I've been trundling away in the background and have been posting wee bits in the WIP section in discord. There's definitely a couple of other people working on this as well from what I can tell

About You

Name: Those who know, know.
Age: 24
Hometown: Wee shitehole in southern Scotland
Relationships: 2 terrible ones previously, currently living with my GF in London. All's good!
Occupation: Lighting technician for a lighting rental company. Hope to become a freelancer within the next couple years and get my ass on tour.
Current goal(s): At some point when I have expendable income, I want to start experimenting with 3D printing and VR. Current events are showing me that you can't really do any form of training wrt. manual labour when working from home, but you could learn how to repair and inspect things in VR. Problem is, just like with mapping, I'll furiously focus on a project for a day max, then struggle to find any motivation to continue on with it and procrastinate... think I'll need to look at that at some point. Not now, maybe sometime tomorrow. At some point many, many years down the line, I may want to revisit my university degree.
Politics: Left wing, but not to an obscene degree. Disagree with identity politics, something that seems to be becoming more and more prevalent. Pro Scottish Independence, but similarly to Archie, not because of nationalism.
Religion: I'm atheist through and through, but completely respect and acknowledge how important religions are to culture and society. No time for those that use it to justify hatred or cause harm onto others, though.

Favourite Things

Food: I'm pretty much a human dustbin, I'll eat anything. A good burger, chilli or spag bol will go down a treat.
Hot drink: Can't beat an English breakfast tea. A flat white or black coffee will also go down a treat.
Cold drink: Passionfruit Rubicon. Get in me.
Snacks: Insane sweet tooth. Tiramisu, a good chocolate fondant, cake, anything with "Ben & Jerry's" on it...
Movies: Anything that is tongue in cheek, self aware or incredibly atmospheric and immersive. Loved Blade Runner 2049 and Joker, but really have a soft spot for Robocop 1 & 2, Dredd, The Matrix and the likes of Evil Dead / Army of Darkness. I struggle to watch the same movie twice within the space of a few years.
Videogames: Used to be really into FPS games, but have found myself playing a load of sandbox games, like Stormworks, Factorio and Cities: Skylines. I love Metroid but haven't played it in ages, still waiting for Prime 4...
Music: Listening to a lot of video game soundtracks and the likes The Prodigy / Pendulum when I was younger made me listen to dance music and electronic music a lot more than contemporary and traditional styles, save for a few artists. Listening to a lot of deep Detroit house & techno ATM.
Other: I sing, a bit pitchy.

Disliked/Hated Things

Food: Aniseed, (most) fish & fennel can get tae. And miso, anything that tastes like I've just swallowed seawater is nothing short of torture.
Hot drink: Anything sugary. Don't know why, but stuff like sweet tea, lemsip etc. makes me gag.
Cold drink: Tomato juice. No.
Snacks: Anything with coconut. The creator of Bounty is a sociopath.
Movies: Generic schlock, horror, and films that give away their entire story in the trailer. Really can't handle films that are just jumpscares.
Videogames: MOBAs, card games and schlock.
Music: Modern trap / rap, and any modern song that samples an entire riff of chorus from another with little to no alteration. Will.I.Am is really guilty of this, it just screams a combination of lack of talent and relying on people's memories of older songs to boost it's popularity. Sampling is such an incredible thing when done correctly, but copy & pasting entire segments of songs is cheap. Again, not massively fussed about contemporary music.
Other: People calling espresso 'expresso'. Winds me up something stupid.

I'm glad this has been brought up.

I'm happy with the community covenant, with the tweaks that Urby and Jessie have suggested. At the end of the day, we're a half life level design community, and it does not necessarily need to cater to political discussion. There's absolutely no reason this community should give leeway to intolerance or bad vibes, we're all friends here and should treat each other with respect and dignity

I'm having a similar creative blank but have an idea for an onslaught wave based thing set in a nightclub. Could work, have some ideas to make fake lights and sync them with audio

Two words:
Yes

You haven't taken anybodies notes on board at all. I appreciate you for attempting this and hope it goes well, but your previous attempts make it seem like we could predict exactly what you will say in the coming weeks...

Just learn unreal or unity man

If you have a new version of Photoshop, it's really easy to make seamless textures using content aware - to the point that it's ridiculously hassle free. Offset your image so the edges are in the centre of the image, clean the seams, offset back, clean, and repeat ( usually never have to ) until it's clean.

I enjoy the mini competitions but as a few people have said, variety is the spice of life. Smaller collabs could definitely be a nice shout, and even some of the older "map a room" / "map from layout" competition styles would be interesting to try again.

On the collab note though, it would be comfortable to have the competition run on for a little bit longer. The nature of collaborations is a bit sporadic as it depends on the time available of the collaborators - one could say the current lengths require you to be on the ball, but when it now involves communication with multiple parties, it might prove a bit too tight.

You can't, I'm afraid. You'll have to stick with static point lights to do your lighting, the engine isn't remotely advanced enough to do anything dynamic.

