Aliens vs Predator | Space Disaster | No Failure Run
7First time I saw this mod, I wasn't sure what I was even looking at in the first place. The mod page seems to imply that it was designed to be a multiplayer mod first, with a singleplayer campaign completely separate from the MP department. The downloads themselves were both poorly explained and haphazard, swapping between small patches to full releases. It was a struggle to figure out which one to download.
You'd think getting the latest version would be the way to go, and that's when the first hindrances start. The HUD was sitting next to the crosshairs instead of the edges of the screen, impairing my vision. The campaign seemed to work, so I thought maybe it's a sideeffect of a different monitor or OS or Half-Life version, who knows. It was still workable enough, so I figured why not try the Yautja campaign to see how the mod itself plays outside of the obvious Marine component?
Couldn't heal. It wasn't even feature complete! The Yautja can't cloak, can't use vision modes, no plasma pistols or spears, and no way to heal. It was a shadow of its former self from AVP2. Trying out the Marine campaign barely changed that resolve, with no motion tracker or nightvision to be used, along with the constantly respawning enemies that are too spongy compared to the original and bleed regular Xenian blood rather than acid ones. A mod that's barely off the WIP oven.
It took me looking at the pictures and seeing an entirely different HUD for me to try out a different version. Lo and behold, hitting altfire on the wristblades heals me. If you're wondering why this version I'm playing is different to the last version, that'll be why. I went with "weapon flamer" first, and then patching it with "multiplayer models Rykov and LightPred", "Hotbomb in multiplayer", and "Laser Dot". Any other version past that has the broken HUD and no healing for the Yautja.
Past that hurdle, found out that it's overall still a very rough mod. The animations are stiff (presumably recreated because they can't port the ones from the game), the flamethrower is one of the worst implementations I've seen barring They Hunger's, most of the NPCs are barely interactible, it's genuinely hard for me to find anything good to say. There's not even any "classes". Playing as a "Yautja" gives the same HUD, just different configuration of entities that are specifically done for the individual campaign.
As for this video, it's pretty much me trying to squeeze as much enjoyment as I could from what I could salvage. Even after everything I said before about how rough this mod is, there's potential. There's lots of custom weapons and entities to play here that beyond the lousy campaign (that I could spend hours ranting about, so I won't), I could find myself enjoying the experience by way of wirejamming and eventual polishing of assets.
And so here we are today, running a wirejammed OP4 mapset. Starting off with the Marine "class" for now, still gathering info on the entities (as there's no included FGDs). You'll also notice the HUD being upscaled so it's not tiny, and some alterations to weapon foley so they'll play correctly. Small steps. There's never any Xeno campaigns, so I'm not sure how I'll approach that when we get around to that. We'll see when we see.
Yeah, I know, the M41A viewmodel clips through the camera in the video. It's already fixed in the addon by way of scaling the model up before compiling, the recording was done before I did that particular thing.
Mods Used:
Aliens vs Predator: https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-aliens-vs-predator/
HLAVP Personal Addon: https://www.mediafire.com/file/1dt8a04yawaoeu8/z_hlavp_addon.7z/file
Space Disaster: https://www.runthinkshootlive.com/posts/space-disaster/
SD Wirejam: https://www.mediafire.com/file/afd8eb53xuqawqr/z_op4_wirejam_hlavp_spacedisaster.7z/file