Invasion Mod on OA?

Invasion is a mod for Q3A inspired by the Alien movies. Two fractions (marines and aliens) fight against each other and try to accomplish a certain goal, which for the marines can be destroying all alien eggs or grabbing an egg and getting to a teleporter. As players can chose among various marine types (armor and weapons) and alien races (different abilities) it's interesting if cooperative play is possible. All human players can join one team and bots will fill the opposing one, but don't expect a clever AI behind it. It works and that's important. Especially the aliens respawn all together, which leads into an aggressive bunch of foes approaching into the crowd of egg searching marines who cannot respawn.

Olivier asked me after reading my HUNT post if there is an option to get Invasion running on Open Arena. Besides the missing textures, which will hopefully be only a matter of time, exact replacements of Q3A playermodels won't be created. Unlike HUNT in Invasion, playermodels are fixed to the chosen armor class or alien race and are hard coded into the game logic.

On Open Arena it runs actually with default models at least if you enable cg_forcemodel and only the missing textures are a problem. If you are really into getting it working just get the sourcecode from the Invasion website and change the playermodels yourself. You will just miss a few nice skins for Orbb, Klesk and others.

Comparing its coop qualities I enjoy the fast gameplay, a nice HUD, and great weapons (no Q3A guns are used). A real Alien feeling emerges when playing Xenomorph and running across the ceiling, being the death from above. Too bad the places where eggs have to be destroyed are always the same so provided maps, which are great, get pretty repetitive. Anyway for me it is entertaining and I would prefer it over HUNT "Save the Universe". On the other hand the latter offers tons of randomized stuff you can never predict and especially "Escape from Hell" is my favourite, when it comes to coop.

Olivier did you check Tremolous and an Invasion mod for it? Maybe you will get what you are looking for. I have not tried any of these yet but I remember I had good times playing AvP1+2 multiplayer a long time ago.

HUNT mod on OA

A wish for cooperative gametypes was stated on oa-forums so I remembered good old HUNT for Q3A.

This mod offers two new gametypes that bring coop experience and serious weapon changes. You shouldn't play this alone as it gets way harder then. One gametype is named Save The Universe which is played in normal FFA/TDM/CTF maps that come with Open Arena. The mission is collecting a certain amount of artifacts that are symbolized by the quad powerup.

The second coop gametype is called Escape From Hell and takes place in long, randomized maps where the goal is simply reaching the exit.

Of course both types of play are not easy as players are not alone in the maps and monsters of various sizes and skills try to stop them. That's where cooperative play comes in. There is a certain amount of lives players share for every map and respawn is only possible if at there is at least one player alive and there are enough lives left.

The mod runs out of the box except the default monster models which are set to Quake 3 player models (klesk, tankjr) and have to be changed. This can be done by HUNT options menu or via console. A small config could do this for you. This config is included in a small additional xoa_textures.pk3 file I created to solve a texture missing problem as one of the randomized maps that comes with HUNT uses Q3A textures.

A playable mod with all required files is downloaded when you connect to the running HUNT server if you enable automatic downloading on your client. If you connect a second time sometimes you get disconnected quickly without entering the game. This happens when connecting from standard Open Arena and can be fixed by launching the mod first (via mod menu) and making sure the right monster models are set (eg. '/exec autoexec.cfg' if you already have xoa_textures.pk3 in your HUNT folder) and then connect to the server.

To have a little coop challenge this server creates a HIGHSCORE of each map played. So the fastest missions and the highest scores appear in these tables. I'm curious who will appear there over time. :)