Forum posts

Reviewer accounts for the top 10 TWHLers.

Ah yes that too.

That's two reasons not to do it then.

I always say I'll do a dual screen setup with one of the old blurry CRTs I have lying around somewhere, the only thing that's stopping me is that my desk is not big enough.

It definitely is. A Black Mesa facility.

That looks great hotdog. Lighting is still lacking a bit but can have a good future.

At least it's PS2.

Are there good optical mice that don't randomly decide to make the cursor all crazy?

I know, I just don't find myself in dire need of a new mouse. Having the cursor disappear in Hammer is not a reason, only Valve's excuse not to fix it.

Well to be honest it's also a rolling ball mouse. No lasers or other trinkets.

When I got it, optical mouses were a new thing and I wouldn't take chances. I didn't like seeing my friends' cursors going crazy like they do sometimes. On the upside, the salesman gave it to me for free because probably nobody else wanted it.

I don't have a scroll wheel

May I leech off your thread to post my random question about Hammer?

For some reason I can't see the mouse cursor in the 2D views when I'm in zoom mode. I end up clicking randomly the amount of times I need and then pressing CTRL+E to center on what I'm doing. Has anybody come across this before?

I still think there's a problem with making a handful of textures scroll at a different speed each to make the different depths of scenery. Could be done with a shitload of prop_dynamics attached to func_trains but I don't think that would be very resource efficient.

Of course. It all makes sense.

It is unwise to allow photographic equiment to get wet.

Sounds like fun to make, albeit difficult. It may be easier to do in Source.

Not that I know of. But if you know the sizes of the textures, you can count how many times they're repeated. I did that once.

Don't the guards themselves count as witnesses? Were they one-shot kills?

You should have said that from the beginning.

Patient history.

Perhaps if you're talking about comparing high-ISO noise it'd be better if you showed the original unedited out-of-the-camera shots. For obvious reasons, resizing alters this state. Otherwise you need to express your ideas in a different way.

So you're wanted in every town.

Still those images are so low-res that your point can't be observed.

Also I wouldn't leave any camera with the lens off for too long, if dust gets on the mirror (or even worse, the sensor) it's very hard to clean properly. My mirror or something in the optical viewfinder got dirt stuck one very windy day even with the lens on, and I had to learn to live with it. There's a speckle somewhere in there and, short of completely taking apart the camera, I haven't found a way to remove it.

I'm pretty stalled on this :/

What I meant is that you posted three images when you should have posted six. If you actually took the exact same photos with both cameras so as to compare and decide which one looks better, why not posting both shots for each scene so everyone can see it with their own eyes?

Do we have to trust you? Because I'm only seeing one shot of each. It would probably be a more transparent statement if you posted the results off both cameras to illustrate your point.

The circles don't look that bad. But why is each one in a different aspect ratio?

I've only found the Hollow tool to be useful as a quick and dirty way of building a room for a test map.

Wouldn't it be the same if you covered that whole scenic area with a single huge clip block? Player's not getting there anyway...

Oh the good times had with The Sims. My houses were the envy of all my friends

...because their houses were complete crap. Not because I was any good.

Great idea for analysis.

I'd venture that BEVEL could be used in places where the player will never ever get to, so as to save on clipnodes, and NULL/Sky everywhere else to keep clip areas from going crazy.

I'm probably the least knowledgeable in this subject in the whole site though, so I'll leave the following room for others to contradict me:

You pressed random buttons until what? Until WHAT?? I want to know!!

Rendertype probably works just as well as with any other entity.

Is there really a noticeable gain from doing all that instead of a func_water?

Yer all a bunch of noobs. I made my early mapping experience in Wolfenstein3D.

[TLDR at the bottom]

My start in mapping goes back to about the year 1999, when I got my first computer. Until then, the only games I knew were those in other people's computers. Most of them were DOS-based and Windows was a rare novelty to me. Along with a crapload of demos and shareware versions of old games that came bundled with the computer there was a shareware version of Wolfenstein 3D (shareware was just Ep1). I had played it before so I knew that was one of the greatest games ever, but I couldn't figure out why the rest of the game was unavailable (as in, episodes 2-6 removed from the shareware version).

One day some acquaintance of my father brought me this unusual-looking disc, all black except for the lone words "Wolfenstein 3D" in cyan on it. Maybe this disc had something of interest - perhaps even the missing parts of the game - so I grabbed it without a second thought. Turned out to be a huge collection of folders and files (that now I know was internet-type content, but I had no idea at the time). Lots of folders with custom Wolf3D mods (most of them just the content files, it took me a while to figure out why there were no playable .exes in there and how was I supposed to make use of them) and some folders with extra stuff that wasn't games at all. Names like "MapEdit 4.5" and "MapEdit 7" got my curiosity, but I still didn't even associate that with the idea that game content could be modified; plus the .exes in there failed to run. I left those uninteresting non-funcioning programs aside and proceeded to get my hands on the "playable" games, each one of which turned out to be some kind of hacked version of the game (custom content, but I didn't know) and quit a bit bitter because none of them were the full game I was looking for.

But what were these dull-looking programs? It took some time but when I got them to run they all showed these big square graphs on a black background. What the hell was this? After some fiddling I noticed one of them looked a lot like the floor plan of the first level in Wolf3D. Matter of fact, the next one also looked a lot like a floor plan of the second level, and the next one like the third. It didn't take long to make the connection, and I got my hands to it right away.

