Yeah, I agree. The true function of "Junk" is not really exposed to us yet. Always good to have it there if someone figures it out.
The 32-bit limit was a surprise to me as well. I even tried using an empty entry called "Sniper" (cut map) that was on the list, but not on the actual world map. It didn't work as I thought it would and remained locked. I think you are right about the Custom missions dir thing though.
I did suspect that there's a 32-bit limit on the tracker for mission progression, as a community-made mod that stitches all the extra official missions into the main campaign has the mission locks bugging. In the stock game where these extra missions are standalone they appear as unlocked. I'll update that on the notes as well.
some other ideas to use the world map for custom missions would be to have a separate mod that falls back to czeror, and that mod can perhaps have its own missions on the world map. other than that, a separate hub map is unavoidable, but it should be its own map and not overwrite the training map as was done previously.
@kimilil I appreciate the redo of the page.
In regards to the "junk" KV, not sure how it functions as of yet. The decompile of the DLL is here for reference. I doubt it will give us any clues tho.
void __cdecl CWorldMap::KeyValue(CWorldMap *const this, KeyValueData *pkvd)
{
bool v2; // zf@1
signed int v3; // ecx@1
int v4; // edi@1
char *v5; // esi@1
v2 = 0;
v3 = 5;
v4 = (int)"junk";
v5 = pkvd->szKeyName;
do
{
if ( !v3 )
break;
v2 = *v5++ == *(_BYTE *)v4++;
--v3;
}
while ( v2 );
if ( v2 )
pkvd->fHandled = 1;
else
CBaseToggle::KeyValue(&this->baseclass_0, pkvd);
}
Also should have mentioned, custom mission are not a thing one can make appear or function on the world map. This is due to the way that missions are unlocked within the game progression (complete X, unlock Y). This can be attributed to a 32 bit int or something of the sense.
A workaround for this is for mods to make the world map button in the menu, load into a different a hub-world type map.
Because this brush entity is oddly named as item_ it might reflect an earlier game mechanic where it's an item in your inventory that you need to select in order to interact with.
What are C structs but database records, and its members but db fields?
But really, reading the BSP specs and how a lot of the struct fields are indices into the next struct really reads like relational model of a db, and with 14 lumps interacting this way I really, really needed a visual aid to understand how it all relates with each other, which strangely for the 27+ years of BSP's existence has not existed in any form. Hence the chart, and this journo entry I made to put it in.
Post-25th Anniversary Update Half-Life has a separate set of files for HD backgrounds:
HD_BackgroundLayout.txt
HD_BackgroundLoadingLayout.txt
In all the files the second field of the background tile set to fit instead of scaled, which appears to crop the background as a whole to fit the screen's aspect ratio instead of stretching it. Example line:
resource/background/21_9_1_a_loading.tga fit 0 0
The above findings may not be finalized on Valve's part and may be subject to change. It's posted here for information purpose only.
Commented 5 months ago2023-11-27 19:24:33 UTC
in wiki page: Tutorial: Changing LevelsComment #105663
when i play my first map and walk into the trigger, it spawns me out of bounds, i did everything. HELP PLS.
EDIT: fixed it. i put a info_player_start in the second map and it was interfering.
Commented 5 months ago2023-11-26 16:25:15 UTC
in journal: Worth the weight?Comment #105662
Another update: winter is right around the corner, which means I'll be gaining some weight again. But! This summer I managed to reach 79 kg. I'm extremely happy, you've no idea.
Commented 5 months ago2023-11-26 16:12:23 UTC
in journal: So I drink coffee now...Comment #105661
I once drank iced coffee in the afternoon and managed to stay up til 6 in the morning.
Never doing that again unless I really really reallyyyy have to. Few things in life are worth sacrificing one's sleep.
Commented 5 months ago2023-11-26 10:44:29 UTC
in journal: So I drink coffee now...Comment #105659
Yeah, decaff is a good shout. I drink coffee throughout the workday and then switch to decaff in the evening. That way I still get the yummy hot drink but I don't have any trouble sleeping.
Commented 5 months ago2023-11-26 10:26:19 UTC
in journal: So I drink coffee now...Comment #105658
As Urba says, try avoiding any caffeine in the afternoon.
