HL2DM to Singleplayer competition!

Have a look, this sounds like an awesome idea:

http://dm2sp.com/index.html

Ima gonna do Lockdown, an' it's gonna have antlions and combineses and even an ANTLION KING woot!

j/k

I wish i had the time to learn the ropes on this. Is it a matter of replacing a few entities, or is there a huge pile of work involved?

haymaker said:
I wish i had the time to learn the ropes on this. Is it a matter of replacing a few entities, or is there a huge pile of work involved?

The rules are rather open: The map just has to be based on an already released HL2DM map of your own and it has to work with vanilla HL2.

Even for a SP map, brushwork, texturing and lighting take up a huge junk of the design process. So, because you can basically skip this part entirely, you can focus on the entity work alone which should make this possible, even for SP-amateurs.

The challenges of doing SP maps to my (limited) experience are mainly

• 1) Coming up with an interesting backstory
  2) Getting the entity work right
  3) Making sure the player doesn't get lost (much harder to playtest).

It's not easy, but not having to start from scratch is rather enticing.

Cool, sounds like a pretty good idea, I would have a crack at it if I wasn't busy with other things!

I think I'd prefer it though if there was a specific set of multiplayer maps only that you could work with as opposed to any old multiplayer map on the web.

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Aaron's Stuff

aaron_da_killa said:
I think I'd prefer it though if there was a specific set of multiplayer maps only that you could work with as opposed to any old multiplayer map on the web.

Oh goodness no! Why would you want to limit it? There are so many good ones out there. I think they set up a terrific competition! -Boy, I wish I had gotten that idea! -We can always copy it for those late bloomers, heehee

Yea, I'm totally behind having missed a day on the internet Phillip sent us a news post about this and I wasn't here to make a post about it, working... I'll link this thread in it. Thanks Reaper.

Yea, this is a good idea. I mean, You don't have to start from scratch, but you do have to do some cleaning up work I suppose. I suppose I would go about it by looking at the selected map vmf and deciding how hard or easy it would be to break it down and understand what all the author had in mind when creating it (assuming it wasn't my own map, and I had permission). Then I would go about making a level diagram with perhaps a level overview and seeing what areas I could chop off or explore a little more and outlining the story and events that could take place, denoting the landmark moments and how it begins and ends. Any special art assets (Faceposer scenes, special sounds or textures) I would list and begin thinking about what all resources I would need in order to create those custom assets. After having my plan down, then I'd begin working on it, maybe outlining a schedule of duties to complete within the time frame to make sure I'd stay on track with things and not end up biting off more than I could chew. Yea, makes me wish I could get started on it for the money! But I have too many other cool ideas I want to pursue first (namely finishing this compilation map), well then, enough talking already, see ya!

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

one thing I noticed is the ultra-short timeframe

entries in 7 weeks? Judging in 2 days?

or mayeb I'm over-reacting? 7 weeks just seemed really soon to release a finished product

Sweet. I'm totally gonna try to enter. I was already converting a deathmatch map for my own single player project so this is perfect timing.

Firslty, thanks for the positive response. TBH, this is the first site that has done that, all the other places have been negative.

@haymaker,
I thought long and hard about the timeframe and spoke to a few mappers. With holidays etc it was thought that 7 weeks is enough to create something.

ANother point was that having too long a time frame would make people complacent. We hope 7 weeks will help focus your mind and energies.

With regard to the judging I have allocated 2 weeks after the closing date and then said I will announce the winners 2 days after the final judging. I did this to ensure I didn't have to rush anything.

Also we will be playing and judging maps as soon as they are sent in, I added the two weeks in case there was a big rush of entries at the end.

@Riven,
If the idea is succesful I have plenty of follow up ideas and would happily collaborate with Snarkpit in their promotion. One idea was to run the competition every year and also as NOPK said on Podcast17 have team join converted maps into smoething much bigger, almost a mod.

I am sure we can come up with lots of ideas, but we better wait until the competition is over and see how many entries we actually get.

PlanetPhillip said:
ANother point was that having too long a time frame would make people complacent. We hope 7 weeks will help focus your mind and energies.

Maybe I'm just a masochist, but from my experience, if you do not finish such a competition entry in a tight timeframe, you never will.

I really enjoyed out the singleplayer mapping comp we had here a couple of years ago (has it really been that long?), and it was basically a 2 week comp. I thought the tight timeframe really helped move it along.

