Deathmatch Classic: Refragged mod for Half-Life 2

Hello again everyone! It's time for a new media roundup for Deathmatch Classic: Refragged!

Today's article is a special one because May 2, 2023 marks the 3 year anniversary of this project's conception.

If you are interested in helping out with DMC:R, feel free to drop by our Discord server and see what help we could use. DM me @mtd_bk.

Get those headphones on because it's time to listen to another new piece of DMC:R's original soundtrack, composed by the talented LAMAJKER. This is Prepare to Die.

Oh and additionally, this song and all the previous songs we've shown off are now available on Youtube here. We'll be posting tracks there instead of Soundcloud from now on. The previous articles have also had their music retroactively changed to the Youtube videos.

DM1 - Place of Two Deaths

Remade by LordVGames, this remake reminds me a lot of Quake 1 more so than the other maps, but that's not a bad thing. You'll continue to see all your old friends still hanging on the walls, though it seems the passage of time has caused all their flesh to rot away.

DM6 - The Dark Zone

Remade by yours truly, I've tried to brighten the place up a tad while still keeping the dark aesthetic the name implies. One of the goals of DMC:R map remakes is to not use fake light sources (light that appears from nothing) in playable spaces. DMC used a ton of them, especially in this map, so in process of removing all these unnatural lights I've added things like lanterns to ceilings, which I think look really nice along side the torches. I didn't actually add too many other details than that as I think it's already pretty nice as is, but this shows that minor lighting changes can make a map look way different than the original.

E5DM - The Theater of Doom

Remade by PJX, I'm always impressed by his map remakes and he does not disappoint this time. Big fan of the hallways getting opened up so you can see all the trees outside.

DMCRDM3 - Monarchy

Created by RAFA, this is a nice small medieval map with three different heights all across. It's very fun for both DM and Duel and I really love the details he added across it like the windows and doors.

DMCRDM4 - Revenant
One of Deathmatch Classic's most popular custom maps gets an official remake for DMC:R!

Over the years we've gotten multiple requests to add Revenant to the game. I've always said that we'd only do that if we got the original creator's permission. Suffice to say after some digging through various ancient links and sites, we were able to track down the original creator, Jinx, and get their blessing to remake the map officially for DMCR. They've given some advice on what they would've changed looking back, and we plan to implement those suggestions, such as improved cover and lighting. Unlike the rest of the maps shown today, this one is definitely still a work in progress, mostly being a port with little changes, but in the future it will get the major overhaul with all these changes we just mentioned. I just wanted to get this sweet info into your hands early. Thank you Jinx! And thank you Rahim for putting your internet stalking skills to good use, now can you get me in contact with Dario Casali next?

New Robo Playermodel:
A fan favorite playermodel from Half-Life 1 returns. As soon as this guy got in, all the skeleton players switched to him. No I won't provide an actually nice render. Instead you get this pic that goes raw. Feel free to screenshot.

New Weapon Models:
Multiple people have attempted remakes of the DMC weapon models during this project's existence. Due to various reasons, they weren't satisfying our goals. However, we've gotten an excellent modeler who has gone above and beyond our expectations and has produced very well made remakes of DMC's weapons authentic to the original designs. These have yet to be textured but I wanted to show you guys some sort of weapon model remake after all these years. These were modeled by the talented Fraudulent, also known as Th3F4k3.

Character Audio:
Other than the soundtrack, I haven't really ever talked about the audio of DMC:R. Here's a demonstration of some of the sounds you and other players will make based on their chosen playermodel. Of course, we love customization, so options are available to replace all voices with the standard default grunts, as well as an option for the default grunts to be replaced with the classic sounds from the original DMC.

Fem Announcer:
DMC:R will come with a few different announcer voices you can pick from. Here are some lines for the first one we currently have finished, being the Female Announcer, reminiscent of the Computer Voice that was Quake 2's announcer. It's not trying to emulate the original voice but it's trying to give off the familiar vibe. This announcer is voice by Ronald Hamrák (who is male but sure has a nice range of feminine voices.)

f-f-footage? Did someone say g-gameplay footage? But what will they think, there's so many placeholders!

