Comments

没玩过，但是感觉不如原神

Played again on Hard, its a lot better now!
Here is some more feedback:

• There are no autosaves! it's a good idea to place them before fights or dangerous areas, or the player will have to start all over again if he forgets to save
• The player can get stuck if he jumps on the chair in the starting room
• First fight is much more fair, good work there
• Office corridor fight is better, but I liked the old pushable crate, maybe you could create another similar area later on where you have to push a crate to avoid getting shot, I just think that's a nice idea
• Jumping on the large crate in the green goop room is possible, but too difficult, might be a good idea to add another floating crate next to it
• In the corridor behind the switch that lowers the goop, the door behind the zombie opens if touched (it should be a fake door)

Very minor details:

• The toilet stalls don't have toilets in them
• The hand dryer sound plays forever if you press its button, it should ideally play for a few seconds then turn off, every time the button is pressed
• I recommend using a trigger_endsection to send the player to the main menu when reaching the end

You're doing well, the gamplay here is fun! Keep going!

Edit: I looked at the sources and there's a few more things:

• The info_landmark entities should be in the exact same spot relative to the map
  In the first map
  In the second map
• In the first map, there is a window on the outside that matches the wall right over the sofa in the corridor fight, but inside, the wall has no windows
  The wall in question... Wait, how did that grafitti get there?
  In the editor, the front door and the window lead nowhere

These two points fit my own experience to a T. I've tried making sketches and blockouts before, but none of that helped me design an environment for a map. The sketches didn't go anywhere because I found it annoying to represent a 3d environment in 2d paper (when that was not the point) and the blockouts did little to get me to think of the finer details - and sometimes I'd just stare at the editor, panning the camera view around without any idea what to change next.

For months now I've been trying to make a small campaign, maybe just a single map in size, that I can release and get feedback on to better grasp HL level design before starting to make full-on mods with assets and code and whatnot. I didn't really have a clear goal other than that, so the map keeps changing and changing - it's still a blockout almost entirely made of grid textures - but it's beginning to settle into a defined shape now. I think what made me stick with this particular blockout is that, for all the others, I was trying to either create an entire environment I could "populate" with gameplay later, or build a level around a single central setpiece; but for this one, I tried to make the map complement the gameplay, and that spurred me on to keep adding to it, despite the fact that even the basic layout was still far from clear. Urby is right, blockouts shine when you want to know if what you're doing is fun.

Just like yourself, I want to make maps that make realistic sense, but I feel like I'm becoming more lenient on that front now. After revisiting Valve's maps and playing a bunch of mods to see what I could learn from them, I started to think the map design of classic HL isn't really much less abstract than good ol' Quake, in the "feeling like a real place" sense. And I kinda like that slightly liminal vibe anyway, so now I'm focusing more on making a place that is fun to traverse and fight in, though the realism is still an important factor that determines what kind of place the map will be. For example, I decided to make this map end with the player riding one of those big diagonal elevators up into the darkness, so to make sense, the map will be a deep underground storage area like the one at the start of the Lambda Core chapter. Building it ended up becoming a bit of a cycle where sometimes the gameplay informs what the map will have, and then what the map has determines what kind gameplay fits best, so it's all starting to converge into a clearer picture now.

About Trenchbroom, I actually learned to use it a bit (but didn't make any finished maps) and I can confirm it really is better for translating that 3d space you see in your head into the screen. It can be faster too, when you get used to it and learn the shortcuts - I recommend Markie's tutorials for these. I never tried to use it for Half-Life though, I'll have to see if exporting to J.A.C.K. works smoothly or not.

Oh, and, about ADHD: I've already asked my mom multiple times if I was ever diagnosed with it as a kid, but can't seem to ever remember what she said. Maybe it's because, by the time she answered, I already stopped paying attention...

Thank you for your feedback. I will correct them one by one.

I like these maps, even though they start very hard and then get easier - it should be the other way around!
I played it on Normal difficulty, and the first battle with the grunts is still way too punishing. Cover is necessary to fight all those soldiers, but the cover becomes a death trap almost immediately when the grenades start to fly. The GL grenades were the worst - they can kill almost without warning because they explode on contact, unlike the hand grenades which give the player time to escape. A fight like that would feel more adequate as a conclusion, rather than a beginning.
The office fight was interesting - most people who played HL would see a grunt using a mounted gun and think, "Ah yes, kill the grunt to stop it", and then feel confused when they can't shoot the grunt at all. I know I did. I don't know if that's bad or good, though: on one hand, confusing the player may lead to frustration, but on the other hand, it made me stop and think about what I really had to do, which gave this encounter a puzzle-like quality that I really enjoyed.

