Commented 5 months ago2024-07-11 10:28:04 UTC
in vault item: Core Critical [final]Comment #106242
Excellent map. Beautifully crafted and fun to play.
The teleport sequence, with its complete change of the arena and resetting of player loadout, adds an interesting and exciting variation to the map and its gameplay that I haven't seen in other HLDM maps. -Chef kiss- 👌
Puzzle design is definitely very difficult and its especially hard to strike that balance - one of the best ways to work out that balance is to play a lot of puzzle games. Not just ones that fit into HL2 or the type of puzzles you want to make - all kinds of different puzzle games. You'll start to develop a feeling of what's fun, what's boring, and what's frustrating.
When it comes to puzzles, especially for something like HL2 where puzzles are relatively easy, you have to design for the audience - people playing a HL2 map are much less likely to enjoy a super difficult puzzle, but people playing a Portal map are probably wanting more challenging puzzles.
One way that works for longer maps/mods is to do what Valve does with the Portal games (many other games do the same thing too) - start with a simple idea and then build on it over time. You can introduce the various aspects of a complicated puzzle one by one and then slowly make it more complicated and difficult - this way the player doesn't get overwhelmed with too many new ideas at once.
Some of my recommendations of interesting puzzle games to play to see how they approach difficulty: Myst, Quern: Undying Thoughts, COCOON, The Witness, Return of the Obra Dinn, Outer Wilds, The Talos Principle
if it's flashbang, it only works once
if it's smoke grenade, it is repeatable but weird thing is: it seems to work only when smoke grenade stops (right before popping) in its area, doesn't work when smoke grenade just flies through it. (tested)
also smoke grenade can activate it even when technically outside of it, because it seems that as long as model touches it (grenade model spans maybe like 6 units so it can activate it even behind some thin wall), it's good.
not only that but grenade also gets launched in random direction after popping smoke and it doesn't lose possibility to activate it accidentally
Commented 5 months ago2024-07-09 09:10:10 UTC
in wiki page: func_guntargetComment #106239
cs 1.6:
since this entity works only once ("start on" flag kind of works like a trigger_auto), it is better to have it unchecked and have trigger_relay with targetname game_playerspawn target it with trigger state "on", so this entity will work every round.
this entity also takes damage from he grenades and env_explosions (all tested)
Commented 5 months ago2024-07-08 09:41:40 UTC
in wiki page: func_breakableComment #106237
cs 1.6:
-func_breakable with any material can be broken by grenade touch
-this works with or without targetname of it
-rendermode has to be something other than "normal" rendermode for this to work, if you wanted "normal", you can just use "solid" instead
this means that env_render can toggle its feature to be broken or not (tested)
Commented 5 months ago2024-07-08 07:01:09 UTC
in journal: There is no spoonComment #106236
Yo Striker, thank you!
The good owner of the service center has passed away and I became a director basically. We are , for some time now , an official service center for Yamaha, McIntosh and NAD products here. Aiming for getting into industry work as well , in regards to CnC machinery and such. Work is hard and you can barely walk around from all the stuff, but it will eventually clean up, I hope. So tl dr living in a hydraulic press for now.
Commented 6 months ago2024-06-29 07:36:26 UTC
in wiki page: titles.txtComment #106222
Has anyone ever get their non-english titles.txt to work properly?
I tested the Korean version. Its titles.txt comes in UTF16LE encoding, but it looks like the engine fails to parse this encoding, so all env_messages just displays their message names instead of the message's contents. And of course it all uses default values for the $ settings.
set light's custom pattern if needed, and whether it will be initially dark
set an entity to trigger the pair. they will be triggered together because of the shared name.
the effect being that the light emitted by the texlight has the same light style as the paired light entity instead of being static, and thus can be toggled with it.
But now that VHLT has light_surface, just use that instead.
Kind of, but I didn't go all-out on replicating the appearance of the original person who inspired the idea, for obvious reasons. It's an approximation, with a little bit of Pamperchu added for extra measure.
Thank you, and yeah it is a labor of love, as weird as that sounds. Even if it was a random stupid idea, I wanted to finish it, and so I did, and I don't regret it.
Commented 6 months ago2024-06-24 21:31:53 UTC
in vault item: Riverpool 2Comment #106211
That secret does do something, you just need all 3 HL logos to unlock the RPG. You can also open the big door if you can figure that one out. Look around it for anything that sticks out. What may look like mistakes may be clues.
Commented 6 months ago2024-06-23 12:55:01 UTC
in vault item: Riverpool 2Comment #106210
The idea with the duck is genious and well executed! The map also looks really good. Nice usage of custom textures and models.