4 articles in and you guys can finally see what the hell this game kinda plays like. For a while I had been reluctant to show footage of the game, mainly because of the placeholder viewmodels from DMC always being present, but I realized this was stupid and people will still be satisfied despite the roughness. I had watched a ton of old-ass videos of Jaykin Bacon: Episode 3 before Jabroni Brawl released on steam, and they were so rough and old but they were so cool too. That made me open the floodgates to people with beta access to post whatever. So here you go, some highlights produced by DMC:R Devs and Playtesters over its development!

(Despite everything that I just said, I'd still like to preface that a majority of the footage in these videos are old and you'll end up seeing older versions of the maps we showed off today, as well as things we may have already fixed and changed. For example, you may see an old HUD or that some players are very tall compared to the first person view.)

Grappling Hook Improvements:
We've added a few features to improve the how players grapple. Firstly, there is now a hotkey (bound to R by default) that instantly switches to and fires the grappling hook, returning to your previously held weapon when you let go. Additionally, you can jump out of a grapple like in Team Fortress 2's Mannpower mode. This was a really nice feature that lets people jump up to those ledges they usually tried to grapple to.

Custom Gamemodes via Map logic:
tholp has been working to allow modders to do all sort of scenarios for custom maps, the example shown today is just the beginning. A new logic_custom_rules entity has been introduced to handle rules and scoring. Here's a short test made with it, a sort of Keep-Away variation of One Flag where the team gains points by holding the flag the longest.

Along came a mod know as Team Fortress Classic: Source, and with that, a group known as Concussion Studios. This team (most of whom no longer work on DMC:R) set out to remake TFC in source with nicer graphics...aaaaaaaand that's about it. Around a year into it's development, everyone kind of realized "Hmm... this is pointless and boring, lets do something else!" One of the devs, RedFire, decided they wanted to port DMC to source in a similar vain to TFCS...because that is apparently more interesting, I guess. And so Deathmatch Classic: Source came into the world, and that was what Conc worked on.

Almost immediately, project leadership was handed over to a developer named Xeller, and he would be DMC:R's project lead for the first half of it's life so far. I wasn't even in the picture yet, joining around 4 months after development began. With Xeller and eventually me in the picture, the scope and purpose of the mod would slowly shift from "DMC in Source" to something bigger and grander. ThreeWave stuff wasn't originally planned, neither were all these extra gamemodes and weapons, but parts of it by the end of the year started getting added to the plan. The plan at this time was to launch with DM, TDM and Instagib, add ThreeWave as it's own post release update, same with Duel? The Machinegun, Chaingun, and Railgun would also be added.

Some odd decisions and plans were made around this time. Extended versions of maps were planned, I guess this was so larger amounts of players could play on a familiar map layout. Imagine DM4 - The Bad Place with a bunch of extra rooms and stuff like that, very odd. There was also an odd grudge at this time against "Space Maps." I guess Xeller really didn't like the black voids and thought they didn't fit, though he now finds these notions to be stupid and regrets it. The Ring of Shadows was also to be renamed. There were many debates about what to rename it too, but Xeller concluded on the Eye of Invisibility. Near the end of the year, most of these odd additions and changes would be cut, or uncut in the case of space maps.

I'm not even gonna sugarcoat it, they just took code from wherever, (including leaked code. 💀) If it looked like it'd remotely work, it was plopped it into the game. Their own code wasn't good either, with lots of stuff getting overwritten and replaced that shouldn't have. On top of that, they wrote really bad english and had an extremely short fuse. Every other day, they would get into a major argument with devs over the most minor of things. They also apparently owned the git repos, and anytime someone disagreed with them, they'd threaten to leak or delete the repos. Suffice to say, this could not continue, and near the end of the year, they were finally removed with no issues. Repos were moved and morale was boosted but this coder's work would come back to haunt us as you'll soon learn.

