Firearms « Cale Dunlap

Half-Life Mod (2002 – 2005)

Overview

Firearms Half-Life was a fairly successful war-based Half-Life mod. A version prior to me joining the team in 2002 was actually packaged with the retail version of Counter-Strike when it was first sold in stores. Firearms developed a very tightly knit community which is still strong today in one way, shape, or form. This team had a lot of talent on it and it showed very well.

When I first joined the FA team for the RC2.65 release, the code was a nightmare. It hadn’t been very well maintained since its very first version. There were a lot of performance problems related to network communication and the new (at the time) prediction system in the Goldsource engine. It went through multiple programmers over the years and each one of them had their own programming style which had to be understood very well to overcome some of the problems in the game. Eventually I continued to write code for Firearms until just before the RC3.0 release. Through that time I had fixed a lot of known bugs and performance problems which were very annoying to the players. I developed a very close relationship with the playing community to get a good feel for how people liked the game. This allowed me to use the community as a source of feedback. I used this input to add and tweak the gameplay to keep it tuned to what the community wanted.

Firearms was voted PC Gamer’s Mod of the Year 2000 and Best Multiplayer Game of the Year runner-up that same year. In 2001,Firearms was the third most popular mod played on Half-Life, just below Counter-Strike and Team Fortress Classic.

In Firearms, players are divided into a red and a blue team and are to complete objectives. Objectives can vary from controlling areas to destroying objects. The main objective in all maps is to reduce the number of the opponent team’s reinforcements to zero. Reinforcements determine the amount of times players on a team can respawn. A team loses reinforcements when killed players respawn. The loss of reinforcements on a team can be stifled by completing map objectives and the direct and indirect actions of medics on the team. As long as a team has more than 0 reinforcements, players can respawn instantly.

Weapons

HK G3A3
Saiga 12K
M16 w/M203
SSG3000
AK-74
UZI
Desert Eagle
Bizon
M67 Frag Grenade
M60
Concussion Grenade
M82
PKM
Colt Anaconda
Beretta 93R
Claymore Mine
Beretta 92F
Dragunov SVD
M79
FA-MAS
MP5
KBar
Sterling
G36E
Colt 1911
M249
Remington M870
AK-47

Technology

Firearms was the first FPS game to have parachutes. This allowed players to be ‘dropped’ onto a map instead of always spawning in a bunker or base.

The particle system in Firearms was also very complex, but efficient. It was developed by Scott Rennie in RC2.6 and was used for a multitude of effects such as muzzle flashes, smoke, precipitation, and debris. I went on to add more particle systems to the particle system manager which created more effects for the game–the smoke for the smoke grenades and the precipitation system.

The weapons in Firearms were arguably the most realistic of all Half-Life mods. The entire weapon system was overhauled from the base SDK to include systems such as a Nomenclature skill (adjusted reload times based on player skills), bipods, realistic recoil, flash suppressors, multiple fire-modes, and closed bolts (+1 round in the chamber of the weapon).

In the later versions, I had created a “Master Ban List” system that was never actually used. The goal was to identify known cheaters and add them to a master ban list which was stored on a master server. Whenever a player joined a game server, the game server would check this player’s unique ID against the master ban server. The master ban server would send a response back to the game server telling it if the given player was a known cheater or not. If the player was a known cheater, or their ID was on the ban list for one reason or another, the player was given a message that they’ve been permanently banned from playing because of repeated cheating. This was followed by them being kicked from the server automatically. We used this same type of system to control leaking of internal releases.