Version 2.27 is the latest patch for the long running HL2 mod, Empires. A better HUD, Lua support, and individual player wages are just some of the changes in this update.
Some mods may be fine with 'good enough', but not us, the Empiresmod development team. We are endlessly tweaking, testing, fixing, and balancing until the mod comes out just right. That summarizes our latest release, Empires v2.27. Nearly everything has been fiddled with to improve performance, upgrade game play, and create balance. While many of the changes in this patch are of the 'under-the-hood' variety, that doesn't mean we don't have a few goodies to show off.
Empires v2.27 features:
- Wages - Players now get resources for various actions, such as killing opponents or constructing buildings. They can then spend these resources building vehicles without using up the overall teams' resources.
- Improved squad functionality - Now, not only can the current squad leader designate his/her successor, but the commander can promote a squad member to the lead position
- More informative HUD - The HUD has been improved to include information on wages, the vehicle limit, and whether the vehicle factory is locked.
- Improved particles - Explosions and weapon tracers have been visually upgraded and modified for increased performance
- Support for Lua - For those scripters out there, Empires now supports Lua.
Here's a look at the improved HUD and scoreboard:
What happened to Empires v2.26?
Our dog ate it. Just kidding, but if your wondering what happened to the previous patch, don't worry. You are not missing anything. With the flurry of changes that have been going on behind the scenes, we decided to incorporate all the work since Empires v2.25 into a bigger release for our ModDB audience. If you want to keep up with the latest developments in Empires, please feel free to check out our forums.
Also, we'd like to spotlight one of our favorite official maps, emp_coast. Nothing says excitement like a battle between rocky cliffs and the ocean shores.
Here's a standard setup of a Brenodi Empire main base:
On the flip side, here's what the Northern Faction main base looks like:
Empires 2.27 Changelog
Added:
- Lua chat hooks.
- Lua traces and player messages.
- Commander can promote any member of squad to leader.
- Wages:
- Doing actions gains players "wage"
- Wage is a players personal res pool
- Wage is taken before team res while building a tank
- Ticket Bleed of 1 per 60 seconds after a team loses all spawn points.
- Support for empires entities to fade and have choices like parenting and have dynamic shadows etc.
- FGD with the correct vehicle spawner names and chassis (and number system)
- More Lua bindings and examples. Commands to run Lua code are slua_file and slua_string.
- Lua support for advanced research conditions (multiple prereqs, forks, etc)
- Coordinates in the voice status, changed position to not be obstructed by other gui elements.
- Slow ticket bleed if team has no spawn points (to trigger sudden death). emp_sv_norax_penalty_interval, default is 60.
- Promote to lead button for squads.
- Color coded vehicle count. Green means unrestricted vehicle factory.
- Client-side server bans. Malicious servers are manually added to it by developers.
- Metric/imperial option for speedometer
- Check for emp_info_params while starting the server. Should give proper error message.
- Show max vehicles on GUI
- Made rank points and titles scriptable.
- Support for ML impact particles
- Support for GL explosion particles
Removed:
- Research initialization.
- Chassis-specific armors.
- Bits of Steamworks API.
- Attack orders. Functionality replaced by visibilty of enemy units on minimap.
Modified:
- Lowered latency effect on semiautomatic weapons.
- Changed Ranged Cannon cycle time to 1.5 s from 2.0 s.
- Scaled physics push for tanks driving out of vehicle factory to behave properly with different tickrates.
- Allow building artillery tank with 2 small artillery cannons.
- Changed vehicle cooling skill bonus from 25% to 15%.
- Scouts with radar stealth are not visible on minimap.
- Scouts are not visible on minimap when hiding.
- CV Engines Heat Output At Idle 1>0|Heat Output At Max 2>4
- Increased heat of all mgs:
- std mg 0.1>1
- bio mg 0.5>1.5
- 50 MG 0.2>0.8
- 50 HMG 0.2>0.8
- DU MG 0.5>1.5
- DU HMG 0.75>1.7
- Chaingun 0.3>0.35
- chain med 0.5>0.6
- HE MG 1>3.5
- Plasma MG untouched
- HIT:Force increased to 100,000
- Ranged Cannon: Damage 70 > 60 |Heat 14 > 11| Cycle time 1.5 > 2.0
- Plasma Cannon: Damage 30 > 55 |Heat 26 > 20| Heat to target 20 > 10
- Homing ML: Damage 70 > 75
- Upgraded Homing ML: Damage 85 > 90
- Salvo Homing ML: Damage 40 > 43
- Bio MG DoT Reduced by 1 per interval (6>5, functional DoT 90>75)
- Absorbant: HP from 55->60| speed to damage from -0.0075 to -0.008
- Reactive:Damage modifier from 0.9 to 0.8|hp from 70 to 65
- Changed repair values for all vehicles(except CVs)
- repair station hull repair from 25 to 15
- Engineer hull repair from 1 to 2
- repair station armor repair from .25 to 1
- Engineer armor repair from .1 to .05
- Improved Detonation Compounds: time 90 to 30
- Explosive Shells: Time 60 to 120
- lvl 2 turrets 90 sec > 45 sec
- lvl 3 turrets 120 sec> 90 sec
- regen armor 150 sec > 90 sec
- reactive armor 120 sec > 90 sec
- NF JEEP: increased cost by 5 (55->60)
- BE pistol2: Reduced falloff to 400(from 600) Reduced damage to 14(from 19). Removed burst
- Gren: Mine start ammo : From 5 to 4
- Scout: Smg2 ammo from 60 to 80 | Starting Smg2 ammo from 20 to 40
- All buildings resists to mines to 0.9 (except engi camera/radar, walls and AF)
- Infantry resists:
- Scout|Mortar resist 0.1>0 Mine resist 0.10>0.11
- Rifle|Mortar resist 0>0.05 Mine resist 0.30>0.11
- Gren |Mortar resist unchanged Mine resist 0.15>0.11
- Engi |Mortar resist 0.1>0 Mine resist unchanged
- Vehicle skills (speed, damage, cooling and armor) give 25% boost by default.
