We love to play
The Internet Archive has released 2500 more MS-DOS games! Since 2015 the Internet Archive has been building their collection of DOS games including great classics such as Oregon Trail, Leisure Suit Larry and a whole tonne of other great titles.
Check out the release announcement at the archive blog and head over to the collection of MS-DOS games directly.
Avenir Shards are live (the Map) – a new global shard game in X-Fac mode! This is pretty cool, and reminds us of an old X-Fac shard game proposed by the Enlightened League of Operators back in 2016.
The game mode was pretty simple – agent controlled beacons for ornaments, RES and ENL. The idea was circulated between regional Resistance and Enlightened Communities – one such idea went something like this:
Select a play area and appropriate targets, ones that might see res action during the session. Use ENL/RES beacons to identify targets and beer beacons for shard spawn sites. Use Zello, Glympse and TG (or other chat utility) to track and communicate with agents on the ground. Light target beacons prior to shard spawn time. At/before start time, move agents to target portal to collect keys. The need to collect lots of keys should be stressed (frakk if you have to). Give keys to runners or bikers to get out to agents in the field. Appoint a “shard operator” to select where a shard jumps to if it is not linked to the target within the window. The shard op will communicate to the team op where the current location of the shard is. Everyone must pay attention to communication her because the beacon will still be on the original site. Spawn sites are pre-selected, but a designated agent on the ground will light them as they see fit (or as instructed by the “shard op”). The team operator(s) should not have prior knowledge of spawn sites (or targets). Adjust the spawn sites and area as needed considering the number of agents.Agents should be clearing a path from shard to target when they spawn. Consider having a “rogue” agent (might be the same one lighting targets and shards) make unexpected blocking links or flipping target portals. This simulated unpredictability is important especially if res activity during the practice session is limited.Depending on the number of agents, consider assigning agents to zones and expand the number of operators. An operator would be in charge of each “zone,” with a sector op helping to give directions. We think this would be a pretty nifty local play! Depending on agent numbers and mobility – zoning out a 2.5, 5, 10 or 15 KM radius could be a pretty interesting competitive event. We think we’ll add this to our wish list for IITC plugins 😉
As community champions and game masters, we understand many of the challenges communities face both in the real-world, and online.
For the past couple of decades, we’ve had a passion for connecting people throughout the world. We know what amazing possibilities become real when we bridge the digital divide by providing spaces that help foster relationships through team-based play and friendly PVP play. In growing these support networks – players become more connected, and most importantly – are able to access even more opportunity.
Back when we started playing Ingress – we resurrected some old concepts we used working on digital divide projects, to provide support for Ingress communities. As our first step, we sketched out some pretty basic principles based on what we perceived as being real-needs in order to accomplish global team work within a fractured, decentralized network of varying communities and lone wolves.
We saw these goals as being central to one of our core pillars: To help bring people together to accomplish new goals, take on new challenges and enhance their skill-sets.
Back in 2014, Ingress was much more of a tactical kind of game. We immediately saw the need for strategic intelligence sharing to gain mind units over opposition team territories. Times have changed a lot, with more and more players looking for more opportunities for field art and a less hard-core approach to playing the game (much of which is thanks to the hard work of agents in cross faction circles around the globe that have helped bridge relationships). But we wanted to take a stroll down memory lane to look at the tools of the trade-craft back then.
The concept of belonging to a team, and having a role in the team’s success.
Using successes we’d learned working on the non-profit volunteer space, we developed a general recruitment and registration system that empowered willing volunteers to help bring new agents in from the cold. We designed the system thusly:
We also built the system into several layers as well, since we also had to manage a number of social media channels:
With different managers covering different channels and regions, the central recruitment system used in our metropolitan area Ingress community was setup to allow for multiple vetting and status reporting for new agents depending which medium they were looped into. And since COMM based communication across multiple S2 cells often led to our having an out of towner show up, we also needed a way to refer agents to well known Ingress communities outside of our region’s coverage area. Thus, the system also supported a concept of agent referral- in that we could refer an agent to Vancouver Island, Alberta or elsewhere ensuring we didn’t drop the ball on our faction getting someone engaged, and leaving the agent out in the cold.
In implementing these processes, teams were able to recruit, track and support new agents through mentoring, connecting them into groups of interest where they could excel and be part of the bigger picture.
And with game genres, continuing challenges in volunteer recruitment and the ever increasing globalization of game communities we’ve taking that concept to version 3 to help foster even even stronger communities.
Foo games provides game masters with management tools and support to build healthier, more engaged communities, and to provide opportunities for gamers to further their game play, art and passions. To find out more, get a hold of us via [email protected] or give our lead operator a shout at +1 778 819 1298
It was a dark and stormy night..
Back in 2013, Valve released the massive steampipe update. It was a pretty awesome change over all – differential updates were pretty important, but various changes to the VFS happened, and an annoying quirk that came out of it was the model chooser in HL2DM – it didn’t work anymore – and still doesn’t!
