My thoughts on custom maps...

I've spent the last few days playing every custom map I can get my hands on. The initial reason for this was to recommend and not recommend maps that work with AS:SP.

I began to write a post detailing my findings on each map. My writings began to look like a serious review of each map. Then I stopped...

I have no wish to piss off the rest of the AS mapping community by arrogantly passing judgement on individual maps. It's not as if I've done better or produced any maps that were noteworthy.

There are a few points however that I'd like to get off my chest.

What's The Story, Morning Glory?

With the exception of the objectives and the overview briefing screen I've yet to find a single custom map that attempts to provide any kind of story to engage the players. A good story may seem to be unnecessary when players are going to be simply joining a map and blasting their way through it but I disagree with this. A story is what drives the players along. Give purpose to their actions. With a good story I feel you can take a standard bunch of online players and transport them to a different place and time and really engage with the game.

There have to be consequences to the players actions (other than being made to look a fool by dieing in the first 2 mins) or the whole game is pointless.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The second thing that I noticed about the majority of the maps is that they lack any kind of clear and sutble direction on where the hell you should be going. It's a number one rule among game designers. The worst sin you can commit is to leave the player confused as to what they should be doing. The game should never be, trying to work out what to do. It should be about the skill it takes to achieve your goal.

By simply lighting up important areas or using some other method to draw the players attention to it, you can save an awful lot of headaches.

This shouldn't be hitting them over the head with a sledge hammer either. There should be no big arrows or on screen text saying GO TO HERE! Never the less, through smart use of textures and lighting you can make it very obvious as to where the player is trying to get to and how to get there.

Alone In The Dark

One last observation I made about many maps was that they were seriously underlit. It's one thing to try and create a creepy or threatening atmosphere, it's another to leave the player in almost total darkness surrounded by annoying map items so that they have to bump their way through a map like some overcomplicated pin ball wizard.

Regardless of the setting or the mood or whether the players have flashlights or not there really is no excuse for not lighting up every corner of your map at all times.
It doesn't have to be fullbright but it does have to be well defined to prevent the players falling over themselves...

Nut Up Or Shut Up

Ok so now I've spouted on about the problems with the current crop of custom maps I should probably put my money where my mouth is.
With this in mind I'm building a simple series of maps for people to playtest (either MP or SP) that will hopefully manage to not break each of the rules above.

My maps will have an engaging story, the players path will be clear at all times without feeling linear and all areas of the map will be appropriately well lit.

Gulp... what have I let myself in for???!

Instant Health and Ammo Pick-ups to add to your maps

OK I made these a while back.

These are instant pick-ups for your marines. Basically the old school arcade game floating, rotating icons that when you walk over them you get an instant health or ammo top up.

I'll explain how they work using the instant health.vmf

Visual Elements
The pick-up icon is basically a prop_dynamic set to "not solid" of the standard heath kit you can pick up in the game. It's orientated vertically and then parented to a func_rotating which is covered in the nodraw texture. I added a point_spotlight to it just to make it a bit glowy. I've parented the model and the point_spotlight to the func_rotating so that the model and the light rotate. Suggest you play with settings on the point_spotlight as it's a little bright.

Audio elements
I've added a asw_ambient_generic with the standard health pack application sound to the entity so this will play when health boost hits.

The health top up
The actual health top up is done through a server command. To do this we need to include a point_servercommand entity to your map. You'll only need one point_servercommand per map you build. I've included one in the .vmf file.
Also in order to issue the command that tops up the marines heath we need to have cheats enabled so be sure to include the sv_cheats 1 command in your map config file (see here for how map specific config files work in this mod).

The trigger
A standard trigger_once as we will only be using this pick up the one time.

How it all comes together
So the player walks into the trigger, the trigger has the following outputs:
-Play sound
-Send servercommand asw_gimme_health (refills the health of all marines)
-Kill prop_rotating (which in turn kills all entities parented to it, i.e. the model and the point_spotlight)

And we're done...

The insta_ammo.vtf does exactly the same thing except the model is changed for an ammo box. I changed the colour of the point_spotlight to differentiate them and the command it fires is asw_gimme_ammo.

Hope you choose to include them in your AS:SP map.

Cheers

Here's the links to download the .vmf's

Insta_health.vmf
Insta_ammo.vmf

Main Menu Frustration

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.