- Rifleman infantry damage skill gives 25% boost by default.
- Removed reloading of clips for vehicle weapons. Vehicle weapons have infinite amount of clips.
- Switched to LuaJIT.
- emp_sv_debug_instant_build is not a cheat.
- Minimum spawn protection changed to 3s.
- Removed AllocTempVector to check if it improves performance (potentially less locking).
- 2nd skill gets activated after getting 10 rank points.
- Empty's Particle Patch 1
- The detail overlay on canyon cliffs.
- The detail overlay on the canyon rock models.
Fixed:
- Scout not being hidden on minimap.
- Team with no barracks was bleeding past last ticket end losing.
- Spawn protection enabled outside of barracks. Minimum time set to 1 s.
- Wages showing being visible to enemy.
- emp_canyon and emp_crossroads.
- slua_file not working on dedicated servers.
- Seismic grenade was always doing 100 additional damage.
- Fixed wrong ironsight accuracy modifiers.
- BE not seeing BE buildings.
- Building damage resists parsed improperly were set to 0.
- Updated vehicle presets to match modified armors.
- Crash in vehicle spawner.
- Weapon X and Y kick were using same random stream.
- Grenade launcher particles.
- Double damage from hitting turret.
- Server checks for semiautomatic weapon. Fixes exploit.
- Duplicate network variables for grenades.
- Prediction errors related to stamina.
- Vehicle spawner not ignoring research when specified.
- Slow weapon lookup from scripts.
- Prediction error related to zoom not being run on client.
- Player collisions with teammates.
- Bots not respawning.
- Melee not triggering lag compensation.
- Hilltop texture in canyon
- GL nuke particles.
This has been a really ****** day
Thank you for fixing that and then some
It's great to see this mod still being developed. Now that it supports Lua I'm going to have a lot of fun!
What happened to your steamworks release?
Still working on it, but we've made so many changes we wanted to get a release out.
Great! XD
More Empires is always good. :)
I still wait for the day when aircraft are added, I will **** bricks.
That day can not be on the source engine D:
Aparently they can't add it untill they switch engines D:
Awesome work guys :D
No aircrafts, on source engine..??, what about eternal silence?
Entirely different situation. Eternal silence could afford to cut corners, it's not the same.
what about making very low detail flying things in the sky, and having a seperate area for flying planes somwhere else, where you battle, like a reverse sky box in both areas, or something. I don't know, it would probably be too much work until the engine is updated, and for nothing.
any way does that mean episode 3 couldn't come out because of the lack of ability to fly? And that the new source engine will come out with episode3 (or maybe even portal 2)?
As far as I am aware, "real" aircraft will be very, very hard to do on the Source Engine in combination with ground units. Player locations are reported less accurately the more you move away from the centre of the map. In a map that is normal-sized (1x), this is not noticable. In a map that is 16x sized by scaling everything down (in all 3 dimensions, this is 16x16x16), this becomes obvious very quickly. The code responsible is ancient; it dates back to the Quake era of the GoldSrc engine (the engine Half-Life used) and we can't change it.
I'm not too sure how Eternal Silence circumvented this issue, they probably only use a small, sphere-like, part of the 16x map. They also have some very nifty code (or so I heard) to transition from 16x-sized models to 1x-sized models which they use for in-base infantry combat.
the combine choppas and dropships?
i think the reason this is one of hl2's longest running mods is because the dev team is so damn slow.
Not putting them down, i did love the time i spent playing this game but i think i have been waiting 2 maybe 3 years for aircraft now, i give up.
I dont want to put anyone off playing this though, its a great mod
Nobody ever promised them
is this related to the mod that come out for battlefield 1942?
The Battlefield 1942 version of Empires Mod has been discontinued for several years.
Your comment is baseless.
Only because the prior discussion got deleted.
I'm not an admin for ModDB idiot, so I can't delete anything. Good job lying yourself into a corner though
I don't lie.
Empires is great as it is. I really don't care about aircraft to be honest. In BF they are just annoying.