Way back in the day – Foo hacked up a quick work around for the Half-Life model chooser problem in Sourcepawn – sm_modelchooser_hl2dm.sp
In designing the interface for the plugin, we also wanted to make it super easy for players to change their model. We added a menu to the Sourcemod !settings menu, but also (and somewhat elegantly even) added support to make model setting even easier. Rather than worrying about players or admins needing to know exact model file names etc, we coded the command handler to search for partial matches within the array of models:
new String:Models[19][70] = {
"models/combine_soldier.mdl",
"models/combine_soldier_prisonguard.mdl",
"models/combine_super_soldier.mdl",
"models/police.mdl",
"models/humans/group03/female_01.mdl",
"models/humans/group03/female_02.mdl",
"models/humans/group03/female_03.mdl",
"models/humans/group03/female_04.mdl",
"models/humans/group03/female_06.mdl",
"models/humans/group03/female_07.mdl",
"models/humans/group03/male_01.mdl",
"models/humans/group03/male_02.mdl",
"models/humans/group03/male_03.mdl",
"models/humans/group03/male_04.mdl",
"models/humans/group03/male_05.mdl",
"models/humans/group03/male_06.mdl",
"models/humans/group03/male_07.mdl",
"models/humans/group03/male_08.mdl",
"models/humans/group03/male_09.mdl"
}
This way, players could simply choose a team to play on using something like this:
!model female !model male !model combine
But if they wanted to be super-specific, they could use:
!model male_01 !model female_03
instead. All in all, we were pretty happy with the easy work around for the problem of models back then, and looking back on this plugin – we’re still amused it’s alive and kicking 🙂
Back by popular demand, we’ve put the custom crosshairs for HL2DM back online! https://foo-games.com/crosshairs/
We were recently asked how to go about configuring a multiplayer Half-Life 2: Deathmatch server to support different game modes depending on maps.
The owner wants to offer varying environments for players to play in, and luckily our weapon manager plugin was designed with this specific goal in mind!
We elected to use the most excellent mapconfigs plugin by bcserv to handle the actual task of setting which set of weapons maps would use. In this case, we set it up so that maps prefixed with “de_” would use sniper weapons only, with remaining maps using default weapons.
First things first though: Deciding which weapons players would spawn with and whether other weapons would be allowed.
We setup defined two weapon modes:
“default” gives shotgun, crowbar, pistol, smg1, slam, 357, crossbow, frag, physcannon. For giggles, we set the 357 magnum to allow firing under water – we were curious to see who figured out they can snipe with the fishes!
“sniperxbow” – my personal favorite, the perfect combination for a neo-style fire and forget physics weapon, and a 357 magnum for those times when you’re sneaking in the bushes. For this mode, we set the option to not allow weapon pickups from the map.
"default"
{
"options"
{
"pickupothers" "1" // 1 - Players can pick up any weapons they find on the map. 0 = deny pickups of other weapons
}
"weapon_shotgun"
{
"default" "1" // Make the Shotfun the default weapon
}
"weapon_crowbar"
{
}
"weapon_pistol"
{
"p_underwater" "1"
}
"weapon_smg1"
{
}
"weapon_slam"
{
}
"weapon_357"
{
"p_underwater" "1" // Primary attack fires under water
}
"weapon_crossbow"
{
}
"weapon_frag"
{
}
"weapon_physcannon"
{
}
}
"sniperxbow"
{
"weapon_crossbow"
{
}
"weapon_357"
{
"default" "1"
}
"options"
{
"pickupothers" "0" // 0 - can't pick up any other weapons than those listed here
}
}
With these settings added to addons/sourcemod/configs/weaponmanager.cfg it was now time to setup the sniper maps to use the sniperxbow weapon mode.
bcserv’s mapconfig plugin is pretty simple to configure. mapconfig looks for a configuration file for the current map in based on map prefix, so if we’re playing a map named “de_xyzzy” – mapconfig will first try to read “de_.cfg”, then “de_xyzzy.cfg”. More technical information about the mapconfig configuration and plugin can be found on the AlliedModders forum.
In this case we set it up as follows:
From the hl2mp server folder, create:
cfg/sourcemod/map-cfg/de_.cfg
and add the line:
sm_weaponmanager_defaultmode sniperxbow
With this in place, every map that starts with de_ will run the sniperxbow weaponmode. The best part is for specific maps (eg: de_xyzzy), if we wanted to add a slightly different configuration (lets call it “xyzzy” mode, we could create a new weaponmode that grants the crossbow, 357 and crowbar!
"xyzzy"
{
"weapon_crossbow"
{
}
"weapon_357"
{
"default" "1"
}
"crowbar"
{
}
"options"
{
"pickupothers" "0" // 0 - can't pick up any other weapons than those listed here
}
}
Then in we would create a new mapconfig file named cfg/sourcemod/map-cfg/de_xyzzy.cfg
and add the command:
sm_weaponmanager_defaultmode xyzzy
We can also add extra commands too, so that only de_xyzzy runs them. For example:
sv_gravity 600 sm_playerspeed_infiniterun "1"
would adjust the gravity for this map only and also let players run infinitely without recharging.
Easy peasy!