OpenAG

Despite most developers’ valiant efforts to tailor the product’s usage experience according to the customers’ preferences, there is only so much that feedback surveys and telemetry-powered reports can do in terms of painting a picture regarding their needs.

The same can be applied to video games, where Valve, the company behind the critically acclaimed Half-Life title, acknowledged the importance of this issue and allowed talented members of the gaming community to use its assets and create spin-offs that not only further develop other parts of the storyline, but also enhance the vanilla experience, leading to dedicated projects such as OpenAG.

While the original Adrenaline Gamer mod stopped receiving updates years ago, some members of the modding community teamed up to rewrite it from the ground up and make the resulting source code openly available for anyone to make their own variant with custom changes.

In a nutshell, the idea behind the program at hand is to provide players with an optional launcher and server browser for the multiplayer component of the Half-Life game, while also fixing certain bugs and polishing the experience in previously unavailable ways. For instance, custom weapons provided by some servers can have varying degrees of recoil and bullet spread, which is why OpenAG lets you increase the size of the crosshair and customize the gun’s viewmodel to prevent it from obscuring the player’s vision and thus increase the immersion where necessary.

Servers hosting team deathmatch game modes can have a particular theme whose player models can be difficult to see from a certain distance or glitchy, depending on how well they were ported to the GoldSource engine. As a result, the app also gives you the ability to change the team’s or individual player’s model manually, which can drastically improve the gameplay for those preferring the lore-friendly alternatives of the Half-Life universe.

Whether you are looking for a way to alter the current HUD’s color, display a speedometer or switch to a left-handed point of view for the weapons, OpenAG’s wide range of commands, openly available source code and compatibility with the original mod should be the right call for anyone wishing to improve their Half-Life deathmatch gameplay.