



Hello everyone!

It's been a little while now, almost 5 months between the last screenshot and now. I would like to explain why I've been so silent those last few months and what you need to expect. For those who noticed, I uploaded some remixes on ModDB to let you know what I was doing. Those were removed because eventually, they had nothing to do with the mod itself, but it was the easiest way to let people know I wasn't dead. But here's the sad news - the mod's development has been moving slower than it used to now since February and, sadly, it will be that way for God knows how long. Keep reading to understand what I mean.





It means there may be a long time between updates or simply none at all.

Originally, I was looking for a music composer to help compose music but seeing the best commitment ever from the few who sent me a message, I decided that I'd just do it myself. Well, I got back into my favorite DAW after years not touching it and... I went off course. As some or many of you may have noticed, I uploaded some music that was completely unrelated to the mod. It was done to let you know that I was still here and not dead. I eventually removed those because, as I said, they aren't related to the mod in any way. That being said, though, one thing led to another so I wanted to produce more of Hands Up music, as it is my favorite music style. And so I did! I quickly made a second remix of a French song called "Sur Ma Route" sang by Black M. I felt they were average at best and that I'll take them as warm up productions to say that I got back into my DAW.

Anyway, those 2 remixes were unlisted on Soundcloud now and new productions were made.

As of the time of this article, I released a remix from Alexandra Burke, called Silence. You can listen to that remix below.





A few artists went by and listened to it and liked it, sent me a friend request on Facebook and talked to me about the track. This was also the time where a label contacted me and told me they liked the remix and would like me to produce more. So I got started. They asked me to do a first remix, which I uploaded a preview of on my Soundcloud.

After that, I was asked to make more remixes and so I am in the middle of making remixes for the label.

Now that I have a label to work with, I barely or even just don't have any time to level design for the mod. Now, that does NOT mean the mod is now dead. I prepared for this and made plans in case something that would prevent me from working on my hobby project happened. Despite the horrible news for you, pals, there was still work done since January. Continue reading...





This is going to primarily focus on the programming department here. I won't bore you with the smallest details such as bug fixes unless it's important enough to mention it.

So this is what's been done:

Programming

For those who played Half-Life 2 and its episodes (and also other games), you may have noticed you have the options to start a new game from a certain chapter? In the original Half-Life, you didn't have any menu option to do so, and you would also need to start from the tram. You could use the console to start elsewhere, but that wasn't part of the menus and it introduced another problem: You had no equipment! You needed to toggle cheats on to give yourself a suit and weapons. Well not so anymore now with Hard Duty.

We're introducing a new entity called the game_player_settings entity.



Nobody likes starting at a certain place and have to toggle cheats to get equipment.



It's a really simple entity really. What it does is provide you with the necessary equipment when you launch a map from the console. For level designers, it's also possible to call for it anytime in the map when it is not used "On New Game". From now on, if you'd like to replay a section of the mod, just type in the map's name (we're looking into implementing a chapter menu) and you'll get the necessary armaments.

Milti_trigger

The multi_trigger is essentially a multi_manager, but we've changed it so that instead of having to disable Smart Edit to input our inputs, we made 16 entries (with their "Delay before action" - and can be retriggered) so that in JACK, we can see the connection between entities. You can't have that with multi_manager.

Long Jump Module Sound



The default long jump in Half-Life doesn't have any. It was introduced when Opposing Force was made, but only used in MP and has been used in the PS2 port of Half-Life.



PS2 Retinal Scanner & Chargers



The retinal scanner isn't exclusive to Decay. So stop with things like "Decay Scanner", "Decay Chargers" and such. I know this isn't entirely your fault because Decay got a PC port and not the main game. Still, it baffles me that nobody played the PS2 version of Half-Life and keep referring to those high quality models to Decay only.

Anyway, the scanner and chargers have been implemented in the mod and are 100% fully working.









In addition, we've made it possible to implement a custom value for the chargers on how many hit points you can be given. By default, you'll get the same number of hit points from using a charger in Half-Life based on the difficulty selected if no value is put in the editor. For some situations, we might need to give you more, and sometimes less.





Furthermore, we changed their behavior a bit so that when you're full on health or armor, the chargers will play the "empty" sound just like in Half-Life 2. Just a neat touch for those who rely more on their ears than their eyes.

Movement Indicator



A small touch. It doesn't add anything to gameplay, just makes the mod a little more unique. Again, not exclusive to Decay, but to the PS2 version as a whole. If you don't know what the movement indicator is, it's that little man at the top right below the flashlight. It shows your current movement (running, walking or crouching). I removed jumping because we've introduced some elements from OP4 that caused the movement indicator to not understand when the player was actually jumping, or simply in the air falling.



Health, Armor and Ammo



Some adjustments were made to the HUD. We had it blue since the beginning and that when you fall under 40 HP, the health numbers become red, but what's new is that now, when falling below 20 armor, the numbers become red as well and when you are below 15% of your current magazine and/or ammo pool, the numbers turn red too. This is a little visual feedback for those who are in the middle of the action and want to quickly know if they need to seek cover to reload or find ammo, health or batteries.

Ground Turrets Retract



We've made it so that ground turrets will retract after not seeing an enemy after a couple of seconds.

Side note: The model looks broken because OpenGL decided not to work for me for some reason, so it's been recorded using Software. Please don't use Software. The model looks fine in OpenGL. Plus, the sentry model is from the PS2 version as well.





Ropes



OP4's Ropes are now in and fully working.



Deleted Allies Limit



You could only have 2 allies follow you at all times in Half-Life. The Source port altered or removed it and so we did remove it altogether for Hard Duty.



