Major Project - Anyone know a decent coder?

As some of you may have noticed I've been dropping some posts regarding
a small mod I will be doing for my final major project in my uni
degree. I will be focusing on the idea of collaborative conceptual
design in a virtual and interactive setting, attempting to address some
of the issues that I have encountered during my course when it came to
group work. I am studying Graphic Design and New Media by the way.

Essentially the mod will turn HL2DM from a game into an online
collaborative space in which designers can participate in creating
conceptual roughs and mood boards in real time, allowing them to work
on the same work at the same time, something which many exisiting
design related programs do not. The weapons will be replaced with
various visual tools, and the users will have the ability to work
together or individually in a set amount of time (Think CS round based
type stuff).

Now I know a number of you are getting ready to throw the proverbial
book at me for attempting what seems to be a large project in about 10
weeks worth of time. Well hold your horses! Firstly this is me, I know
all of it already, and secondly I'm not attempting anything quite as
ambitious at this stage.

What I hope to achieve is an early beta that offers a limited selection
of tools and hardly any of the visual bells and whistles you would
expect in a mod. Essentially the tools are just modified weapons with
individual decals and setup (spraypaint, stencils, type, etc).

What I need to do in the time frame is:

- Make 2-4 small maps.

- 1 Font set (Weapons/HUD)

- Various Decals

- Basic models only (The player will only view the HUD, no tool animations/models)

- Any files needed for mapping purposes (cfg, etc)

And all importantly the coding, which is all possible and mostly
simple, according to some coders I've spoken to. I am not going to
attempt to learn Visual C++ in 3 weeks, so I am looking into recruiting
a 3rd year student from the informatics department at my uni to do it.

The beta will give a taste of what a full program would do, but without most of the work required of a full working program.

I should have a working site up for the project soon, where I will
update progress and post my research into my chosen area. As mentioned
in other posts, I'm hoping to recruit some of you lucky members to do
some beta testing and ensure the mod actually works as planned.

Also I would appreciate any advice those with mod experience have,
particularly relating to the coding, as its the major weak spot in my
range of skills.

At this point this topic is more of a fill in for you guys, my trusted
peers, with some substantial updates and work coming soon :smile: .

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Ham and Jam Contributor
http://www.hamandjam.org

'Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!'

Cool, can't wait for it.

Can the "players" move around in a map, or are they fixed viewpoint
looking down on a canvas or something? Sounds like a novel project
anyway, definately something different from the norm :smile:

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

The players can roam freely around the maps like normal and there'll be
some camera's focused on the main work area's, so that at the end of
the rounds there will be opportunities to capture the work done. I
might try and work in an automatic screen capture system.

The maps for the project will offer some varied locals for work. Since
the tools available for this initial mod will be more graffiti style
there will an aquaduct or train yard setting. Also a gallery setting, a
studio setting and a white void with invisible walls to work on.

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Ham and Jam Contributor
http://www.hamandjam.org

'Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!'

Sounds interesting. I'm looking forward to this :biggrin: .

Sounds interesting. I'm looking forward to this :biggrin: .

Indeed.

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Dark_Kilauea
DVS Administration
http://www.dvstudio-production.com/

I'd be happy to work on some simple decals for you, I'm quite a wizz with photoshop, but not with the whole hl2 textue thing.

Sounds interesting, this project. What are the things your teachers will be looking at most for this project?

As for the coding department, shooting decals shouldn't be too hard.
It's mainly removing code and changing decal references and all, I
think. Not that I've looked at the MP code yet, I've only fiddled with
SP weapons so far, but hey... :wink:

Good luck with this bytheway.

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

I haven't even bothered myself to do that. What compiler do you use?

My lecturers are primarily interested in the process of the project
rather than the final product, so it's not a huge deal if you don't get
it finished. Basically we had to choose an area of interest for us
personally (eg web design, animation, publication, etc), then choose an
area of research that will lend some depth to the project (I'm working
with online collaboration and intereaction).

It actually took some convincing for them to let me do this project,
because they were a bit suss about the validity of games as design, but
recently game design has become recognised as a part of the design
community, thanks to games like GTA: San Andreas.

Most people in my class will be working with multimedia, web design,
print stuff or whatever, more traditional graphic design area's. I was
able to do my project because I'm not producing a game, just using the
game as a base for a graphic design tool.

Thanks for the offer Dr, but I have to do everything I can myself, and decals are going to be about the easiest part :smile: .

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Ham and Jam Contributor
http://www.hamandjam.org

'Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!'

You should encourage people to use thier signature as thier spray, so they can add it at the end :razz:

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-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-

Thats what I was thinking Myrk. A lot of the exisiting HL2DM functions
carry across beautifully. If I end up taking it further than the beta
stage I get to for the assignment, I'd like to set up some kind of
customisation system, so that users can add a number of custom made
elements for specific work.

Obviously at this point the mod aims at designers or creative people,
in particular those in a collaborative situation. I've also been
thinking that if the more graffiti styled tools work well, I'd work on
making a more graffiti and street culture mod, so that it becomes more
of a game again.

Anyway, the site/blog for my project is coming along nicely, so I should have it up by this wednesday.

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Ham and Jam Contributor
http://www.hamandjam.org

'Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!'

