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First impressions

Posted: Sun Jul 23, 2006 9:34 pm
by your evil twin
I write for Planet Half-Life. I'm planning on doing a mod review of Obsidian Conflict. It's going to be pretty positive. Have to play the game some more, and see what my other teammembers think - you never know, may even end up being Mod of the Week. (Not this week though, that'll already be taken care of. Next week's might be as well. Would be week after.) Can't guarentee MOTW though, cause the game experience is pretty variable at the moment.

I played for a couple of hours. It felt like I was playing Sven Co-Op for HL2. Both good and bad - shitloads of enemies, great new weapons, some clever ideas in maps, but also people being very stupid, and occasionally there were really bad lag problems.

The map with the crane where people have to get in a container and someone has to carry it across to the other side - brilliant idea, but flawed because for some reason people kept falling out of the sides of the container (not just the opening at the front). The crane operator should just have to worry about keeping the container straight so pepole wouldn't fall out, but sometimes people would just randomly fall THROUGH the container for no reason. Perhaps it is lag related? Could people be being left behind by the container due to lag? Or is it just some sort of physics/collision detection problem?

Finally got some people over to the other side... and they were killed by vortiguants. Argh! Heh.

Oh, one time in the map Bunker, after all enemies had been killed in the outdoor bit with the snipers and antlions, the door didn't open. Was just stuck there with nothing to do. But then switched to another server also doing bunker, and when we got up to that bit it was fine, door opened no problems. (I assume the door opens when everyone there has been killed, there were no signs of any buttons or levers or anything...)

There's a bit with a small room with cameras/turrets on the ceiling, you have to crawl across the room, because if you stand up the doors lock and the turrets kill everyone inside. People are such dumb shits - every time someone tried to crawl across, someone else would walk/run in, trigging the security system. Took bloody 10 minutes to get through that room. Not the mapper's fault, it is a great idea... but people are dumb. Anyway, keep that bit the same.

There was terrible lag during the fight in the room right after that, with Combine elites repelling down from the ceiling in the control room with lots of combine control panels.

Customisable hud and flashlight is great. The laser on the sniper rifle is awesome too. (Wish I could stick that laser onto the sniper rifle I've got in my SMOD Remastered mod!) Would be really nice if we could customise the colour of the laser on the sniper rifle as well.

Oh, seeing how you have recreated some of the HL2 beta things... I think the next logical inclusion would be the OICW. It is a fan favourite, and would go nicely with the sniper rifle.

Oh, I understand Obsidian can use mapadd files... where are those files? What folder are they in/do they go in? I love using SMOD's mapadd files. And I read that Obsidian allows you to alter the properties of NPCs the same way. Pretty cool.

Posted: Sun Jul 23, 2006 10:14 pm
by Lark
hi your evil twin you need to look in the script files there are a lot of goodies you need to add to your review and will you stay around after you have done your review?
off topic how is hl2:remastered coming along is it still going to have that custom SAW you for got to include the right cfg for?

Posted: Sun Jul 23, 2006 10:17 pm
by Hyperjag3
Being a MOTW would be awesome, thanks for considering us! I'll answer a few of these, some I'll leave to the others though. The maps that you are talking about problems in are from JoeScoma, and I have to be frank, he doesn't optimize his maps well. Single maps aren't a big problem in my opinion though, since we wanted the mod to be very open to custom maps, not just the maps that ship with it. I don't know about the OICW, it seems a little redundant to me, but we will consider it.

All external map customization files are in the maps/cfg folder. You can have a mapname_cfg.txt file with custom convar settings in it that will be specific to the map. mapname_briefing.txt is what is displayed on the MOTD window for the map. mapname_modify.txt allows you to add, remove, or modify entities in the map, and override the custom spawn weapons in that map. Take a look at testmap_modify.txt in the maps/cfg folder to get an idea of the format. mapname_soundscapes.txt allows you to add soundscapes for your map. mapname_soundscripts.txt allows you to add or overwrite existing soundscript entries for your map.