Eternal Silence is a Source mod that has been under development since 2003 and already has released several version.
It set in a sci-fi universe with 2 opposing forces battling each other. You as player start out as an infantry soldier on your baseship in the usual FPS style. You goal is to get into the mothership of the other team and capture all controlpoint, while defending your own. To do this, you'll have to enter your hangar, where you can find various different smaller spaceship which you can fly through space to the opponent's baseship. The spaceship fights in this game are awesome and feel just like in wing-commander.

I really liked this mod when I tried it almost a year ago. The new 3.2 version is already finished and is due to be released on Steam within this month.
What I ask from you guys is to try out the current version. If enough people like it enough we might have found a game that is worth hosting.

http://www.eternal-silence.net/

Absolutely agree with you, demm. Eternal Silence is without question ingenious although, like virtually all MODs, it's a bit rough on the edges (e.g. model animations). If you ask me ES is one of the MODs that Valve could pick up to propel it to epic greatness (like CS and DoD).

I also think that it's a great MOD for communities like ours since it requires lots of teamwork and good coordination.

I have 3.1 but truth be told I want to wait for 3.2 because it will bring lots of new features and bug fixes.

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

Sounds like Battlefield 2142.
But it sounds good to me, will give it a try in the next time.

Demm, you got my blessing!

Well... actually no. Because what I don't like about BF is that what's fun in that game isn't what your goal is. It's fun for me to fly/drive around and shoot stuff, but it's not fun to get into one of those bunkers and capture it. What this leads to (at least all the games I played on some public servers) is one half of the team trying to achieve the objectives and the other half simply not caring and doing something useless (but more fun).

In ES flying around the mothership and shoot stuff is not also fun, but it is your objective as well. And the FPS part is pretty good as well.

Speaking of more MODs - another one we should keep an eye out on is Dystopia (http://www.dystopia-game.com/). It will be coming out on Steam soon-ish as well and is one of the oldest playable Source Engine MODs (when it comes to total conversions) - not to mention probably the most polished one. I will post some encouragement like demm when the new version is out.

It's basically a cyberpunk class-based MOD with a twist - it has an alternate "cyberspace" to which you can connect through special implants and then hack or protect objectives - or duke it out with other hackers. ^^

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

I only said "it sounds like" not "it is".

Dystopia is awesome as well, but tbh the whole cyberspace thingy is just unnecessary.

The heavy in Dystopia is just great!

Sounds like Star Wars Battlefront II TBH... which is by the way a really entertaining game

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[SpA]Revenge "Wheres the element of surpise :/"

[SpA]Mint "IN.... MY....PANTS"

[SpA]Minimoose "Revenge is going to jump out of your pants?"

Stop speculating what Eternal Silence is "sounding like" and download it and play with us. :-D
It's free after all. ^^

One word of advice: don't try to be a fighter ace if you have no joystick. Yes, you can use the keyboard to pilot the craft or switch to Freelancer-esque mouse controls but this is only sufficient for simple tasks like troop transports etc. Without a joystick you will only snatch fighters from the hands of more suited players and piss them off to no end. ES is similar to the BF series in that regard.

Sooo - who wants to play Eternal Silence or Dystopia? :-D

SonnY already told me that his graphics card is overstrained by ES so he probably can't join the fun.

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

Graphics doesn't look all too nice (reminds me of the Starwars map for Counter-Strike 1.6, eugh). Giving it a shot later.

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slurper

By the way - 3.1 should be used only to familiarize yourself with the game, the moment demm envisioned a SpA server coming up, from what I gathered from chatting with him, is when 3.2 will be released on Steam. This is a good moment to try and lure people onto our servers and into our community since a Steam release always brings a considerable player surge for any MOD and there aren't that many European Eternal Silence servers we would have to compete with (only two to be precise ;-).

Anyways - I assume that nobody will read the game manual so I'd like to present a very quick and rough tutorial how to play Eternal Silence - it's a bit more complex than other MODs and you need to know what you're supposed to do so as not to run around aimlessly.

The basic "game flow", as taken from the ES site, looks like this:



The game starts with the "Strike" phase where everybody is flying in spacecraft and trying to take down the three corvettes protecting the enemy base-ship/station.

To do that you need bombers - they can fire their Ion projectiles (secondary fire) slightly outside the corvette's range (target the corvette and approach it until a small leading reticule appears - then fire away). Of course fighter pilots must protect their bombers and take down enemies.

The moment all three corvettes are destroyed the attack/defense phase begins depending on if you lost your own corvettes or destroyed the enemy ones.

