Forum posts

Hopefully you aren't using the milkshape decompiler as its a more outdated version of mdldec.exe that misses stuff like additional skins & at times introduces vertex shading errors in some models.

Also is there going to be a review of areas that may have optimization issues? I did a whole playthrough of TWHL tower and things for the most part were fine but there was an area on one of the cubicle maps that dropped my fps hard and the other end of the wind tunnel seemed to do the same thing (im assuming due to overly error prone brush stuff that could have been done with a model).

Yup. Gearbox models freak out if you rename them and try to use them in monster_generic entities. You learn something every day O RLY - :rly:

I'm actually interested in what is actually causing this since I am considering some monster_generic needed stuff (also writing a troubleshooting guide so this would be important info to note down).

As for the regular monsters thing you mentioned, yeah mixing styles is kinda iffy and I also realized that Id probably have to make 2 versions because say if someone checks the "Use HD content" then the custom model would not be loaded.

If its a room of that size and I got time till september count me in. Now question: since this is vanilla HL there isnt really a way to choose a custom monster model... however as a workaround would it be possible to have a custom model for said monster in the mod folder but have the customization be in another bodygroup/skin so its normal for everyone else until you explicitly set it in hammer? Thats the only way I can think of with vanilla unless someone knows better.

Yes it does and with a wider variety of control. Max has a very deep amount of customization. My experiences with various 3D programs are as follows:

3DSmax: Decent straightforward UI & layout, has a learning curve similar to photoshop but goes much deeper. Powerful general purpose 3D editor who's main strength is hard-surface, enviroments, and the "modifier stack" (imagine each edit to your model is saved as a "snapshot" or layer stack so you can have non-destructive editing. This is what max is known best for).

Blender: Not quite as powerful as paid main industry standard software but as free program its excellent. Its strength is speed due to its heavy reliance on hotkey workflow. Main drawback is that it tends to have a rather awkward learning curve and by design is very different from any other modelling program. This made it difficult for me to learn even with my 6+ years of using 3Dsmax and others. Also its UI and design compared to others has a fairly mixed reception online.

MilkShape3D: Easy to learn, has a simple UI, but works on very old workflows and is considered very clunky to use. Its UV editor and animation is particularly lacking, however it has a lot of built-in tools for legacy games which has made it a popular choice among modders.

kHED: Incredibly easy to learn freeware, modernized UI, nice UV editor with active preview & vertexnormals on UV render for easy texturing, has more powerful gizmos for scale/rotate/ect than milkshape, has a very simple smoothing , group & materials menu. Lacks rigging capability, but id say the best for an absolute beginner. Also has built in SMD/MDL and milkshape export.

Maya: While Ive barley used it, it shares a lot of similarities with 3Dsmax, but its main strengths are animation, rigging, movies, and has become a more popular choice for gamedev over the years (Valve went from Max to XSI, then to Maya for orangebox).

There is a Snap to grid button that can be adjusted with Right-click to set the snapping distance.

Also, I demonstrated cycler_sprite because its still used in CS1.6 and some others for staticprops. Standard cycler can have issues (its shootable and bleeds and sometimes has an iffy collision; better to make a clip brush + cyclersprite)

I recently found this little piece of freeware called kHED that ive found is very intuitive and easy to use. Its actually easier Ive found to use than Milkshape3D and has GoldSrc compiling right out of the program with .mdl export. The only downside is that there is no rigging or bones, however this program can also save scenes as milkshape files. Ive used a wide variety of 3D programs and id say this would be something id be playing around with if I were an absolute beginner.
http://khed.glsl.ru/index.php?page=home

