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 🙂
