As I predicted, a short 2-map campaign like Crash Course would force Valve to introduce new ways to control certain aspects of the maps, which were until now pretty inflexible.

***** Panic Event Control *****

OK, if you've read my topic (Mobs, Crescendos, and Director behavior) you know that mappers have very limited control over panic events.

Now, you can at least control the number of waves a panic event will have (with 5-second pauses and all). This is accomplished by sending a PanicEventControlled input to the director entity, where the parameter is the number of waves you want. (Ie: 0 will give you 1 wave, 2 will give 2 waves, etc. No negative numbers).

***** Witches and Tanks in First Maps *****

Witches and Tanks (aka "boss infected") would never spawn on 1st maps of campaigns on Coop. There is a 10% chance in versus however.

Now there are new settings on the missions file which give you some control over witch and tank spawns on every map. They are "SpawnBossThreats" and "versus_boss_spawning". You can control the chance of tanks, witches or both and also which range on the map they can spawn (ie: 10% distance up to 90% distance).

For further information, refer to the garage.txt file in the missions folder.

***** Map name conflicts fixed *****

Any of you who have played custom campaigns might have noticed that the game is (was) rather dumb and would give you problems when 2 maps had the same name even though they belonged to different campaigns.

For example, I had Back to School which had a level named "Forest". Then there was a "Forest" on some other map. The game would load only the Back to School one regardless of the campaign I picked, causing great frustration.

Now it will recognize different campaigns and load the correct maps.

***** info_map_paramters_versus *****

There is a new entity (I believe it's new, don't recall seeing it before) which allows you to control the density of items and weapons (Pipe bombs, mollies, etc.) on Versus. It works like the info_map_paramters entity.

The existence of these 2 entities leads me to believe that the ridiculous amount of weapons and items on Crash Course was just Valve being careless and forgetting to set the values to something reasonable.

These are the ones I found so far. There might be more stuff.

Nice! Just firing up hammer to see what new mapping goodies we have. It's like Christmas!

Crash Course campaign is fun.. but I think there will be another update soon to fix the weapon densities. Interesting in the garage.txt to see the developer is listed as Turtle Rock Studios... the helicopter is a give away that it's the follow on campaign from No Mercy.

Can anyone access the developer commentary, other than No Mercy? Mine seems to be broken since this was all added.

YAY, new achievements!

Can anyone confirm there are any new models available in hammer please (I don't really want to wait 5 mins for it to open).

"Can anyone confirm there are any new models available in hammer please"

I haven't looked much but so far I've found :

- The crashed helicopter - NoMercy skin
- The crashed helicopter - plain grey skin
- armored escape van
- regular delivery van
- destroyable barrier wall
- destroyable guardshack
- guardrails
- railings
- bridges / bridge details
- trains
- billboard towers

That's interesting. It actually allows you to make a gauntlet style crescendo event. Just make a panic event with like 100 waves and have a second trigger kill the panic event to stop it.
And I wonder if it's possible to control the amount of Tanks that are spawned in each map. The Junge Ruins of Night Terror mostly has 2 AI Tanks and I'm not sure I like that... the AI Dir is a bit too tank-trigger happy on my map...

Thanks for the info churrasco. It's not the first time I learn a lot from one of your posts.

AFAIK it will only spawn multiple tanks on Coop; VS. is limited to 1 tank per round.

Thanks for the tutorial!
I see they added a new line in the info_map_parameters, to control weapon (non pistol) spawning, so you don't have to use entities, but it wont work for me, i tried the defauld 6.48 and even 0.5 but all non pistol weapons spawn EVERY TIME on the whole map.. help?
and where do i put this SpawnBossThreats?

looks like they are actually still developing a game even though number 2 is out in 6 weeks.

good call glad im still percevering with my campaign

Check the garage.txt file in the missions folder.