Ive made a 15 minute sped up video of a static TV prop from start to finish. I went for quick and dirty so most of the stuff is PS layer style effects.
Things to note:
-I didn't need to UV unwrap the antennas because I used a special "_chrome" texture (64X64 only).
-If you get errors on export/autosave try running as admin (also if your compiled model is 0kb)
-There are some things I rushed like some bits of wasted UV space and having an on red light when the TV is clearly off (whoops.)
-You can find the QC and SMD in the folder you saved your working kHED file and edit it to add other things if you need
-If you are a more experienced modeller (Blender,Max) you can probably pass on this. However the UV unwrapping tools on this program are superior to MilkShape3D with more options and an active selected 3D preview next to your sheet and if you are a Milkshape user id give it a try (also remember you can save as milkshape scenes)
-For Sven id probably go with item_generic, I went with cycler_sprite for generic vanilla GoldSrc compatibility
YouTube Video Of Prop Making
I threw on some GTA3 RISEFM because why not.

Yes its a tricky process but Id say its well worth the effort, especially if you are working with Sven coop now since you can use topcolor/bottomcolor with any model/monster entity for great variety.

Now if you know about UV editing you can do a workaround where you just detach the parts of the model you want remapped and give it its own smaller texture sheet and then use a "full range" number for a faster method so you dont have to pallete edit. However you can only use one or the other that way.

No, you dont need to make a new armature. What you did making a new bone and parenting the armature to it should make it the "root" of the armature. and "Bip01" isn't a must-have name, just as long as the bone is the root bone.

Now basically in order to make it "move" you make a walking animation and have the root bone keyframed to move forward a set distance (depending how fast your custom NPC is moving) and with linear keyframes for just that root bone. See my above example of that scientist walk. But if you are still trying to get this working mabey just have a simple movement if you dont already have an animation ready.

Now one thing that I may not know is that I mainly work in 3DSMAX where the root bone has a world rotation of X0 Y0 Z-90. Im not sure how to check this in blender so depending on the root rotation it may need a different extraction: for example:
$sequence walk "anims/Walk" lx fps 30 loop ACT_WALK 1
LX may have to be changed to LY or LZ.

The way I tested to see if extraction is working is open the compiled model in HLMV and go to the "walk" animation. If it is walking in place then the extraction worked, if not then try a different once other than LX.

It also just so happens that I have a test model that walks very slowly with no other animations and has a custom skeleton if you want to examine: www.the303.org/stuff/root_test.rar

EDIT: Also when exporting with blender, make sure to uncheck "Implicit motionless bone" on the SMD tools export settings. That will likely mess up your skeleton hierarchy.

@Screamernail Root bone of most if not all HL1 skeletons is "Bip01":As for walking im using an example from the gordon scientist model in bshift who's walking sequence moves Bip01 forward about 48 units (-48Y as it says in the blender inspector) which means he will move 48 hammer units per animation cycle (how ever many frames at how ever fps).Now an important thing to note is that if you are animating root movement is that you make your keyframes linear or in blender you set the keys in the curve editor to "Linear Extrapolation".

You can see other movement speeds by importing other models animations/run sequences to see how they were done.

Okay if you are making new animations are you sure that the walk animation is not "in place", because LX motion extraction is taken from the animation root bone itself to move the NPC. If you don't know what I mean import a walking SMD and you will see that the root bone moves forward in a linear fashon in addition to the walk animaiton.

No, but it does need an ACT_WALK/RUN for the AI to identify the sequence as a walk for example from the Hgrunt:
$sequence walk1 "hkwalk" LX fps 30 looping ACT_WALK 1
$sequence run "run2" LX fps 30 looping ACT_RUN 1

Color Remapping Guide

Color remaps are the ability to make playermodels use the topcolor and bottomcolor changes in the multiplayer tab and is more powerful than DM_BASE method. This will also work for HLDM models.

I am also posting this because as of the recent Sven Co-op update version 5.13 there was an update to allow any model entity or NPC that has remap textures to be controlled via "topcolor&bottomcolor" keyvalues using ranges 0~255. This allows for wide variants of models without needing additional skin textures (adding to filesize) or multiple models as some people have done just for reskins.

While this video tutorial was originally written for just playermodels, the same methods apply for NPC/other model textures only without needing a portrait.

