Had some feedback that the main menu page should be altered to show the name or the mod and the Play Online option should be removed. They are of course correct and its been on my mind for a while.
So, last night I delved into the horrid black hole that is the Alien Swarm Main Menu. And quite frankly its a pig to edit.
Half life 2's main menu was a joy to work with. After an hours work I could have a cool looking background map with new options showing and even get a logo up there... job done.
Not so with Alien Swarm. Changing the menu options should be as easy as modifying the mainmenu.res, gamemenu.res and the english translation.txt file. All do-able in a text editor.
However, every time I change any of these the menus get corrupted and the flyout menus (the menus that pop out from the side of the main options) go all funky and become unusable. Most frustrating.
The other immensly frustrating thing is that the bacground for the menu is a .bik video file. I need to get this disabled so that the regular viewport is available.
A very nice man working on the fantastic Jastain Summer mod sent me their modified mainmenu code. Have tinkered with this and managed to break my mod about 8 times.
I know I'll get there in the end. I always do but its so frustrating that something so simple as modifying a menu could be so damned hard and unintuative.
Ok a little tip for anyone planning to release a free game that you hope the modding community will keep alive...
DON'T HARD CODE SIMPLE STUFF LIKE MENU MODIFICATION!
OK rant over and it's back to work for me.
The problem with Alien Swarm is that its multiplayer by default. As the community gets bored with the official campaign they move on and pretty soon theres no one to play with anymore. Take away the multiplayer and you have a great top down shooter. I give you Alien Swarm: Single Player... enjoy!
Download Alien Swarm SP
Alien Swarm SP is available for download via the link below:
Download
And here's more new levels to play through than you'll ever need!
Swarm Armory Map Database
Here's the contents of the Readme.txt
Alien Swarm SP by Aazell
Installation Instructions:
1: You must have an up to date version of Alien Swarm installed on Steam in order to play Alien Swarm SP
Extract the contents of AlienSwarmSP.rar to the following folder in your Steam directory.
\Steam\steamapps\sourcemods\
Now restart Steam and you should see Alien Swarm SP available in your games library.
Launching a map in Alien Swarm SP:
From the main menu of Alien Swarm SP select Play AS:SP option and you should see the mission selection screen. All addon campaigns (if you have installed any and activated them) should be available within this screen also.
I have encountered no bugs (heh heh) as yet but if you do please send an e-mail to aazell1@gmail.com giving as much information as you can and I will attempt to investigate the problem.
Hope you have fun with it...
Download
And here's more new levels to play through than you'll ever need!
Swarm Armory Map Database
Here's the contents of the Readme.txt
Alien Swarm SP by Aazell
Installation Instructions:
1: You must have an up to date version of Alien Swarm installed on Steam in order to play Alien Swarm SP
Extract the contents of AlienSwarmSP.rar to the following folder in your Steam directory.
\Steam\steamapps\sourcemods\
Now restart Steam and you should see Alien Swarm SP available in your games library.
Launching a map in Alien Swarm SP:
From the main menu of Alien Swarm SP select Play AS:SP option and you should see the mission selection screen. All addon campaigns (if you have installed any and activated them) should be available within this screen also.
I have encountered no bugs (heh heh) as yet but if you do please send an e-mail to aazell1@gmail.com giving as much information as you can and I will attempt to investigate the problem.
Hope you have fun with it...
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
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2 comments:
Did you ever get the main menu fixed? I've tried to for my own mod and it sucks.
Never mind I found your tutorial post
http://alienswarmsp.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-to-change-alien-swarm-main-menu.html
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