There were other problematic developers as well, who especially made a bad mix when they argued with the main coder, but they are not worth mentioning further. Overall there was a ton more arguing during this time than there ever would be in later years. Nowadays, there's almost never any arguments, as all the problematic people have been gradually filtered out over time, that and this project isn't aimless anymore.

At the tail end of the year, we decided to rename the project. This is because the mod would be going on Steam, and Valve doesn't like mods having "Source" in their name because it makes people think it might be an official Valve product. We asked our community for name suggestions, and these were the one's Xeller picked for everyone to vote on.

Initially I really didn't like the Refragged name and thought there were other names that were nicer, but looking back on it, it really was the best option, and clearly everyone else thought the same because it won by a landslide. That pretty much concludes 2020, now for some images taken during that time.

I don't want to throw Xeller under the bus, especially because he's a really nice guy and friend of mine, but if we're being honest here, he was not the best at keeping notes and info easily available. And that's kind of the theme of this year. A lot of disorganization and a lot of developer turnover, usually mappers joining and leaving a couple months later after being given little to no instructions beyond a list of maps they could remake. The closest thing we really had to a todo list was an external Trello page that you needed to make an account for.

In April, me and a couple of other devs secretly planned a fun little april fools event a week before it happened, called DMC: Recycled. It replaced a bunch of the weapon sounds and models, and changed the maps to be wacky. I even got my bud to make art of My TF2 character at the time and Rahim Ali's avatar making out, in reference to a meme someone made. It was quite the event, and we would try and fail to do it the next year, due to scope. (It would've been Murder Miners themed, because for some reason a lot of people in that game's community overlap with us.)

Me and Xeller always got along very well and we understood each other a lot, so halfway through the year me and him teamed up and I became a Co-Project Lead along side him.

With DMC:R being in a sort of rut this year, not many major features were being worked on, just general bug fixes, map updates, and asset additions. I put out some calls and my good friend and now lead programmer on DMC:R, tholp, joined the project near the beginning of autumn, starting work on CTF. The quality of life would really start to increase after this point. Now for some images taken during this year.

Xeller would end up becoming very inactive a little way into the new year due to life obligations and unfortunately he was no longer doing much "leading." So at this point I basically took over as the Project Lead.

We had gained a couple of new programmers this year so many major features were being added like Runes, new powerups, Clan Arena, Freeze Tag, Tag Tokens, HUD Updates. One of these new programmers, fed up with trying to find out if code our old programmer (mentioned back in 2020) wrote was stolen or from leaks. So they hatched a brilliant idea, they would create a codebase that all 2013MP based Conc mods could pull from so that they didn't have to reimplement a feature/fix multiple times for each mod. Anything this old coder did was also going to be rewritten to ensure we had no stolen code. And thus, the Conc Codebase was born! It took a week or two to get everything that was broken and the rebuild back up and running, but we were finally free from our old coders lingering curse.

Other major things that happened this year were the implementation of the announcer, We had a buggy playtest that inspired us to add an Infection gamemode and the music got implemented with it's own entity. We also started getting some traction from ESCalation's video mentioning us, along with letting some people post footage about the game as you saw above. We even almost put one of our music tracks in an E1M1 Magazine CD, but unfortunately that prospect fell through since we asked at a bad time. For those who know about what became of E1M1, you might have a guess.

And here we are, 3 years in. To be honest, I hasn't felt that long, and it's crazy looking back at stuff and being like "That was 2 years ago!?" But I think DMC:R has never been in a better spot than now, and I believe it will only continue to grow into something greater as time goes on. I sure as hell don't expect it to take another 3 years to get to release. Everyone who stuck around has definitely learned a lot of skills and improved existing ones. But we're only halfway through the year, so there's still much that could happen. Who knows, maybe the whole collective could fragment or something crazy like that.

