silverpower
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So I've been doing yet more fucking around. I ended up having to scrap several prototypes, and currently have one in progress.
Multiplayer transitions are working, but have a significant balancing glitch - the code assumes that every weapon you have has a unique ammunition type. Which is fine for stock HL2 (unless you're carrying both a Magnum and Annabelle), but breaks when you have several real-world weapons implemented. I'm working on a fix, and I'm also trying to puzzle out the secret to entity preservation and restoration. Right now all it does is keep track of a few player vars and the names and ammo counts of your loadout (and it doesn't do the latter very well at all).
I've also managed to patch in proper ironsight code. Don't use the OBCO code, whatever you do - it's awful. It's the old version of ironsight code, when it was a major accomplishment just to get the damn thing to move to the center of your screen. No FOV support, melee weapons were ironed in, switching weapons had random glitches related to ironsight state... it just sucked. z33ky's code fixes pretty much all of that, and for sharing it with us, he's earned my gratitude. :)
I still need to implement the Overwatch Dispatcher.
Weapons are still HL2 defaults, though I managed to get the Alyxgun working again, and I'm using a punch skin for the crowbar.
Also, a teaser...
This was our world once...
In 2008, we were winning. We numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A new world in our hearts, we battled the corporations, their state lackeys, and our ancient enemy, the fascists. Slowly at first, and then with greater speed, we started to take back what was rightfully the birthright of all sapience.
And in 2008, what became known as the Black Mesa incident occurred. Distracted, a team of Black Army operatives was able to cripple the Pentagon's command and control links, allowing us to establish autonomous areas, where people can live without being at the mercy of profiteers and bigots.
But the capitalists wouldn't give up that easily. Led by a consortium, Aperture Science was able to establish a stable portal link to a Universal Union world, and they negotiated the purchase of our home, Earth, in return for franchise rights.
In 2014, the Seven-Hour War began... and ended, in seven hours, after Wallace Breen, the man overseeing Black Mesa, was finished conveying demands to the UN. Earth's governments surrendered. We did not - this is our home, and we will not be playthings of interdimensional capitalists!
It is now 2035. The joyous cries of children are but a distant memory - the only new humans are clones, produced as stunted slaves for the Overwatch armies. The bustle of the streets has been replaced by the silence of terror. The long corridors of fiber linking our world are dark, used only to convey the most mundane of business administration matters, deaf to the culture that once thrived there.
But everywhere, there is still hope. The Sino-Soviet Union, our autonomist Marxist comrades, are valiantly defending the last untouched megacities left from the Seven Hour War, where a billion souls make their lives without interference from capitalist authoritarians. The Lambda Resistance Front has cells in every city, keeping the last flames of revolutionary spirit alive in the hearts of a downtrodden slave populace. And then... there's us.
We are the Terran Insurrectionary Black Army. Named after Nestor Makhno's army of liberation during the failed Second Russian Revolution, we fight the Overwatch, the corporations, and the roving gangs of fascists that plague our world. We give no mercy to the merciless, and expect none in return. We fight so that no one will ever have to struggle for survival again. Alongside our extra-terrestrial and synthetic comrades, we will push them back through their portals, and back into the abyss where they were spawned!
--- pamphlet found in the ruins of a City 17 resistance-occupied bunker, dated 4/29/2035, located in 1/24/2036
Basically, you play as one of six soldiers of the Squad 187 Black Army Strikers, which is their special-ops arm. Because you're a Striker, you get priority access to the resources of the Black Army, but you have to earn them. You do this through killing or destroying Overwatch units and hostile flora, and get bonuses for major task completion. This is done because the Black Army has limited resources, so they must spend their limited procurement funds first on regular soldiers, and then special-ops units. Personal pay is the same for everybody - bounty points are only worth something in the armory or at the upgrade workshop.
I don't want to give away too much of the plot (such as it is so far), but I'm hoping to get in tank, vehicle, sniper and urban combat - not all at the same time, of course. I'm also hoping to have a structure that allows you to have a persistent character (well, actually, set of characters), complete with upgradeable stats and powered armor. Coding it should be relatively simple - it's balancing everything that's going to be tricky.
It's intended to be a co-op and SP game - AI handles the characters, though I plan on writing bot code to lay over the players in SP and to fill slots in MP. The realism level is basically semi-realism - it's realistic if you're a super-soldier wearing powered armor with active kinetic dampening and energy dispersion - unprotected humans tend to die pretty quickly in this game. Also, the suit is based on the HECU PCV technology, so it includes an item entangler, allowing you to store more weapons than the human form is capable of carrying (it has a mass limit, though, so you'll have to manage it). You'll be faced with the Combine's vast array of resources, so consider this your one concession from the developer.
I went and ran through my old prototype last night.
Tokarev: Broken irons, aside from that, no big deal.
