Help us brainstorm ideas for Half-Life DC mods

[doitall]

Hey there! I am known on YouTube for my Half-Life Mods series (272 episodes currently) and I recently played through what I thought were all of the mods available on Dreamcast (see link below). My big question is: how many mods are there for Half-Life Dreamcast? I thought I had just played them all haha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9N-j3LaeO0U

Additionally, I was just discussing the topic of future Half-Life 1 mods on the Dreamcast with my community. Up until this point, we didn't think folks were still creating mods for the system, so this post is amazing to see! If you want to get in contact with some current modders in the Half-Life PC community, please consider joining the Discord server in my videos description! I really want to see more mods on this system, I am certain my community would be willing to help in any way they can.

As for mod recommendations: The Conspiracy in Shadow, Case Closed, Heart of Evil, Half-LIfe Zombie Edition, Destination Black Mesa, Go-Mod, ESHQ, HL2 Legacy, Autonomy Lost, Half-Life Echoes, Black Guard, Gateway 2, Run and Drum, Riot in Progress, Crack-Life, Hunt the C*nt, and Half-Life Anti-Climax

[doitall]

Also, in regards to the Dreamcast hardware, what would be the ideal qualities for a mod that could be ported to the Dreamcast? I'll talk with my people, share the information you give me, and we'll make sure the right people hear. Crazy idea, but it could be awesome if it works out!

[Anthony817]

Hey! Well, right now I am balls deep working on my Battlefield 2 total conversion HD reimagining of Bf1942 called Battlefield 1944. An unofficial sequel I have worked on for over 3 years since about 3 months before Battlefield 5 was ever publicly announced. So I don't really have time like I thought I would to start on HL modding on DC, but I must also make clear I have never made a mod for the game. I only played them all. And to answer your question there were just over a dozen mods for the game on the system.

Those mods you list are not possible really. Well, not in the traditional 1.1 sense. You see, the only thing we can hope to do with the game engine is creating custom maps, and weapons and characters. We have no way to load mods that require custom .dll's. So anything of that nature is kind of off limits. HOWEVER, things can still be ported. Paranoia is on the console, as well as They Hunger trilogy, U.S.S. Darkstar and even a custom port of Gunman Chronicles which ported over the assets of the PC only game.

So you can still do a hell of a lot with the game and creating retail quality FPS experiences using this game engine. But some things are not going to be possible. Also, you need to make sure everything whilst running stays below 16mb memory usage. This has always been the big issue with the console as it was always the bottleneck.

Another thing you need to keep in mind for optimizations is to convert the textures to the .pvr format. There are tools out there to do this to this day as it was a very popular format for smartphone games for many years. Converting them will help with the overall speed of the game. But PC textures would still work just not recommended.

There are a lot of things somebody could do. For instance, those HD Eduke32 models from Duke Nukem 3D were ported over to the HL engine with the Half-Nuked mod. I would love to see somebody take it one step further and build the Duke 3d levels and add in the enemies from that Eduke3D HD mod of the game and try to make a proper Dreamcast quality Duke Nukem game.

So if you know people who are good at making maps, maybe try to have them focus on remaking the levels from Duke Nukem in Half-Life and see if they can get something working.



Hell, even having this mods assets ported over to HLDC would be awesome even if we can't do much else than replace the weapons and character. But like I said, if your community could get serious about making a Duke Nukem 3D remake in the Goldsource engine that would be epic. Since the system may never get a port of that game since 16mb memory is too little for it even. Not unless somebody was able to port the PSX version or something which seems unlikely.

Oh yeah, and since I mentioned it earlier, here is the trailer to my passion project I have been currently working so long on. Hoping to finish this year so I can move on to other projects like this but not sure.



https://www.moddb.com/mods/battlefield-1944

[ShadowGeist]

Mix & Match Mod...

HeadCrab + FaceHugger = "HeadHugger"

MishMashUp Funhouse full of community suggested assets and easter eggs.

Half-Life DC-T

[bjankins1]

I would just like a definitive type of version of the game, optimized to run better on DC along with blue shift getting any optimization it may need

[Anthony817]

I don't know about definitive, but we could easily port the PC assets over to the game and optimize it much more. It just wouldn't have the remastered models. Somebody already did this by replacing the assets with the PC version which ran way, way better and also they made a PS2 assets version mod which actually ran worse than DC version natively did. Unfortunately they both were actually lost to the internet as the files went offline. I also do not use a physical disc drive anymore as on GDEMU but I hadn't gotten into archiving Dreamcast content at the time It released. So unfortunately I never had the foresight to back it up.

[Retro-45]

Could it be possible to make a raceing game out of the dreamcast version? Or would that require revenue engineering since it’s a FPS engine.

[Anthony817]

The engine is possible to be used for racing, in fact one of my all time most wanted tings to happen was to turn it into a rally game.



However, there is a pretty big caveat to that, and that is that anything on PC that uses custom .dll's would not work. So many of the larger mods that really changed the engine up are not possible. Moi, one of my long time friends from back in the heyday of HLDC modding he attempted to use the HLSDK to compile a .dll for HLDC but he never made any headway into it. It is really unfortunate because if somebody can ever figure out how to get them loading we could literally port over so many awesome HL PC mods.

So things like Paranoia, that had to be heavily edited to work on DC, but in the end it actually happened. Even some custom code works in it but no loading of custom .dll's sadly.

I want to see this mod on Dreamcast, a super impressive new mod in development that would seriously scratch that WW2 itch since we literally just missed the WW2 game craze that had just started around the time the system died.



I just need to learn the engine and start working on porting mods. I have the want and drive to do it, but I am still working on finishing my WW2 mod for BF2 on PC and it is super ambitious so always needing to fix and update things or work on new maps.