Overview
Barren Meadow is a single-player unit for Kingpin following most of the original design choices: it puts the emphasis on shooting, rewards exploration, has a hub connecting multiple action maps and many options to defeat your adversaries (from weapon modifications to hirable henchmen). It features spooky environments and foes, ideal for a spooky Halloween fix. The campaign isn't that long and will last you for an hour to an hour and a half (maybe more on harder difficulties).
New features and fixes
No one likes a broken record, but this time it's for a special occasion. Barren Meadow features new content and fixes some of Kingpin's awkward aspects (nothing game changing). The source code used to build this mod isn't exactly identical to the one used to compile the original game's DLL, so there might be a few issues here and there that were not in the original.
New stuff:
- New weapon modifications: accuracy for the pistol, slowburn for the flamethrower and acid shells mod for the shotgun (select the shotgun twice to load acid rounds).
- Barren Meadow uses tons of rain particle effects. If it slows your computer down, you can adjust the "raindensity" console variable (default is 1.00, double with 2.00, remove entirely with 0.00) and reload the map.
- You can remove all cast entities from the map with the new "nomonster" command (you may also add "2" behind that command to remove only enemies)
- If you want to take some nice-looking action shots, you can stop time with the new "freezeworld" command.
Changes:
- Hints are added to the note book in the order in which you receive them. Pages are also numbered.
- Allowed the "no monster" spawnflag on some doors again.
- The Ammo1 and Ammo2 categories in pawn-o-matics are now merged.
- Cycling through your arsenal is now slot-based rather than weapon-based. In Kingpin, to go from the pipe to the shotgun, you'd have to cycle through pipe, crowbar, pistol, silencer and finally shotgun. Now, you will cycle through pipe (or crowbar), pistol (or silencer) and shotgun (with standard or acid shells). You can rotate weapons in a slot like you would in Kingpin (selecting the same slot multiple times).
- All pawn-o-matics will now randomly comment on your health (it used to only work in Skidrow and Poisonville; yes, I'm as surprised as you are).
- Sharky won't let you buy ammunition for weapons you don't have.
- The original pawn-o-matics stocks have been modified slightly so you can use the acid shell mod, pistol accuracy and slowburn mod in the original game.
Fixes:
- The silencer used to eject two shell casings per shot and made no sound when reloading.
- The shotgun would play one too many times the reload animation if you ran out of shells before the weapon was maxed out.
- Attempting to buy empty slots in the pawn-o-matic no longer triggers a response from Sharky. Those empty slots no longer have a price attached either.
- The "give X" cheat code wouldn't apply a cap on ammunition, so you could request more ammo than you can carry.
- There was a tiny bit of code missing for cast_shorty when they are equipped with the Heavy Machinegun.
Last words
I could see myself working on this thing for the next ten years of my life, but it's really not my intention (no one should have to bear endless "early access" development time). Some content was cut to finish on time and new ideas had to be put aside, but it doesn't matter. The whole unit works from start to finish, is stable enough to be released and polished enough to be fun (huge thanks to the play testers for pointing out the most glaring issues, I hope we got 'em all). It is very unlikely a patch will ever be released, unless a completely game-breaking bug is discovered (on the plus side, the sources are available so you're not entirely out of options).
As an added bonus it should be possible to play the original campaign with the new mod features: open the console and type "map sr1" to start the game as usual. A modification was made last-minute regarding enemies opening doors; it shouldn't break compatibility... at least I hope it doesn't (ran out of time to test it).
I think that's about it. I hope you'll enjoy the mod at least as much as I enjoyed working on it. Have a good one and take care!
- ACC
