It's interesting.

The last 3-4 weeks I have been working pretty exclusively on Single Player Action Quake 2, fixing bugs, adding features, and watching people play on the server and tweaking things.

The general reaction has been pretty impressive, I've heard people describing it as, "Addictive", "Great", "The Best", etc.
I think it has something to do about the teamwork involved. A group of people "saving the world" against the unnamed masses, so to speak.

My feeling towards single player mods has shifted a little in the last couple weeks. I didn't really see it as a viable *online* experience. Something that you would pick up and play a couple times, then throw it back on the shelf so to speak.

Right now I have got about 4 mappers, and I'm still looking for a few more. I'm trying to create a full single player experience for Action Quake. Something enjoyable, with some amount of replayability.

In addition I tracked down some people from a project to take the regular AQ maps and add single player missions to them through the use of entity files that get loaded at map load time. I plan on also expanding that some, to some of the newer maps (as this pack was done in 99).

It seems that the majority of the tweaking I have been doing is in the monsters, trying to balance them against the power player weapons, without making them slaughter the players constantly, and things like making sure the players have enough ammo and weapons to use against the hordes. Most of the changes have been in adding ease of use features to the players that were lacking from the original AQ. Things like reverse zoom so you dont have to zoom all the way in to zoom out on the sniper rifle.

It's an interesting experience doing something fully single player (or coop). But all in all it's still enjoyable.

Any thoughts? Comments?

What is interesting, is that with the scripting abilities of the newer engines there are many possibilities of adding single player elements to a MP gametype. Making a team work together to accomplish an objective as was done with the MP levels in RTCW was great. It's going to be fun watching this being taken to the next level...:)

I think we'll see more co-op stuff coming up once unreal2 is released. I don't think it'll take long for some team to write the multiplayer part of unreal2 with help of the ut2003 code, and once there is a codebase, there's a lot of potential (I hope someone does it, otherwise we have to do that as well )

We tried to do it with Jedi Knight 2, but we kind of lost faith when we found out that we couldn't play the original maps in co-op cause the single player executable could handle more models in a map than the multiplayer executable. So we switched to UT2003. It's a strange technology when you are used to Q3, but it's cool nevertheless.

I haven't looked at UT2K3, but I worked on the UT engine for a while and I really liked coding for the Unreal Tournament engine, however I thought the engine itself left alot to be desired.

The coding was easier, cleaner, more OO.

I'm actually considering starting a new single player project, we will see.

UT2003 is cool cause it forces you to learn 3DSmax, and I'm glad that I learned a lot of it.

Single Player anything tends to get played a single time unless it has some kind of expansive non-linear thing about it (ie. multiple mission paths / endings, secrets or level pars). Even then you'll get sick of it eventually or only play it once and a while. I'd say making a decent single player mod would be a lot harder then making a decent multi-player mod.

As for co-op - it rocks!
Beats me why so a lot of FPS games of late have multi-player, but no co-op / potential for co-op. I was upset when I found out ST:EF had separate .exe's (one SP, one MP). When RtCW, JK2 and SoF2 came out like that, I was totally pissed off. While I understand the reasons behind the separate versions, I don't have to be happy about it

Was looking forwad to playing Halo co-op, but damned if I'll buy an X-Box!!
(Yeah I know, PC/Mac version IS finally on the way...)

Unreal was a powerful mess.
UT2k3 seems more powerful, with out so much mess