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.
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