Half-Life Mod (2001-2002)

Overview

Nuke! was a product of a collective imagination. Most of the ideas for this game came from some dark parts of mine and Clem’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):

  • Deathmatch – Free for all
  • Team Deathmatch – Teams must eliminate each other. The team count could be from two to four, decided by the server admin. The team names were entirely up to the server admin as well as what models each team played as.
  • Chainsaw Massacre – Sort of like an assassination type gameplay but with nothing but chainsaws. A single player is identified at random to become the ‘Victim’. He/she is only given a single weapon–the crowbar. However this crowbar had the capability to knock an opponent clear across the level, usually resulting in him or her ‘instagibbing’ (exploding into bloody pieces) when he/she hit the ground. The remaining players were given chainsaws and played as a zombie character. These players would run around the map with one mission: hack the ‘Victim’ to death.
  • Last Man Standing – Stay alive as long as possible
  • Capture the Nuke – A single objective for both teams, either capture and use the nuke or defend it to prevent it from being used against you.

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.

Weapons

  • Chainsaw
  • Crowbar
  • KBar
  • Autoshotgun (Streetsweeper) – Basically a gattling gun that shoots buckshot
  • Lawgiver 0.357 Magnum
  • Glock 17
  • Dual Glock 19’s
  • Hyperblaster
  • Electro Crossbow
  • M3 Super90 Assault Shotgun
  • RPG
  • Satchels
  • Tripmines
  • Pancor Jackhammer Shotgun
  • Mini-Nuke Rocket Launcher
  • Vulcan 20mm Cannon
  • Sprinfield Sniper Rifle
  • H&K G-36K

Technology

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.

Downloads

  Nuke! Preview Installer (*.exe) (34.3 MiB, 15 hits)

 - This takes a little hacking to get working right:

  1. Install the game
  2. Navigate to the install folder
  3. Open the liblist.gam file with notepad or other text editor
  4. Change the value for “gamedll” from “dlls\HPB_Bot.dll” to read “dlls\nuke.dll”

The above instructions will break the AI (bot) functionality, but it will get you into the game to play around. It really isn’t a lot of fun without extra players, and in some cases its necessary for the gameplay (Chainsaw massacre).

If you chose to, you can edit the in-game playlist by running the “nk_plmaker.exe” file from the game’s install directory. When you go to save a playlist, make sure to overwrite the existing “mp3list.txt” file in that same directory or it won’t show up in game.

  Nuke! Design Document (*.pdf) (19.8 KiB, 51 hits)

 - This is the design document we were following, it does a decent job of explaining the features and weapons. The best thing to do would be to see it for yourself, but is does look really good. Only problem with that was stated above in the description for the installer.

Video

Screenshots

Now that I finally got the game running again, I’ll probably post some but right now all I’ve got is video (and that’s arguably better).

Credits

  • Cale Dunlap – Co-Leader, Programming, Webmaster, 3D Art, Level Design, Public Affairs
  • Iconcore – 2D Art, 3D Art, Animation
  • Clem (Cekkent) – Leader, Weapon Programming, Testing
  • Spitfire – 2D Art
  • SKULLEYES – 2D Art
  • Chuck ‘Atrocity’ Wilson – Level Design
  • Kelekin – Public Affairs, Testing
  • $lagOps – Testing
  • -S30U| – Testing
  • Bones – Testing
  • FuZZm3n – Testing
  • MasterChopChop – Testing