(Voluntary project so no payment)
Engine: GoldSrc (Half-Life)
Roles Needed: Level Designer, Programmer, Concept Artist

Hello and good day.
Lambda Team is working to revive the cancelled Hostile Takeover expansion as a mod. We aim to make it our own by taking the essence and adding our own ideas and creativity to make it unique and not just a copy.

It will be a Singleplayer campaign, set in Half-Life's universe during the events of the second half of the Resonance Cascade, in another region separate from Black Mesa. The player steps into the shoes of a junior G-man and works to complete his assignment while accompanied by members of Team Fortress: Classic (not TF2).

The mod will include:

• New combat mechanics with new and original weapons, plus G-man "powers".
• New and original NPCs that change up gameplay.
• New locations.

You will be working alongside the rest of the team, consisting of Writers and Game Designers who have already begun painting a good picture of the mod and its roadmap. As a member you will also be able to influence the design.
If you're interested, DM me in Discord @Chimz76 even if not meeting all requirements.

General Skill Requirements

• Good team spirit and communication.
• Open to feedback and criticism.

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Level Designer Skill Requirements:

• Familiar with Half-Life Level Editor tools.
• Familiar with Blockout/Grey Boxing and Fast Prototyping.
• At least one published Goldsource map.

Bonus Points:

• Familiar with concepts of Level Design.

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Programmer Skill Requirements:

• Able to code NPC behaviors.
• Able to code weapons.
• Familiar with FGD development.

Bonus Points:

• Familiar with Half-Life Featureful SDK.

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Concept Artist Skill Requirements:

• Able to work closely with designers.
• Able to paint pieces that can be read and used by modelers.
• Experience in painting weapons, creatures, characters.

Bonus Points:

• Experience in painting environments.

Hi

Weird nature about the internet. It's both a place to share and not share. What's ok to share, what's not?
Why do I feel more comfortable sending this here as opposed to other online communities, my online friends?

I don't need to share this. I could write this personally just for myself. In this case I already have but I think it's still a fascinating thing to think about.
Maybe it isn't at all and I'm just weird. I already know I am aha.

I'm kind of fortunate enough to have not suffered any major death in my life yet. My grandfather died whilst I was still in the weird "baby comatose state", so that didn't really effect me. I lost a dog, which sucks but at the end of the day isn't a human. A great uncle died and whilst it was a little upsetting, didn't effect me too much.

On Tuesday (yesterday for me) my whole class was gathered up. Someone from our grade had taken their own life. I was quite shocked. Still am.
I didn't really speak to the girl. We had spoken before but we weren't even 'just say hi acquaintances', very neutral to each other I suppose.
I think this is why I wasn't able to have a deeper, more physical emotional response. I simply didn't have that connection. I felt hit in a more "abstract", general or broader way. I just felt (and again still feel) numb, plain, blank, empty.

I couldn't relate to some of the other people in the class. I hadn't really lost somebody before and in this particular situation I didn't lose a friend or family member. Yet it still kind of really hit me. Nobody wants to think or expects that suicide is the path someone will take. Then to hear and have it confirmed they did is pretty heavy hitting.

I didn't speak to her but I saw her, I heard her. She was in my classes, she spoke, she did things. She had a presence within the grade.
Obviously what is shown to the outside doesn't always accurately reflect what somebody is feeling on the inside. Even knowing this concept it's still such a surprise. She was with me on a trip only two weeks ago, speaking and laughing with her friends. She was here last week. She was here Monday, alive. In between me leaving school and arriving in the morning on Tuesday she took her own life.

She's a young adult just like me, at a big opening point in life. She's a person just like me. There's an acknowledgement of her as a person that exists. It's not some far away, unrecognisable name or person.

It's also kind of struck me because I've never applied the thought of mortality to people at school. Obviously I know that death is a thing. Accidents, illnesses and unfortunately things like this can happen. Still, I don't think of a person at school, especially a student, especially one within my grade as being mortal. People dying within your grade isn't a thing that feels like it should happen.

Nobody will be able to gauge exactly all her thoughts and feelings, especially in the moment. I can't confirm whether she did or didn't try to reach out to somebody, whether in the past or even right before it happened. But to think how she must have felt. For however long she had been suffering and before taking her life. To think that at the end of it all, the only perceived option for her was to take her own life over anything else.