Also don't forget you can also have "topcolor" & "bottomcolor" changed by things like "trigger_changevalue" as ive tested. Lastly P2MV model viewer can preview Remap_ textures.

Those image links give me errors.

Also, question about the model you compiled: monster_generics can and do walk when told to as ive done a lot of use with those entities, so im wondering if the root cause is a lack of motion extracted forward movement in the animation.

For example if you rigged from a playermodel animations where the model walks in place.

Speaking of Models & brush models, Id thought id share some research I did the other day:

I did some tests with this program called "VMF2SMD" which can take .map or hammer files and dump SMDs out of them and grab the nessasary textures from the wads which is damn convenient.

Functions similar to like source engines "propper"; also places the root bone at world origin. Now the big issue is that while you get a reference SMD which can easily be brought into source engine; the problem is the UVs work on tiled space (so not gonna work for goldsrc) so they are all over the place. So in order to not get your UVs borked on compile you either have to basically redo the UV layout in the 1st UV space which is a massive pain. Sure you could do some simple planar unwrap or something but you are still gonna have to do alignment on multiple texures.

There is a quick and dirty method i tried where i moved the UVs onto Channel 2 with an Unwrap UVW modifier, then regrouped the unwrap using the automatic packing so it all went into the 1 space, then did a "render to texture" so it projected it all onto a 512X512 map. Then I moved the channel to onto the 1 exported the SMD and compiled. It was not the most efficent textel density due to a lot of repetition and whatnot but sorta worked (albiet at probably worse resolution). If you did the baking method with a bit more care in the UVs and did some overlaps you could wind up with something nice.

Furthermor, brush to model's usually have unwelded verts, bad triangulation and iffy smoothing groups too. Its an interesting concept but IMO its a lot of "clean up" work and probably just faster to grab wad textures and model it as new in a 3d editor.

Xash has some odd quirks, I noticed that animated sprites (env_sprite) flicker for some reason. I posted a bug report on the MODDB page a while and the guy there said he would take a look into it.

Pretty much everything Windawz said. Cyclers use is pretty much a dev/testing/placement model in that it "cycles" through the chosen models each animation sequence and plays it each time you shoot it. It does have a good use when first blocking out the map or any things before finalizing.

Also while its not usually included with many FGD's you can use "skin" and "body" keyvalues to change the model skin and bodygroup if the said model has any.
More info here:
http://gamebanana.com/tuts/12202

"empty" model? as in no mesh or bones? I'm assuming that you need your model to have at least one bone or something. For example my first test with QUAKE mdl flags was putting $flags 1 on the mp5 grenade. So whenever it launched it had that trail while in motion. I did similar by giving the gib model $flags 4 for blood and the blood particles stop flowing as soon as the bouncing gibs come to a rest.

Glad to see a new update!

One thing I found interesting was that "$flags 128" has a different appearance in vanilla HL as opposed to XASH. For example in Xash its the "purple trail" and in regular it looks like a single burning trail.

I wrote a long description of all the $flags in this page here including what exact quake effects they are:
http://the303.org/tutorials/gold_qc.htm

If you are using GIMP, I suggest saving it as standard 24bitBMP and either A: Let Wally do the conversion to 8bit or use IRFANVIEW conversion. I say this because ive found GIMP has a very nasty habit of doing bad dithering or color choices when doing the conversion. Worse is when you are doing transparent textures and it saves it as the wrong color. My texture series is here give it a read. While it is written for photoshop mainly there is alternative methods in the tutorial you can skip to:
http://www.the303.org/tutorials/gold_texture.htm

Also, to answer your question, yes those maps that have custom textures without a wad had them packed in with the CSG command.

That's interesting, wonder if its functional or if its incomplete like "weapon_cycler".

But yeah with "Patrolling" you can easily find examples in c1a0 or c1a0d which has a few scripted_sequence entities set to walk where scientists patrol around certain areas in a loop.