These are the hurdles of mod and game development, it's a rollercoaster with many highs and lows. Not every mod will have a story like ours, some will have cleaner ones, some will have worse ones. At the end of the day, the goal is to have fun, the journey should be just as fun, if not more fun than the destination. But for people reading this who are looking to potentially make their own mods with a team of semi-strangers, this is what can happen, both good and bad. Project Leaders should be passionate about their mod, but not turn that passion into closed-mindedness and rude behavior. Try to keep your devs engaged in various ways, I survey my fellow devs about a variety of ways I can help them become more interested and engaged in helping. I host monthly developer meetings and keep a consistent idea of what the mod will turn out to be. If everyone is not on the same page on what your mod is supposed to be and don't grasp a solid idea of it, they'll for sure become disinterested, disgruntled and annoyed. I don't know where I'm really going with all this, but I think I've become a much better project lead since I first took on the role. I learned a lot, and I'm very proud of myself. I'm also very thankful and proud of my fellow devs who've put up with me and stuck with me through everything.

So I assume many of you have been wondering, What exactly is the planned content and features that DMC:R will launch with? Today this question gets publicly answered, I don't want to leave people in the dark on how far we plan to go and how much we have currently.

What Maps will DMC:R launch with?
-The original Q1 DM maps (DM1-7)
-Dario Casali's DCDM map series (DCDM1-5)
-Dario Casali's P:SE map series (PSE1-4)
-Threewave's CTF series (CTF1-8)
-Threewave's CTF2 series (CTF2M1-8)
-Dimension of the Past's E5DM
-The Following Q1 Singleplayer Levels: E1M1, E1M2, E1M5, E1M7, E1M8, E2M2
-Various custom DMCRDM/DMCRCTF/DMCRDUEL Maps designed by the Refragged Team.
-A testing map, with basically everything you could ever want to test and experiment with.

Currently, a little over a half of these maps are playable. I've been able to make steady progress recently pumping out around 2 playable maps monthly, though that doesn't mean they are fully finished and pretty.

What New weapons will DMC:R launch with?
-The Machinegun
-The Chaingun
-The Railgun
-The BFG

These are the main new weapons found in Q2/Q3. They will be found on our own custom series of maps but are also hopefully utilized by you guys in custom maps.

What Gamemodes will DMC:R launch with?
-Deathmatch
-Team Deathmatch
-Capture the Flag
-One Flag
-Clan Arena
-Infection

Additionally, variants of these modes will also appear, such as Duel for DM, Freeze tag for Clan Arena, and Horde for Infection. Stuff like Instagib is also available, but that is classified under "game modifiers" with how our gamemode system is setup, so stuff like Instagib, Tag Token, Autohop, etc can be toggled on for any of these modes.

What new powerups will DMC:R launch with?

Resistance (Powerup and Rune)
Strength (Powerup and Rune) (Combining this with Quad grants you the mighty power of Octo Damage)
Haste (Powerup and Rune)
Regeneration (Powerup and Rune)
Silencer
Flight
Personal Teleporter
Personal Medkit
Kamikaze
Invulnerability Shield

Basically all powerups that appeared in Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q3TA. Like the new weapons, these will make appearances on our custom maps, along with being available for use by you guys in your own maps.

That's it? That's all the "Content from future Quakes" you guys are adding?
Well yes, but also no.
Basically, the current plan is launch with a majority of Quake 1 stuff, being the maps and arsenal, and over time, have themed post-release updates based around additions the next entry included, so a whole update about Q1 expansions, and a whole update about Q2 stuff, etc. We did however add the main new weapons/powerups from Q2/Q3 already because we know you guys will want to get your hands on those ASAP, well we do too. At least that lets us spice up our custom maps with this new stuff, so hey, win-win for both of us there.

Lastly, I'm proud to announce that DMC:R will be playable at the DoKomi Anime Expo in Dusseldorf, Germany, specifically at the Retro Wave Arcade's Dark Room Section in the 18+ area. You'll be able to get your first taste of DMC:R action and frag other players doing the same. So if you happen to be attending this expo, make sure to check out the Retro Wave Arcade. The expo runs from June 30th to July 2nd. Thank you neoXite for giving us the opportunity to appear.

And that should do it for this 4th development media update! Thank you all for checking us out, whether you've been here since the beginning or are just joining us. I'm glad to witness that the community is continuing to grow. We even recently surpassed 500 members on the discord server. Thanks again and see you next time!