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 "Suislide"
Well, the other night I saw Suislide on ICQ and I asked him some questions about AHL just out of curiousity and got some useful information, so I asked him for a real interview and he kindly agreed. Everyone knows the beta release date on the site is July 29th, and at the time there hadn't been any posts since July 9th so I wanted to see what was going on. Here is what he had to say. Will the first beta of AHL be released on the proposed release date, July 29th? Yes. It is a firm date, the beta is already finished, is being
burned onto press cds for the mod expo, and will be released that night.
The only thing that could delay it would be won.net since they have the
first 24 hours or whatnot because the gave us a limited sponsorship a long
time ago (they bought 3dmax and Character Studio without which AHL would
have been impossible).
A little birdie told me of some new features such as the lasersight being a full beam instead of a dot, the sniper rifle being semi-automatic, that the six shot pistol is really powerful close up, the 9 mm isn't as powerful but shoots faster, the weapons feel just like they do in AQ2, the netcode runs very smooth, the handcannon is better then ever, and the locational damage is done way better this time. Care to comment on any of these? The laser is now a dot again. We relly want to be able to get the beam
working correctly but right now with it lagging behind the cursor it looks
kind of silly. When you stand still it looks exceptionally cool,
but how often do you stand still when playing a game called Action?
We will be looking into it more later. The sniper is semi auto
and currently is unbalanced. It is too powerful and will have
some sort of balancing done on it (other than the short delay between
firing it has now). It may even change totally, it is something that
only time can tell. The netcode runs fine from what I can tell.
I can play most of the time and I connect at 26.4 to an isp that is not
even in my local calling area with a forwarding number (i.e. a horribly
bad connection). Everyone who has tried it says it runs well.
The anaconda is powerful and has good wall penetration while the
beretta fires faster and is more accurate, yeah. Plus the beretta
can go akimbo while the anaconda currently can not. Locational damage
is not better though it does have more precise hit detection. The
areas are the same (leg, gut, chest, head) because anything more
wouldn't suit this particular game well. But you can do new
things, for example the limp actually shows a limp animation and
you can hit either leg and the limp is leg specific. Plus you can
do such things as firing between someone's legs without hitting them,
which in Q2 was impossible since the character was basically a block.
Any other cool or new features that you can talk about at this time? Nah, just wait a few days and play the beta. It is far form feature
complete. As a matter of fact we disabled many of the really cool
new feature because they were close but not quite ready for public testing.
I will say there is a long jump now though, which is preformed just like
the HL one but with a delay inbetween jumps. This is only the beginning
of the planned movement freedom in the mod as will become apparent as it
progresses more. Who needs a strafe jump when you have a long jump eh?
About how big is the first client side download going to be? 24 meg I think.
Wow, thats gonna take us 56kers forver to download. Are you gonna at least make multiple parts for seperate downloading? I might, but I doubt it. The maps make the AHL client bigger than
the AQ2 one was.
How many maps are going to come with the intial release? Also, any of them that we might familiar with, such as remakes of old AQ2 maps? I don't remember the specific number in the first beta but the port
of action city (which has been changed a little from the last time anyone
saw it), and Cliff are in there. There is the sequal to asylum as
well, which is nice. The new Urban map is in there, though it feels
much different than any prior Urban. I think all the rest of the
maps are totally new. Wiked City (probably spelled that wrong) is the best
looking one I think. It is quite large though so it will not be very appropriate
for small games.
Is the Map Depot going to continue to handle all of the AHL maps in addition to the AQ2 ones? Yes, but it will be the AHL map depot rather than the AQ2 map depot.
They will handle all maps that are not included inside the actual mod client
itself. Although I am aware of the fact that many casual Action players
have a hard time keeping up, I think by including some maps in the client
we will see enough servers with only those maps for those people.
Then of course there will be the harder core action servers like the ones
AQ2 is lucky enough to have.
In the intial release will there be more then one gameplay variant? If not, are there any planned such as some sort of teamplay? Suislide: No, I have never checked to see if Half Life style teamplay
still works or not (we probably broke it somewhere along the lines).
But if it does it is the only other play type. I have no doubt we
will see what all OLD action Quake fans will remember from early AQ2 games.
Lot's of improvised games, such as gentlemans teamplay (choose a skin and
don't shoot your teammates type of thing). The actual in code rigid
play types will come later. Including (of course) but not limited to Action
teamplay. There are other variants planned but I would rather not
talk about it until they are closer to being done. We have a lot
of refining to do on the actual deathmatch play before the other play types
make it.
What weapons will be in the first release? What weapons are planned for future releases? Hmm, all of them. The only one that may make it in a future release
that currently isn't in would be the akimbo anacondas, which will be tested
and decided upon later. Many of the accuracies, penetration, damage,
firing rate, models, etc. are all still beta and will most likely see changes
in the near future. We are setting up a special version that will
allow all these things to be set as CVARS so that we can tweak them in
real time and that way we can tweak them fast and then hard code them in
for the public releases.
Do you think the balance of AHL will be better than AQ2's? Not at first. Not even close. Expecting the first non feature
complete beta of AHL to be as balanced as AQ2 (which is well over a year
old now) would be silly of me. I think even in it's current form
I prefer AHL over AQ2 and it is a lot of fun, which is basically what is
important for now. Balance will definately make it though. Then again
balance is all relative. A lot of people praised Q2 for it's balance and
that always boggled me.
Do you think AHL will compete with the ever-popular CounterStrike? Of course it will compete with it. But not directly. I think
the competition between the two mod will be a lot different than many people
think. Most of the Action type features in CS come from the fact
that Gooseman was of course part of the Action Quake team. But even
with those features the differences are too many to count. If what
I expect to happen does indeed happen, then you will see a lot of the hard
core people playing both mods. As far as which will be more popular
over all.. I think a guess right now would be premature as both mods
are in early beta. I definately see these being the two main Half
Life mods with maybe some CTF variant pulling in as the third.
Lastly, what is the state of the code? It is, from what we can tell, very stable. It is far from complete
but I can't think of many things that remain from Half Life even in this
early form. It is MUCH further along than the first public beta of
Action Quake2 was, if that means anything.
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