Ballmen Mod for Half-Life 2 Post-Beta 1 Plans news

Ballmen

Half-Life 2 mod | Released Mar 22, 2008

Ballmen is a total-conversion for Half-Life 2 featuring frenetic, fast-paced deathmatch with a unique twist: wallwalking. Essentially, any surface is traversable, including walls and ceilings. Combine that with eight weapons and a host of power-ups, and you get Ballmen. The mod is currently in beta stages. Visit our website for more information. Beta 1.5 now available for download.

Report this article Post-Beta 1 Plans

After the release of the first beta of Ballmen, we've gotten many positive responses, as well as a number of valid criticisms and suggestions. Work has already begun on the next release and things are progressing quickly.

Posted by MovEaxEsp on Mar 30th, 2008 digg this super bookmark

Greetings.

It's been about a week since our first release and things are going very well. A number of maps have already been created by our players that easily surpass the quality of the maps in the release, and many more are on the way. We've gotten a lot of feedback about bugs, possible improvements, and some very interesting feature requests that we're hoping to be able to address in the future releases.

The following is list of some of the things we plan to include in future releases:

A new death effect. Instead of ragdolling, or perhaps after ragdolling, the constituent parts of the player model will fly apart and bounce around for a bit. This is something I've been thinking about for a while and I think it will make the players feel much more like Ballmen.
A CTF type gamemode. We haven't ironed out the specifics of this yet and we'll probably be discussing this on the forums when it comes time to implement it.
Improved energy regeneration. One of the biggest complaints so far has been that energy runs out too quickly and too often, and players are forced to run away from a fight in order to regenerate. To remedy this, instead of always regenerating at a constant rate, energy will regenerate significantly faster when the player is low. This should allow players to always be able to continue a fight if they so choose, while still requiring them to be mindful of their energy if they want to extensively use the more powerful weapons.
Many new maps. Since maps for Ballmen don't require (and probably shouldn't have) as much detail as maps for other games or mods, making maps takes considerably less time. As such, a number of very original and fun maps have already been released by our players and more are on the way. For those that were frustrated by the numbr of sucides caused by "falling out" of the map, there will also be some maps which will be completely closed, and thus impossible to fall out of.
Many tweaks and bugfixes. We've gotten a number of suggestions on how to improve the UI of the mod(i.e. making it easier to read off the health/energy level) and a number of bugs that don't warrant their own bullets but are important nonetheless.

You can check out some screenshots of one of the maps created by one of our players (fall safe by Flowerpod) in the images section. It is a lot of fun to play and, as the name suggests, its impossible to fall out of it, making it great for new players.

Visit the forums if you'd like to talk about these future changes or if you have some suggestions of your own to make.

Of course, if you haven't tried Ballmen yet, you can watch the gameplay video and download the beta here.

See you in the game.

Comments

FPSUHalcyon Mar 30 2008, 5:15pm says:

very nice update. i cant wait to play it, especially the new ctf mode.

+1 vote reply to comment

DOLBYdigital Mar 30 2008, 9:13pm says:

Good to hear that you are actively patching, I really like this game although its hard to find a lot of people playing.
I think I played with 4 people once but that was the most.
Keep up the great work :)

+1 vote reply to comment

MovEaxEsp Mar 31 2008, 8:20am replied:

Yeah, there still aren't too many players, but theres usually someone playing and sometimes you can find a nice big game; yesterday I was in a full 14 slot server for a while. Until the server crashed. (I'm working on it. :))

+1 vote reply to comment

Harimau Apr 2 2008, 7:54am replied:

Sometimes you gotta be the first one in the server :P when other people see you playing they'll join in. That's how it's been in my experience anyway. Though when I'm on, I do often see players, which is in the mornings like 11ish (GMT+8 here).

+1 vote reply to comment

Harimau Mar 30 2008, 11:25pm says:

I like all those updates, but a little clarification on this one:?

We've gotten a number of suggestions on how to improve the UI of the mod(i.e. making it easier to read off the health/energy level)

I don't think numbers would fit the theme of ballmen, imho.
I was thinking there should be a visual indicator showing how much energy a weapon will use (perhaps just a line dividing up the energy bar).
Also, something to show when your health or energy bars are full (perhaps just 'fill in' the health/energy icons).

And I noticed that when I respawned I'd start off with less than full energy; since it happens every time, I'm assuming that's intentional. How much energy do you start off with when you spawn?

+2 votes reply to comment

MovEaxEsp Mar 31 2008, 8:08am replied:

To make the bars more readable, we definitely won't replace them with number. What we're planning to do is to replace the gradient bars that are in now with solid ones. This should fix the problem of not knowing if you have full energy, but your idea of showing how many attacks you have with your current weapon is interesting, we'll have to talk about it.

Currently you spawn with 300/1000 energy. We'll probably increase this to 500 when we up the energy regen, as 300 is looking like its too small an amount.

+2 votes reply to comment