printf("Hello World\n");
printf("Hello World\n");
Half-Life Mod (2001-2002)
Released: N/A
Download: N/A
Nuke! was a product of a collective imagination. Most of the ideas for this game came from some dark parts of mine and another developer’s brain. This mod played great although it was never released. It was a ton of fun and had a lot of neat little features that kept you playing for hours.
The neatest feature of this mod was the different modes of play. They were the following (also outlined in the design document):
This game was even fun to play alone against bots. I added a simple AI character to the game that could be copied and spawned any number of times up to the server’s maximum player count. This AI would behave according to the rules of the game being played. It would only shoot opposing team mates if teamplay was enabled, it would chase the ‘Victim’ if it knew it was the Zombie in the Chainsaw Massacre rules, and it would attempt to flee if it knew it was the Victim.
This mod was probably the most advanced mod I ever did–it is a shame it didn’t release. It had a very versatile particle system which almost made the whole game feel like it was running on a more advanced Half-Life Engine (almost had a Quake 3 feel to it). Using this particle system I created a weather system (snow/rain/hail). The only problem with this particle system was that it didn’t have very good collision callbacks–the particles had a tendency to fall through the floor and not clip against the world brushes.
This same particle system was used to create bullet impact effects, blood, smoke, fire, and muzzle flashes.
Another neat feature this mod had was an MP3 player that each player could customize using a small utility I packaged with the game. I even wrote an *.m3u to *.npl playlist converter. MP3 playing capability was not yet a function of Half-Life, so I used a third party DLL (called fmod). I hooked it directly into the client DLL at load time. When a player brought up the MP3 menu and hit play, the sound would simply play right over top of the existing game-sound as long as the sound card supported it.
This mod (like Spud Gun Mod) had nearly an ALL VGUI HUD. I took the Spud Gun Mod HUD code and enhanced it, greatly improving it’s performance and look. Almost every HUD element was drawn using colorful 32-bit TGA files instead of 8-bit sprites.
I also took advantage of the dynamic lighting (even though it was limited) in the Goldsource engine to create dynamic-lit muzzle flashes that brightened the world and surrounding objects whenever a weapon was fired.