If you find yourself enjoying the taste of coffee and would like some in the afternoon anyway, I can recommend caffeine-free coffee. Alternatively cocoa (either as hot chocolate or a bar of dark chocolate) is also a source of caffeine but at a much lower dose and better to have in the afternoon than coffee.
As for the last part, self-destructive behaviour is often a symptom of some other cause, like stress, anxiety, and it could help to talk to someone professional about it.
Commented 5 months ago2023-11-22 15:49:49 UTC
in vault item: Sykhiv_yards_b2Comment #105651
Thank you for your feedback. Yes, it is possible that the color of the outdoor lighting under the sky is not perfectly matched and it seems that it is evening lighting. However, in reality, with such a sky, there can be soft yellow lighting, like in summer, the sky is clearly not winter or autumn. So I'll think about the texture of the grass, because before I thought the texture was not very contrasting and somehow got lost against the background. Of course, the terrain affects performance, but I don't know if I can optimize it so much that I don't lose this most important visual feature of the map. I don't really understand what central courtyard we are talking about? I would be grateful for screenshots
Commented 5 months ago2023-11-22 14:26:30 UTC
in vault item: Sykhiv_yards_b2Comment #105650
Oh hey, new areas! Sadly the download link is broken. nvm it works now.
Feedback:
Outdoor light_environment should be white on midday, with ambient colour set to sky blue.
Grass texture is too rough. Find a softer one.
Grass colour doesn't match the tree or the other foliage. It's too green.
Grass terrain is super bumpy; I'm pretty sure it affects performance. It doesn't need to be super bumpy or super-divided. The central courtyard in crossfire achieves a non-flat terrain with just 3-4 brushes.
General:
-Delayed map start by an extra 13 seconds to give clients time to download soundcache and load.
-Added fill lights.
-Fixed some texture and lighting issues.
-Balanced item pickups.
-Improvements to the health regeneration.
-Visual fixes.
-Gameplay improvements to locations with firefights.
-Lowered glass table strengths so they break with 1 hit.
-Added a "Reactor" sign to the reactor door.
-Improved reactor lighting.
-Causing the reactor to go critical will now cause radiation damage.
-Added new screen to reactor room that lights up when there's an emergency.
-Replaced some sign textures with more fitting ones.
Bug Fixes:
-Fixed the test chamber's button being spammed and bugging the door. Now it's 1-time use.
-Added visual guidance to same room.
-Fixed some lights having gaps between them and the ceiling (floating).
-Fixed the coolant elevator getting triggered and stuck while moving.
-Fixed an issue causing fodder enemies to keep spawning after boss is dead.
-Fixed an issue where fodder enemies could follow the player to the surface.
-Fixed wrong address for some entities.
Specific:
-Improved the platform's entities.
-Made the pistol pickup more visible and eye-catching.
-Gameplay improvements.
-Fixed an issue causing barneys to softlock doors.
-Added messages to areas with special goals.
-Lowered server healths so they break easier.
-Removed coolant elevator pit.
-Reduced noise from frank5.wav.
-Increased volume of frank voice lines to 200%.
-Made small edit to MOTD / Mission Briefing.
Due to Valve reworking the game menu to visually look like the old WON menu screen, the structure of GameMenu.res is changing and in flux until Valve finalizes it.
As usual, switch to the steam_legacy beta to continue using the old specs in the meantime.
2024-05-08 - Safe to say the new specs have stabilized.
Mods no longer crashes if gamemenu is missing the WON-style help texts.
Mods with custom code may still crash from the differences in the UI resource files like new game dialog and option pages and may still require the legacy branch.
BIG CAVEAT: If the base textures are not square, YOU MUST USE near the same ratio for the horizontal and vertical tile factors or the detail textures will look stretched. Unfortunately, applied detailed textures in the wild are more stretched than not.
The current tool set [or utter lack thereof] makes it very very cumbersome to get the correct factors to account for the different dimensions of every texture in every map of your mod, which I think discourages more widespread application of detail textures to maps.
There is also an issue of textures containing a mixture of material types which basically need their own detail textures tailor made.
I'm thinking of developing a program to address these issues but I want it to be able to render the result in 3D. It's a very steep thing to pick up though. (I could fork off of bspguy but I don't want to take over someone else's cooking 😅)
If people were to do these kinds of meta-mods, they should be developed to run on metamod[-*] imo. That way there can be a path to extend it to run on top of any mod, not just Half-Life.