I guess it just makes me feel empty. I feel sad and weird because it happened. I then feel weird that I care so much despite having no real connection with her. I feel guilty that I get to just live right now. I feel guilty that I feel this way considering the way her friends and family must feel. I don't know what I can do support or help in the situation, I don't know whether I should.

I just don't know...


Journal over. A weirdly comforting song from a movie genre not so associated with comforting...

It's another revolution! Of Earth around the Sun...

Not much has happened in my life since last year. I'm continuously trying to come to terms with some emotional parts of my life and move on. Acceptance is the hardest thing in life. Taking care of your spirit, or soul, or whatever you want to call it (having a connection with something bigger than yourself) is harder than going to the gym. Constant negative news from the world, new wars, the war next door in Ukraine.... is sometimes taking a mental toll.
Yet, I find myself prepared better than ever to cultivate a positive outlook. Maybe life does get better in the 30s, who knows.

This year marks my first time I went snowboarding outside my country, and I visited the French Alps, specifically Les Trois Vallees! Here's a picture of me on one of the tops! I was constantly in awe at the landscapes. They're breathtaking! (especially at >3000m ) Last year I've also exchanged my Hornet for a Tracer, and now I'm timidly planning a hypothetical trip to Italy on 2 wheels. But I'm not sure yet, I think I need to find some partners. I did a 1000km trip last year and apparently it's not as comfortable as a car trip, who knew :)). I have second thoughts about all this stuff. I dream of spending a summer with a girl in my father's countryside orchard.

On the gaming front, I have very little time to play new titles, especially single player ones. I mostly play some CS2 with a couple of regulars now and then, and recently I played a few matches of Helldivers 2. I'm only level 10, but I think this game is a bit overrated. During the Christmas break I played and finished Talos Principle 2. I heartily recommend it, but to be played in order (so Talos Principle 1 -> Talos 2).

On the cinematic side, I guess everybody saw Dune 2. Other than that, haven't seen many new films. Maybe I'm out of the loop but most of the Hollywood stuff, with few exceptions, seems like the same series milked to death, same universes... it's growing stale and tiring. So for some reason I'm shifting my attention to European cinema. Recently I've watched Close (2022) and it was heart breaking. It's a dramatic coming-of-age story, it kinda reminded of some lost friendships, lost childhood innocence and being carefree, and relationships without closure.
I've also started watching The Three Body Problem, I think it has potential.

On the books side I recommend "Scattered minds" by Gabor Mate and books by Carlo Rovelli (ex: "White Holes").

How's everyone doing?

Some might've noticed I've been absent on the Pathos Engine channel of the TWHL Discord. I've been dealing with some problems in life and for the sake of my sanity I need to take some time off from the project. Yes, again, and this time for a bit longer. If you have any burning issues, please e-mail me at doommusic666@hotmail.com or submit an issue on the Pathos repository. Until then, take care.

One of these days I was doing my yearly pilgrimage to the Hazard Course when, for no particular reason, I decided to examine the more overlooked corners of those maps. So I took the HEV suit, went into the next room, and noclipped up to the pipes along the ceiling.
That's when I found this lil' guy: I had never seen this rat before. I had never heard any mention of this rat before. Has it always been there?

After this earth-shattering discovery, I realized that, though I knew the Hazard Course was the only place in the game rats could be found, I did not know how many. So I decided it was time to take a rat census. I looked on every nook and cranny I could think of, but didn't find any more, so for now, this should be the definitive answer: there are 5 rats in all of Half-Life.

Why did I do all of this? ...I don't know! I just think it's amazing how it's possible to keep learning new things about this game, even after you think you've seen everything. Now, what I want to know is: did YOU know about 🐀 #1?

Went to a hike. It was agonizing, but the view was worth it.

Every map has to be about something. There has to be a goal, a reward for pressing buttons, shooting enemies, solving puzzles. At least that's how I feel: I want to feel like I've achieved something beyond the sum of the tasks the map gives me. I've been trying to formulate some goal or other for a map I've been planning, and that's really been the hard part.

A campaign map doesn't have that problem. There's an overarching story to guide me, the goal is "make it through the level to the next plot bit". There's voice acting and cinematics to reward me, Alyx talking to her father, Kleiner broadcasting to the city, etc., all leading to the game's climax. But in a self-contained map, I have to provide the goal. I have to tell the player "this is what you're working towards".

