Comments

2006? I have been gone for a while, apparently!?

Yeah, Quake was our favourite from Lab17 as well...

Thanks for your comments and votes so far...

Yeah, I could have done with more textures, to reduce repetition a little, but I was already hitting the 4Mb limit at this stage!

The moving platforms are slow, precisely BECAUSE the egon is so easy to get to. It may be easy to pick up, but escaping with it in one piece is another matter. One aspect of my buddy's level that I had to preserve was the egon/rocket battles which unfold so regularly -- since the egon's range isn't enough to reach the platform where the rocket launcher sits...

The explosive crates DO explode. Just not easily!

(A consistent complaint about my maps is that breakable stuff is too darn tough, and doesn't break with one or two shots. My thinking is that if it's gonna break that easily, it may as well not exist. If you have a crate filled with explosives you don't want it to go off every time some clumsy handler bumps into it... Long story short, that aspect of my level design is unlikely to change anytime soon. Sorry...)

Edit: The rolling doors are func_trains with a rotational speed applied. I've tweaked my own code so that they reverse rotational direction when they close, which I couldn't get to work under standard HLDM. Must investigate platrots, see if I could make them do the same thing...

Edit 2: As for the "same old overused sounds" -- yeah. I haven't really looked into adding new sounds (or more to the point, I'm not sure where I'd go to find new sounds...) Should probably investigate that further...

Uh ... why?

For one thing it's DM, not SP, so I sorta hope people will play it more than once.

I write big documentation because every level I build - every HLDM level - has its own story. It's part of the process. Maybe people want to read the story, and maybe they don't. I write big documentation because it's what I do. When I'm not a level builder, I'm a writer. (Well, gamer, and reader, and general-time-waster, and watcher-of-DVDs, and writer. It's in there somewhere...)

Much of the time involved in FINISHING the documentation - 'cos, y'know, most of it is worthless waffle that nobody will read anyway - is getting the credits right, giving due and proper acknowledgement of all the textures I've used which were made by other people. Getting THAT right is important -- anything less would make me a lowly scumsucker who passed off other people's work as his own!

And sure, I'm sure there are people who think my writing four novels was a waste of time too.

shrug

ETA:
As for why I continue to build levels for goldsource at all ... well, didn't think that would need to be explained on THIS site. But I build 'em for myself and my friends to play, and HL is one of the few games we can run without difficulty at work where we most often play. That's all. I choose to make them available here to give back something to the community from which I learned a trick or two over the years ... but that's a bonus. Certainly the half-dozen or so comments I get on each level are nice - the positive, and even the negative - and they teach me something too, but they hardly repay the months (even, in some cases, years) of work I put into each level. No, I build them for private use!

Since I'm also working on tweaking the SDK, this may well be the last level I release that will work (almost) properly without my PetesDM mod. OTOH, since I've pushed the engine about as far as it can be pushed, maybe it IS time to branch out, to find something else we can put on the machines at work. shrug

Links fixed ... not sure how they broke!

@ Tetsu0: That's what the "&& m_pevCurrentTarget->avelocity != g_vecZero" is all about. At least that was the idea. I found another line elsewhere in the code comparing a vector to g_vecZero so I simply borrowed that idea and duplicated the "if ( m_pevCurrentTarget && m_pevCurrentTarget->speed != 0 )" from the section above. I figured it should work, but obviously I'm missing something.

Possibly if the field is blank in Hammer, the avelocity value is not zeroed but nulled. Possibly g_vecZero isn't what I think it is. Possibly a simple "!=" comparison between vectors (or, uh, "Vec_3D" structs) doesn't work the way I think it does; my C++ is a little rusty and I've been spoiled by too much PERL!

I'll dig a little deeper and see what I can find...

Not really. I know the world is full of people whose attention spans are so short that they can't manage to read any more than 20 words before giving up. The whole TL;DR crowd. Their loss, I figure...

I'm a storyteller. I could just post "I'm working on a new level, yippee!" but really, what would be the point?!

Well thanks for that...

It did turn out a little too big/complex even for my tastes -- and typically there's only two of us in it when I get to play -- but once you learn your way around it works pretty well.

The glass in the outlier buildings ... yeah. The texture works pretty well on a semi-transparent entity, but is a bit blah on the non-transparent world brushes. If I had a few more leaves to play with I'd probably build an empty room behind the windows and make them properly semi-transparent. (I will do that with the "Erupt" version anyway, so I guess there will be the potential for comparison... I may even give it a shot with LavaLab, but I'm pretty sure it will break the compile -- which, for the record, is about 16.5 hours on a 3Ghz machine with 3Gb of RAM...)

Edit: I tried several different ways to get transparent glass with a space behind in the windows around the edge -- and every single attempt broke the compile. The level really is that tight...

Yeah, the whole ultra-cubic exterior thing is lifted straight from the original (although the interior was a little more creative than that of the original...) I guess I could have gone for an octagonal lab, or something less symmetrical, but then I'd have never got the darn thing finished! (Spent too many nodes and other resources on the rock terrain! :-))

And as for the windows ... my windows are ALWAYS too strong! Not sure what's happening there...

