Dearth of HL2 single player custom maps

Personally, I derive much more pleasure designing a single player
map. The best part is to anticipate what the player would do in a
situation, and set traps to challenge the player.

Why aren't there more single player maps for HL2? Why do most mappers prefer making multiplayer maps?

In the begining, before i knew anything about hammer, i used to make single player maps (noobish), i liked it better because you can ( as you said) set traps and make tricky situations, but after coming to this helpful site, i began working on DM maps for learning new stuff, so i think i may start working on a single player map soon, its just more...Enjoyable in a way.

But i would say if we can mix these 2 in one cooprative map, this would be a bit of a challenge with your friends online or at lan, trying to kick some alien and combine butt, That must be FUN !!! What do you think ??

I dont tent me map for SP becuase it takes alot more to make a SP
map. AI, I/O, etc tend to be more taxing on the mapper. I'm
going to try and make one though.

MP maps are far more basic, in many you dont even need many entities apart from wepons and spawn points.

I think many people plan a collection of SP maps rather than one-offs, and obviously those take time- so we'll probably see a bunch in a few months, when people have figured out all the relevant entities!

<DIV class=quote>
<DIV class=quotetitle>? quoting Leperous</DIV>
<DIV class=quotetext>I think many people plan a collection of SP maps rather than one-offs, and obviously those take time- so we'll probably see a bunch in a few months, when people have figured out all the relevant entities!</DIV></DIV>
Yeh, i agree with lep, sometimes you just get mixed up with these entities, for a single player map, the mapper should know all kind of entities and what does it do, it is really a hard work, But its worth it.

Well I think it's possible that some SP maps might start appearing- just single maps... the area you can use is so huge it wouldn't suprise me.

But i would say if we can mix these 2 in one cooprative map, this
would be a bit of a challenge with your friends online or at lan,
trying to kick some alien and combine butt, That must be FUN !!! What
do you think ??

I think two words, Sven Coop

I'm making an SP map pack. It involves a teleporter destination mess up that
allowed an army of antlions in. You have to destroy the Antlion Leaders
(Guards) and shut down the teleporter to stop more coming in. Oh and
you also let in an army of headcrabs too.

You are right, hl singleplayer maps are way nice to make i think, and while i make then i stumble upon problems (and so solutions - as in learning new stuff :biggrin: ) that i would never come across in a hldm map,

but making a singleplayer map needs a good idea and i think most people don't think up a good idea before making a map, that is also why people find it hard to finish maps and.or make a proper map instead of half a map with walls around it to stop leaks.

I can think of a few reasons multiplayer maps are more popular:

• Variable challenge level: when you play a multiplayer map, the challenge is based not only on the map but also on the opponents. This enhances replay as there's always different things to do and different situations occur. A single player map is more or less a one-time event.
• Enjoyment: because of the above replay benefits, I think more people enjoy playing multiplayer maps of different sorts. When they enjoy playing something, they will spend more time thinking about mapping for it and thus have more ideas they would like to use.
• Time Commitment: deathmatch maps take less time. I'd hate to see Gollum take on a single player project as I'll probably be confined to a hospital bed with a lingering stench of poo, forgetting the names of my grandchildren by the time it comes out.
• Connectivity: not sure how big this is to most people, but as a mapper I enjoy creating levels with high connectivity. I dislike the room-corridor-room feel that seems to dominate single player situations.
• Professionalism, Manpower and Competency: creating a professional looking deathmatch level requires a smaller skillset. You need to know how to map. Modeling, texturing, coding, writing, sound editing and so on are great skills to bring to the party, but a deficiency in any can be easily glossed over and ignored. In order to produce a professional looking single player map (or more frequently, sequence of maps), on your own, you need all these skills. This becomes exceedingly necessary as you move outside the Half-life themes. If I get my hands on some cool textures, I could churn out a futuristic skyrise themed deathmatch map. I could not create a similarly polished single player level without leaning heavily on someone else to support me in areas I am weaker.
• Boasting: let's face it, it's a lot easier to show off your work to friends if it's multiplayer. You'll be the life of the LAN party.

SP is great because of those said traps. I need to sit down and thing
of traps, and piece them together in a very nice themed map. SP tends
to be vistas, Traps, monster bashing and Attempting NOT to die.

DM is also great but not as great because of the human bashing, vistas
and repeated deaths (when RPG hits you and you fly 300m down the road
with everyone saying "rofl!")

Personally, i prefer SP encounters as they have a distinct feel to them, its subzone
not just Killbox_2beta4. SP takes you to another place, somwhere
completely unrelated where the weapons and traps seem feasable. DM has
a sense of this, but normally the weapons feel out of place, and
normally (there are exceptions, mostly the good DM maps for HL and HL2
hosted here) are quite Kill or be killed purpose built environments, and are labs, or in the sense of the game.

