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???!

Cutscenes are mine at last!

What would a single player game be without a decent cutscene or two?
A bit rubbish if you ask me. Up till now it's been thought that Alien Swarm didn't come with any entities that allowed you to project an image to the full screen. I.e. present a camera driven scene to the players full screen.
The only thing that was provided was a small pop out camera screen at the side..
Well after a lot of tinkering I discovered that the image that was shown on that pop out video is actually a texture. That texture can be applied to any surface in a map by turning the brush you want it to appear on into a func_monitor, covering all sides in nodraw texture then applying the texture vgui/swarm/Computer/ComputerCamera.vtf to the side of the brush where you want the image to appear.

Nice... What's even nicer is if you use that image as an env_screenoverlay you can fill the players whole screen with the camera feed...

Here's a BSP map file for those who want to see the results... just drop it into your alien swarm maps folder.

Here's a .vmf map file for those that want to see how it's done.

Ahh I can now go to bed with a sense of achievement!

Update!

I have managed to create a new .VMT file that removes the security camera style overlay. It can be downloaded Here!

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

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.