A couple nitpicks minor issues:

• The "battery" for the detonator is short enough to walk over, so it has to be pushed while crouching (or thrown with the Use key)
• If the player jumps on top of the armored vehicle near the detonator crate, he will fall inside it and may get stuck
• Some of the walls inside the office area look a bit too thin

All in all, there is some interesting gameplay going on, but the difficulty needs balance. Good luck!

Definitely a challenging map but with a handful of issues which make it a little unfair at times. In the starting area, there appears to be an issue with some of your entities, such as the doors and the lit of the crate. For some reason, from certain angles these are blocking the player's bullets, meaning you can empty your entire stock of magnum ammo into the grunt outside and hit nothing but the air in front of him.

Also, the grunt fights in the office, even in the office are wholly unfair to the player. The mounted gun at the end of the hall cannot be stopped, even if you kill the grunt shooting it. This combined with the tight spaces and enemies at every possible angle mean that this is a near impossible gauntlet which took me multiple attempts. I love a challenging grunt fight, but the issue here is the small space and vast amounts of clutter which turn it into an exercise in slowly peaking around corners and chipping away at whoever you see first before you can move on to the next target.

On the level design front, try to make use of func_detail for the various objects and vehicles around the map. This will prevent your brushwork getting carved up like so, and save you some compiling headaches down the road:

I am not the best reviewer but I'll try.
I am also not the best gamer. I played this on hard and it was... Hard.

The first arena looks pretty nice. I like how you can open the shutters and see what you're going to have to deal with, the brick building looks good and you have a goal set with the explosive box in the container.

This is where the skill issue comes in. The amount of soldiers for what you have feels a little much, especially when I think they can all throw grenades. I found it quite tough to get outside because grenades kept being thrown at the door.
The explosive "detonator" also doesn't look too special. It does have the cable running to it and is connected to the, electricity tech thing? But there isn't a button or display that makes it look different from the normal crate. I was clicking e around it thinking it would have something to do with it but I didn't actually know what I had interacted with.
After (what I found to be) a hard fight you're very quickly thrown into another without many recovery items. I ended up having to hide and just take potshots for a while.

After you go through the container there's another large group of aliens and because I was already quite low this was actually really hard, even with the turret. And again it doesn't feel like you get much back in the way of health or armour.

From the first level, you can see the hallway inside get cut off and the light levels noticeably change when transitioning into the second level.
The hallway is really tight and the soldiers can still throw grenades, so I found myself dying to that quite a bit. There also appears to be a soldier behind the turret indicating that he's controlling it, but you can't actually hit him as there seems to be an invisible wall?

I like the little elevator climb and how you can hear combat from above.
The goop room is a nice little change of scenery even if it is only for the ending.

I think the map looks pretty decent but I feel like it could be a tad more balanced.
Hopefully this doesn't seem too negative! I did enjoy it, just found it quite hard.

I think we might be in the presence of a modern day John Carmack here. This sounds like incredible progress man, and certainly something I'm going to be keeping an eye on. I've been fortunate enough to work within the indie games industry for the last couple of years, but to be able to make something of my own from the ground up is enticing to say the least. Just need to get my neurodivergent brain in line so that I can actually knuckle down and put the work in.

Update: we on Linux nowIt manages to run on my 2012 Fujitsu S792 (Intel HD Graphics 4000 + mobile Intel Core i5 + 4 GB RAM) at about 15fps, which isn't too far off from what I expected, though NGL I kinda was hoping for 30fps... oh well, that's what I get for using Vulkan on hardware older than the API itself.

Now, I'm most likely not touching this thing until March, because February will be full of exams.

Thank you!!!
I feel like the past 2 years (turning idTech 3 into GoldSRC, enhancing idTech 4, writing an engine from scratch) were more or less a preparation for this thing. Designing systems, understanding how my motivation works, keeping track of things via Trello and getting them done etc.

Also I forgot to mention this in the journal, but once summer's here, I will likely be looking for volunteers, mainly mappers and programmers. We'll have to see though! From experience I know stuff gets delayed, so that might as well be in autumn.

Elegy sounds like exactly the thing to get me to try Godot. This is a super ambitious project but I know from your previous stuff and watching your tutorials that you're capable of doing it!

Your third map does not include a trigger_changelevel back to the second. Even if you do not intend for the player to go back to the previous map, you must include the trigger to go there. Make it use only and keep it out of the way somewhere.

mehemt, how were you able to fix the issue? I've been trying to do that.

(Nevermind, fixed the issue)

How were you able to make the player invisible? I'm looking for a way to disable that so that Gordon could be at least visible to the camera.
(Nevermind, I kinda fixed it, but I had to remove some things)

It's long gone, sorry.

Has anyone had luck in tracking down this map?

Very generous of you for sharing.

Yea I mean I never taking seriously because I'm getting crazy about it. Anyway the moderator remove my last Day of this journal due to piracy issue even though I'm basically Tell anyone how Terrible Visiting Those Website so people don't ended up like me

Alrighty then here's the image https://imgur.com/a/YJw8i6P

The best thing about walks is the photos honestly. One damn good reason to buy a good camera.

