone wants to expand this out further, or just checkout how it works, the full source is available: Subversion.assembla.com

You are correct good sir, there is no multiplayer available. Didn't have time to tweak out the level generator system to sync between all players in a game to ensure everyone generated the same level. And thanks for playing!

Shouldn't get you VAC-Banned, Valve released Alien Swarm open source and this is installed as a mod, so it would be really really odd for Valve to punish someone for using it.

The exe should be an installer. Run the exe, click next a few times and then restart steam. When you steam loads back up you should see Alien Swarm Director Mod in your list of games. Launch it as you would any other steam game. Hope this helps and have fun!!!

What's the installation problem? Did you install Steam, Alien Swarm and the Alien Swarm SDK?

ASDM shouldn't have any impact on VAC. It's installed as a 3rd party game and doesn't change any of the original Alien Swarm files.

I finished writing the paper, thanks to everyone that took the survey!

Thank you kindly sir! Much, much appreciated!

fasteddie -> ASDM adds a new campaign that is dynamically built every time you play. When you are playing, it feels very much like the original game, however, when you play the campaign a second time (or die) you'll have a very different experience than when you played the first time as the level layout and size will change.

Raygoza -> You are correct, it's not difficult to adapt the performance measurements to create a score for the entire team rather than an individual. In fact, doing so opens some interesting opportunities to measure team based attributes like friendly fire, team healing, etc. The reason why I made ASDM single player was I didn't get a chance to get dynamic level generation to sync with multiple clients. With 4 people playing, the game has to build the same dynamic level for each player. While this is not overly difficult, it would be some what time consuming to implement and unfortunately there just wasn't time to include it and still make my release dead line.

alect01 -> Did you install the Alien Swarm - SDK? If it's not installed ASDM will still run but it wont be able to dynamically generate maps at the end of a mission.

Hey Raygoza,

You're correct, the server would need to generate the random component and then distribute it to each player. From my exploration of the code, Alien Swarm originally had the functionality to support random multiplayer levels. A random seed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_seed) would be generated server side and then distributed to each player. The tilegen process would then use the seed so that each player generated identical layout files. If this worked (I didn't get a chance to fully investigate it and test it) this would solve the majority of the problem.

Ya, unfortunately there wasn't enough time to get multiplayer working correctly. But if you know anyone that would be interested in developing that functionality, let me know!

Yup, if you set mod_rebuild_map_on_restart to 0, you'll be able to replay the same map if you die.

(hit the character limit. continuing on from previous comment)
Rebuilding the level on restart was one of the final (if not the final) feature I added to the mod. Just like you said I originally wanted to allow the player to replay the level and improve instead of forcing them to learn a new map. What happened was during play testing I realized that there were occasions when the tilegen system would build a ridiculously hard map, ie putting several large fight rooms right next to each other and putting all the health and ammo right next to each other at the very end of the map. There was also a very rare occasion where the tilegen system would build a map that didn't actually contain a viable path from the start to the exit. Essentially, the tilegen system is not perfect and I simply ran out of time to continue to refine it. So rebuilding the level on restart is basically a fail-safe to help prevent the player from getting stuck in a poorly built tilegen map.

Sorry about the lack of multiplayer / bots. The mod was meant to experiment with dynamic level construction and giving the AI director more control to manipulate level geometry. Getting multiplayer and bots to work was simply out of scope and I couldn't justify the research time. If there's a next version multiplayer will be a big focus.

Thanks again for the feedback! Most appreciated.

Hey dhkadhasd, thanks for the feedback! Unfortunately the automated tilegen system doesn't work 100% of the time, and can generate improper level layouts which can then cause problems later on in the map compilation pipeline. I occasionally ran into the problem you described with the lighting. Going from room to room would cause odd lighting issues such as the room you're not in going completely black. I, unfortunately, just ran out of debugging time and couldn't get it 100%.

Per the minimap and the 'tab' map I did a bit of tinkering with this. There's a separate process for creating the maps, and it's not exactly trivial. There an article on Valve's development wiki that describes the process: Developer.valvesoftware.com. Anyway, so I took the easy way out: "you're not supposed to know where you going." Although, allowing the players to draw their own map is an interesting idea.

Astute observation about the chainsaw. I forgot to make those doors 'unbreakable'.

You are right about the level generation / music problem. The map is compiled by an external process (vbsp.exe, vrad.exe, etc) which are instructed to run at a low priority. However, they quickly eat up all avialable cpu and this makes the music choppy. There is an api command to stop all music, I just didn't figure out how to use it in time and released anyway. So, sorry about the choppy music. If I release an update that's definitely on the to-do list.

More gameplay shown at youtube: Youtube.com

This is true, ASDM is single player only, there currently isn't any support for multi-player or for using bots. When I first began working on the mod I couldn't figure out how to allow bots to be chosen in a lobby. I know you can use the 'asw_show_all_singleplayer_maps' command to enable bots in a campaign. By the time I realized it, I had already scaled the spawning in the majority of rooms to play well against a single marine.

Perhaps I'll go back and adjust the spawning to play well with 4 marines, as I agree it would be better to have 4 people playing, even if it's just bots.

Looks great!