Randomizers

Most of what makes The Alternate Difficulties Mod different are the alterations to many of the games convars and director options. These are variables that contain numerous values for controlling how infected spawn, how much health things have, how fast things move, and many other values. There origin comes from wanting to separate the games logic from the games numeric values. They are not something created by the mod, the mod just edits them.

Currently almost all of the games values a set by a number that remains the same each time the game is played. The health of a tank for example will always be set to 4000 and then multiplied by a factor for the difficulty it appears in. The Alternate Difficulties mod applies randomizers to many values that used to be set by a single number just like the tanks health. This means in the example given that each tanks health will have a range value when spawned which might be something like 3600-4000 health so each tank spawn will have slightly different values for their health. All of the Special Infected and Tanks in The Alternate Difficulties mod have their healths randomized in this way and many other values that define them, making each one just a little bit different from the last one.

Randomizers are also used for determining how much damage players receive from regular zombie attacks and how much damage a zombie receives from non-head shots which used to be a flat amount. Numberous other things have also been given a very slight randomization applied to them, like the number of zombies spawned from a bile bomb, pipe bomb duration's, mob recharge rates, how often zombies can hit/strike players, max zombies per map, how many SI can spawn, which SI can spawn, and much more.