I must admit I've had dreams recently about remaking the whole of BM this time, and really there are three things stopping me:

• Time! i cant spend so long! BM is huge! my attention span dies after a few weeks :sad:
• Resources! My PC crashes in hammer every so often already, plus i need BM textures and decent models
• Plot! what the hell will I do in BM? Subplots? (Meet barney at
  the bar lol) Major mission or Just wonder around wondering "Omg this is
  huge!"</li>

anyway, thats my Point of view, Cheers for reading :razz:

<DIV class=quote>
<DIV class=quotetitle>? quoting satchmo</DIV>
<DIV class=quotetext>Personally, I derive much more pleasure designing a single player map. The best part is to anticipate what the player would do in a situation, and set traps to challenge the player.

Why aren't there more single player maps for HL2? Why do most mappers prefer making multiplayer maps?
</DIV></DIV>
like some ppl said already, have a combination of both: coop. AI, challenging the player map-based, yet teamplay and interaction with other ppl. The problem is that there aren't many good coop mods. i'm crossing my fingers some good ones will pop up for HL2, otherwise i'm gonna have to start mapping DM

I prefer singleplayer design a lot more over multiplayer. You can make
a lot more assumptions (such as the player can only be at one place at
a time) and you have an opportunity to tell a story in a unique way.

I am glad most people agree that single player maps have more potential to be more entertaining, especially for the mapper. It's very true that single player maps are more challenging to make and require a lot more time committment. But the result is nevertheless rewarding. As Campaignjunkie said, I get to tell a story instead of having random weapons scattered in an arena for no reason.

I've just released a beta of my single player map. I haven't had a chance to upload the screenshots yet, but I'm just trying to have people playtest it at this point. I will, however, get the screenshots uploaded by tonight (in a few hours).

Here's the beta: http://www.snarkpit.com/maps/HL2/sp_justice.zip

I can't wait for some of the veteran mappers start making single player maps and mods. I wonder what people will come up with, since many of the original mapping constraint of Half-Life are lifted with Source.

I find I have to spend a lot of time with multiplayer maps as
well...granted it's DoD usually which requires a lot more small detail
over the standard deathmatch type map. There's a lot of real-world type
stuff to get to scale and good looks. I also enjoy a lot of the
technical aspect...there's a lot of planning that has to go into
placement of everything in a multiplayer map to account for who can see
who at what time, different areas of combat with specific elements to
mold the general gameplay. But you also have to take into account all
the exploitatious stuff people try to do too...It's just as much work,
or can be, depending on the mod.

There are not many people who will play the same SP map over and over again no matter how good it is. But a DM map could be played 100,000's of times all over the world by 1000's of people. What more could ask for?

Even my s**tty map has had several 100 hours of play from various servers. (Not that there were people playing on it 24 hours a day). Still cool to think that eventhough these people don't know who i am, they are all running round my bedroom (rats style map).

The main things for me is the time it takes, but mostly the fact that Hammer reboots/screws up/explodes my computer every 15 min or so and this is more frustrating on a multiplayer map that may take a couple days or even hours but this happening every couple min for making a SP map with a story takes like 4 weeks just makes me give up.

After I finish my current CSS map, I plan to make a new CSS map and also make a SP spinoff of the same theme. I've done some design sketches for the storyboard, maps and traps. I've also come up with some artistic design/story quirks that I think will work really well (nothing I've seen done before in any game or movie).

I think the single biggest obstacle will be voice acting. I can't do that at all, and I'd really like to have some customised interaction rather than recycle Barney's lines or make it totally without vocals.

Eeek, another Vash!

I'm changing my name to Vash Car Star, effective immediately.

Dr.Vash

I have an idea which probably won't work. I will try it as soon as I get Source. My idea is... a non-linear SP map!!! This would be extremely difficult, and take a hell of a long time to do, but I reckon it could be done, and it could be pretty cool. What do you think???

It's entirely possible. In fact, most of my single player maps are non-linear, including my latest one, Justice. (http://www.snarkpit.com/maps.php?map=1643)

But one of my first maps ever made (for the original Half-Life) was non-linear as well. (http://www.snarkpit.com/maps.php?map=1325). It's not easy to anticipate all the possible route the player might take, but that's part of the fun and challenge. It's the reason why I wrote an extensive walkthrough for this map (Escape from Black Mesa).

There are always more than one ways to beat these maps, and that adds to their re-play value.

Nice self-pimping there satchmo :razz:

Nice self-pimping there satchmo :razz:

Hey, I live in L.A. Self-pimping is virtually expected.
Some people (esp. actors) here have developed it into an art form.

Just to bring this thread back on topic, I'd like to say that a completely new theme needs to be developed if SP maps are to be popular. Such as... has anyone else here studied chaos therory?

I haven't studied it, but I understand what I've heard of it ...

You're not suggesting a ridiculous amount of possibilities from each and every action are you?