My idea was, okay, there's a Combine installation that needs to be shut down or destroyed. That's easy enough. That's a common goal.

What kind of Combine installation, though? What does it do?

After all my puzzles and combat encounters, the player is gonna barge into that Combine installation and blow it up or flick the off switch or whatever. The actual act will be just as basic as the rest of the map: press a button. So that act of pressing the button needs to have meaning. What did I achieve when I blew up that Combine fortress?

Will this allow the rebels to mount some large offensive? Was it producing weapons? Churning out troops? Jamming communications? Conducting horrible experiments? Housed a superweapon that could obliterate entire city blocks?

And I have to make that decision before I start building it, because its purpose will inform its design. Form follows function. A secret lab full of torture chambers will have a different design than a weapons manufacturing plant or a troop garrison. So I can't just build a generic outpost and pencil in its purpose later, not without major, major revisions that may as well be a complete rebuild.

And coming up with that sort of purpose or goal is hard, harder the more I want the narrative to make sense. The map I'm planning is set in an urban environment that's largely accessible to regular citizens, so any sort of super secret, super access restricted installation is out. I've written myself into a corner before I've laid down the first brush.

Writing it all out like this helps me focus, so that's nice, but the problem doesn't fully go away.

(This is the next logical step after last week's journal about planning.)

Every time I try to make a map, I force myself to try planning it beforehand instead of building away willy-nilly. And every time, sooner or later, I sit in front of a stack of badly hand-drawn maps and am out of ideas. Stuff I draw doesn't fit, doesn't work, I had a better idea afterwards, the proportions are off, the page is too full… you name it.

I tried different approaches. Floor plan design software, for one, though it's tough to find any that is free, works offline or without an account, and lets you save in some useful format.

So last night, I thought: what about writing?

I know I can do that, so what if I wrote descriptions of the maps I wanted to do? It can only get better, compared to drawing and sketching...

VERY GOOD JOURNAL ENTRY

I decided to try to write a Journal post. You can now read this masterpiece of a post. If you happen to have stumbled upon this journal post and have read it to this point, please write "wasd" in the comments. Anyway, this function is quite a cool way of telling people what you have made progress on. Obviously, I didn't make any progress on anything and still wrote one. If you happen to have stumbled upon this journal post and have read it to this point, please write "blackmesascientist" in the comments. Anyway, I like this function and I might even use it properly some time in the future. If you happen to have stumbled upon this journal post and have read it to this point, thank you!

THE END

Every few years, after playing around with other games and engines, I touch Source / Half-Life² / Hammer again, and every time I go in with grand ideas about what kind of things I'd like to do. And every time, invariably, I quickly run into the limitations presented by the I/O system.

This time, I've come back to HL2 after doing some stuff with Arma III and BI's Real Virtuality Engine, namely the 3DEN Editor and the SQF scripting language, and the difference is night and day. The two engines almost perfectly complement each other; what Arma is lacking, Half-Life provides, and what Half-Life fails to do, Arma makes a breeze to achieve.

Whenever I was working with 3DEN, I would usually want to make some missions themed around urban warfare (or story-heavy missions), and the bottleneck would usually be level creation. The 3DEN Editor doesn't facilitate much in the way of creating new environments; beyond dropping new buildings or props into the landscape, the maps are immutable. New maps can be made, of course, with different tools, but anything like creating new houses instead of choosing existing models is a fairly big endeavour, and any sort of indoor scenes are usually close to impossible to stage due to the AI's limited-to-nonexistent navigational capabilities. Cinematics of any sort are hard to create, due to a limited set of NPC animations and very imprecise navigation that's largely oriented to squad-level movements on an expansive battlefield. What 3DEN and Real Virtuality excels at, though, is scripting highly-adaptable missions with any number of varied outcomes, custom dialogue, custom AI behaviour, custom gameplay features, the whole nine yards, due to its fairly trivially-learned scripting language and near-unlimited possibilities it offers in customising UI, NPC behaviour, interactions with world objects, and accounting for as many divergent player behaviours as the scripter is willing to anticipate. This makes it possible to make highly nonlinear missions.