You can add point lights by selecting the entity tool, and select "light". This tutorial will help.

I wasn't aware that there was any media whatsoever of Prospero - you've deffo shown me something here

He... Lives?

I like the idea of a different protagonist but dislike the idea of ending in death; as that sort of adds a "well what was the point of playing the game w/o dying if I just die at the end". Different ways for the player to wrap up their arc is a good shout though, like being absorbed into an AI that's later referenced or seen in a later game, being put into stasis, etc.

Not doable unless you code it into the engine, and I don't see that being an easy task either.

Agreed, well deserved first place. Congrats to all!

Weirdly had a dream that you were the winner, however you also created the next competition which meant building a foosball table that had to include memes. I was shooketh and frustrated

yeah, got issues in my map too. Didn't do as thorough a check of making clips for the models ( had the thought that disabling collision on all models would help with the large amount of models I was using, and then manually creating clips for them) as I had hoped. Jessie's approach to using the batteries to keep the door open was correct, I've never had it bug out like that when I was playtesting the map. Should've been more thorough!

I'm glad I submitted something regardless of the outcome. Might go back to submitting something Goldsrcy next time.

Yes. Moon is an excellent frame of reference, big fan. Gonna look fairly Natural Selection then!

Ever need a hand with textures, V/O, SFX, Music - give us a shout yo, sounds really interesting. When you say retro sci fi, are you meaning late 80s / early 90s stuff like Demolition Man, Escape From NY, Alien (in some ways DN3D) or we thinking more 70s / ""retro""

Gonna tune in and watch in the middle of work!

I can't speak for CPripyatUit's entry, but mine definitely has episode 2 content and will be missing a lot of textures and models if loaded into anything else.

Had a lot of fun playing Emergence, been a long time since I'd played portal so was good to get back into that mindset! Upmine had some good onslaught moments, although did get stuck for a while before realising I had to shoot off the lock, rather than crowbar-ing it! The voice acting added a nice level of story! Good wee bunch, a bit saddened we've only three entries

I bloody hope there's another day otherwise my entry isn't going on

I agree, I think it being collaborative is actually a really good shout. Only issue being a central section for people to expand upon, but it's definitely an idea for the future

Has someone been watching Bandersnatch?

I actually think this is a really cool idea, unsure how easy it would be to deal with in stock goldsrc, but definitely not hard in something like Sven though.Might be worth a tackle at some point?

Got a recurring bug that's making one of my gameplay things frustrating, going to spend some time trying to fix it. Chugging along. I can say that the quality of polish is going to vary wildly as time pressure builds up, but I'm vowing to submit something actually playable, and hopefully complete

Satchmo raising the stakes! Gonna have to be extra dedicated now

What does "community vote" actually entail? This seems like one of the only compos so far sans judges

Here, 2kliksphilip got involved in judging a map competition back on RunThinkShootLive. Might be worth giving him a shout to raise some awareness?

Cool, think I can still do what I was planning. Makes sense!

Recording with Fraps? Is it 2006? Dude, nvidia's shadowplay and whatever AMD's version is will be way, way more than enough. Fraps was for when that wasn't a thing.

As with everything, I suggest you have a solid plan and realise how much work it's gonna take to produce - I wish you the best of luck man!

Very excited. Have an idea in my head that I've wanted to try for ages. Does it strictly have to be HL1 / Source or is something like Sven Coop applicable?

The only reason I never properly got involved was the mods; I don't have an issue with a few quality of life improvements but when it starts to become more complex than factorio ( are considerably laggier as a result) I just can't play. I don't know if that reason is similar to others

I think there's a variety of reasons.

The singleplayer shooter doesn't really exist nowadays. Why should it, when multiplayer games w/ MTX can provide a steady source of income, whereas a standalone game would just be a one time cash injection. No [large] publisher would get behind it nowadays, especially not when there's more interesting, profitable projects they could focus on instead.

Half Life has gone the way of Duke Nukem Forever - DNF was announced in '97 and released 14 years layer in 2011. It's now 12 years since the orange box released ( wow, is it really that long? - we're almost approaching the same time frame. Remember how terrified the developers were of releasing something that would fit to the hype? Same issue here - no matter what Valve make, it's never going to please the fan's insane hype as to what they expect HL3 to be - so what's the point in making it?

Honestly, when you deconstruct both Half life and HL2 there wasn't anything amazingly unique about the games. They did the right things at the right point in time, but it's not as if those things were unique in and of themselves. The physics and graphics of HL2 were mindblowing at the time, but now physics is expected from games, and the graphics aren't exactly stellar by comparison to today's games. HL1 played out in a cutscene-less, continuously flowing world that hadn't really been attempted before, but again, is now the norm. What would people expect to see from a HL3? What's the big draw, the big thing that has people go "woah" when they see the game for the first time that the previous two had?

