Last months work news - Distant Hope mod for Half-Life 2

The last month has been a very busy time for us, with development, and also exams, and other commitments. We have still been working hard on DistantHope, and we are making good progress.

We asked Xanthi – our lead mapper to give some input to this update so you can have an idea how the mapping is going. This is what he had to say;

The first level for Distant Hope is already in development!

The map is inspired by New York City. You'll be able to fight on top of the Brooklyn Bridge (which you have seen in multiple screenshots) and the first "capture point" will be the Empire State building. There will be more capture points but we'll unveil those at a later date.

We've chosen the Source Engine to build this game. In theory the Source Engine is capable of large environments but many developers know that it isn't easy to pull it off.

The Source Engine allows us to optimize our maps. Distant Hope will consist of huge battlefields so we are going to try our best to exploit the Source Engine to the fullest!

I've added fog to improve the frame rate and I've optimized the brush work as well. It's hard to put in enough detail without using excessive amounts of polygons, but with the right environments and lightning I've been able to create both detailed and functional visuals for the map. I started development using development textures and simple shapes like cubes and cylinders to lay out the level design. The screenshots on the media page are from early development. I will return with some new footage soon!

One of the biggest challenges so far has been the lightning and atmosphere. Distant Hope is all about warfare and we really wanted this "gritty" and "dark" feel to the game. I think we've struck a nice balance between the "dark" style you've seen before and the more colourful style I'm working with now. Especially the indoor areas look improved compared to earlier builds. I'm sure you understand that development hasn't finished yet. All the images released so far are work in progress and although we're messing around with different styles we haven't finalized the look yet.

As always the logic and rules of the actual game play are still being worked on, and improved. The latest thing to get implemented was the scoring system. Each team will start out with a score (depending on what map) and this will be like your teams ‘lives’ if you will. The team who’s score reaches 0 first will be the looser.

The score will decrement each time you spawn, so you should try to stay alive for as long as you can, so no running straight out into the battlefield without thinking!

You can reduce the other teams’ score by capturing critical areas of the map. Once your team captures over 50% of the capture areas for the map, the other teams’ score will start to decay. So you must delegate people to defend the capture areas, as well as capturing new ones.

That’s all for now, we don’t want to ruin the surprise when we release the game. I will leave you with some new screenshots of Xanthi’s map.