I started by making small "convenient" modifications to the existing levels, but after a while they got boring and I started making my own levels. Basically by putting all the placeable stuff I could find in the editor. I made 10 levels for the whole shareware episode. Let's say I called it WolfenStu . They were crap, but I still thought highly of them. My friends also thought they were awesome, so shortly after I made another 10-level pack - WolfenStu 2. Then came WolfenStu 3, 4, and 5. Each one meaner than the last as I gradually learned the subtleties of the W3D engine. There also was a resource editor, so for pack 6 I started drawing new sprites to replace the knife with a lightsaber and the gun with a hand throwing a red brick.

Unfortunately, I lost all of these the next time I had to format my hard drive. I think there might be a possibility of finding one or two, though. I'll look for them.

Fast forward a few years to when somehow, a Counter Strike disc came into my hands. It came along with a bunch of boring multiplayer games that seemed to use the same engine (HLDM, Op4, etc. plus Redemption which I thought was crap for not being multiplayer, despite me not even having internet access). I no longer have that disc. At the time, maybe you knew someone that knew someone that knew someone that had a cd burner, so I had them make me a copy so I could loan out the copy without risking the "real" disc getting damaged. Ironically, I eventually lost the "real" disc and I was only left with the copy. Which unfortunately was one of those cheapo no name blank discs that look the same on both sides, and after a while the plating started peeling off and no longer reads. On the other hand I somehow ended up with a HL disc. I didn't even care about it, everyone was playing CS at the time.

One day a friend said he knew someone that knew someone that knew someone that somehow had made his own map for CS. Nobody believed him, but I immediately started searching the internet for some form of level editor (whenever I was visiting someone with internet access) and eventually came across some program referred to as Worldcraft that I couldn't figure out. I kept it, but also kept looking for easier and user-friendlier alternatives (that turned out to be worse).

I eventually went back to Worldcraft to try and make some decent CS map to play with my friends. And for years, my only mapping resource was random google searches. I only came across TWHL in 2009 and I immediately registered. Most of the mapping sites I had visited before were all flashy looking with ads and popups. I loved TWHL because it was easy on the eyes and didn't look massive, more like that small bar around the corner where everybody knows everybody.

TL;DR: First tried out mapping for Wolfenstein3D, until I moved to Counter Strike. Didn't play Half Life until about 2006-7.

~Your advice to future mappers/current mappers?
If somebody else could do it, you can do it too. Game makers don't do magic, there is always a way to do things.

Also, less is more.

+0texture1
+1texture1
+2texture1
+3texture1 etc, with maximum of +9.

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that you can also do:

+Atexture1
+Btexture1
+Ctexture1
+Dtexture1 (...) to a maximum of +Z (26 frames instead of 10)

Never tried it myself, but it makes sense.

Isn't the normal water effect enough then? Any water texture (that starts with a "!") will have it.

Make sure you're running it in OpenGL mode (water gets 3D-wavy) and not in software mode (everything looks bad and water is flat).

Are you mapping for Source or Gold? Because HL1 already has a scrolling water texture, you could use that or copy it and change its colour to suit your needs.

I'm thinking it's called !scrollwater but I'm not sure. Whatever its name is, though, it most definitely starts with "scroll"

As for Source... water is rendered differently and I don't know much about how to use it.

I'm with Madcow, lol

Hotdog just received a contract by Valve in the mail.

C. If it doesn't work, you can still go for B or something.

iPods are internet-enabled?

What the fuck.

As I said, on Counter-Strike all entities reset on every round, so it doesn't matter how complicated your setup is, it's useless.

It MAY work in HL:DM only because there are no timed rounds, but you can't do this in CS without coding.

I thought it nullified its effect.

Wedding photographers don't make that much. Plus I'm saving up for a new lens.

If "delay before close" is -1, it'll stay open forever.

I'm not entering. Been using up my holidays on long overdue chores such as tidying up my room, which was a mess. I suppose I could volunteer to judge, but I'm afraid I'm not much of a writer. I don't think I'm the right man.

I did work around this once, without a func_train. It seems a func_train would be easier but here's what I did:

Set the func_door to "not solid" and put in a trigger_hurt that killed you instead. The door wouldn't bounce, but now that I think about it, I can't remember how did I get around the whole "solid" issue (i.e door actually stopping you from walking across it)

You're better off with a func_train

If you want to greenscreen yourself into an ingame video, it's not the map that has to be green; it has to be whatever is behind you IRL.

@CT: My rig is 7 years old this year. Got it in early 2005. It's a P4 @2.4GHz / 1.5GB RAM. It's good and it does everything I need it to do.

By the way, I didn't say GS > Source. Only said that got a lot of crashes in just a few hours. I don't think I'll use it for the compo only because I have to LEARN source mapping first.

Don't all entities reset on every round? Making the above setup completely useless?

Sure, it's not that hard: Custom code.

Well I think I DO understand.

He wants to make it so that after you're past a certain point in the map (let's label it Point A), if you die you can respawn at Point A instead of the original spawn.

Then if you get past Point B, after you die you respawn at Point B rather than Point A.

I don't think this can be done without coding.

Also, there are no monsters in Counter Strike, unless you've coded a mod based off CS; in which case you're already doing custom code. As for which code file you'd need to tinker with to accomplish the above, I have no idea. Maybe somebody else does.

And to think I had such high expectations. I managed to make a test map without it crashing. Experimented a bit with the new entities: Placed a TV and Alyx in front of a camera. But so far it doesn't display, I only see a black screen

Oh well. I better get back to the compo map.