For Mappers: Removing the Offscreen teammate arrows

In order to make the Using Bots As Power-Ups idea I ran across a problem.

If you spawn a bot elsewhere in the map you get an annoying arrow pointing to their location. That's just annoying and spoils the illusion..

So I asked plaYer2k very nicely if he could add a CVAR to his HUD mod that allowed the user to switch these arrows off. You know what... he said YES!!!

.. and here it is

asw_arrows_for_offscreen_teammates 0

this command switches off the arrows.

asw_arrows_for_offscreen_teammates 1

switches them back on again.

Just add these to your map config file if you want to start your map with this disabled.

This also leads to a very interesting idea. You can spawn 4 players. In different locations and have them run into each other at various points of the map.
So it's like 4 players playing a single player game that affect each other at various points.

For example. Player 1 moves forward through his map and reaches a particular trigger or button. This opens or closes a particular route for player 2. Player 2 is then forced to intersect with player 3's map, or pass over the top of it etc..

at the end of the map the team meet up in the middle for a nice big finale battle.

Just a thought!

For Mappers: Forcing the game to spawn particular marines as bots

Assigning Bots to Slots automatically

THe HUD Mod

plaYer2k's Better HUD mod allows the user to fire off specific config commands to the console before the map is loaded. This is really helpful as it allows us to modify the playing experience for each map we want to play in Alien Swarm SP.

In the folder \Steam\steamapps\sourcemods\alienswarmsp\cfg\configloader

You'll find a .cfg file with the name of each of the official maps.

In order for the mod to recognise the config loader .cfg file it must have exactly the same file name as the map it is designed for and simply change the file extension to ".cfg".

So for example the map name for the first official campaign map is asi-jac1-landingbay_01.bsp therefore the map specific config file must be named asi-jac1-landingbay_01.cfg file for it to be recognised and run before that map begins.

Assigning bots

Some mappers out there may want to control which marine characters are spawned for a specific mission. This could be for a variety of reasons but this is generally because the mapper had a specific experience in mind for the gamer.

Using the following commands and placing them into the map specific config file will allow the user to assign bots to team slots and launch the mission. This will effectively skip over the team roster screen.

Here's a single command assigning a bot.

cl_selectm 0 -1

Let's break this down a bit so we can understand what's going on:

cl_selectm
This is a console command that instructs the game to assign a specific marine to a team slot.

0
The 0 that appears after the cl_selectm is the identifying number for the marine character we want to assign.

-1
The -1 is the slot we want to assign them to. Slots range from 0 to 3.
0 is the first slot and 3 is the fourth.
Using -1 here basically tells the game to assign this marine to the next available slot.

Here's a full list of the identifiers for each marine.

Sarge - 0
Wildcat - 1
Faith - 2
Crash - 3
Jaeger - 4
Wolfe - 5
Bastille - 6
Vegas - 7

So when we put it all together, an example of a map config file that assigns bots to each available slot and then jumps straight into the map would be...

cl_selectm 0 -1
cl_selectm 1 -1
cl_selectm 2 -1
cl_selectm 3 -1
cl_start

Here we're assigning Sarge, Wildcat, Faith and Crash to all available slots (including the player slot, slot 0).

The cl_start essentially automatically clicks on the "Start Mission" button and launches the map.

The end result of this is that the player selects the map they want to play and clicks on the "Create Game" button, the map loads and launches straight into the map with Sarge, Wildcat, Faith and Crash all spawned.

If you have any questions on this please e-mail aazell1@gmail.com

Welcome To Alien Swarm Single Player Mod

I see the future of Alien Swarm (AS) as being a single player game.
The problem with so many multiplayer based games is they require an active gaming community to survive.
As we are being so often reminded at the moment (Feb 2011), people are moving on from Alien Swarm and making silly comments about how its a complete failure. This isn't true of course but I do feel that this games reliance on multiplayer co-op will be its major undoing.

There is a huge section of the gaming community that prefer single player games to multiplayer (yes even and sometimes especially co-op play). Additionally most folks who enjoy a multiplayer session enjoy the Single Player experience.
Bearing in mind that Alien Swarm is a FREE game and available to everyone online, by creating single player maps we're providing free (hopefully high quality) content, that can be played and enjoyed immediately. That's a pretty darn attractive prospect to most players.

As a result I decided to focus on single player mapping. Unfortunatly, AS shipped without many of the SP features enabled. It's all there, it's just not switched on by default. Alien Swarm SP aims to address those issues.

I've based this mod on plaYer2k's Hud Mod and he was kind enough to add in some additional features for me.

Current Features:

- configurable automatic team selection allowing mapper to assign team spots for each map and force player to spawn in a specific marine (skips team roster screen and boots straight to map)
- all official maps and addons available to play in single player mode, through the Offline Practice option in the menu.
- can spawn bots elsewhere in map and bring them into and out of play when you wish (to be used as power-ups etc...)
- Weapon strip allowing more half-life style weapon discovery
- instant health and ammo pick-ups

All these element are optional and can be configured per map you create.