At this moment you (or the enemy) can take gunships, which double as mobile spawn and supply points by the way, to the opposing base and deploy troops. This phase lasts around five minutes since after that all the corvettes respawn.

The attack/defense phase plays out similarly to Battlefield games - you need to capture/defend certain critical ship systems. Captured points function as spawn locations as well. Also, capturing shields or weapons has the added benefit of stopping the capital ship from firing or making it much weaker against your own capital ship's attacks - remember that the space battle between the larger ships is still taking place but it usually makes no sense to fly around with smaller craft at this point.

If you manage to capture all points or cripple the enemy ship so that it is destroyed you have won the map.

I hope this helps a bit since although everything is explained in-game many people skip the tutorial messages and are confused later on.

The full manual can be found here:

http://www.eternal-silence.net/manual.php

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

Have to admit it sounds quite interesting.
Maybe I'll try it out.

edit: downloading right now.
Just takes a long time...
Internet here in my parents home sucks, I just love my 16Mbit connection in germany.

edit2: just tried out the game and I think it has a lot of potential for some awesome space fights.
Unfortunately all servers I found with a decent latency had no players on it.
So I was flying around alone, but this allowed me to learn the controls and know how the game works etc.
Hope to see some regulars and SpA members ingame soon!

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Ze Ãœbermensch

Don't expect too many players on Christmas Eve...

The "problem" with ES is that such a large and diverse skill set is required to master the game. The more complicated a game is, the more frustrating it gets for people being owned by expert players.

From what I gather it's due to some pr0 clans emptying the servers that there aren't that many players left...

While there is the FPS element where everybody can get lucky, you won't even get to see it in action on the enemy side as long as you don't win space battles and a couple of experienced players can easily own the whole enemy team since flying spaceships is a central game mechanic, not just a tactical addition like e.g. in the BF series.

Microsoft Allegiance immediately comes to my mind - it's probably one of the most complex and best multiplayer games but barely anybody heard about it. It lives to this very day because Microsoft (YA RLY!) published the source code... It's basically a Space-Sim with RTS elements (a commander giving orders to players and building structures) but there's SO MUCH to learn before you start doing anything meaningful that the experience might be too intimidating.

Even I resorted mostly to scouting and leaving behind probes, laying minefields or doing nanite jobs (a kind of repair beam) during bomber runs and that after several months of playing. No wonder - the guys who play Allegiance have been doing so for years so are incredibly experienced pilots, virtually unbeatable by a newbie under normal circumstances.

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

By the way - I'm trying to gather some people to play Eternal Silence today at ~20:00 CET (GMT+1).

We (at least I) will be playing on this server:

UKMANDOWN.CO.UK | Ver 3.1 | N00B Friendly | Eternal n00bs |#1|
212.219.8.120:27016

I hope to see some other people as well - I'd say that ES starts making sense at around 6 people although the more, the merrier.

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

I guess I'd like to give it a try, but I also guess that I wont make it until then, still downloading TF2.

So, you didn't exaggerate the slowness of your connection. ^^

ES is a much smaller download than TF2 though.

3.2 Trailer to convince some more people. =)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f827Y51L ... 26fmt%3D18[/youtube]

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

Looks fun, I'll wait till 3.2 though.

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a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig

Thanks for the game today, m!gu and demm! We managed to attract a total of like 8 or 9 public players - incredible. ;-)
Nevertheless later on the frustrating part of ES kicked in: we had an ES pr0 on the server and since there were so few people playing we literally couldn't do crap against him in space battles - what follows is that we couldn't EVER destroy the enemy corvettes and hence were pretty much stuck in an unwinnable game from the beginning. :-\

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

Well... tbh I think ES is not mainstream enough for us to host.

ES feels too much like a HL2 mod. The problem is that HL2 is already 4 years old and ES looks like that too.
The space fights are nicely done and it's incredible how well this works on the Source engine, but without a proper joystick you can't really enjoy them.
Somehow I get the same feeling as with Spore and the different game modes. Neither of the modes alone has enough depth to be interesting for a longer period of time and just sticking them together doesn't really increase the overall depth of the game.



I will be looking into Dystopia again. They recently announced that they will be launched on Steam as well. The game has been very polished a few years back and I'm curios how it looks today. It's also more similar to TF and since 99% of our community can play it for free it's certainly worth a look.

Well I have to say I enjoyed playing yesterday, even if the game is kinda confusing at first.
Spacefights require some experience in order to know what you are doing.
But I think you can learn it kinda quick.
I really would like to see what the game is like with 20+ players, but I guess this will never happen as barely no one plays it.

I'm also open for other Mods though, if people here are willing to get together and play a game or two.

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Ze Ãœbermensch