Cooperative mod for the great atmosphered game – RTCW, which was released in 2001 – have been announced a year before although it have been awaited more than 10 years, at last it will be released in this month. As promised by the developers a lot of new features have been built – in into the mod, which must be mentioned before we start to do the killing with our friends.
For this occasion, I created a report with a Hungarian developer, which you can read below.
Where did the idea come from to the Cooperative mod?
In the first few years of 2000 cooperative mod was practically dead. A lot of great games were released without this mod telling omnifarious foolish reasons (it cannot be included into the storyline…etc). When the Deathmatch – games started to become boring, Cooperative mod upraised back to the industry of games. Unfortunately it couldn’t help the games, which missed this opportunity, however they can provide unique gameplay ’till nowadays.
How did you get into the group?
I tried to make this mod more times on my own, but looking back from here it was a good choice that I stopped, because without any kind of result it would be just wasting time. In last year I was so curious that there is anybody working on such a project like this, especially since the source code was sent out. Then I found Fretnn, who was keen on to start over. I contacted him immediately offering my help. Since then we are working together. He is a very fair person, we can agree on everything although we passed by our 700 update, which is kind of a big thing. The third member of our group is Ken, who is, depending on his time, helps a lot in the codes and scripts.
How the work is shared among you?
Fretnn is the boss besides he is an expert at programming. I worked on some projects earlier, but I can cooperate with him the best so far. He is an expert and owns a good attitude. He can built – in everything into the game, if it makes sense and it can de developed. We keep in touch daily on MSN, we are brainstorming, debating with our arguments and counter arguments, but in the end, we always make an agreement. I edit the mapscripts and the new menu system and if the modelscripts have to be edited I do it. It’s better if we don’t detail Fretnn’s programmer work, because it’s way too complicated for me, it’s the inhuman category. For our luck he loves it.
What we could know about the mod’s new features?
There will be three different gameplay mods: Cooperative (this don’t need to be detailed) Speedrun, (it counts the time, whic time is stored by the programme itself), Battle (this is a brand new type, which I don’t want to share the details).
On the maps we had to make innumerable changes. We had to go through on each map step by step and overwrite the scripts, for example: block the debouching tunnels, closing doors, which block the other’s way (or the rebirthing players). Therefore every map went through changes some of them on more some of them on less. These changes will be noticed by the players for sure. Of course we tried not to ruin the game, but we have to keep an eye on that there are more players on the map, and the events are not only based on one person. When we were basically done with this there came the idea of placing in more enemies, since there will be more players on the map running around. Three different grades were made. The first one is the orignal number of enemies of the game, the second one adds 15 – 20 enemies map by map, the third one adds 30 – 40 enemies. After it we focused on the abilities of the enemies, here also three grades were made. The lowest is broadly as hard as the basic RTCW hardest grade. Finally the rebirthing function of the enemies was a separate option, which will be a tough challenge for the players, but the completion of the game is not impossible though. There are options at the players too, for example: common lives numbers, new Friendly Fire option: you’ll loose the same amount of life as your shoot dealt on your teammate (it is concerned to the civilians too not depending on the Friendly Fire option)
Points system is a brand new feature too: just for justiceship, you’ll receive points after your damage given to the enemies, so it can’t happen that you’re shooting a Boss like hell and one of your teammates kills it with one shot only and he gains the higher points.
At certain scores you’ll receive Bonus Lifes, which is very useful playing over tougher settings.
Moreover players can drop their weapons and part of their actual used weapon’s ammo to help their teammates. Since it is not hard to die in the game we thought that it would be a great idea that after rebirthing the player won’t lost his guns to not to waste time with searching for guns and ammo.
There are three different types of saving functions: traditional quicksave, autosave in all 30 secs and capturing the flag system known from Multiplayer. Farmore the voting system is also in this mod.
There are way more new features, which I forget to speak right now, for example: we blocked all the built – in (and boring) gameplay – videos, which was a problem via the gameplay.
The hated alarm system on Forest and Village2 maps are disabled, if the players kill the engineer guy.
In addition the menu system is fully changed to a new style, for example we made a quick menu system with the main settings which you can reach by pressing ’Esc’ button. We wanted to a create a user friendly system for this mod.
I won’t detail Fretnn’s work, but as you can see it requires a lot of programming work to do all the things which got listed above.
What happens if someone is out of lives?
That goes to spectator until the next map, but then he can return to match.
But giving number of lives is not necessary, 0 means the unlimited life same as when we give the number of savings.
Will the main character, BJ, appear in the mod?
No. He was put in for a while, but then we took him out, because he seemed unnecessary. We brought the soldiers from the multiplayer with 3 different skins for their heads. Therefore there won’t be 3 BJs running around the maps. It’s more like that unnamed heroes goes through BJ’s adventures.
What are the further plans? Will there be a sequel?
It really depends on the players. If we’ll see that there are lots of (not empty) servers around then it’s sure that there will be a continuation. We’ve already got the ideas, for example importable of Fan Made Missions. We are trying to test more and more, but we hope that there won’t be a need to release lots of corrected versions.
But if there won’t be too much interest for this mod, we give it up and everybody move on on his own way. All of us have our own life, family, children…etc. By the way special thanks for the patience shown by them until now.
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[Thanks]
Thanks for your help with the translation of HigH.
