[Mod]Alien Swarm: Open Upgrade

[Loswaith]

This is a copy of the original post I made over at Swarm Armoury.  I felt having it in its entirety here was better served.
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This is something I was working on last year (and plan to continue on) and with all the hectic things going on around Christmas and new years I didn't have a chance to post it up. It also required some last bug testing before I was happy to release it for use.
I've been fairly tight lipped about it, because with most projects you never know how long it will take or if it will ever come to fruition.
Ill get to the info on it instead of boring people with idle chatter.

Alien Swarm: Open Upgrade (ASW: Open Upgrade)
This is a mod that adds on to the basis of Alien Swarm.  What it adds is the ability to make your own Marines

That's right make your own Marines.
It doesn't change the way the game plays outside of the effect of skills and classes but does give that little bit more flexability to play around with marine designs.
Its purely a mod at the marine selection level.
Its still in Semi-Alpha/Beta stage but the core functionality of the what the mod will offer is done.

The mod offers 4 customisable Marines (on-top of the original 8 ), each with an assigned base profile that can be altered as you see fit.
What you can alter:
Ability to select a class and thusly determining 2 primary skills (shown below)
 

Commander: Leadership and Vindicator Damage
Specialist Weapons: Autogun Damage and Piercing Bullets
Medic: Healing and Cure Infestation
Technician: Engineering and Scanners

Ability to assign any of the non class skills (shown below) to the remaining 3 slots

Combat Drugs
Damage Bonus
Explosives Bonus
Health Bonus
Melee Damage Bonus
Reload Speed Bonus
Speed Bonus

The ability to reset and assign a set number of skill points to a character.

Each character gains 15 skill points by default to assign to any of their selected 5 skills
The number of skills points a marine gets can be changed with a consol command
Consol Command format: asw_ou_marine_skill_points <number of skill points>
Eg: "asw_ou_marine_skill_points 20" without the quote marks will give each character 20 skill points to spend

The Mod:
Alien Swarm: Open Upgrade v1.11.37 (18.4MB)
Edit Note: This is the release version, more info below (I've included a self-extracting 7zip archive in a normal zip file to make it more accessable to people.  I don't generally like posting .exe files to the web which is why its not just the file directly.)

Installation Instructions:
Note: Note: The File is a self extracting 7zip.exe inside a normal zip file, so just extract it from the zip and run the exe.
Make sure you have Alien Swarm Installed (the mod wont work without it)
Unzip the folder in its current format to your steam/SteamApps/SourceMods folder
Restart Steam and the mod should appear
These last few steps are very important, without them the mod will crash on loading.
Right click the ASW: Open Upgrade and select properties
Under the general tab (usually the only one) click the "Set Launch Options" button
Enter "-override_vpk" without the quotes and click ok. Make sure to include the leading '-'.
Run the Mod like any other game or mod.

Mod Images
Marine Selection
Marine Customisation
Changing Skills
Changing Class

Custom Maps
 To be able to use custom maps you use with Alien Swarm the simplest way is to simply copy the add-ons folder into the ASW: Open Upgrade folder.
So copy the 'addons' folder from ../steam/SteamApps/common/Alien Swarm/swarm
and paste it in the folder ../steam/SteamApps/SourceMods/asw_openupgrade/
This should let you select any custom maps as you would for Alien Swarm.
If I find a better solution Ill add it or if anyone knows one please let us all know - thanks .

Differences from Alien Swarm:
All Skills have 5 ranks
Existing Marine profiles have been altered to fit with the 5 rank skills to keep their 3 rank skill equivlent effect
The ability to enable Skill point gains across missions had been disabed.
Marine Selection no longer shows the Marine's Bio.

Known Issues:
IF you start a game, quit out to the main menu and start a new game it will cause the mod to crash.
This happens due to the linking of alien swarm to the steam server where achievements and the like are stored.
I didn't want to disable this feature as I wanted players of Asw: Open Upgrade to still be able to gain experience in the main campaign.

Future Plans:
The mod has achieved the basics of what I wanted it to do.  I do however have some future things I would like to implement (assuming I even can).

Marine Portrait selection
Marine Voice selection
Additional Skill points for Promotions
Default Weapons automatically updating with skill choices
Release of the Source Code, for those that want to add it into their own mods.

Last words:
Its not as efficient as I had hoped for but does work, if anyone can point me in a direction that deals with or has tutorials on network variable Array Proxies in Source, that would help me get allot better efficiency out of the mod.

Enjoy, and feel free to let me know of any bugs, feeback or ideas you have in the mods regards.

Release Notes:
Alien Swarm: Open Upgrade v1.11.37 (18.4MB)
 This is the version I'm releasing.  Most of the things I wanted to add have been scraped for various reasons, that I'll explain below.

Portrait and Voice Selection: Unfortunately getting the voices to be able to be changed doesn't quite work as I'd like.  They actually get initialised on the mission loading and the marine selection is after that process, making it next to impossible to get the right voice working for all queues in the game.

As an alternative a friend mentioned that opening up all the marines for customisation, would achieve basically what I was after with allowing voice and portrait selection.  So now all marines can be customised not just the additional 4 slots I added. 

Skills Determining Default Loadout: As for skills determining weapons equipped we found that it was kinda pointless because as you unlock more weapons you tended to change them anyway, so the hit on performance for changing the weapons as skills really wasn't worth having.  A downside to this is when changing classes, marines can carry weapons they wouldn't otherwise be able to. 
I don't mind so much, since for the most part I'm sure people will typically be playing with friends, also the marines don't have the skills that will be increasing damage on those weapons.  Besides it can be fun to occasionally play an engineer with an autogun or vindicator .

Skill points for Promotions: We discovered in playing this tended to unbalance the game slightly between the new, casual and hardcore players. I really wanted the mod to be accessable to all levels of play or experience, for much the same reasons I left in the ability to gain XP disspite it causing a bug.

Source Code:
ASW: OU Source v1.11.37 (30.1 MB)
  Here is the sourcecode (in a 7zip archive), with the visual studio 2008 files included.
Feel free to use the code in your own mods, I'd just like the credit for the work
To make it easy to find I have added Loswaith commented to the bits of code I have changed, so a search should let you find all the pieces.

Edit: Updated the links Dropbox has broken with their changes.