I'm the author, and I agree with pretty much everything you wrote - NS was special and trying to preserve that specialness was why I put the buildings into Combat in the first place. I miss that era of experimentation both in mods and commercial releases. I would've loved to be online during the heyday of Tribes 2 or Planetside.

Ironically, I don't think I ever consciously built in xmenu<->buildmenu support (though I don't have the .amxx file to hand to check); that was a surprise to me. IIRC, both ExtraLevels and Combat Buildings used the NS module for AMXX to read write the "unspent level points" for the player. Placing buildings was a lot less crazy when you had to spend one of your nine precious levelups on a welder or a gorge morph, and then spend another on each building.

Combat Buildings made Combat pretty stupid, ExtraLevels made Combat really stupid, but the combination was way stupider than the sum of its parts.

Fate was probably determined at the point that combat came out, xmenu just accelerated it with absurd upgrades that let one person steamroll the server (though it was sometimes fun to be that one person, it wasn't for the other half of the server...)

At least your mod brought back the building aspect, cheers for that.

Both of planetside and tribes were amazing. This was really before the age of competitive gaming so it was actually fun to play and not just another day job

I couldn't remember if I'd played this mod - then I saw the teeth/mouth that surrounds the screen when you play on the alien team in one of the screenshots and it all came flooding back.

Original HL had an absolutely awesome modding community. As well as the huge one (CS) there were tweaks to make it better in all sorts of ways: - Adrenaline Gamer or AG - which changed the movement a little to make deathmatch super fast-paced. - Bubble Mod - which make a few gameplay tweaks to make deathmatch more sensible and manageable in large servers

...and I even wrote my own for the deathmatch games we played on our LAN at Uni, which announced a particularly annoying players name whenever he got fragged.

Don't really have time for these things any more!

> It was one of the most original and novel video games i've ever played, only planetside comes close.

I think I'd throw Tribes (2) in there as well. Those were the days.

Tribes was so amazing it’s sad that all future releases failed. That being said the core game was pre meh but with mods it was so much fun

I play NS2 sometimes, which still has a pretty active community.

It's a tough game to get into and even harder to get good at commanding since being a bad commander will sink your whole team. But it feels extremely rewarding to play on a well-coordinated team.

You guys should try the current crop of FPS games like "Hell Let Loose" which actually require a lot of strategy and coordination! HLL, for example, has huge battles with commanders and several squads of different types with squad leaders, and you earn upgrades and abilities over the game as you take positions and etc. I haven't played that one for a while, but it could scratch that same itch that NS scratched.

I could never figure out the bunny jumping. And the eyeballs in mouth thing bothered me for a while, but people on the forums thought I was nuts. :(

That said, NS was prob my favorite multiplayer game of all time... After Age of Empires 2, OFC.