Cat Life mod for Half-Life

1 comment by The_Wildcat on May 1st, 2009 digg this super bookmark

The search for a Team Cat-Life coder continues.  To help, I've now set up a BWL Development profile on fpsbanana.  Watchers that have an fpsbanana account should stop by to show their support.

I will also be posting a help wanted profile over there and a job board message here on ModDB.

To summarize our needs:
We are looking for an experienced Half-Life coder.  The code demonstrated in the Cat Code video was scripting in the maps themselves... I think it was once referred to as the "Innercode" by the team.  But that will not work as the actual game modification.  Scripting like that is buggy and inconsistent.

1. Our coder should be able to effectively change the player point of view via the C++ source code.  This can be done by either player scaling or shifting the FOV down to a cat's eye level.
2. We would also like for Dark-Vision to be implemented.  This would be similar to night-vision.  In this case, it would be an effort to simulate a cat's natural ability to see in dark places.
3. Additionally, we would prefer to feature modified jumping, sprinting, and other such cat movements.  However, the Cat POV is our primary concern at this time.

BiGToM is indeed offering a reward for the coder.  This could be anywhere from $10 to $60 US.  Payment would be issued via PayPal.  The actual dollar value depends on how long it takes to track down a coder.  Applicants need to speak with BiGToM directly about this dollar figure.

Also, you can help raise the reward for our coder by donating to BiGToM's PayPal account.  There is a button on the main Cat-Life page at BWL Development.  Please note, there is a difference between the Cat-Life donate button and the "Help Us Improve" donate button on the right side-bar.  The link on the side bar is for my own BWL Development website account.

In addition to this request for a coder, if you know anyone that may be interested in coding for our mod, please point them in our direction.

BiGToM can be contacted...
...here on ModDB via private message
...on MSN via sayrken@hotmail.com
...by email at sayrken[AT]gmail.com

I'm not adding any new media just yet.  We really need a coder so our team can record some actual in-game action footage.  Beyond that, we don't want to reveal too much of the actual mod yet.  Anything we post will be limited until we have some custom source code to show off.

In the mean time, here is a list of all of our current videos from the BWL Development Gallery as they appear on YouTube... including two unofficial clips that haven't been posted here before.  [The two unofficial videos do not show any new areas, just FYI]

Original Cat-Life Video
Cat-Life Paw Beta Video
Cat-Life Cat Code Video [In-Game (innercode) Scripting]
Silverfang's Slide-show [Recruitment Video]
Cat-Life: A Look Back [Nostalgic Video Response to our 1-page PC Gamer UK December Article]

Finally today, I want to take a moment and explain the recent [1-month old now :( ] move to a new web host and the change of the Cat-Life homepage.

For those of you that use FileFront for game downloads, you may recall the end-of-March announcement.  Ziff Davis Media Group sent out a last minute warning that FileFront would soon close down.

Unfortunately, BWL Development was hosted by hl2files.com... a member of the FileFront network.  In response, I set out to find a good cheap host service instead of another free host.   In the end, I decided on JustHost.com.

After April 1st, FileFront announced that the original owners had taken over the network and FileFront would remain online.  However, via email, hosted sites were notified that the free web hosting service was too expensive to maintain.  So, our site was still on the chopping block.

Before this, though, I had already committed to changing to our new paid service anyway.  I wanted to expand the site to other games and give it a bigger scale.  I consolidated all the old pages, dropping the Half-Park: CCC and archived LOAPS site.  I moved our downloads page to our forums.  And compressed GargArena and Cat-Life into sub-pages rather then "hosted sites".

As a result, the old Black and Orange version of the Cat-Life homepage has been dropped.  Honestly, I wanted to make a distinction between our own projects (Cat-Life and GargArena) and our hosted site(s) (Special Forces: Source/SF Studios).

None of this means that Team Cat-Life is under new leadership or has changed in any way.  It just means that it's web page has been integrated with the main website and that BWL itself moved to a premium web service.