Call of Duty: Source

Moddb.com is a website for team of modders to promote their mods. This is the place I have been looking at for a mod of the HL2 engine geared toward a world I am friendly with: the CoD serie and the MoH serie. I have been playing MoH since the Playstation release and it is an all time favourite when it comes to FPS with a WWII theme. I have since been playing vCoD (vanilla CoD), the expansion pack for it UO, CoD2 and CoD4. I had a go at CoD3 on XBox, but I was less than impressed. I have tried a few FPS on the side, but I consistently came back to this serie for the fun I have with it, even with the last instalment I played (CoD4) which changes the theme to a modern area (IE the weaponry was suddenly more forgiving with all those full automatic assault riffle and other added features).

Like so many others in the community I have been less and less happy with the development of the franchise (the first being run by EA, and the second by Activision). So many things have been left out. So many things are being implemented that should be left out. But I have no access to the code and modding for the CoD serie means that every year or so the current code base has to be ported to which ever new game is being released, as Activision is seeing this as a product to be pushed every 12 months. I won't even look at the modding situation in the MoH serie as EA has not only a bad reputation of after release management, but proved it many times over.

So I have decided to have a look for myself at the possibility to port MoH and early CoD games into an environment that is a bit more stable. The choice of the Source Engine is quite obvious for someone like me: in between a gamer only and solely a developer. I've heard so many things about the Source Engine that I have to see for myself. The good point about this engine is that it is modding friendly: you have access to the source code, it is fully in C++ and it is related to the Quake engine. I don't have to remind anyone that the MoH/CoD series have been developed from a modified version of the quake3 engine. So I hope I am not making any mistakes assuming that it'll be easier to navigate through that code than, let say, the UT3 one. And being a engine still in use for recent games (L4D being the latest) there is good hope that the support will be far greater, even if it is from the community.

So I've spend a day configuring my dev machine to have the following: a working installation of HL2, steam, HL2DM, VS2008, SVN to be able to go through the different explanation of the code I could find online. I am hoping to be able to make some progress.