No other company would want to touch the game with a barge pole either for the exact same reason as Valve - they've got nothing to win except the anger of fans for not delivering their expectations.

The story was put to an end by Marc Laidlaw, which although put a lot of fans at ease, would've made Episode 3 or HL3 a bit of a downer that's ultimately pointless, the story wouldn't have been that much of a pull. How on earth were you expected to make good, consistent gameplay on something that's supposedly phasing in and out of existence?

I don't think we're ever going to see a continuation of Half Life unfortunately. I loved the series and still do, but I think it's done. There's not much more that can be done with it. The most I can see is Valve using Virtual Reality as their "woah" thing for a HL3, but that's it's own kettle of fish.

I'd love to see more competitions based around set pieces or entities - lifts, some complex entity work like a keypad or bank vault, some gameplay element? Nothing that requires an extensively large map

vibing with this stuff right now; can't really classify it as much outside of tech / deep house, maybe?

I can do a benchmark on a 12 thread Ryzen 5 2600 - can also test against an overclock and normal clock. RAD is definitely going to be one that benefits the most from multithreading. It's totally radical, man

So annoyed I didn't really have any time to work properly on an entry - downsides of being a busy bugger. Good luck to everyone who entered!

Audio Technika AT2020? Looks pretty good, the XLR connector at the bottoms looks a tad too small in comparison to the body, would make the radius of that whole bottom part at least 20% larger.

MC Name is Instant_Mix - Might pop along at some point. Any recommendations for a good launcher that'll deal with the mods & skins & whatnot

So on a scale of "not that bad" to "university finals", how difficult is it to learn / get a grasp on most of the mods on this server? Might join if it's not too bad

My apologies, I'm a bit of a cynic.

Before you continue on your other videos, a checklist might be helpful to go through:

• What makes your videos unique compared to other hammer tutorials : What can YOU bring to the table that others can't?
• How can you improve your production quality?
• What kind of people will watch your videos and hope they learn from it?

Here's a few things from watching the video that in my opinion could be changed or improved:

I'd personally suggest writing a script and having your entire video planned out before recording it, and definitely spend some time clearing up your audio. As the tutorial is for a trigger_changelevel, the viewer isn't interested in watching you build a map from scratch - have this pre-made and jump right into it before adding the tutorial specific entities. There's a lot of electrical interference "pops" coming through your microphone, and there's background noise throughout the video. I'd try using a better microphone if you could - maybe otherwise use Audacity to remove some of the noise and manually take out the pops. When you playtest the level at the end of the video, the audio of HL is so much louder than the previous 4 minutes, which is a bit jarring and makes it difficult to hear your voice - keep this in mind and maybe bring the volume of HL down when playtesting.
There's even smaller things that you could do that would polish your video such as removing the start of the video where the viewer can see you minimise your screen recording software.

It's a good start and would like to see what you can build upon in future videos

MuchoFranco said:i have complee

Couldn't have said it better

Really feels like an OG HL map, big fan so far

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Nobody really knows about looping sounds in GS; this makes sense as I've tried multiple cue points in those files and doesn't have the same effect it does in source.
I've always just used goldwave with two named loops of start and end, but now I'm enlightened with the knowledge this does almost nothing at all.

Embedded cue points are really odd, the half life games are the only thing I'm aware of that use them and support
for them is so rare hence that only cooledit / goldwave are the only programs that support it. A sound VMT style thing would be perfect as a replacement

Would highly advise against a multi-manager targeting itself. Torekk is correct with using two separate env_renders if you simply want the visibility of an object to change (whether this be sprites or normal entities). func_wall_toggles will change it's own visibility and solidity. To make a loop, make a normal multi manager and a separate, invisible func_button who's target is the multi manager. Trigger this func_button at the end of the "loop" - this will sidestep the instability that will inadvertently arise. Can simply use a changetarget entity on the func_button to jump out of the loop at any point.

Manually build a clip brush around the models if your collision is wonky.

Sorry, what is that comment meant to mean

The idea of doing a competition "roundup" once done is really good IMO - having one single thing to download rather than having to download a bunch of maps is much easier for punters to digest. I think rather than trying to have any sort of coherent transition between levels, a fade in / out or just straight level transition would probably be best to minimise any huge workload that may entail.

Just to clarify, these are rendering the maps with no visibility testing, ie. No form of blackface culling, visleaf rendering etc?

If so, that's bloody impressive. Wonder how much of an improvement visibility testing will have if added in

What is that texture assigned to? Personally I'd avoid starting any names with "env_" as who knows what weird hackery was done to make the engine work. Seems more of a case that the brush you've assigned that texture to is an illusionary or doing something weirder.

What on earth was any of that post meant to mean? I'm pretty sure Urby is using VHLT and also knows how to use texlights

@Urby have you tried doing a really shit / rough plan on either paper or blocked our in Hammer before mapping proper? I'm very guilty of exactly what you've said, corridors upon corridors and not really thinking about how it goes together and the purpose for this. Could help potentially!