Hi, excellent work on this mod!
Something I've always considered a flaw in Half-Life... i n Questionable Ethics, when you pick up the tau cannon it is supposed to be a big dramatic moment (you get cool "James Bond" style music)... except that there is actually a possibility that the player might have killed all the enemies in the labs before picking up the tau cannon.
When you come up the stairs there is a fight between bullsquids and hgrunts. Depending on how it goes, other soldiers might come from the far end of the corridor to fight the bullsquids. Also there is a high likelihood of the player pursuing the soldiers and/or bullsquids to finish them off, and encountering the other soldiers in the lab at the other end of the corridor. The is a good chance of the player wiping out all the soldiers, and you end up with noting to use the tau cannon on except a few houndeyes in the last laser lab.
I can think of a couple of solutions to this:
1) The easy option is to spawn in some hgrunts once the player has grabbed the tau cannon, or when the player presses the button to turn on the laser in the room.
This might feel a little cheap (where did they come from?!) but the normal game does stuff like that anyway. For instance in Power Up, when you go down to the bottom level and turn on the power, the upper levels repopulate with soldiers and some come down an elevator, despite there being no obvious place for them to come from. So there's certainly precedent for this. (And, it would only be noticable to the player if the player made a point of going to all the other auxillary laser labs first and making sure there were no enemies.)
Narratively it would make sense that soldiers could arrive due to the explosions caused by the scientist and security guard messing around with the tau cannon. Or the soldiers notice you turning on the auxillary laser (which bounces around the ceiling to the main laser room) and they come to check out who turned it on.
2) Alternatively, there could be some way to "funnel" the player towards the laser lab with the tau cannon before encountering all of the soldiers . Perhaps closed doors in front of the other labs. They could be like the emergency blast doors that close when you activate the electric steriliser machines in the labs below. They don't necessarily need to be locked, they could be openable with a button next to each door, but if the main laser lab and and auxiliary laser labs aren't all immediately open to the corridor with hgrunts running in and out of them then it reduces the liklihood of the player fighting those soldiers before getting the tau cannon.
Once the player picks up the tau cannon (or activates the auxiliary laser) then those blast doors could open, supposedly triggered by the soldiers investigating what the commotion outside is.
your_evil_twin
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