Sharing, Wounds, Ironsights, and Bullets news - Zombie Colony mod for Half-Life 2

Special thanks to Zira for her Glock model!

Lots of new features have been added to Zombie Colony. There is a video of all of this in action at the end, but some of it is a bit difficult to see, so I will explain it all here.

First, however, I posted some screenshots of zombies in Alien Swarm ( link ). For the time being, the mod is on the Deathmatch engine. I was simply testing out how hard it would be to bring over the code from Deathmatch to Alien Swarm (not hard, actually). I've done a lot of work on the Deathmatch engine, so to bring it over to Alien Swarm would be like starting over. Instead of throwing away all the work I've done up to this point, the alpha (and perhaps beta) versions of Zombie Colony will be built on the Deathmatch engine, while the final version will be using Alien Swarm.

Health, Stamina, and Wounds

On top of the five resources (scrap, rations, fuel, munitions, and medicine), there are a few secondary mechanics that are every bit as important. Health and stamina are now two of them.

Health ties strongly into stamina. Stamina is a vital part of the health system, because when you have at least half your stamina, your health begins to regenerate. Sprinting, doing work, everything uses up stamina. To regain stamina, you can eat some of your rations.

To accompany health regeneration, 'wounds' have been introduced. Wounds are limits on your health. If you take a hard enough of a hit or get shot, you become wounded. With a wound, your health cannot recover past a certain point, and your health HUD icon turns red. To repair this wound, you can use a medkit, which treats your wound and restores some of your maximum health, allowing your natural healing to take over.

Sharing Resources, Ammo, and Guns

When a camp is initially constructed, players will rely on scavenged materials and resources as opposed to the larger sources (the fuel station, water tower, etc). Players will need to actively search locations and salvage what they can. However, when a scavenge resource is picked up, it isn't distributed; it goes right to the player that picked it up. The team will need to cooperate in the beginning if they want to make it. All players now have an inventory menu that allows them to share their resources with other players (this menu also allows you to interact with your resources, however the only feature right now is to eat some rations to regain stamina)

Sharing guns and ammo works the same way, except you don't need to bring up the menu. While holding a gun, pressing "L" drops a magazine of ammo, and pressing "k" drops the gun itself. There will only be a few different types of ammunition. This way ammo is easily shared between players even if they find slightly different weapons. The current ammo categories are: handgun, magnum, shotgun, and rifle.

Bullet Drop and Ironsights
In order to separate this mod from your standard zombie shooter, guns needed to be a part of the resource system. Every bullet has a cost associated with it, whether that cost is time, scrap, munitions, etc. The best way to accomplish that is to introduce some realism to the guns.

In any disaster, weapons become very important for defense and survival. In a zombie apocalypse - doubly so. Every bullet can do tons of damage to other humans and the undead, making guns a powerful tool. But as convinient as they are, they take some skill to use. Rather than the simple trace-line system HL2 Deathmatch has by default, bullets are physical objects that have realistic trajectories. Every bullet is affected by gravity and will drop, waver and lose energy over range.
The best part about this system is that its very flexible; it could be extended to simulate wind, weather conditions, health, but at the time being, it's solely gravity and grouping for the sake of simplicity.

The guns themselves also needed some upgrading. If they're going to be that realistic, ironsights are a necessity. Using the sights (or scope) on your weapon makes it more accurate. In the future with class updates, the sights might be easier to use on specific guns.

And with that (except for zombies actually attacking barriers and buildings now using resources), the news is up to date with the mod. Enjoy this (boring) video of the features in action.