This list is my current compilation of current GoldSrc links, resources, and tutorial content. If you have any more useful things to add, let me know:

Sites:
The303.org (my site of GoldSrc tutorials including Custom map texture, sprite & modelling series)
Sourcemodding.com GoldSrc section
Wavelength.net Articles
RunThinkShootLive
Sven Manor (Mapping For Sven Co-op)
The SnarkPit
CounterMap2 CS Mapping site
LiveWires List Of Mapping Resources
Tools & Plugins:
Sourcemodding.com GoldSrc Tools Archive
GS-HL Tools archive
Half-Life Zone Editing tools
Half-Life SDK (can also be downloaded through steam)
Hl-Texture tools - Wad & Sprite Creation Utility
Slackillers Collection Of Legacy HL Tools
Nem's Crafty BSP Viewer Tool
ModDb's Half-Life Section
GameBanana's GoldSrc General Tools Section
GameBanana's Half-Life Tools Section
GameBanana's CS1.6 Tools Section
RIPENT - BSP entity ripper
BSPedit
Mapping Specific:
J.A.C.K Map Editor
Sledge Map Editor
Hammer 3.5.3 by Yo-Den
ZHLT - Hammer Compile Tools
Modelling Specific:
HLMV Standalone - GoldSrc MDL viewer
P2MV Model Viewer (Color Remap Preview)
Game Zombie 3DSmax SMD Tools
WallWorm 3Dsmax Tools & Utilities
Blender SMD tools
PeterTheGoats SMD converter (for blender)
Wunderboy's Tools and 3DSMax Plugins
MilkShape3D lightweight editor (has built-in SMD support)

Models & Wads:
17buddies GoldSrc Model Downloads
Gamer-Lab GoldSrc Content Downloads Resource
The Half-Life High Definition Pack

Video Tutorials:
RunThinkShootLive's Hammer Beginner stream tutorial
RunThinkShootLive's Level Design Academy Playlist
Modelling For GoldSrc In Blender Series
Animated Helicopter In BlenderTutorial
Transparent Textures
Animated Textures
Creating a Mod playlist & Hammer
GoldSrc Programming and other playlists

Communities:

GameBanana
SourceModding Discord Server
Sven Co-Op Forums
HLFX (Russian Community)
Half-Life Creations Forums
Snarkpit Forums

Legacy Content:

The Valve ERC
CS1.6 Playermodel Tutorial
PlanetQuake's Half-Life Tutorials
Legacy 3DSmax Plugins
Unknownworlds Big Forum Thread on Half-Life Modding
Hammer Content Pack
EYERONIK'S Mapping Tutorials

Okay, the problem is threefold:

1. Your transparent color seems to not have been palette index 255 (very last color spot on the palette). This can happen if you use black as your background as the index conversion may choose a different duplicate as your color. You can use Wally to swap the indexes, or HL-Texture tools to pick it. Also the best bets to go with when making your transparent color are RGB 0 0 255 or RGB 0 255 0.

2. You saved the wrong format. Masked transparency is "AlphaTest". Your sprite format was "indexalpha" which is a totally different type of transparency used for decals and is the reason why it showed up as a black square in VHE

3. Stuff like plants/trees that stand upright or have a part that should be planted in the ground should be using "Parallel upright" instead of regular parallel (which can look like the plant is uprooting itself at angles).

Sprites can be pretty annoying assets to make and understand, I made a corrected version here:
http://www.the303.org/stuff/plant.rar

Also I wrote a big tutorial series on these:
http://www.the303.org/tutorials/gold_sprite.htm

Its gonna be hard to troubleshoot this without seeing the file; could I look at your .spr file?

Hey, im gonna be adding yet another piece of documentation to my long list of TODO things and that will be a "troubleshooting" reference list. I recently found a few hard to diagnose issues and their solutions. If there is any real common ones let me know.

