As you could probably discern from the title, yes I am renaming the mod from Another Shift to Protocol Blue because Another Shift didn't sound as cool as it did about 2 or so years ago. Not that Another Shift had a scientific meaning behind it or anything but Protocol Blue sounded more fitting because it sounds all security like so I figured the change would be for the better, I was thinking about a name change for a while but could never think of one I thought sounded decent until I googled cool security terms and mashed it together with blue.
Source style prop pick up
While this doesn't mean full on source engine physics with ragdolls and whatnot this does mean you can pick up props and throw them. Thanks to Baconstu for writing the original code and helping me tweak it to work I can now utilize these for puzzles down the line, while I have no levels fully designed with props in mind just yet I do have plans for how to integrate them into the game, they won't be as huge and wacky as you might imagine them being for a goldsrc mod but I do plan to try and have them appear in an interesting way.
SCAR SSR
as mentioned last article I had plans to add a 3 round burst DMR to the game and here it finally is!, functionally it's remained the same conceptually but visually and balance wise it has gone through many changes. The initial version used the glock/mp5 ammo still, had a 30 round magazine, and used a gamebanana skin of a SCAR L with a CSCZ scope on it and it remained that way for a while until I swapped it out for one from CSO, the TFC sniper, and then finally landing on a SCAR SSR and modelling it from scratch. Now it uses a 12 round magazine to account for the damage that 7.62 ammo does and it includes a zoom feature as of now instead of a proper scope, one of the major hurdles for a while has been properly implementing a scope function for this weapon as opposed to the fov zoom of the crossbow. It involves sprite making, vgui stuff, and things generally out of my skill level so it's remained unimplemented with the crossbow style zoom being a placeholder for a while which I hope to figure out soon.
USAS-12
I know what you're thinking, isn't there already the AA-12?. The short answer is yes but no, I decided to switch the AA-12 out with a USAS-12 because I felt the USAS-12 was more believable in a Half-Life setting and just overall the AA-12 model was riddled with so many issues so it was for the better. It is functionally no different, only cosmetically has it been changed.
Throwable Flare
An old idea from this project's infancy was having a flare instead of a flashlight, I even had a model for it lying around. However for a long time it was never carried out because of the way Steam Goldsrc is making it unreasonably difficult for anybody to do, however since I moved to Xash the idea was finally able to be brought to life courtesy of Baconstu once more and this time with a lot more polish. The way it works is very similar to how it does in the Half Life 2 Episodes and Black Mesa but with some differences obviously, firstly, it has a 2 minute duration before it goes out and once it does it will be taken out of the player's weapon selection, you can pick more flares up but you can only carry one at a time, lastly you can holster it and decide to use it whenever you want unlike it's source counter part where it's activated upon picking it up. And yes you can light zombies on fire just like in Black Mesa
Other Stuff
It's very apparent I have been infrequent with updates on this mod (like 6 months between each article), while I don't think anybody particularly expects super frequent updates I thought I might as well still let people in on why they take so long. Short answer is I'm now the only person working on the mod and along side the extra time it takes to produce I now have to take longer to have enough to present for an article. Occasionally someone will help me out or do something for the mod however the only person developing the mod actively is me so understandably that comes with a slower output speed, any former team members who worked on the mod pretty much just got tied up with work on a lot of other projects so they couldn't really stick around understandably. I also for the 3rd or 4th time created a discord server for the mod however for the time being I'm keeping it private because it needs to be fleshed out and I have to figure out a way to keep it from dying so hopefully if I am lucky in the future the mod gains enough traction to have an active user base for a discord server. Also I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy Hassaultidays
Awesome to hear the mod is back on track!
based stuff
Blessed
If you are going to add prop pick up like Source engine then why not just make the whole thing in source at that point, like Monster_Urby would say. He is a genius!
Thank you Jacob
Lovely newspost and brilliant name choice for the new title. Due to the previous title I was constantly suspicious whether I should take your mod seriously. Now I most certainly do.
The new features surely will come in handy. I'm looking forward to your next newspost.
Merry Christmas and a happy new year everyone.