Grand Theft Modification – General Information „Again just another semi-realistic Half-Life Modification which tries to beat the mighty Counter-Strike!“. That's what you might have thought coming to our webpage. Well, you were right in one point, we want to take the lead in the herarchy of the Half-Life modifications, this goal is gonna take some more time to achieve, but, unlike the other yet released mods, Grand Theft, or GT, as all of the team members call it, does not try to copy Counter-Strike. We want to create a much more realistic and team-oriented gameplay as well as a whole new athmosphere for Valve's great game. The general subject is the classical robbery-situation, with a team of Thieves that has to steal a certain objective placed in the game environment and a Security Force which should keep the bad guys from doing so. Also, in order to force the players to play really team-oriented and well-thought, a condition many mods failed to provide. For that reason, we designed different classes for both fractions with individual abilities, advantages and disadvantages, making them easy to eliminate alone but strong playing in a team with a good strategy.

The next thing we wanted to get done was to create an ego-shooter that is less quake-style and doesn't live by making huge massacres and drowning the maps in blood. An aspect of this is that there are no heavy weapons in the mod, at first we only wanted pistols, knives and bats to be available, later we powered up the Securities' heavy guard by giving him a small pump action shotgun. The thieves have the best chance to win and get their job done by staying unseen and unlocated throughout the whole mission operating in the darkness and finishing all off before a Security Officer is able to react. In a one on one fight Thief versus a Security Officer the Thief has about a 1-on-100 chance to survive the dance. The mod will have a very tactical and secret-ops feeling, introducing as much realism and tactics an ego shooter can have. If you wish some further information about the classes, their weapons and abilities, read the full info.

Now just a few more words about the team and how we got to this point. Ismael, Tliffrag, neoNaut and me had the idea to do our own modification in one of Mr Stein's exciting arts lessons. Very soon, the base structure of the mod was present, as well as the decision to use the engine of Valve's Game Of The Year 1998 Half-Life. Although there was one member who would have preferred making a mod for the Unreal Engine, we decided that the yet very old, but still quite up to date and very compatible HL-Engine fitted better into our concept (we didn't want the real-life-robberies to take place on board of some science fiction space ship). Although the team was small, we already had the potential to get our mod done, because we had a specialist for every purpose and were able to cover every part of the mod development.

Tliff, the best coder at our school (big lol, ras), famous for php-scripts and small stuff like that, had his first really big task, neoNaut, who had yet experimented with different maps for standard HL filled the postion of the lead mapper, Ismael, who is not only a awesome talented 3d artist, but has the ability to produce loads of polies in no time, started doing the first person weapon models for the young mod and me, Rascal, up to that time only had only done some small UT Maps, was applicated as Mapper, but quite soon changed to the Modeling Section. Work progresses, but we refuse to announce a release date for not to get into time problems and have to release a buggy, almost unplayable and unfinished alpha version of our mod. The mod will be released „when it's done“. Stay tuned and check the news for further updates! Stay cool
RASCAL