The flashlight is now an item



We've made it so that the HEV suit no longer has a flashlight by default. I think that the flashlight on an HEV suit was out of place for what it was intended to be used for, so instead, we've decided that HEV suits in Hard Duty don't have flashlight embedded. It's not a hand held object, it works the same way as Half-Life once picked up. Furthermore, it can be stripped away with a player_weaponstrip.

Weapon Sway



To give credits where it's due, it was implemented after Step4enko implemented it himself in his mod. So we did as well. If you don't know what it is, maybe you know it as weapon drag. It's when your gun model... well sways a bit when moving your head around in game. I've taken the gif from one of the Black Mesa's update in case you're still confused.

The M4





The M4 comes with full ammo when picked up for the first time.

All models are HD by default



I know some of you don't like the HD models, but we've decided to go with them anyway. There won't be any low definition models and we're removing the option in the menu to switch between them. We wouldn't recommend porting low definition models to the mod, although we're not stopping from doing so, but don't complain that it's broken if you choose to do so because we warned you not to do it.

Ported Op4 Weapons





We ported some of the many weapons from Op4 to Hard Duty. Among those we ported: Wrench, Deagle, Shockrifle, LMG, Spore Launcher, Sniper Rifle.

You won't be wielding all of them at once at any point in the game. If you want to use cheats to acquire them all, be my guest, but remember that you'll do a lot of menu'ing in game to get to the weapon because we kept the weapon category to 5 and haven't increased it to 7 like in Op4.

Ported Op4 Allies and Enemies



We also brought many other elements from Op4, such as the enemies and allies. Otis, shocktroopers, male assassins, etc. will be present in the mod.

Removed Cloak



We've decided to remove the retarded cloak from assassins when playing on Hard.

Python Sound



Fixed the python .357 so that it plays its sound when reloading.

Tripmines



Tripmines will blow no matter what now. Previously, you could step on tripmines. For speedrunning or skipping sections, you could build a staircase and sayonara. Now, you can't. It acts the same way as its PS2 counterpart. It's not new.

Empty Weapon Bug



When you emptied the ammo of your weapon and switch to another weapon you would change the weapon but that emptied gun would still be on your last weapon used slot, so you could press your Q key to switch back to your last weapon which lead to the only time you would see the holster animation play in Half-Life and just cause you to see no weapon. So we fixed this.

New Sprites In JACK



That's more for level designers. I made some sprites for many of the entities that didn't have any.

Some of those sprites are available for download. I posted a download link on TWHL.info a while back.

And that's the most important changes so far. We've got many other changes like the following:

Adjust Race X relationship to Xen monsters

Separate relationship class for black ops

Don't drop weapon flag for monsters

If no HEV is on player, do not deploy and play sound "medshotno1.wav" when attempting to use it. Same thing with HEV charger "suitchargeno1.wav"

Added a check so that no matter what happens, health and armor can never go above 100 (this will be a failsafe to any mapping error such as the infinite health door in HL1)

Fixed crowbar body smashing bug

Addition of item_generic

Addition of env_model

Addition of env_spritetrain

Addition of env_warpball You thought that was all? HELL NO. We've got so much more to come.

Here's what you can expect in the future (hopefully):

Scaling HUD based on resolution

Magazine drop when reloading

Barnacles can grab any monster

monster_alienflyer (TBD)

item_random (Check below for an explanation of randomization)

Random enemy spawn (Check below for an explanation of randomization)

Overriding monster relationship

trigger_look

3D Skybox Support

trigger_wpn_holster

env_zoom

game_timescale or game_slomo

Background gun reload (like in HL2)

trigger_hidehud

trigger_autosave edit to only save based on health

Addition of M249 for enemy grunts

Silencer on glock (will replace rapid fire)

Barney reload & disarm

Barney gun shell and magazine eject

Barney gun shot dynamic light

Dynamic lighting for weapons

Enemies are no longer bullet sponges on harder difficulty (we've balanced this for the randomization) And perhaps much more in the future...

GAME RANDOMIZATION



So what is this supposed to be?

For anyone who's played Underhell, you will be familiar with the system already. The idea is to have each and everyone of you have a unique playthrough. Plus, we want to add replayability value.

So how does it work? What is affected by randomization?

Short answer: Enemies and loot.

Long answer: We plan on having enemies randomly spawn in certain places in certain areas. You won't always find randomization being applied everywhere, because always guessing where someone is not that fun, so we keep it within reason. What type of enemy? Easy-to-defeat enemies such as vortigaunts, zombies, grunts. Harder and more resilient enemies will less likely be subject to randomization. Last thing we want is have players die to an enemy because randomization kicked in incorrectly. Also, we want to make it so that if you play on the hardest difficulty, you'll see more enemies. Since you like a challenge and you'll be playing on the hardest difficulty, we've also made sure to make enemies fun to play against on harder difficulties, meaning that they won't be bullet sponges anymore.

For loot, it's very simple. Sometimes you'll find ammo, sometimes health kits, or sometimes, literally nothing. That's the beauty of randomization. We also plan to have the aggressiveness of the randomization take place based on the difficulty selected. So if you play on harder difficulty, you'll find less loot, so you'll have to be smarter when using ammo.

We still need to implement that and test the system to make sure it works, but we're excited in having that implemented as soon as possible. So stay tuned for more info on that.

And there you have it for now.





Back to this. Now, in the unlikely event I have to lay this mod to rest, I will find somebody to take over the mod's development. I won't have it die anytime soon. There is no telling what is going to happen, though, but do know this: I still look at this page regularly for new comments and try to reply if I can. So, I'm not going to disappear and leave you hanging with no news forever. As I said, it may take a while before any new update is brought here, but there will be.





Just because good things happened to me doesn't mean I'm giving up on you. So keep tracking and keep an eye out for updates ;)