Half-Life Mod (2003 – 2005)

Overview

Jungle Mist was an attempt at a Vietnam type mod for Half-Life. The team had a lot of good people on the team, but it never got completed for a multitude of reasons which I won’t discuss. It was very similar to Firearms Half-Life in that it had realistic recoil, realistic weapon animation, push gameplay, a skill system, and a stamina/sprinting system.

I do not have much for ingame-screenshots of this mod, plus the old website didn’t have much either. I did however take an ingame video and highlighted some of the features of the game. This mod was unique in that it had 7 different modes of gameplay. Those gameplay styles are:

  • Teamplay Deathmatch – Eliminate the opposing team
  • Push – Control areas of the map, capture all to win
  • Capture the Flag – Each team has a flag that must be captured by the opposing team
  • Capture the Object (not implemented) – Only one object that is fought over by each team
  • Kill of the Hill – Stay on a ‘hill’ point as long as possible. Kill all enemies that come into view
  • Rescue (not implemented) – Rescue a hostage or set of hostages
  • Assassination (not implemented) – Kill a specified individual
  • Last Man Standing – Stay alive as long as possible. Last man standing wins.

As you can tell, not all of the gameplay modes were implemented, but we had a few unique ones like King of The Hill and Last Man Standing.

I ultimately ended up leaving Jungle Mist for personal reasons. JM went on to merge with an existing mod team for Half-Life 2, which in turn merged into another mod team for Half-Life 2 and is doing well. The game has changed a lot since I left. What is listed here is what it was like while I was working on it.

Weapons

  • XM177A2
  • Galil ARM
  • M9
  • Browning HP
  • M67 Frag Grenades
  • M203
  • AKSU74
  • M249
  • RPK74
  • MP5PDW-SD
  • AS-VAL
  • Para Ordinance 14-45 / 5-7
  • SOCOM-SD
  • HK-USP
  • MP5K
  • UZI
  • M1911
  • Mossberg M500
  • SKS
  • M24
  • SIG P210

Technology

This mod had a few pieces of technology that were not seen in many other mods. The particle system being one of them. This particle system was used mainly for the precipitation system. A mapper could place a special entity on their maps and control the density of rain/snow with just a few keyvalues. The weather system never really lagged the computers because of the way it was created. It wouldn’t cause rain/snow on the entire map, just in a certain radius around the player with a few checks for if the particles are under a skybox brush or not. The particles had collision on them too which allowed the programming of hit callbacks. These callbacks allowed me to spawn certain effects when a raindrop hit the ground–such as a splash effect. This system was created using TriAPI (Half-Life’s internal wrapper for OpenGL/Direct3D drawing). It was as close to direct OpenGL and Direct3D calls as I could get.

Another ground-breaking feature at the time was a persistence engine I wrote called Angel. Essentially it was a statistic tracking system that would hook into the server-side dll(s) and write information about the players who were playing to one central database. Once this information was in the database, it didn’t matter if the player left the game, lost his/her connection, etc. They would always pick up where they left off in terms of skill points, rank, and overall score. I even went as far as developing a web-reporting engine for the players. This allowed players to log into a site and watch their statistics and see how they ranked up with the rest of the community. Angel was supposed to be used for the skill system in the game–to allow unlocking of certain weapon features. It never made it that far, but I did prove the concept by hooking the Angel DLLs into the server dlls and playing a few rounds myself. You can read more about Angel here.

Downloads

  Jungle Mist Installer (*.msi) (29.8 MiB, 16 hits)

  Jungle Mist Design Document (*.pdf) (182.2 KiB, 14 hits)

  Jungle Mist Portfolio Video (*.wmv) (15.4 MiB, 15 hits)

Videos

Jungle Mist Ingame Video – This was shot for the sole purpose of being displayed on this page. There are no other players in the game but myself.

Screenshots

Credits

  • Stephen Ganji – Team Management, Sound, Concept Development, Public Relations
  • Cale Dunlap – Team Management, Programming, Level Design, 2D Art, Public Relations
  • Rammstein – Programming
  • Fearfisch – 3D Art
  • Lee Salo – 3D Art
  • Metalhead – 3D Art
  • Azyunomi – Animation
  • Christian Oeulund – Animation, Concept Development
  • wolferine – Animation
  • Bondage Jaguar – 2D Art
  • Chuck ‘Atrocity’ Wilson – 2D Art, Level Design
  • SiD – 2D Art
  • Cassius – 2D Art
  • Monochromatic Stain – 2D Art
  • Vunsunta – Sound
  • Prime Suspect – Music
  • Daan van den Heuvel – Level Design
  • Prowl – Level Design
  • SDDM – Level design
  • Shinobi – Level Design
  • Afro Joe – Concept Development, Beta Testing
  • Overclocked Jesus – Concept Development, Public Relations, Beta Testing
  • LampShade – Public Relations