First of all, thanks for all the compliments/worship! I really really appreciate it. It's very encouraging, and makes me want to work on my maps even more!
--
Secondly, I finally managed to download OC without my internet crashing! (Seventh time's the charm)
So I ended up playing it until 12:30 last night until I remembered I had work in the morning
.
But anyways, let me give you my first impressions of the mod:
Pregame:
MP3 Player for t3h winz. I must say, this was an impressive feature, having not seen it in other mods. It will be a welcome addition to LAN parties, and not having to alt+tab to change a song or load up a new list. I also liked the amount of customisability.
Ingame:
I liked the HUD, especially the images of which ammo/health/armour you have. Very useful. I've heard you can customize the HUD, which is good too. I had a few problems with the weapons selections fading out too fast. In fact, I blew myself with the rocket launcher several times because of this.
Health/Damage:
A medkit is essential in any Coop, and therefore OC has one. However, I wasn't able to figure out how it worked, as it didn't seem to heal me. (I'm guessing it heals other players, but I was playing by myself so I couldn't check). Also, in my antlion_attack map I'm working on, it seems that the healthchargers don't work. I mean, they look and sound like they're working, but I don't gain any health.
I also noticed that on some occasions, when I got damaged, it would take a second or two to show up on my HUD that my health had gone down.
Weapons:
The uzis are cool. I really liked the way that the bullets came out of
both muzzles (something lacking in parts of Gmod). I also liked how it was easy to switch from holding one to holding two and back to holding one. The gauss gun was a little dissapointing; I was expecting something more like what Half life 1's gauss gun was like. The gauss gun in OC didn't seem to do much damage, killing things on three fully charged shots when a single double-shotgun blast killed them. It also had an annoying habit of damaging me more often than what I was shooting at. The sniper rifle was a bit better, I quite liked it. I had a tough time hitting anything with it, and it didn't seem to zoom very far even while max zoomed, but if it did hit then it did some damage. I enjoyed the realistic effects, including the swaying and the kick-back. Effectiveness-wise, though, I found the crossbow to work much better. The deployable manhacks were excellent. I really love deploying a few and having the antlions go for them while I get my ass out of the area! Best of all, this weapon goes great with this map, along with the sniper rifle!
NPCs/Monsters:
I was really impressed by the re-appearance of classic Half life 1 monsters. The bullsquid, garg, gonarch, tentacle, houndeye, hgrunt, and alien grunts are all great! Oh, and snarks too! Let's not forget about snarks! The garg was especially well-done, and moves really damn fast! It snuck up on me a few times. His flames could use a bit of work, but I really enjoyed his gibs. The Gonarch/big momma behaves just as I remember from Half life 1, and the baby-headcrabs work great too. The houndeye looks a little strange with his new skin. I'm especially enthused about one of my old favorites, the tentacle. I was a bit confused at first by the naming, some are npcs and some are monsters, which gave me a bit of trouble when trying to spawn them. It's probably easier leaving their names the way they are than modifying large amounts of source code, though.
The AI was excellent (after mapping for HL2: DM), and I loved the fact that they actually used my assault points!
The customizibility was a huge plus too. Being able to change the health and model of an npc up front is very useful.
Maps: *NOTE* I haven't played very many maps yet
Most of the maps I played looked really good. Nice blend of aesthetic and functionality, with good gameplay. Some really good ideas that I need to go and play again with more people than just myself
I was dissapointed by some of the maps. Some of the ones I played were quite blocky, looking more like Half life 1 maps than anything else (though I have seen better Half life 1 maps than some of these).
However, I must say that the gameplay in all the maps was quite enjoyable and easy to follow.
Mapping:
When I initially downloaded OC I thought there would be the usual hour-long hassle of trying to setup the mod for Hammer, but with the supplied files and readme I had hammer going in 10 minutes! I am very impressed! Thank you modders for thinking of the mappers! (This is the only mod I've mapped in that came with an easy hammer setup)
I had a bit of difficulty figuring out what the entities did (until I read the
Entity Guide 
). It seems a lot of them are I/O based instead of keyvalue based, which is probably a better way to do it, but certainly different. It will take me a bit to figure out how each of these entities works, but I'm excited about the variety and customizability avaliable. And I haven't got a chance to look at MapAdd yet.
Summary:
In conclusion, I think OC is a terrific beta co-op mod, with lots of potential. OC has more than its share of things to be worked on, but for a beta it's doing fantastic. Currently, I see OC's greatest weakness as being a fairly small fanbase. I only saw two people playing last night, and there doesn't appear to be a huge amount of activity on the forums. Some more maps would be cool too. OC's greatest strength, in my opinion, is the large amount of customizibility, which allows for tons of re-plays. From new npcs to new weapons and a feeling not unlike Sven Coop, OC is one of the best co-op mods out there.
-DaMaN
P.S. I don't get the name though...
looks good!