My current work in progress:

Illegal parent bone replacement in sequence "X" , "X" has "X" reference has "X":
SMD skeleton bones mismatch. Correct in your 3D editor or use $renamebone for a quick fix

Model looks good in 3d editor but polygons look faceted:
Your model likley is imported geometry and has explicit normals. If your exporter has the option of exporting in explicit mode use that option.
2nd case:
If you have two bones of the same name on export it can do this to your mesh
3rd case:
In rare cases models with $texrendermode additive can do this when used as separate mesh parts or $bodygroups. Change the order of the meshes in the QC

Unknown for bbox "bonename"
This happens when you are using $hitbox and the bone its trying to make it on is either a different name, wrong name or was stripped out by the compiler. The compiler will strip out bones that have no verticies attached to it, the only exception is if a child bone of said bone that is parented to it has verticies skinned to it.
An example is say you have an arm set of bones an upper, lower and hand. The upper and lower have no verticies attached to it but the hand does. The model will be able to assign hitboxes to the arm bones since the hand is parented and has skinned verticies.
Unknown Attachment link "X"
Same thing as the hitbox issue only for attachment.

Line "X" is incomplete:
This can be difficult to diagnose since it can be a line way further down in your QC code that is causing the issue, for example having an FPS but with no number on a sequence can cause this or an improperly set brackers {} can do this
My model is rotated wrong but looked fine in 3d editor:
Most likley is your first or idle sequence has the bone rotated. Either fix in editor or use "rotate" on your problem $sequence line
Models textures are all wrong but looked fine in the 3d editor:
Textures were likley tiled across the UV space. GoldSrc does not support UV tiling. To fix you must take the tiled sections and either overlap in the main UV space or just re-uv the model parts

Model looks horribly broken with all limbs rotated 90 degrees
This is a milkshape3D issue where it can break animations on export

BMP X.bmp [-19999998 -19999998] (6260919%) 1025789700 bytes
9999999 -9999999 9999999 -9999999
********** ERROR **********
texture too large

You declared a texture in $texrendermode that exists in your directory but does not exist on the model itself. So either you chose the wrong texture in your QC or your SMD had the wrong one assigned to it.

Model looks like a horrible mess of vertices scattered everywhere
This is likley a blender export problem where you either exported with a bone with multiple vertex weights or 2 verticies to the same bone. Fix your skinning and re export. If this still does not work, export in source engine mode then use peterthegoats SMD converter.
Model renders inverted
Use "reverse" after your $body line and smd name. This reverses all the triangles in your reference mesh.
Getting wierd dark areas, or inconsistent shadows or smoothing problems
Several reasons: Unwelded vertices, overalpping faces, bad triangulation, overlapping edgeloops, large NGONS (a polygon in your editor with over 4 vertices which results in bad triangulation on export) bad vertex normals, improper use of smoothing groups such as using 1 smoothing across right angles, or errors with imported geometry. This stuff needs to be fixed in your 3d editor.

My skin change does not work
The first skin in the $texturegroup bracket list must be the one that your SMD has on it.

invalid BMP file/compression
Your BMP texture is not 8bit indexed. Use an image editor to fix this (but be sure to keep a copy of your 24bit version just in case since 8bit conversion is destructive)
too many normals/verticies in model
You went over the per-SMD limit of normals or verticies. Reduce your polycount and/or break up the mesh into different SMDs (also ffs, don't go stupid with your final polycount. Porting high-density badly rigged stuff from gmod will animate horribly and is bad for performance). This can also happen by accident if you ment to export one small part of a model but your exporter did everything in the scene.

