A few years ago I released the Half-Life DM GOLD multiplayer maps century megapack.
It basically includes all maps created over 20+ years of existence of HLDM that are more than barely playable. Inspired by many (quite useful!) packs and collections for other games (e.g. GoodNES. I love torrents!) it had a warm welcome by the public. Unfortunately, as I have next to none marketing skills, nor do I have the time x power to spend, it didn't gain very much traction.
Anyway, since the release I've got a bit of feedback, and while it was mostly words of gratitude, some questions were received. Some of them were repeating or maybe are interesting to wider audience of HL fans, so I decided to post a bit of info here :)
- Q: Whyyy???
Short answer: Because.
Long version: The thing started because for the whole history of Half-Life I've been collecting and playing maps (you DO know that I'm developing a multiplayer mod, right?). All went more or less well while I've downloaded maps from PHL, GB, TWHL, etc. where I could see before I get. But one occasion changed my peaceful existence ) Once, I had to go through a backup of some active HLDM server where lots and lots of user maps (and other resources) were uploaded by players. Boy, what I've seen there cannot be unseen! But - hey - since I've got maps, I can't leave 'em alone! Not until I play all of them... oh... It's over 2000!!
So I made the only decision I could: "FINISH HIM!" At least I'm somewhat qualified. And an obsessed perfectionist.
- Q: Well, to be honest, it's the job of the players to handpick the maps they would like to get. (actual quote)
Yeah, right. Right after you start vomiting after 20th killbox in a row. Or 10th entpatched crossfire that is carefully renamed to someting like HYpErFirE_by_MAdMAN. Or 200th "this is my first map". Or whatever. (actually there are some really good "first maps", they have their place in the map pack). So, I made my collection and saved players their time handpicking jewels out of... dirt. I hope you get the idea. (for the rest see above).
- Q: How did you do it?
By hand. This is a long process to describe. I tried recording it, but, unfortunately, I've lost access to my youtube channel (joined the population of gmail victims). Let's say it required time, patience and lots of tools, not just HL.
- Q: Did you discover anything interesting in the process?
I did, yes. For example, I've seen such amount of leak-proofing skyboxes that could cause serious brain damage to unprepared people. I've seen mappers (I'm staring at you, DocRock_HL !) putting megabytes of 44+KHz 16-bit looping WAVs with their maps (which still get downsampled to 11025 8-bit mono in ugliest possible way by HL)... Lots of ugly stuff. But, on the other side, I've discovered a lot of maps not featured on any major HL-related sites I know of. And some of them were pretty good and made it into the pack.
The scale of the work also helped a big deal discovering bugs in both the Half-Life engine and my mod, XDM, which I used for testing. For example, did you know HL actually transmits mapcycle.txt over the net and prone to crashes? Who would've guessed! No one, until their file gets over 8K in size.
- Q: Did you stop?
Almost. I stopped collecting maps (btw, drop me links if you have something you want to be included!), but I didnt stop searching for missing resources and fixing things. ALSO! I finished making 900 screenshots of all these maps (believe me, it's not fast or easy). And to make this even more useful, I contacted mittorn from the FWGS Xash3D team and asked to implement map preview during selection in the main menu.
- Q: When is the next update coming out?
Unfortunately, all the review work is kept on a computer, which is a bit unreachable for me to turn on. So, the waiting.
PS: why "gold"? Because I had that picture of the golden Gordon figure! :D
Post written thanks to @napoleon2 ) it took 3 hours to write. Also, you can take the Doge if you want. No Doges were harmed during production of this article. Doges must doge.