Sounds too good to be true :smile:

I can see it now, at the end of each round naughty pictures of d**ks all over the maps :smile:

Yeah, you're not the only one fed up with that duck pornography :razz:

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

<div class="quotetitle">? posted by ReNo</div>
Yeah, you're not the only one fed up with that duck pornography :razz:

LOL :biggrin:

Good news, I have an 'in' to the informatics department at my uni.
Turns out the current artist in residence in the creative arts faculty,
who does a lot of game design and was one of the first people I
approached regarding my idea for the project, is a lecturer in the
informatics department as well. So first up tommorow I'm off to see
about recruiting me a coder :smile: .

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Ham and Jam Contributor
http://www.hamandjam.org

'Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!'

Well as the revised thread title would suggest, I'm in need of a coder.
I wouldn't say I'm desperate yet, but getting close. I've tried some of
it myself and failed quite miserably. I'm way over my head when it
comes to coding of any type, and have come to the realisation my
project will only succeed if I can find someone to do it for me.

So if everyone and anyone could recommend a coder if they know one,
someone experienced and reliable, that I could contact, I would be much
obliged to say the least.

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Ham and Jam Contributor
http://www.hamandjam.org

'Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!'

Sorry, I do happen to not know anyone. If I come across someone I'll tell you :smile:

this mod is a really good idea. but i dont know any coders though, sorry!

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Bullet Control: $5000 for a bullet.
"I would blow your f**king head off! ...if I could afford it. I'm gonna get another job, start saving some money... then you a dead man!"

I could probably give you some pointers (no pun intended), but I've got too much school work to finish before Fall starts for me to be able to do anything for you.

Not to mention I haven't sat down with the source engine at all. So that'd take some time (after I finish vomiting from all the global variables and terrible MS practices in use)

But, if you have a specific question I could help as much as I can. I have a feeling though that you could just do some research on the source sdk to get some clues as to how to change things.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Thanks for the replies fella's. Here's a list of the stuff that needs doing Crono:

1 Individual damage decals for each weapon.

2 Extra weapons (Most weapons are different from standard HL2DM set, no exisiting weapons except crowbar).

3 Extra places in drop down weapon HUD display for extra weapons.

4 Player invulnerability (ie cant get hurt).

5 Limited range for all weapons.

6 Weapon decals that dont fade (Increased number of allowed decals if too low).

7 Re-organise the weapon HUD classes to suit new tool classes (eg spraypaint, letters, shapes, stencils, etc).

8 Round based gameplay, with or without teams.

I've been asking around some various HL2 coding forums and all the
stuff is do-able, most of it easily so. The hard ones seem to be 1, 6 and 7. If anyone has tuts, or forum threads, or even if your a 1337 coder and know how to do this stuff, let me know.

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Ham and Jam Contributor
http://www.hamandjam.org

'Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!'

Most of that sounds like it'd be scripting and not coding. It's probably stuff that's in configuration files.

It also sounds like you could just replace some files (models and such) and it'd do what you'd want. Not sure though.

Player invulnerability is built into the game, if I'm not mistaken. (Remember the beginning of HL2?)

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I think much of it would require some simple coding (there sn't much
potential for scripting in source as far as I've seen anyway), but as
you had heard, most of it should be simple enough to do. Crono's
thoughts about much of it working with simple resource replacement is
also true, though I think you would be better off coding in new
"weapons" to get them working optimally. Player invulnerability is
built into the game in a sense, but I don't know if it would work in a
multiplayer game the way its currently implemented. Its a bit of a
non-issue however, given that if you are going to be doing some coding,
stopping players taking damage is probably about as trivial as it gets
:smile:

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

Right, as I said, I'm not familiar with The Source engine's code. But in most games properties of objects is just in configuration files since it'd make it MUCH easier to just define a new weapon that way instead of hard coding it. Because then you'd just make one piece of code for a weapon with a management system and define as many weapons as you wish in configuration files instead of coding it specifically 12 times or something like that.

However, as I've seen, a lot of game developers use templates ... and those are Satan incarnate. But, they follow the type of design I'm talking about (but are fundamentally flawed)

My suggestions were mostly regarding the time you have. It'd probably be a good idea to cut some corners instead of jumping waist deep in development.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Well the biggest task that needs doing is having inidividual decals for
each weapon. As near as I can tell from going through the source code,
decals for weapons are assigned by the 3 base weapon classes, which all
HL2 weapons fit into, by the material the bullet/crowbar/rocket hits,
and also within the weapon code itself. This is going to require a fair
amount of coding, or at least code knowledge. Luckily the weapons could
all be part of one weapon class, and I can use some of the exisiting
weapons for my new set, just copy, paste and change values, etc.

Some of the stuff I want to do can be done through script files
thankfully, and a lot of HUD options (mainly visual properties) can be
found in .res files, so that also makes it easy. HL2 also has an in
game VGUI editor, so essentially that shouldn't be too difficult, just
take some reading to understand the system.

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Ham and Jam Contributor
http://www.hamandjam.org

'Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!'

Almost got the coder for Hidden-Source mod to give me a hand, but he
needed more time than I've got. Oh well, the search continues :smile: .

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Ham and Jam Contributor
http://www.hamandjam.org

'Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!'

Agent Smith said:
Almost got the coder for Hidden-Source mod to give me a hand, but he needed more time than I've got. Oh well, the search continues :smile: .

Hidden-Source was pretty cool :smile: . the coder must have been good, though, it was a shame you didnt get him.

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Bullet Control: $5000 for a bullet.
"I would blow your f**king head off! ...if I could afford it. I'm gonna get another job, start saving some money... then you a dead man!"