Back to Hammer, it's the complete opposite. Building new things is trivial. The geometry tools are right there; short of vertex limitations, nothing stands in the way of creating any building the mapper can imagine. An entire city can be built from scratch, if so desired. Cinematics can be much easier, in certain ways; NPCs can be directed to walk anywhere with a nearly pixel-perfect precision, an extensive system for scripted sequences exists, and animations flow together much more smoothly due to the story-oriented singleplayer origins of the engine, as opposed to the MMO combat-oriented gesture system of Arma III. The navigation mesh is hand-built by the mapper, so indoor navigation can be as good as the author is willing to invest time and effort into; NPCs running into walls, failing to see doors, or being unable to navigate around trivial obstacles is usually a non-occurence. Compared to Arma, whose physics engine is virtually nonexistent, the Source engine allows liberal use of movable props, physics puzzles, destructible levels and objects that are easy to manipulate, and packing custom content with the maps is trivial as well.

Polar opposites. Taken together, the two would form a near-limitless engine.

And here comes the bottleneck, where my HL2 dreams are concerned: no scripting.

Half-Life² is an incredibly linear game. At no point is the player asked to make any sort of choice, at least none that matter beyond throwing cans at cops. There are no alternative routes. There are no side quests, optional objectives, no ways to fail partially without failing entirely. Reduced to its core, Half-Life² is a tube; what goes in at one end must come out the other end, following the only path available.

And that works fine for the game's campaign. It's much more of a ride-along movie with puzzle and combat interludes than an interactive narrative, it doesn't try to be anything else, and it does what it is very well.

But by these engine limitations, attempting to create any sort of nonlinearity in custom maps is very, very difficult.

I've been thinking a lot about projects like that lately, about what I'd like to make once I've reacquainted myself with the engine and tools sufficiently. Drawing on Warren Specter's famous quote about wanting to make games that are "an inch wide and a mile deep, rather than a mile wide and an inch deep", the idea of making small levels, perhaps the size of no more than a city block, that offer a multitude of ways for the player to engage with them, I've thought about ways that could be achieved in Source.

But doing that with the I/O system? A map that needs to keep track of, and adapt to, countless variables and changes in their values? It seems impossible, secondarily due to the entity limit, but primarily due to the sheer workload and the ever-increasing possibilities for increasingly hard to track errors to occur the more complex the I/O network becomes.

The one beacon of hope here is Mapbase, which to my knowledge implements VScript, something I have yet to learn. I've always been a little intimidated by Mapbase and largely dropped out of RTSL mapping tournaments when they switched to routinely mandating Mapbase, simply because at the time I couldn't figure out how to install it and was just glad Hammer worked for me at all after an extended stint with perpetually broken game configurations for mods (maps not updating, maps failing to compile, etc. etc.). I ought to take another look at that some time.

Idk. I just needed to get all that out. I'd still love to make less linear, more freely approachable HL2 maps and try to bring more of that New Vegas, Deus Ex, Mankind Divided feel over to the Source Engine. Of course the obvious solution would be to simply switch to a game and engine that offer more support for the kind of maps I want to make, but it's a labour of love: I love Source / Half-Life², and I want to make and play the kinds of maps I dream of in the game I love playing so much I'm still doing it in 2024.

P.S: Two additions I forgot earlier:

One, perhaps the best way to compare working with NPCs in Arma III vs. Half-Life² is this: in Arma, it's easily possible to create NPC behaviour that will dynamically, react to certain map/story events, in variable order (within the boundaries of what you prepared), but very difficult to exercise precise control over an NPC. In Half-Life, it's easily possible to manipulate an NPC with minute detail, but very hard or often impossible to set up any sort of behaviour that will continue working once you take your hands off the reins.

Two: one more limitation of HL2 is that custom dialogue or custom scripted sequences are very hard to implement purely on a map basis, because they require things like recompiling scenes.image, editing game-wide files like language files for subtitles, etc. In Arma III, custom dialogue relies on its own, separate subtitle and script files, much like HL2 custom materials and models can be packaged into the map.

So with the open-sourcing of Pathos being more successful than I expected it to be, and after fixing bugs and other issues and having a bit more of a stable build available on GitHub, I've decided to take a bit of a break. Truth is I've spent the last few months working tirelessly on Pathos(and by extension, my game), and I've hit a bit of a burnout. Spending hours upon hours on one bug I couldn't fix yet made me realized, I've become a bit obsessed with it.

What does this mean? Basically, I will be online less, and I will be taking a break from working on Pathos for a little bit. I'll still check any issues that are reported, from time to time, but I will be unresponsive for a bit. So if you find any issues, please raise it on GitHub so I can track it easier.