bogus bone index
SMD formatting problem. This is due to an export issue or a source engine SMD.
My masked texture still has blue on it
The blue color was not made on the proper index (index 255). You can fix this by bringing your texture into WALLY and using the "swap indices" feature or attempt to automatically do it by putting "{" on the front of your BMP before bringing it into wally. When done export the bmp back.
My masked texture has blue fringe
You resized your image/used a soft edge on your transparent image. You need a hard edge, so use pencil or a masked threshold.
My models limbs crumple/streach badly when animating
This is a topology issue + hard vertex weight issue. You must modify your topology/edgeloops to compensate for hard vertex weights. There is no vertex weight blending so you cannot spread out a movement over several verts or edgeloops. To compensate remove some loops then create/cut new loops that have further distance on moving parts. Hard-vertex limit favors lower poly/density meshes. Testing movement in your 3D editor and a good understanding of topology and movement is key to fixing this.
My models UVs are offset badly from what they used to be
This is a problem that comes with decompiled models which causes UV shifting. To compensate use this method of fixing:
http://www.the303.org/tutorials/gold_uvfix.htm

While I am quite busy these days, if I get a moment I could contribute something. No promises though, but Ive been writing a lot of GoldSrc tutorial content and I could offer some info and some stuff of mine.
For example I have a prop model pack anyones free to use that comes with sources:
24 model pack

Also if you haven't seen I wrote a very lengthy series on map textures that even includes goldsrc skybox creation methods & a similar series on sprite creation and types:
Map texture series
Sprite Series

So I revisited an old error while going through stuff and I found that having separate meshes with $additive has some unusual behavior in $body or bodygroup order:The closer one had the main lamp mesh first, then the blobs. The farther one had the blobs mesh first then the main lamp. This error is easily mistaken for the "explicit normals" issue since it looks the same but is additive and mesh order related.

Now heres another thing that I cannot figure out. I noticed that on some props the additive would not render when another prop was present. But in trying to replicate the error I got some strange sometimes working sometimes not. Thought it was light or distance but its not consistent:Notice the far stove in the back is rendered correct but only in the second pic.

Also anyone know of any order conflicts that I may have missed? For example things like having to put $origin before $body or similar things.

http://www.the303.org/tutorials/gold_qc.htm

Latest thing ive been working on as I ramp up to a full model export/compile guide, this is a quick list that ive made that fills a lot of the gaps that the SDK and some online lists have missed. Ive included as many examples and my personal comments on them. There is still a few things I may need to add/fixes but its mostly done.

I don't have any more that fit that description. I only made a handful of fully custom skyboxes and many were just half-baked test/concepts.

On the topic of placement, if you do need a monster_generic like for animations and whatnot and need it placed in a difficult spot that gives you problems like not going where you want it or the "yellow sprites" error you can do this:

1. Take your monster_generic and place it in hammer where you need it to be in its final position.

2. Shift-copy that monster_generic and move it to a big open space and hover it above the ground. Then give it a name.

3. The in-place monster_generic that you first made, turn it into a scripted_sequence (delete the model path keyvalue) then choose the named monster_generic as the target monster. Then set "movement type" to "instantaneous".
(if you need to check "not solid" for your monster)

On map run the scripted_sequence will now take the monster_generic and place it into place with no errors. This is how "pipebubbles.mdl" in blast pit chapter and other models stuck in complex geometry are placed with no errors.

The first one with the trees is included in the Example content download on the page. The second one the neon city I realized I did not include it. I got it here if you want: www.the303.org/stuff/neon_city_sky.rar

Surprisingly there were a few active TFC servers last I checked. Only issue is that I am totally terrible at that game lol.

http://www.the303.org/tutorials/gold_texture.htm
http://www.the303.org/tutorials/gold_sprite.htm

Id like to share two long GoldSrc custom map asset creation series I wrote a while back. Both include example RMF&BSP with sprite gallery and assets.

---

Map Texture Series:

Basic Texture creation, .WAD packing, and hammer config
Masked Transparent Textures
Additive Textures
Toggled Textures
Animated Textures
Water Textures
Scrolling Textures
2D SkyBoxes
Detail Overlay
Batch Conversion

Sprite Series:

Basic Sprites and Orientation Types
Additive Sprites
IndexAlpha Sprites
Masked Transparent Sprites
Animated Sprites
Beam Sprites

---

I am also in the process of working on modelling for goldsrc series.