Commented 5 months ago2023-11-16 07:10:52 UTC
in vault item: Diesel electric generatorComment #105643
I know... but I don't feel like iterating it until it feels right. The panel func_button as is targets an intermediary, currently occupied by `trigger_relay`s so that those who wanted to fine-tune the sequence further can just put a multi_manager or more complex logic in its place.
I would do it if I were to actually put this in an actual mod... But don't count on it! 😅
^ This program is written in Python 3.11. Most Linux distros include Python by default so you can run the python file directly from the source files (though you might have to upgrade to 3.11). You need to know how to [optionally set up virtual environments and] install the required python packages. The requirements file is in the source, and you should be able to set it up in the standard Pythonic way.
Make sure you have Python 3.11 or above
Download the source:
Extract to a folder.
Open your terminal and type these commands:
cd <path to the src folder from the extracted path>
python3 -m venv venv
./venv/Scripts/activate
pip3 install -r requirements_gui.txt
Create a new file run gui.sh (name not important) and type these commands:
cd <path to the src folder from the extracted path>
./venv/Scripts/activate
./BspTexRemap_GUI.py
Now any time you want to run the program, you just run the bash script above.
Man are we glad to be here. Gotta say, the last 2 weeks have been some really busy ones, but it was all worth it. We managed to make a map with a decent length, good gameplay and in some parts, great visuals and topped it all off with some enjoyable scripted sequences.
Let us know what you think and if you're interested to learn about how these 2 weeks passed, how we worked and what we learned.
We'd like to thank all of you who accompanied us during these 2 weeks and kept your eyes on us. We hope you'll enjoy what we've made.
Those of you who have honored us with your support:
Admer456, SV BOY, Caretaker u.k, The Regent, WyattTheEpicDude, TrollBooger, The 303, Ryor, Sparks and Soctom. Sorry if I missed anyone.
Impressive. I really like the effort you putted into weapons model that replicates Classic looks into Gearbox HD Style even though I don't like the Gearbox Hand Sleeve but I still appreciate how the Hand Sleeves kinda fitted into Classic Style. Oh Btw are these Weapons Animations are made by yourself in blender?
Commented 6 months ago2023-11-04 19:20:19 UTC
in vault item: fy_steppesComment #105622
Long gone. This was made on my college macbook which is long gone. I'm dabbling in Source 2 for funzies maybe I'll make something similar to this because I did quite like this dumb little map.
i recently started on my first map (of any game, let alone half life), so once i'm done with that, this'll be a great project
The 32-bit limit was a surprise to me as well. I even tried using an empty entry called "Sniper" (cut map) that was on the list, but not on the actual world map. It didn't work as I thought it would and remained locked. I think you are right about the Custom missions dir thing though.
I did suspect that there's a 32-bit limit on the tracker for mission progression, as a community-made mod that stitches all the extra official missions into the main campaign has the mission locks bugging. In the stock game where these extra missions are standalone they appear as unlocked. I'll update that on the notes as well.
some other ideas to use the world map for custom missions would be to have a separate mod that falls back to czeror, and that mod can perhaps have its own missions on the world map. other than that, a separate hub map is unavoidable, but it should be its own map and not overwrite the training map as was done previously.
In regards to the "junk" KV, not sure how it functions as of yet. The decompile of the DLL is here for reference. I doubt it will give us any clues tho. Also should have mentioned, custom mission are not a thing one can make appear or function on the world map. This is due to the way that missions are unlocked within the game progression (complete X, unlock Y). This can be attributed to a 32 bit int or something of the sense.
A workaround for this is for mods to make the world map button in the menu, load into a different a hub-world type map.
item_it might reflect an earlier game mechanic where it's an item in your inventory that you need to select in order to interact with.Not putting it in because, speculah.
But really, reading the BSP specs and how a lot of the struct fields are indices into the next struct really reads like relational model of a db, and with 14 lumps interacting this way I really, really needed a visual aid to understand how it all relates with each other, which strangely for the 27+ years of BSP's existence has not existed in any form. Hence the chart, and this journo entry I made to put it in.
