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.