Foundry (Faceposer)

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Not to be confused with Foundry (for communicating between the engine and Hammer).

Risk of Confusion:It is not an engine tool, but instead simply a one way link from Faceposer to the engine.

Faceposer Foundry is a feature present in Alien Swarm's Faceposer, it accessible in the "Foundry" menu, with the "Play scene in engine" action. It does not require loading the Foundry DLL, as it is not an engine tool; it instead uses the  Windows API to send commands to the engine.

Overview

When running the action, Faceposer will check if a scene is loaded, and if it's the case, it will rebuild scenes.image.

Faceposer will then send 2 commands to the engine :

• The first one is scene_flush, which reloads scenes.image.
• The second is load faceposer\scenename, where scenename is the name of the currently loaded scene in Faceposer.

Note:Because the load command loads save files, it is assumed this feature is supposed to be used with scene_vcdautosave (in all games since ) ^[confirm]. But scene_vcdautosave doesn't save in the faceposer folder, and it doesn't name its saves by the scene name ^[confirm].

Confirm:How is the save supposed to be loaded then ? Creating the save manually doesn't even seem to work because of the backslash.

Note:Because Alien Swarm doesn't support saving/loading, using a game such as Portal 2 is required to get a bit of this feature working.

Bug:Due to how the function for sending the commands to the engine is coded, the window indicating the engine is not running will pop up as much time as a command is run, so twice in this case.  [todo tested in ?]

The feature does nothing afterwards, therefore it can be considered unfinished.