10 years? Wow. I guess the release of my level was timed perfectly...

Looking at what they've done with BMS really makes me want to switch to Source mapping...

Thanks for the enthusiasm, guys!

Yep, it's HL:DM. Yep, it's in the final stages of its compile (which has been running all night (after I stopped it at 5:30 last night to add a missing sound effect, sigh)) and will hopefully be released this weekend.

And as for a mod ... yeah. Since I've now started tweaking the SDK, this may well be the last of my levels which will be compatible with standalone HL:DM (although I'm loathe to sever that link, so I'll probably produce both an HL:DM version and a modified "petesdm" version. That still needs a lot of thought (and at this stage, "petesdm" doesn't have anything new (except, y'know, fog support and fixed button handling...); all that is still under consideration!)

In the comments for "LavaLab" Daubster said (among other things) "the cliffs were rather blocky"; in the comments above Kasperg says "the post-disaster elements ... arent enough to replace the original freedom we had with the other map".

The blocky cliffs are the main reason I decided to revisit the LavaLab concept in my new (almost ready to be released) Lab11_Lavalab. And Kasperg's comment on freedom -- well, let's just say that Lab11_Erupt will reduce the size of the map a little but, if I get it to work as envisioned, you will possibly have more freedom than in Lab11_Lavalab.

To be honest, it never really occurred to me to look into Spirit of Half-Life. I've only recently started playing with the SDK - ultimately I guess I'll be developing some sort of MOD (if I don't lose interest) but adding Fog seemed like a nice little exercise to attempt. When it then didn't work and I had to actually start reading the code and understanding it, I learned a lot - which is always a good thing.

After Skals' comment I went looking for SOHL. I found the Mod download, but could not find the source-code download anywhere. If I ever want to do something which is covered by SOHL I guess I'll go hunting for the code again (as it is, I suspect that the original code of this tutorial was probably lifted from SOHL, but until I find it I can't be sure...) Until then, though, I much prefer to play in the SDK myself...

Since my text has already been pasted over the original as well, it's probably safer and less confusing to delete that one.

Up to you guys, of course... I was originally led to believe that the original could not be deleted. shrug

Hey thanks for the tutorial link!

Of course, it is now up twice; once under the "Coding Fog Addendum" title and once under the original title...

Do I need to do anything else about this, or is it something which can be fixed on your end?

Actually, 'tis for HL!

And yeah, I could play with SOHL -- but where's the fun in that?!

Indeed. The beeps are the only way your motherboard has of communicating with you when there's a problem. (More modern motherboards attempt to speak, like the time I came home to find mine repeating endlessly, "System halted, CPU hot" in a voice like Yoda with a bad head cold.) Look up the number/type of beeps, and it will tell you whether the problem is with your RAM, your video card, or whatever...

My guess is RAM -- but it really could be anything.

It's preliminary, but it seems to be working. Check it out at:

http://www.petesplace.id.au/coding/no_use_through_walls.php

I'll be changing it sometime, but that will do for now...

Just a public reply to zeeba-G (since his inbox is full!)

There's no music that I can think of in this level. A couple of ambient sounds - mostly computer chatter and sparking, IIRC - but nothing else. (I'm thinking it could possibly do with a couple more, but that'll wait a while yet! :-))

As noted by Younis, there was a problem with the download of this (and all my other) map(s).

The problem is now fixed!

Thanks, and sorry...

Just a quick response to what has already been said about this map.

I certainly do need to go back and do some more texture work (see my comment on "Quake" for an elaboration on this subject) and I will, at the same time, review the lighting in this level. It is, as noted by Kasperg, the pre-disaster version, so it should be pretty well lit (the occasional dodgy lightbulb notwithstanding ;-))

Just a quick response to what has already been said about this map.

Yes, the interior of this level (Quake/SlimeLab) does suffer from a severe lack if texture differentiation. So, to an extent, does Flood/Storage. Basically I got to a point in building Storage that I just lost enthusiasm for picking textures, and basically did the whole warehouse area with the one texture. That carried through to this level, where it is a lot more noticeable, primarily because it extends through to much of the "standard-sized" corridors and rooms too. (I suspect it's not too bad in the large atrium-sized rooms simply because it's not so obvious and overpowering.)

Once I finish the level I'm working on now, I will go back and re-texture these levels to make them a little less monotonous...

Just a quick response to what has already been said about this map.

First, I really want to thank Kasperg for his kind comments; they really were a nice boost to the old ego!

Second, I feel that I should point out that where Seventh-Monkey had some difficulties is pretty much related to one of Daubster's complaints: some of the glass in my levels is really quite strong -- fair comment there! The glass in the window of the two security posts does break, and you need to break it to get into the security rooms to push the buttons which open the doors at either end of the bridge. Of course, the glass there is supposed to be strong -- it is, after all, tempered security glass -- but I shall probably go through all these levels and rationalise the various glass strengths to get a little more realism, and a little more consistency...