Hopefully, if i have time, I'll participate in this comp - sounds like a really fun idea, that doesn't require a ton of overhead.

We just recieved our first entry. It's a conversion of Lockdown.

Lockdown is a conversion of hl2 singleplayer. Wonder how it holds up against the original?

So I was brainstorming a few ideas for this, and made a test box to try and learn some stuff. Hate to say it but I think SP mapping is too far beyond this timeframe for me. To me doing this means learning every entity on this page and then some.

2 hours and I couldn't get a monk to defend himself against stupid zombie torsos.

No no, AI In HL2 isn't hard at all. That page you posted gives you more information than you need. If all you want are some soldiers to file in at certain times, then it's only a matter of 2 or 3 entities. Zombies don't require much either. On top of that, all you have to worry about is adding hint nodes in order to help your NPCs recognize where they're going. But beyond that, if you want to control animations on facial characters, like Alyx, would be to investigate FacePoser, which isn't hard to master at all. I think a lot of people are scared off by it at first though.

There are plenty of tutorials about working with zombies and soldiers. I highly recommend you find a good tutorial and take it from there before shunning it all off first!

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

haymaker said:
So I was brainstorming a few ideas for this, and made a test box to try and learn some stuff. Hate to say it but I think SP mapping is too far beyond this timeframe for me. To me doing this means learning every entity on this page and then some.

2 hours and I couldn't get a monk to defend himself against stupid zombie torsos.

Would be a shame since I'd love to see some of your DM maps in SP.

Admittedly, fiddling with SP entity work can be tedious, but it's not exactly higher rocket science. I don't think you'd need to read through that entire wall of text.

The monk, for example, should defend himself automatically (I never used him, though, try a simple npc_citizen for starters).

All you need are a ton of info_nodes to get the AI going.

For scripting and story bits you'll need a scripted_sequence or the more dynamic/AI-friendly ai_scriptedschedule.

The rest are triggers, logic_relays and I/O commands.

Highest of the high skills will be using npc_template_makers to spawn new npcs just the right moment or, eventually, get a goddamn combine_dropship to work!

Well, just give it a second try. I won't force you, though.

lol thanks guys. There probably is something simple I didn't do ie node hint.

And ironically part of my mental "scenario" involved a combine dropship...

Awww...

Only 2 entries (one is mine, I got it semi-finished the last minute).

Maybe time was too short after all.

Awww. That's a shame.

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Aaron's Stuff

damn :/

I had my entry 95% complete before I realized that maps made with the Orange Box SDK aren't backwards compatible with default HL2 and I had no way to get the old version of the SDK before the deadline.

Aww, geeze, yea, I was looking forward to seeing all this play out. I think the problem was that he gave too much time. When given that much time, some mappers actually get discouraged because they might think the regular mappers will have nicer looking maps given the time, but if you shorten that time span, then everyone will have to cut corners, and the focus lies more on a functional map with graphics as a feature rather than a main-stay. And thus equals more fun for people. It looks like you guys are anxious for another competition, if you're having to branch out to other sites looking for some

I think (we) might be able to host a competition perhaps around in October or so (a competition with cash or game prizes). Of course, anyone is free to host a competition here anytime if you've got the time. Anything sponsoring community activity is a plus. I wonder why this competition didn't have a good turn-out; I thought it was a terrific idea.

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Yak_Fighter said:
damn :/

I had my entry 95% complete before I realized that maps made with the Orange Box SDK aren't backwards compatible with default HL2 and I had no way to get the old version of the SDK before the deadline.

For the love of god, release it anyway! I'd love to see it.

Send it to Phillip, too. Poor guy deserves some response for coming up with such a great competition idea (the amount of plain hatred he received just for announcing DM2SP on the HL2DMU forums, for example, still amazes me). I imagine a lot of people started out something but missed the deadline or gave up in the middle. I literally finished my entry in the last minute.

Yeah I feel sorry for the guy. He really does alot for the Half-Life community.

I would have most certainly done something for this but I was busy with school at the time.

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Aaron's Stuff

I haven't been mapping lately, but it seemed like an awesome idea. To be perfectly honest it pisses me off that he got so little input he actually closed his domain before I even got to visit the site.

I really liked the idea of this competition, at the time I had had enough of hl2 and took a break but I would love to learn sp mapping and to give one of my maps a fresh lease of life.

But I know nothing of this side of things, I'd appreciate it if someone could point me to a tried and tested tutorial that i could get started with..

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http://aworkingpig.org