The Maddest My Code Made Anyone

I was lucky enough to grow up through the early 2000’s, during the golden age of Half-Life mods. Industry classics like Counter-Strike (CS) had just been invented, every month brought new mods to try, and files were too big to download on a dial-up connection so you’d leech them off a server at a big local LAN party. One of my personal favourites was Natural Selection (NS), a sci-fi marines-vs-aliens deal where one of the marine players had to command the others, RTS-style, from a command chair. If you’ve never heard of it before, this 2022 video review of NS will give you a sense of what it was like.

As Half-Life modding matured, some really interesting inventions appeared. MetaMod was a C++ framework that interposed itself between the server binary and the actual mod DLL, allowing you to inject custom behaviour into an existing mod. I didn’t understand enough C++ to write MetaMod plugins, but that didn’t matter: AMX Mod and later AMX Mod X let you write custom plugins using a simpler C-style language called Pawn (known back then as “Small”). This enabled an explosion of ways for operators to tweak their game servers: quality-of-life improvements for players, reserved player slots for members, and delightfully bonkers gameplay changes. I remember having my mind blown the first time I stumbled upon a game of CS with a class-based perks system, inspired by Warcraft 3, and that was just one instance of the creativity that came from the AMX(X) modding scenes.

And with the Half-Life-specific background covered, we are now ready to talk about NS: Combat and my gloriously dumb contribution to the AMXX world.

The original release of NS was hard to enjoy at low player counts. It was balanced for 6v6, so confining one marine to the command chair hurt the marine team a lot. This was also before the era of server-side match-making, so if nobody was around you’d join your local (often ISP-provided) game server and hang out, hoping enough people would come online to get a good game going.

To address these problems, the NS team added a simpler alternative mode called “combat” as part of the mod’s 2.0 release. Combat maps were much smaller and removed the resource-gathering and RTS elements in favour of a much simpler goal: the marines had to destroy the alien hive, and the aliens had to destroy the (unoccupied) command chair. With the resource system removed, players instead earned XP and levels for kills and assists, and could spend those levels on upgrades, advanced morphs (aliens), or weapons and equipment (marines).

Combat was perhaps too successful: it was designed as a lightweight substitute for the real game, for when you didn’t have a lot of players. But it quickly overtook classic NS in popularity and stayed that way for the rest of the mod’s lifespan. Of course, AMXX modders extended the combat mode in all kinds of broken ways; the main one raised the level cap beyond 10 and added additional upgrades to spend those levels on. It was colloquially known as “xmenu”, because it added a /xmenu player command, opening a menu of new upgrades to spend those additional levels on.

But I liked NS for the buildings! To me, that was what made NS special. Since I could code well enough to write AMXX plugins, I added them to the combat game mode. The Combat Buildings plugin gave players a new /buildmenu command that let them spend their levels to place structures.

The release was surprisingly controversial. Some people rather liked it, but the people who hated it really hated it. One of the ModNS forum moderators (in a long-deleted post, sadly) called it “the most ridiculous concept I have ever seen on these fora”. And here is the maddest my code has ever made anyone:

But as absolutely terrible as /xmenu is, /buildmenu is the god damned devil. Buildmenu is an abomination upon the lord that is causing the universe to unravel and all heretics who follow the terribleness that is buildmenu shall perish in hell. I’d like to give a big thanks to whoever created /buildmenu for making THE WORST COMBAT PLUGIN EVER.

You’re welcome.

I was very taken aback when I first saw this comment, but these days I cherish it. It reminds me one of the first times my code had a big impact on a community. Enough people liked it that I made the final versions of Combat Buildings integrate with other plugins, allowing servers where the aliens could build on walls and ceilings, or allowing players to build in the custom marine vs. marine and alien vs. alien game modes. I loved the feeling of making a game play by my rules, of building on others’ work, of being part of a community and swapping knowledge, and of making cool (dumb) stuff happen just because I willed it. Those feelings don’t ever get old, and are a big reason why I still love hacking on things.