<DIV class=quote>
<DIV class=quotetitle>? quoting DrGlass</DIV>
<DIV class=quotetext>Dr.Vash</DIV></DIV>
Vashius

(it's better than TwoKnives)

You're not suggesting a ridiculous amount of possibilities from each and every action are you?

Yes actually I am.

You're not suggesting a ridiculous amount of possibilities from each and every action are you?

Yes actually I am.

Then you have no idea how miserably it would fail, no offense.

Not to mention, it would take years of studying to understand that level of AI development.

HL2 (and any game with scripting for that matter) can do this "kind of" no where near the level you're thinking, though.

This wouldn't run on a normal workstation or gaming computer, to be blunt.

Chaos theory is too much for a game. Even "random" functions in most
languages technically aren't random. You could have a map with lots of
cool possibilities, but eventually it'll get old or predictable without
input from other human players.

Honestly, I don't think it would be worth the effort, assuming it would
even be possible. It takes an insane amount of work to polish an
experience even remotely similar to Half-Life 2. How would one go about
formatting that into some sort of "random" generator? There's a reason
why HL2 is as linear as it is - scripting and choreographing require
it to be that way. :smile:

No, there's a way. It's just you can't do it to the level he's thinking.

You'd use fuzzy logic. It's a type of AI programming "thought process", or so you could call it. It's pretty damn complicated stuff.

Basically, you make a tree of choices. Then each node of that tree goes into sub-tree of sub-choices and so on until you get to the last node in the series (which you use logical statements to decide which to choose in each level) and that is the final "decision, action, reaction? etc.

It's a doable concept, even in a game. The only problem is this is for one aspect, for example, a personality. He's talking about for EVERY SINGLE ELEMENT in the game. THAT will not run (nor would it be anything a development team could realistically finish).

Fuzzy logic is the way to go for this type of thinking. But, yes, NOTHING in computing is random, not even a random number generator. Also, usually if something says "random" when speaking about computers, it generally means the fastest choice.

Complex stuff. What I was saying though, is something that is 10% of this level of complexity could be simulated in something like HL2, but I don't think it'd be worth it.

I'd mark this under "crazy game ideas", along with Kojima's idea to have the game disc RUINED when you die in the game, forcing you to play cautiously.

I haven't programmed in quite some time, but I remember trying to create random numbers for dice games in QBasic. If I just used the typical random number command, the same sequence would always occur. If I used the Randomize Timer command before generating random numbers, they would be truly random (or at least I never detected any patterns). I always assumed this worked by taking a random seed at the time the command was entered, which to a computer would be far more precise than a human could ever be, and this time would be based upon when the user pressed a button to run the program. Therefore, the exact time at which it went off would be completely unpredictable. It's kind of like how if you have a precise machine toss a die, you could theoretically calculate all the forces on the die and accurately predict the result. When a human tosses a die, there's no way to maintain such precision with the spin, velocity and altitude and as such, it is completely random.

So basically I've always considered the sole source of true randomness to be results based on human action more precise than can be controlled. Anything that taps into this source can become truely random.

20 years ago, the most popular PC was the Zilog Z80 4.0MHz. Now, PCs are a thousand times more powerful, and 20 years from now, we'll have PCs more powerful than today's supercomputers. My idea can be done.

20 years ago, the most popular PC was the Zilog Z80 4.0MHz

Man, 20 years ago my Speccy only had a 3.5 MHz Z80 CPU. I should've overclocked it.

Fox, no it can't, trust me. Even when regarding new technologies, like the Cell chip, it would still only be simulated.

For your idea to "work" we would need computers with connections that are 100% efficient (meaning, no heat is given off) and all forms of storage would need to be instantaneous. This is impossible, since we can't make a connection that is 100% efficient (which is what, when you get down to it, computers rely on for speed).
This isn't even taking into account all the flaws with every computational design ever. A true simulation of real life, which is what you're talking about, not only will never have proper hardware, but would never be completed on a software level. It's too complex.

it's not 100% certain that a technology which seems impossible now, will still be impossible in the future. Technology advances exponentially, and many boundaries that were predicted to be unbreakable, have already been surpassed. I'll always remember that my geography teacher told us 7 years ago that fusion would be impossible. Well guess what mr. Maes, they're almost in the construction stage of ITER.

So when you say efficient connections, i think upgraded superconductors. Could be it turns out a whole other technology will be used, but the point is that there is a chance.

Unless we find some new element that conducts better then anything else, I highly doubt it would ever happen. Since, doing what you seem to be suggesting would no longer classify as a computer, really.

It's not a question of finding a new element (superconductors already exist, having no electrical resistance whatsoever), it's a question of finding an economic technical solution for attaining the low temperatures that require it (liquid nitrogen temperatures, around 77degrees Kelvin), and hence being able to use it in ordinary computers.

A quantum computer could do it.

No it is possible, I made one. Want to see pictures?