P226: Needs new animations, stat. Seriously, the ones I have suck major cock when ironed in.
Five-Seven: Works perfectly.
Colt Python: Works perfectly.
Desert Eagle .357: Works perfectly. I discovered that using the triple-fire on zombies really fucked them up. Noted for the future, when it's time to talk internal upgrades for weapons. :)
Glock 18C: Fires *way* too fast. I know the firerate is correct for a full-auto model, but this is a three-round burst model. Need to implement the fire mode stuff soon.
MP5 Navy: Works perfectly.
FN P90 Tri-Rail: Works perfectly.
MP7 Abomination (HL2 SMG1): Needs model replacement, stat.
'Syndicate' AK-47: Need to implement 7.62x39mm - it really shouldn't be sharing ammo with the Scout.
M4A1: Works perfectly.
FN SCAR-L: Suppressor QD function broken (why?). Irons broken.
SPAS-12: Need to switch this to a CSS skin - M3 or M4, haven't decided which.
RPG: Need to replace skin with RPG-7.
Scout: Just need to test my latest fix for the scope, then figure out what the hell is causing the gun to appear at the top of the screen, inverted. Bad rotation? Weird FOV settings?
Buy menu: Need to put in the Glock 18C. Medium-term: need to redo layout to match new categories and gain more space for the weapon buttons.
All in all, better than I thought. But for some reason the Metropolice and Combine Soldiers are all glitched. They're using the HL2DM animation set, which is what's causing them to crap out. *sighs*
Well, it seems I was overly ambitious. My attempts to port the Stalker Makarov to UDK ended in abject failure.
At the moment, UDK is a bad choice for my project, since it requires far more computing horsepower than I have. I'm on an ancient laptop, which can comfortably run HL2 on medium-low or Stalker on low. I get a whopping ten frames a second average in the UDK game. This isn't conducive to development.
Meanwhile, I dusted off a Bay 12 game that I really liked but could never finish (because I sucked at it) - Liberal Crime Squad. You lead a bunch of liberals (ultra-vanguardist Trots or something? I dunno) in an effort to take back Eagleland from the oppressive Arch-Conservatives. It's better than it sounds, and it's really more about political violence in general than anything else. :)
The underlying principles behind the game are fairly simple. You recruit people, and gain leadership points (or juice), and this lets you recruit more people, until you have an army of fanatical expendable extras you can use to smash up factories, free cute bunnies or horrifying genetic abominations, raid apartments for laptops and dirty socks, free prisoners from the cop-shop or the courthouse, and kill conservatives. Lots and lots of conservatives. Of course, you can play the pacifist, by recruiting hippies and cranking out the Liberal Guardian (haha). But that's no fun!
Anyway, it hit me - you could do an anarchist version of this!
Basically, you're a lone guy or gal in an arcology in post-apocalyptic
You can do things like:
- expropriate banks (in other words, rob them blind)
- hack for money, pay-data or propaganda
- rebroadcast pirate feeds (to supplant corporate-owned content)
- steal gear from corporate offices and upper-class housing blocks
- hold executives for ransom
- run guns into the Underground City
- protect factory occupations
- block strikebreakers
- incite rent strikes
- free prisoners
- kill cops, judges, corporate lawyers and soldiers
- raid the armories (to deprive the cops/soldiers of hardware and line out your own armory)
- and beat back the gangs, the fascists and the Trots.
I'm dusting off the old Source-based Refusal to Submit prototype and will start hacking on it tonight.
Well, I has a project! I've had it for a few years now, kicking around as an idea in several iterations. I've changed engines several times before settling on UDK, despite its total lack of pre-baked gameplay features.
It's called Refusal to Submit. It's about a world run by corporations and warlords, struggling out of the ashes of the Accumulation Wars and the American Balkanization War. A world where people toil in the service of others, where terror is a constant, and hope is a distant memory.
But there's one group willing to stand against the darkness - the Insurrectionary Black Army of the World, known informally as the Black Army. Formed from defense collectives created during the American balkanization and similar groups worldwide, they're the last best hope of humanity.
You are (or will be) what's called a Black Army Striker. Strikers are a cross between a guerrilla cell and a special-forces unit. They're the fist of the people, and they're coming for the corporations and the fascist warlords. When you get to join a unit, you will be joining the 13th Strikers based in the Pittsburgh Sprawl in the Northeastern Metroplex Zone. However, you'll be traveling across the world to support or initiate various actions as you are delegated or choose to.
The style of the game? Semi-realism. You'll have access to weapons that are more or less realistic. It's not going to be on the level of, say, ArmA, more like modded Stalker or something. I'm hoping to eventually have lots and lots of weapons - a veritable arsenal - to play with, but for now I think I'll stick with around fifteen or so until I (and/or my team, when I *get* one) have the workflow down pat.
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