Ever wondered how to get to those batteries and health packs in that one blast pit room?
Well turns out you have too... walk on the slope its actually really easy why

So... I didn't think I would crunch this hard, but I did it. I spent the last few days working tirelessly on the public release of Pathos, to remove spoiler code and content, to remove as much Half-Life content as I could, and to write documentation. After all that blood and sweat, I present to you, the public release of Pathos on Github:

https://github.com/TheOverfloater/pathos-public/tree/main

This includes the files required to run the game, along with some example levels, example NPCs and models. I have decided that for now, I will not include the custom Hammer editor I use due to obvious reasons. I recommend using JACK, but more is explained in the readme.

I hope you find it useful, and enjoy.

I've been contemplating this for a while, and I've recently come to the decision that I will be open-sourcing the Pathos Engine. After the experience of needing to maintain and provide fixes for Trinity back in the day, I was put off by the idea of having to do the same all over again, while at the same time being busy with the process of creating a video game as a one-man team.

For those who do not know exactly what Pathos Engine is: Pathos is a Quake-like game engine heavily inspired by GoldSrc. It offers extended limits, better graphics and better performance, support for HD textures, vertex weights, normal mapping, specular highlights, dynamic lighting with shadows, and a lot more. This all without any copyrighted code attached to it. Unlike Xash, it does not rely on Half-Life code at all. Everything was reproduced with a clean-room approach while referencing the Half-Life SDK and ReHLDS, as well as the Source SDK.

This means that while the game is very similar to Half-Life and Quake, it is not the same engine. And as far as content is concerned, you are still not allowed legally to use Half-Life code and content in Pathos. Pathos is not compatible with GoldSrc mods, and attempting to run such content on Pathos will cause issues.

I have several videos on my YouTube channel which show Pathos's development progress, and new features:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQnXkjA1l7uamgh8_ZnrFPSQxm1Kr91oA

I have already begun work on an open-source version of Pathos, one which is missing most if not all game specific code and content that would qualify as spoilers, or placeholder content I do not on, which I cannot just release. This version of the engine will offer the same expand-ability and functionality as the one my game uses.

However, I also believe that Pathos can offer the community a lot, in the form of a perfectly legal engine replacement for GoldSrc. People have become more and more frustrated with recent updates to GoldSrc, in which Valve still refuses to provide useful updates, such as upping the model limit and the AllocBlock limit, for example.

For now the current hurdles I am facing are the following:

1. The need to ensure that no content remains which would act as spoilers for the game I am building on Pathos.
2. Removing content that is not needed for the example game to run.
3. Removing Half-Life 1 textures, sprites, sounds and models.
4. Writing documentation for each entity in the game.
5. Writing a comprehensive credits list.

Currently I have already accomplished tasks 1 and 2 mostly, but there's still work to be done. The remaining HL1 textures and models will be wiped clean from the code with proper replacements provided. This part is not that big of an issue, but it will take time to do so.

As far as entity documentation is concerned, this will take a bit of time to accomplish, same for the credits list.

So when will the release happen? I can't provide a deadline, as the amount of work left to be done is not small, and I need to make sure that legally, Pathos is covered and won't end up like Xash when it comes to Valve.

Speaking of which...

• The level editor

Pathos's model format requires a custom level editor, and currently there are no alternatives, other than the custom Hammer I use, which was based on the 2003 leak code. There have been previous examples of people releasing custom Hammer binaries(Hammer++) and Valve not really caring, but one thing which would be great, is to add support to TrenchBroom, however this again depends on how much time I am willing to sacrifice for this purpose. In all likelyhood, I will be providing the custom Hammer binary without any sources as part of the release.

• The model compiler

Pathos uses a custom model format for model geometry data, in order to support vertex weights and facial animations. However, I am still using the original HLSDK studiomdl code, albeit heavily edited. I would prefer not sharing the source code for this until I have my own clean-room version for Pathos available. So until then, I will only supply the binary with the release.

So, I hope this has gotten people excited. I will try to get things out the door as soon as I can, but I can't promise anything in terms of timelines. I hope to keep you updated as this project goes on.

Edit: Decided to edit my opinion regarding JACK out. Regardless of me thinking it's the most likely scenario, that's still just like, only my opinion, so I'd rather everyone treated it as such.