Paranoia | Automap: American Training Facility | No Failure Run
13It's fascinating, isn't it? Half-Life has the capability of having gameplay mods of its own, but due to how the modding system works in that game and the general mindset of modding at the time, people end up rarely making any. Some have tried with things like Counter-Life or Half-Payne or Half-Nuked, but to this day, there's maybe only about enough to count on one hand? Maybe two?
Most gameplay changing mods ended up as multiplayer mods, which is a shame 'cause most of them are dead by this point with no way to enjoy the gameplay changes outside of having friends that like the same thing you like, which is often out of the question for me, unfortunately. Would've loved to play Firearms in something like Edge of Darkness, but luck is not on my side.
It was then I started to consider the possibilities of wiretearing. In Doom, it is possible to intercept the spawn of certain items and rip out various "wires" that make up a partial/total conversion, allowing me to play those mods with other gameplay mods. However, in Half-Life, it is unfortunately not so easy.
The gameplay mods I mentioned does have interception in mind, but for mods that aren't designed to be played in the original campaign? Not doable. Even with recent additions that are tremendous for mod mixing such as fallback_dir (I'll explain later), you can't really mix something like Paranoia over here with any other random maps 'cause vanilla entities'll spawn instead of Paranoia's.
That's where direct map editing comes in. Well, not the actual map geometry themselves, but the more accessible entity list within. Using programs such as BSPEdit, I am able to place entities that would fit in other mods but instead in maps that don't come with them. Sort of like a wiresetting instead of wiretearing.
However, there are concerns that it might break mapsets with complicated scripted sequences. Replacing a random scientist that's supposed to open a door for you might break a mapset due to how the animation sequences are vastly different from one another. That would not be cricket if you've played a mapset halfway and then is suddenly stopped by a softlock.
And that's where things like Automap comes in. I found out about it because some doofus tried to release a generated map from it to RTSL, and it intrigued me pretty much 'cause of its guaranteed no funny scripted sequences important for progression that I'll have to worry about. The level architecture leaves much to be desired, but it does make for a fun little combat gym. So today, I'm running a wireset version of it with Paranoia for today's NFR.
Will there be more runs where I wireset stuff or just plain mixing gameplay mods with other mapsets in HL? I hope I can. Last time I tried mixing a mapset with a gameplay mod, in this case MMod and Project Quantum Leap, half the maps wouldn't even launch with the blasted thing. So I dunno. Shame, 'cause Radix was such a good map.
HL1 mapset runs also scare me because of how long they can go, several hours and stuff. I already get heartaches failing an hour long NFR in Doom, but in HL1 where the mapsets can go for even longer? Tricky. I know there's a demo recording and playback feature for HL, but I'm not sure how reliable it is when gameplay mods are involved, so maybe I'll end up doing just direct recordings like this one. We'll see.
Mods Used:
Paranoia: https://www.moddb.com/mods/paranoia
American Training Facility: https://www.runthinkshootlive.com/posts/american-training-facility/
Wireset ATF: https://www.mediafire.com/file/7sewwimaj2jouy5/paranoiaATF.7z/file
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