Alien Swarm First Person Mod

It's a remake of an old UT2004 mod and unlike other shooters it is using. If you want to enjoy Alien Swarm in first person you'll need to enable.

Alien Swarm SP is available for download via the link below: And here's more new levels to play through than you'll ever need! Here's the contents of the Readme.txt Alien Swarm SP by Aazell Installation Instructions: 1: You must have an up to date version of Alien Swarm installed on Steam in order to play Alien Swarm SP Extract the contents of AlienSwarmSP.rar to the following folder in your Steam directory. Steamsteamappssourcemods Now restart Steam and you should see Alien Swarm SP available in your games library.

Launching a map in Alien Swarm SP: From the main menu of Alien Swarm SP select Play AS:SP option and you should see the mission selection screen. All addon campaigns (if you have installed any and activated them) should be available within this screen also. I have encountered no bugs (heh heh) as yet but if you do please send an e-mail to aazell1@gmail.com giving as much information as you can and I will attempt to investigate the problem. Hope you have fun with it. I will be reviewing a bunch of the most popular maps and campaigns created by the community on this site.

My reviewing critera may upset a few mappers out there but I believe they are valid. In my opinion a good map is not the best looking or the most complex. A good map is a map that the player has fun playing.

Fun can be destroyed in so many ways. Heres my main list of sins that I'll be looking out for.1. Lack of direction to the playerThe Lara Croft SinThe player is forced to wander around the map desperately trying the most stupid actions in order to progress through the game simply because the mapper didnt make it clear what the player was supposed to be doing.2.

The Pinball WizardThe player is continually backing up into props and junk in the main play area because the map is too dark and too cluttered. For gods sake people, keep the play area clear of obstructions!3.

No Rest For The WickedNo break areas are provided. Swarm continue to harass the player regardless of where-ever they are in the map. Think of them like the safe rooms in Left 4 Dead.

Theyre essential to good game play and allow the team to regroup.4. It's All Too Much!The mapper is a hardcore player of AS and designs his maps to his own difficulty level. Maps should be challenging but not onslaught crazy! Getting this balance right is essential for fun to bloom!5: Go Back Young Man!A dead end forces the player to backtrack through the same area of the map. Bad news and boring for players. You might get away with it if the play is changed dramatically but it very rarely works.

Always provide a different exit.6: Looks.Yes its only number six on the list. Deal with it!I want to feel lost in the environment.

Doesnt matter if its an ugly environment. If its good enough that it doesnt distract from gameplay then its good enough for me.7. SoundSound adds another dimension to the world. If you couldnt be arsed to add ambient sounds your going to lose points.8: Tell me a Story!In order to be drawn into a map Im going to need a decent story. Additional points if the story is progressed during the map itself through datapads, voiceovers, screentext etc.Busy life at the moment so will take me a little while to get reviews out the door. In the mean time if any readers want to comment on AS:SP playing experiences with certain custom maps, send me your thoughts and I'll post them up here! 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 DarkOne last observation I made about many maps was that they were seriously underlit. I'm really quite happy with the response to the mod so far.I've actually released very little to the open web in my time as mapper.

I tend to get a certain way through a map then lose the passion for it. I've realised since it is because I don't prepare properly. The trick to finishing a map is to know the whole layout before you even open Hamme for the first time.Well I supposed it's a double edged sword in some respects. My user base must be cared for now, I'm sure they're a greedy bunch. Let's hope we keep the content flow at a decent enough pace to keep peeps happy.To be honest I've only been contacted by two of the 150 people that have downloaded this.No news is good news???I would actually like to hear from anyone who's used the mod and try and put together a wish list for the next version.

I've finally gotten all the functionality I wanted in place for me to build my map.See all this began with a simple idea. Treat Alien Swarm as a top down Half-Life.A single marine based map focussing on exploration and puzzle based gaming.There were several things in the way of that.1: The player selection screen and the ability for players to seleft their own weapons.2: The offscreen player arrows which meant I couldnt place bots elsewhere in my map or the player would know they were there.3: No ability to create cutscenes therefore difficult to tell a story4: No other Human NPC'sNot sure if I can do much about 4. I will continue to check out the code but I think I've reached a point where I can crack on with mapping and be happy that the player experience will be what I wanted originally. 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. 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 funcmonitor, 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 envscreenoverlay you can fill the players whole screen with the camera feed.Here's a file for those who want to see the results. Just drop it into your alien swarm maps folder.Here's a 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. It's always amazing to me how the online mapping community works for HL2 related games. People post screenshots and talk about the maps they're working on. Finally they release them only for their map to be crucified by the various reviewing sites most of the time.I think the problem is that while you can learn all there is to know about the mapping editor software, you need to really explore and test the hell out of the gameplay with other people. As a lone mapper you are not capable of designing, building then testing your SP maps effectively because you know exactly what is coming round the corner at any given moment.Also there seems to be very little information shared about good gameplay vs bad. People seem to just assume that if someone has some skill they will suddenly know all these gameplay elements automatically.

Gameplay is always something that is drastically overlooked when designing new maps.So in my frustration I decided to write blogs that focus entirely on gameplay.