@jamie yeah, I like checking the recent changes page and seeing a lot of edits. Makes me more curious to check out stuff I don't normally use.
- HD_BackgroundLayout.txt
- HD_BackgroundLoadingLayout.txt
In all the files the second field of the background tile set tofitinstead ofscaled, which appears to crop the background as a whole to fit the screen's aspect ratio instead of stretching it. Example line:EDIT: fixed it. i put a info_player_start in the second map and it was interfering.
Never doing that again unless I really really reallyyyy have to. Few things in life are worth sacrificing one's sleep.
If you find yourself enjoying the taste of coffee and would like some in the afternoon anyway, I can recommend caffeine-free coffee. Alternatively cocoa (either as hot chocolate or a bar of dark chocolate) is also a source of caffeine but at a much lower dose and better to have in the afternoon than coffee.
As for the last part, self-destructive behaviour is often a symptom of some other cause, like stress, anxiety, and it could help to talk to someone professional about it.
Second: You say "last night" you drank two coffees? Here's a crazy idea. Don't drink coffee at night before trying to go to sleep.
Feedback:
Really happy to see you enjoyed it so much.
Version 1.1 Changelog (released)
SPOILERS ahead for anyone who hasn't played yet.General:
-Delayed map start by an extra 13 seconds to give clients time to download soundcache and load.
-Added fill lights.
-Fixed some texture and lighting issues.
-Balanced item pickups.
-Improvements to the health regeneration.
-Visual fixes.
-Gameplay improvements to locations with firefights.
-Lowered glass table strengths so they break with 1 hit.
-Added a "Reactor" sign to the reactor door.
-Improved reactor lighting.
-Causing the reactor to go critical will now cause radiation damage.
-Added new screen to reactor room that lights up when there's an emergency.
-Replaced some sign textures with more fitting ones.
Bug Fixes:
-Fixed the test chamber's button being spammed and bugging the door. Now it's 1-time use.
-Added visual guidance to same room.
-Fixed some lights having gaps between them and the ceiling (floating).
-Fixed the coolant elevator getting triggered and stuck while moving.
-Fixed an issue causing fodder enemies to keep spawning after boss is dead.
-Fixed an issue where fodder enemies could follow the player to the surface.
-Fixed wrong address for some entities.
Specific:
-Improved the platform's entities.
-Made the pistol pickup more visible and eye-catching.
-Gameplay improvements.
-Fixed an issue causing barneys to softlock doors.
-Added messages to areas with special goals.
-Lowered server healths so they break easier.
-Removed coolant elevator pit.
-Reduced noise from frank5.wav.
-Increased volume of frank voice lines to 200%.
-Made small edit to MOTD / Mission Briefing.
As usual, switch to the steam_legacy beta to continue using the old specs in the meantime.
The current tool set [or utter lack thereof] makes it very very cumbersome to get the correct factors to account for the different dimensions of every texture in every map of your mod, which I think discourages more widespread application of detail textures to maps.
There is also an issue of textures containing a mixture of material types which basically need their own detail textures tailor made.
I'm thinking of developing a program to address these issues but I want it to be able to render the result in 3D. It's a very steep thing to pick up though. (I could fork off of bspguy but I don't want to take over someone else's cooking 😅)
func_buttonas is targets an intermediary, currently occupied by `trigger_relay`s so that those who wanted to fine-tune the sequence further can just put amulti_manageror more complex logic in its place.I would do it if I were to actually put this in an actual mod... But don't count on it! 😅
Texturing — 8
Ambience — 9
Lighting — 9
Gameplay — 7
Wasn't easy though, I'll say that.
run gui.sh(name not important) and type these commands:Man are we glad to be here. Gotta say, the last 2 weeks have been some really busy ones, but it was all worth it. We managed to make a map with a decent length, good gameplay and in some parts, great visuals and topped it all off with some enjoyable scripted sequences.
Let us know what you think and if you're interested to learn about how these 2 weeks passed, how we worked and what we learned.
We'd like to thank all of you who accompanied us during these 2 weeks and kept your eyes on us. We hope you'll enjoy what we've made.
Those of you who have honored us with your support:
Admer456, SV BOY, Caretaker u.k, The Regent, WyattTheEpicDude, TrollBooger, The 303, Ryor, Sparks and Soctom. Sorry if I missed anyone.