Even with fastvis, the ocassional tree model will disappear due to visleaf disconnections. You could mitigate this a lot by editing the models and put the origin point higher up. This will solve most of the issues.
Another point of improvement would be sound. The map is dead silent. Some splashing water around the fountain or a sound for the jumppads would go a long way.
The only secret I found till now is the HL logo but I'm not sure what that does?
Commented 6 months ago2024-06-22 01:03:25 UTC
in wiki page: VERC: Custom DecalsComment #106208
Curious about how the engine differentiates between monochrome and alphatest decals. I've seen (and used) decals that has full colour with the last index being the transparent colour, just like regular { textures. My working theory is that it checks that palette indices 0-254 are monochromatic (black→white or the reverse). If it's neither then it assumes alphatest mode. I think I've also seen decals.wad in the wild that have the palette indices 0-254 all zeroed out (i.e. black all the way), but I haven't loaded them in game and see how the engine interprets that decal.
Glad to have you here, Philip!
Anyway, as I was originally typing...
X and Y scaling should be proportional to the aspect of the base texture. If the base texture is a skinny 16x196 texture then having both X and Y scales be 10 means each tile of the detail texture would be 1.6 by 19.6 pixels relative to the base. If you can't tell, this is horribly, horribly stretched.
Sadly there exists no tool today afaik that can easily plug in the aspect ratio values to you.
I got linked here after going on a nostalgia-binge of Half-Life modding sites and was very surprised to see this article preserved from VERC! I'm the original author and never expected it to be preserved twenty years later
Some of the commenters on the original VERC article were a little... suspicious... of how I managed to decipher the format of the detail texture list file given that the only software using it was the (then un-released) Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. Despite my protestations to the contrary, after twenty years I feel I can come clean: yes, I downloaded a pirate copy of CS:CZ. In my defence I was an idiot 19 year-old who was really excited to figure out a new feature for one of my best-loved games and wanted to document that for everyone to use (and get a bit of recognition myself).
It also wasn't strictly necessary -- the cvars were publicly known, and I had access to a legit copy of IDA Pro; I just didn't want to go to the effort of reversing the client DLL given Valve's import table stripping. I later did that anyway to try and figure out the function pointer table entries that were added post-Steam but not mentioned by Valve. Never documented any of that publicly though; most of them weren't useful for single-player modding which was where my interest lay. All long since lost several hard drive failures ago. The cheater community, I'm sure, figured them all out long before me and I didn't play multiplayer anyway.
I'm glad someone is still keeping the HL modding scene alive though -- it's one of the most thoroughly-documented games/engines I know of, right from the era where a tiny mod team could produce content rivalling commercial releases. My playing around with the HL SDK eventually helped me get a job as a software developer barely a year later! Not the games industry itself (too stressful!), but having the ability to play around with a 'real' piece of software's code was a massive boost for me. It helped me grow from knowing I could make a computer do whatever I wanted to knowing how to tell it to do that, and it did it in a context I knew and enjoyed.
Commented 6 months ago2024-06-07 08:18:56 UTC
in vault item: fy_lockedoutComment #106196
Eww... Halo. XP
I'm pretty sure there's Half-Life haters as well. Humans are in nature quite hateful after all.
For the map. I don't have Source anymore but it looks might fine from the screenshot. Old isn't too bad cause of the majority of crap people does in today's age.
Finally we have the goldsrc equivalent to source's Propper!
The teleport sequence, with its complete change of the arena and resetting of player loadout, adds an interesting and exciting variation to the map and its gameplay that I haven't seen in other HLDM maps. -Chef kiss- 👌
When it comes to puzzles, especially for something like HL2 where puzzles are relatively easy, you have to design for the audience - people playing a HL2 map are much less likely to enjoy a super difficult puzzle, but people playing a Portal map are probably wanting more challenging puzzles.
One way that works for longer maps/mods is to do what Valve does with the Portal games (many other games do the same thing too) - start with a simple idea and then build on it over time. You can introduce the various aspects of a complicated puzzle one by one and then slowly make it more complicated and difficult - this way the player doesn't get overwhelmed with too many new ideas at once.
