Half-Life: Enriched - Alpha version 0.87 news

You haven't played online until you've WON.. or played the new alpha build until you've clicked this link!

Today's update of Half-Life: Enriched wants to shed some light on new features, such as monster roaming, optimizations and of course the WON build. But before we dive into the subject matter, I'd just like to appreciate how far the project has come. The days where I released based on chapters are far behind me now so sometimes it's harder to really show what kind of work has been done on the MOD. I'd like to put that into numbers this time.

It's been 583 days since I've started working on this MOD. The current changelog holds over 15.000 words and is 56 A4-sized pages long. Currently 579 issues have been reported and resolved on the test team's Github. The size of the 0.10 release was 113 mb zipped, the current version is 269 mb. As of today, The total amount of downloads is 13.269 and 537 people are following the MOD. Make of those what you wish :)

WON

One bit I'm very proud of in this version is the enhanced support for the old retail version of Half-Life, also known as WON Half-Life. WON (or World Opponent Network) was the old master server that Sierra/Valve used to keep track of all Half-Life servers and connected MODs. This service was shut down once Steam made its debut. I've taken great care to make sure my MOD is still fully compatible with this older version and thus I've created new artwork for the menu.

I've gotten used to the Steam version over the years, but seeing the old Half-Life menu really brings back some fond memories. This is enhanced now I see my very own MOD displayed in a similar matter. I hope you like it!

I've updated the WON code base to fix up some issues that were plaguing that build specifically. There are still some things to iron out but it should be far more playable in this state.

New map features

One of the more interesting new features is monster roaming. This has been a feature in Half-Life since the beginning but oddly enough it was only used in the beginning of 'Questionable Content'. The grunts in the screenshot below will patrol the corridor up and down:

If you've played Half-Life as often as I have, you'll know exactly where monsters spawn. To remedy this somewhat, I've added similar roaming paths to many monsters. While you are off fighting or exploring, monsters will more around in their areas so it's very likely a monster will be an unexpected location. There will still be plenty of static enemies waiting in ambush but these roaming monsters will create some interesting suprises for sure.

Secondly, all maps have recieved HINTs. These aren't guides to help the player, but rather guides for the engine to render the world more efficiently. The map compilers do a pretty decent job at cutting up the worlds into smaller bits but do not always make the right or most efficient cuts. As a mapper, you can create these cutting points by placing HINT brushes in your map and thus help the compiler make better choices. This then increases the performance of the map. If you're interested: I've written a very extensive tutorial on map optimization here.

New Models

I've nearly remade all models by this point and this is one of the last specimen: the Gargantua.

I've added many extra polies and the upscaled textures really make the model look crisp! I really like how this one turned out which is great for such an iconic monster.

There are still a few more models to go such as the player model and various smaller models such as gibs.

Whats next?

This new build has seen a lot of bugs squished but there are still some issues that haven't been adressed yet. Some are easy to fix and others require more attention or potentionally code changes. I just really wanted to push a new build to get the current fixes out of the door and give myself another milestone. As there is still stuff left to do, it's still labeled alpha.

For the next build I'd like to dedicate some time to fixing up various models. Next to that, I'm slowly getting the hang of the code in the SDK, so I might take on some ideas that were too complicated when I started out.

But mostly this project is centered around the maps and it seems that these are stable and mostly bug free at this time. This means I can now start focussing on the co-operative version of the maps. This has been a goal from the very start and it would be very exciting to see it all in action. More on this later!

Thanks for reading!