Is Source Suitable?

[Nexum]

Hi all,

I'm a student at the University of York in the UK, undertaking a research-led Summer project generally concentrating on cheating and security visualisation in online gaming.

I'd like to humbly appeal to your collective wisdom, so that you might let me know whether using a modded Half-Life 2 will allow me to implement the changes that I might require from the game. The changes are as follows:

- I'd like to mod a multiplayer aspect of the game, either HLDM or CS:S, whichever is simplest.
- The changes that I wish to make to the engine are to show, visually, a cheater in the game world. So for example, I wish to do something akin to the following:
- Turn a player red or some other colour
- Implement some kind of effect, perhaps a particle effect, or simple swirling around a character in-game to identify them as cheating in some way.
- Change a certain player's movement speed in-game.
- Change a certain player's representative model in-game, or failing this, at the start of a new round (so, for example, a cheating player may be turned into a donkey for the next round).
- Etc.

The focus of this project is on the visualisation, rather than the *detecting* of the cheating, so don't worry about that.

What I'd like to know is:
a. How capable is HL2, and its modding tools, of being able to easily implement the above modifications.
b. As a competent programmer, with experience of C++, DirectX, OpenGL etc. but *NO* modding experience. How feasible is this to undertake?

Thanks for any advice on the feasibility - and thanks for your time, it's much appreciated!

- Nex

 

[Cole]

The source coe for CS:S isn't there but it's there for HL2DM

Anyway, what your asking wouldn't be that hard at all, just would be changin a RGB value(color), adding a model(particle), editing a paramater(speed), chaning a model.

If you know C++ that is a good start. Although it would be quite a bit different since your working under "Sources API", but there are tons of resources and a giant comunity to help you out.

 

[Nexum]

Thanks

Thanks for taking the time to give some feedback Minerel.

As far as I see it, my alternative is the Quake 3 Arena engine, which has some benefits:

- Full source
- Lower system requirements (easier testing in the labs)

But I think the community and information available on modding HL2 is incomparably better to that available for the Q3A engine. I was just looking through Valve's documentation, and at least at first glance it looks very friendly and comprehensive. Id, on the other hand, have supplied absolutely nothing, not so much a conceptual diagram to support the Q3A engine.

I think because of this I'll progress with HL2DM modding (although it's such a pain that Steam doesn't work through a HTML proxy, as that's the only connection almost every on-campus university student has available ).

Thanks again for your input!

(However, I'd like to encourage any further responses to my original post if people want to give further advice.)

- Nex

 

[Epsi]

Having the full source for the engine is totally overkill for something like this, it's not going to be much of an advantage.

 

[Asuka]

This might sound stupid, but just download a hackpack. It does 90% of what you just said.