Some of my recommendations of interesting puzzle games to play to see how they approach difficulty: Myst, Quern: Undying Thoughts, COCOON, The Witness, Return of the Obra Dinn, Outer Wilds, The Talos Principle
if it's smoke grenade, it is repeatable but weird thing is: it seems to work only when smoke grenade stops (right before popping) in its area, doesn't work when smoke grenade just flies through it. (tested)
also smoke grenade can activate it even when technically outside of it, because it seems that as long as model touches it (grenade model spans maybe like 6 units so it can activate it even behind some thin wall), it's good.
not only that but grenade also gets launched in random direction after popping smoke and it doesn't lose possibility to activate it accidentally
since this entity works only once ("start on" flag kind of works like a trigger_auto), it is better to have it unchecked and have trigger_relay with targetname game_playerspawn target it with trigger state "on", so this entity will work every round.
this entity also takes damage from he grenades and env_explosions (all tested)
-func_breakable with any material can be broken by grenade touch
-this works with or without targetname of it
-rendermode has to be something other than "normal" rendermode for this to work, if you wanted "normal", you can just use "solid" instead
this means that env_render can toggle its feature to be broken or not (tested)
The good owner of the service center has passed away and I became a director basically. We are , for some time now , an official service center for Yamaha, McIntosh and NAD products here. Aiming for getting into industry work as well , in regards to CnC machinery and such. Work is hard and you can barely walk around from all the stuff, but it will eventually clean up, I hope. So tl dr living in a hydraulic press for now.
How's the engineering life going on?
I tested the Korean version. Its titles.txt comes in UTF16LE encoding, but it looks like the engine fails to parse this encoding, so all env_messages just displays their message names instead of the message's contents. And of course it all uses default values for the
$settings.- have a light and func_wall entity pair of the same name
- set
- set
- set an entity to trigger the pair. they will be triggered together because of the shared name.
the effect being that the light emitted by the texlight has the same light style as the paired light entity instead of being static, and thus can be toggled with it.func_wall's style to-3light's custom pattern if needed, and whether it will be initially darkBut now that VHLT has light_surface, just use that instead.
Even with fastvis, the ocassional tree model will disappear due to visleaf disconnections. You could mitigate this a lot by editing the models and put the origin point higher up. This will solve most of the issues.
Another point of improvement would be sound. The map is dead silent. Some splashing water around the fountain or a sound for the jumppads would go a long way.
The only secret I found till now is the HL logo but I'm not sure what that does?
{textures. My working theory is that it checks that palette indices 0-254 are monochromatic (black→white or the reverse). If it's neither then it assumes alphatest mode. I think I've also seen decals.wad in the wild that have the palette indices 0-254 all zeroed out (i.e. black all the way), but I haven't loaded them in game and see how the engine interprets that decal.It's almost like starting over, meeting new patients and working with new nurses and colleagues.
I need to upgrade my computer before it can play the latest Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Anyway, as I was originally typing...
X and Y scaling should be proportional to the aspect of the base texture. If the base texture is a skinny 16x196 texture then having both X and Y scales be 10 means each tile of the detail texture would be 1.6 by 19.6 pixels relative to the base. If you can't tell, this is horribly, horribly stretched.
Sadly there exists no tool today afaik that can easily plug in the aspect ratio values to you.
Some of the commenters on the original VERC article were a little... suspicious... of how I managed to decipher the format of the detail texture list file given that the only software using it was the (then un-released) Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. Despite my protestations to the contrary, after twenty years I feel I can come clean: yes, I downloaded a pirate copy of CS:CZ. In my defence I was an idiot 19 year-old who was really excited to figure out a new feature for one of my best-loved games and wanted to document that for everyone to use (and get a bit of recognition myself).
It also wasn't strictly necessary -- the cvars were publicly known, and I had access to a legit copy of IDA Pro; I just didn't want to go to the effort of reversing the client DLL given Valve's import table stripping. I later did that anyway to try and figure out the function pointer table entries that were added post-Steam but not mentioned by Valve. Never documented any of that publicly though; most of them weren't useful for single-player modding which was where my interest lay. All long since lost several hard drive failures ago. The cheater community, I'm sure, figured them all out long before me and I didn't play multiplayer anyway.
I'm glad someone is still keeping the HL modding scene alive though -- it's one of the most thoroughly-documented games/engines I know of, right from the era where a tiny mod team could produce content rivalling commercial releases. My playing around with the HL SDK eventually helped me get a job as a software developer barely a year later! Not the games industry itself (too stressful!), but having the ability to play around with a 'real' piece of software's code was a massive boost for me. It helped me grow from knowing I could make a computer do whatever I wanted to knowing how to tell it to do that, and it did it in a context I knew and enjoyed.
All the best from the UK -- Philip
For the map. I don't have Source anymore but it looks might fine from the screenshot. Old isn't too bad cause of the majority of crap people does in today's age.
Take care of yourself, and hope you get well soon!