One of the best things about working with a mod designed to use hl2 content is that there are lots of things already in the code that can be included in the mod, often with little extra work.
For instance, our vortigaunts - in hl2 & the episodes, players had never fought them before. We changed one line, and voila, a nasty new type of enemy. Ok, we changed more than one line, cos we also wanted to link them into having different stats at different levels, and properly attribute their kills, and stuffl like that. But compared to making vortigaunts from scratch, it was easy.
Next up: Antlion Guards. We've wanted to add these for ages. The biggest problem, and the coolest thign about them is that they're huge. I added them to the pvm monster list yesterday, turned off everything else, and got loads of them. Woah! Even in Ep2, you only ever fought 2 at a time, and here I am running around dm_runoff getting butted around by six of the damn things! That was quite fun. But their size is a problem: they're not that good at navigating, cos they're bigger than most of the gaps and doorways. A lot of corners even give them trouble. So while they occasionally would give me a great chase on dm_drift, most of them would just stand still until I'd killed them. Which sucked.
So, we added a new type of spawn point, the large npc spawn point, to dm_runoff and a few other maps. Antlion guards would only spawn at these, and if none were present, they wouldn't spawn. For the moment, we've made them quite rare, because when you're not expecting it, one of these running round the corner at you is hilarious. Server owners can configure that for themselves, of course, and in the future, with scripted pvm, we'll be able to give players 10 of them to fight at the same time, for example, and then go back to normal monsters.
But for now, there's a few things holding us back from releasing the next version, with all the antlion guardy fun it has to offer. The main one is that somehow I've managed to stop PVM mode from turning on properly. So that's top of my to-do list for tonight. There's a handful of small and annoying bugs we need to fix apart from this, then we'll release what should be a good fun update.