Kinda funny to read. I had the same problem with my computer.

Hey, your image isnt working
I recommend using other file hoster, like imgur or ImgBB

Nooooo!!!

The social networking mod has now been created via the Meta Verse. Your nightmare is now a reality

Tbh My Journal Kinda Ridiculous :/

I'd like to add that step 4 can be skipped by reversing the layer order, i.e. place the scaled lowres layer on top of the original and applying the blend mode to this.
This produces the exact same result but without a colour invert step.

What blending mode would I use for Paint.NET?

It does not seem like Paint.NET 5.0 natively has the Grain Extract blend mode. It's possible there might be a plugin for it but I haven't checked.
GIMP is another free image editor that does have Grain Extract blend mode and so I would suggest using that instead.

I put the type "multiplayer_only" in my liblist.gam and it didn't work. any help?

This is brilliant, seedee! I think this could be merged with Tutorial: Materials.txt

Fun idea!

You don't talk bad. You're fine.

I'll give these a shot the next time my headspace wanders into TFCland!

I'm encountering an error every time I try to open the zip

Do I talk bad?

I totally understand the first point, feeling like mapping takes a looong time, even to do basic rooms. I often struggle with this as well. In fact, it's something I've been dwelling on more recently, in regards to work and my level design side job. Even when I'm working on a map, which I thoroughly enjoy doing, my focus isn't quite 100% or I find ways to procrastinate.

I've been working with Hammer / JACK for 20+ years and TrenchBroom (for work) for around 2 years and I'm pretty familiar with the ins and outs of the software. Still, things seem to take me much longer than other people in the modding community or working on the same project at work.

I've since reached out to my GP about possible undiagnosed ADHD and I'm awaiting a response from a consultant.

This could be a possible explanation and might even be a factor with your second point: Retaining the information that you're taking in while playing official maps for inspiration.

I am more accepting of blockouts these days since I HAVE to do them for work. I can appreciate that it's difficult to get a feel for the map while working with a blockout since I felt the same way initially and I just couldn't make it work. Now however, I think I will be blocking out all of my future levels. Blockouts mean that you can nail down the basic layout and gameplay for your map, and can make adjustments very quickly.

In the past I would just make areas look as nice as possible and then shoehorn gameplay into them, often having to move around a lot of small details where the gameplay demanded it. So my maps looked nice but played poorly. The one exception to this was Bridge the Gap, which I blocked out until I was happy with the gameplay, then textured and lit. The outcome was... a pretty ugly map that played OK. Then I made Bridge the Gap 2.0 based on the first map and put in more effort detailing. So I think blockouts can be tricky to get to grips with at first, but once you realise their true purpose (super basic gameplay focused template which can be quickly edited and compiled) they really do help.

I gave it a go just doing Quake stuff and uhm. I think I'll keep trying for a little bit, seeing as I just started using it. But so far I'm actually finding it really hard and annoying to use. Probably just me being used to Jack though...

You should try out Trenchbroom and watch Dumptruck_ds's videos, its a lot faster to work with than JACK. Though it doesn't really fully support half life it is still has some support and you can just import the map file to jack, export the jmf as a map and import that to trenchbroom, vice versa.

Whenever I make maps, I just go from one room to the next, not really planning a head too much (even if I have a general idea as to what I'm building) I just stick to one thing and then move on to the next, room to room and box to box. I've gotten used to JACK now but I do remember trenchbroom being better to actually make maps with.

First of all, I'm sure that this is referencing a franchise that I am not familiar with so I can't really comment on that side of things. I'm going into this totally blind.

From the perspective of a Half-Life mod and as a map pack, this is a strange one with some room for improvement. A series of incredibly short maps, some which feature action and some which do not. There is very little plot to guide the player, but basically when the action kicks off the mod is a grunt fest. On the hardest difficulty there isn't a lot of health for the player. I was stuck with 6HP for the last couple of fights (which included assassins) which quickly devolved into corner peaking, shotgun blasting tedium.

From a mapping point of view, there are a lot of little niggles throughout that make it obvious that the grid was either disabled or set really low in the editor. There are a ton of single unit gaps or lips on brushes which you can sometimes get snagged on as well as causing some ugly lighting issues.

Overall I would say this one is an oddity, maybe worth checking out but with a number of issues that can cause frustration.

Yea, I'm still lurking around here. I use the shoutbox regularly

I have my own set of dev textures which I prefer to use, but the hand drawn graphics representing the entities are great.

Download and use wadmaker, it will take no time at all to make textures with it. I assume you used something like walley or a photo editing software so this took you a while longer to make than it should have.

Find a job that can give me a better work life balance

Atmo Project Page
If someone's interested in knowing a bit about the game.