Does anyone here know much about coding for Half Life 2? I've got a mod idea that...well, I don't have any know-how or skill in any part of mod-making, so it'll probably never happen (can't get a mod team together if you don't have skills, after all!) but I'd like to see if some of the main features of this idea are possible, and also some of the smaller features. If they are, I might toy around with them and maybe elarn some programming, and if not...I'll file this idea in with the others that I never got around to.

(it's multiplayer-based, if that makes adifference to what's possible and what isn't)
(I almost just pasted the design document in here, until i realized it was a jumbled mess of stream-of-consciousness sentence fragments, so I'll paraphrase the main questions)

1. Leaning (visible by other players) using the mouse, meaning in increments? Raising up/down also, but I would assume they're related.
2. How moddable is the voice chat system, and how integrated with the rest of the engine is it? Could the voice be pumped into the game environment like any other sound, and manipulated? I assume since you can do voice chat by team, you can ahve multiple "channels"?
3. Range limit on the hitscan calculations for bullets?
4. How flexible is the ragdoll system? Can you combine it with regular animation on a bone-by-bone basis? That seems like it might take some doing...can the ragdoll information be sent back to the game to control other stuff?

Yeah, I'm not expecting many responses, if any, but if you're out there and have ANY idea, that'd be cool! Thanks.

Oh, I'm also toying with an America's Army style "only 1 team" concept, where you're always the good guys...that should be possible, too, right?

Really, no one? Huh, I would've thought that with all you HL2 lovers out there someone might have some suggestions. Ah well.

I play games I don't code them.

Wow. That wasn't anyway helpful.

Talk to Mega_ZZTer. I think he knows some about the coding and could offer some tips.

hmm. I think leaning should be done with the e and q keys my self. I don't think putting into the mouse would work too well.

Also, has anyone realized how good the source engine would be for JK3? It's absolutely perfect.

er..JK3...?

Jedi Knight 3: Teenage Mutant Ninja Jawas

As in the next version of the game this whole forum is about...

See, I thought about leaning with e and q, like usualy, but here's the problems i have with that:

1. Keyboard keys are binary...they're off or they're on. I don't want to either be leaning all the way to the left, not at all, or all the way to the right...I want to be able to carefully peek around a corner.
2. using e and q eliminates 2 of the most useful keys on the keyboard, if you use wasd.
3. What, then, would be the keys for peek up/down? There aren't any that make sense...

this way, I slow down the gameplay a bit (which is a plus), increase functionality and smoothness, free up some keys, and allow for peeking up and down carefully.

But that could easily all change if it was ever put in after I felt it out...

I have a feeling though that that would just eliminate use of the lean. It has to be able to be done quickly or it's useless.
You could set up to e and q button fluidly though. Sort of like and axis.

You could activate something that lets your mouse leans for you. That'd be hard to do though, I bet.

My extent of knowledge with the HL2 code is mostly with the VGUI.

But, it is fairly easy to make new keybindings. the kb_act.lst file somewhere in a new mod directory has the listings of the descriptions and the console commands. To make the actual console commands is easy as well, of course the actual work would be making the commands lean you. :p

I learned how to make console commands from one of the tutorials in the Source SDK docs that talks about it.

Yeah, that's what I was going to do. Just press a button, and move your mouse a bit...then press it again and you'll move back to center.



It'd still be fairly quick, but the feel of this hypothetical mod would not be to lean around a corner and shap-shoot heads then pop back around the corner. This'd be more of a careful game.

Thanks, Mega_ZZTer, I guess I'll just get the SDK, get the free beta of Visual C++ 2003 or whatever it is, and get with the learnin'!

http://labs.msdn.microsoft.com/express/ Here's the demo you seek.

http://www.chatbear.com/board.plm?a=viewthread&t=104,1102070328,6443&id=741090&b=4991&v=flatold Here are instructions for compiling with it... more or less. Read through the whole thing, the first post isn't the complete answer. Also it might be for the FIRST beta of express, not the second one as in the download above (not sure which version I have).