Half-Life: Enriched - Coming up in 2024 news

Welcome back to an update on Half-Life: Enriched! It's been a while since I've posted an article but that doesn't mean there hasn't been any news. Let's dive in!

Thanks to all of you, Enriched got a lot of votes in the MODDB Upcoming Mod of the Year. It received enough votes for a honorable mention, since it already reached the Top 10 last year. Nevertheless, thank you all for your support!

In my last article I mentioned I was working on a Half-Life DM map, called Core Critical. It's a submission for the TWHL mapping competition. You can download it here if you want to take a look for yourself. The judges yet have to release their final decisions so fingers crossed. I'll be sure to report which spot my map got once the results are in.

What's in store for 2024?

With that all out of the way: What's coming to Enriched this year? A little while back the new SDK for Half-Life: Unified was released. This is a special version of the Half-Life developement kit made by Solokiller (and various others) which combines all the features from Half-Life, Opposing Force and Blue Shift into one package. As a player, you can use this to play all HL campaigns from one game. As a developer, you can use anything from all these games and put it in your Mod.

The HL:Unified SDK also comes with many fixes, improvements and additions of which HL:Enriched will make good use. One of these things is skill based monster placement. Half-Life only differentiates in skill level with the amount of health and damage monsters have/do but Enriched will add more to this.

Here is an example from 'Unforeseen Consequences'. If you play on Easy, only one zombie will appear in the corridor. Medium will use the default Half-Life amount of two zombies and Hard mode will give you an extra zombie to fight, putting the total on three.

The other thing this image shows is the new random trigger. At various points in the campaign, a random encounter will be generated. Once you get close to the rec/locker area, you can encounter a headcrab hiding somewhere in one of the three locations. But there is also a 25% chance that nothing will spawn. This will keep the game interesting, even after you've completed Half-Life before. Random encounters will only happen when you play on Medium or Hard difficulty.

The random trigger will also generate random monster placements, especially in places where monsters will ambush you. The game will now give you at least three different monster formations. so you will always be guessing where the enemies come from next. Random formations will be happening on all skill levels.

The new skill setting will make the Hard mode even harder because it will also limit the amount of ammo and items you can find in the game. On Easy and Medium you might find two clips of ammo but on Hard only one.

So, when can we play this?

I'm currently working my way through the single player campaign, adding the skill and random feature. Simultanously, I have to make changes to the map to adjust it to the new SDK and add new code to the SDK to support some of the legacy features from the old SDK. I want these maps to work on both the old Half-Life retail version as well as the new Steam version, so this makes it a little more complex.

My main goal is to focus on getting the single player campaign done for the new Steam version of the MOD. After that I would like to add the skill and random feature to the WON build as well. I'm still learning how to write code so that might be a bit of a challenge.

I'm currently about half way through the campaign but I'm also planning some more art upgrades. It might still take a while before the new version is going to be released.

What about co-op?

Good news first: the new SDK has full support for co-operative campaigns. I've adjusted all maps to work and it's currently possible to play it all with friends. However, I also want to add the new features to this version. I want to base the skill on the amount of players, so that will take a lot more work and testing to get right. I'm also adjusting the maps to have more elements of co-operative play, where you have to help eachother overcome obstacles and puzzles.

What's pretty clear now, is that the co-op campaign will be available for the Steam version only. The new SDK has made structural changes to how some game data is stored and I won't be able to replicate that for the WON build. I also expect only a very small percentage of the players will ever play the co-op campaign on the old WON build, so it's not with the effort.

So, plenty of work left to be done but also many exciting new things to look forward to! Hope to see you all soon here again for a new version of Half-Life: Enriched!