Demo is on the way! - Game Mechanics Progress, New media news - SourceWorld mod for Half-Life 2: Episode Two

Hello everyone! We're glad to bring you another article after a month since the first one. Due to life circumstances(studies, work), not as much development progress has been done as we wished. However, we've still made considerable progress nonetheless.

After the first article's publication, we have decided to work on a public Demo version of SourceWorld. It will feature the majority of planned mod's features. My intention is to give players a relatively short, but somewhat complete experience of what SourceWorld will be. It's going to be released publicly on ModDB, whereas the full version of the mod is intended for a Steam release. (As a free mod of course)

This article is being written a little bit earlier than I initially intended. As much as my university studies(and upcoming end-of-term exams) are holding me away from modding, the modding itself is holding me away from keeping up with education program. Hence I've decided to showcase what's already done, so that I can focus on life more and eventually get back at full-scale modding during the summer break.

We've made quite a progress on the teleporter room. A place, where player has to scan the Multiverse for dimensions they can travel to, charge the portal and jump into the unknown.

I've also made few improvements to the terminal interface, you can now make short scans which give out a dimension with randomly selected seed. Entering a "start" command launches the portal opening sequence, letting players travel to a generated dimension where nobody else will probably ever be.

Procedural map generation (or Mapgen, for short) got new additions.

First off, multiple floors, connected by elevators. Upon exploring a Mapgen floor, players will eventually find an elevator which will take them to the next floor, seamlessly. Some technical limitations aren't allowing generation of decent vertical level design, at least for now.

Another change is that I have finally added the Objectives system. Player has now to explore the entire generated level in order to finish their mission. There can be additional objectives.

After finishing all objectives, an exit portal spawns nearly, which will teleport the player back to the lab. Thus, this addition closes the circle of going in and out of Mapgen, whilst keeping all stats and weapons.

Indeed, I have added new player attributes, such as Leveling and Money. In future, experience points will be used for skill tree to unlock new abilities and money will be utilized for buying equipment or just stocking up on ammunition before another adventure.

While making proper transitions between the Lab and Mapgen, I have encountered severe technical issues with having vanilla HL2 map transitions work. Eventually I decided to come up with my own "save" system, that writes all weapon and player data into a file between map transitions, thus achieving same effect as vanilla map transitions, but without crashes.

Player saves get "obfuscated" to prevent casual editing. This is being done, since savefiles in any Source engine game can't be easily edited either.

The_Guardian™ has been working on models related to the District Security. Most notably, District Security guards and a Sergeant with signature beret.

The formerly-Combine APC was also repurposed for District Security's use.

Another important aspect of recycled combine aesthetics is the change of the energy source everything uses. Since humans have no access to the violent Dark Energy, they settled on making the most of Xen Crystal Energy.

So far, things are beginning to slowly take shape. I'm satisfied with the amount of work that we put together into this mod. Besides, I want to thank everyone who follows this project and does not feel indifferent to it. Feedback helps us to keep working. If you feel like supporting this project, feel free to share it where you feel like it, join our official Discord to keep up with the latest development news.