Forum posts

What does the compile log say?

Hey, everyone! I'm now looking for testers for the Alpha 3 build of TWHL Tower: Source. This will probably be the last alpha, so I'm looking for some new testers to make sure everything plays smoothly on a first playthrough. Let me know if you want to be a tester by sending me a direct message on the TWHL Discord server (my username is @dr._orange) or the TWHL website!

Have you included extdll.h and cbase.h before including anything else in your .cpp file?

Hey, everyone! Sorry for the delay, but we're now testing the Alpha 2 build of TWHL Tower: Source! Send me a direct message on Discord (my username is dr._orange) or here on TWHL if you're interested in testing. There's a dedicated channel for testing on the TWHL Discord server where you can chat with other testers, so I highly recommend joining the server if you haven't already.

Again, this is an alpha build, and there are still quite a few things that need to be finished before the full release, but we're slowly getting there!

Hello, everyone. I'm proud to announce that the first test build of TWHL Tower: Source, Alpha 1, is done. Testing will commence shortly, and I'm now looking for volunteer playtesters. If you're interested in testing, send me a direct message on Discord or TWHL.

I'm looking to get around 10 or so testers for this build and priority will be given to people who've submitted maps for this first round. There will be more test builds later which will require new testers, so if you wanted to test, but didn't get in the first time, there will be another chance later.

Please note that this is an alpha build, and TWHL Tower: Source is still far from finished, so don't expect a full release any time soon.

Make sure to place a few env_cubemap entities throughout your map, and then run the buildcubemaps command through the developer console. Building cubemaps takes a while, so it's best to only do this for final releases of your map.

Depending on the game, the map file may already have blank cubemaps in it when compiled which are not overwritten when building cubemaps, so you'll have to manually delete the cubemaps first. This can be done through a BSP pack lump editing tool such as either BSPZip or a third-party GUI tool like VIDE.

It's out already.

Brush entities should have a keyvalue called "global name". Entities with the same global name will carry over their properties through change levels. Set the global name on both doors to be the same and they should work.

Hey, everyone! So we're now past the submission deadline. As I said in the previous announcement, I won't have as much time to dedicate to the project within the near future as I'd like to, so it might take a few weeks before I can get to fixing up and connecting the floors and eventually begin beta testing.

If you haven't submitted your floor already it's a good idea to finish it up and send it in as soon as possible. As I said previously, any submissions by now should be considered final, as I'll work on connecting the floors when I have time.

Once I've done a basic level connection pass, I'll make a call for beta testers. More information will come once beta testing is about to start.

I want to say thank you to everyone who has submitted their entry, and I really think there are a lot of cool levels that have been made for TWHL Tower: Source! Even if it might take a while for me to work on this, the project is certainly not dead, and I'm looking forward to sharing the final work with you all!

Hey, everyone! I hope all is going well with your floors! I will be be a bit busy the next couple of weeks and won't have as much time to manage the project as I had hoped, so I'll give a last minute time extension of two weeks. If you were just finishing up your floor, or even if you had already submitted your floor, this should give you some extra room to really polish up those final details. The new deadline for submissions will be Sunday the 16th of January 2022. This will be the deadline for final submissions. I may accept new submissions for another week or so after that date while I'm doing some initial testing, but I will not accept any re-submissions during that time period. As always, I'm looking forward to see your floors, and have a happy new year!

For me, personally, the most important thing is to have something that's as close to the original, unmodified Half-Life SDK code as possible, while still being usable with VS 2019 or later. Whether that be through a VS 2019 project file or CMake doesn't really matter to me.

Yeah, it applies to everything. If you can't get in permission from the rights holder, then don't use it in your map. And if it's a large corporation behind the game, chances are they wouldn't have let you used their content even if you did get in contact with them. Sorry.

Hey everyone!
The submission deadline has been extended until Sunday the 2nd of January 2022, so you now have an extra month to get your floor finished.
Happy mapping!

Nice! Welcome aboard!

Hello!
The DVD is in the mod provided along with the map source files (link). You need to install this mod, along with Mapbase, and set up Hammer to use it.
You are allowed to extend your floor above and below the level. The only requirement is that the player doesn't go outside the playable volume, and that it doesn't noticably cut into the floor above or below (no deep chasms that stretch down thousands of miles).
It's more of an exhibition than a competition. It's a colaborative project, there will be no prizes, and everyone who submits a floor (or multiple) will have their floor in the mod.
We're ascending the tower. It looks like I forgot to edit that one when copying Strider's TWHL Tower 2 post. Sorry

Right, my mistake, sorry. Glad to hear it worked out in the end. Really looking forward to see what you come up with!

Looks like you're using one of the older versions of Hammer from the obsolete Source SDK launcher. The Source SDK launcher (the one called "Source SDK" in the Steam tools section) isn't used for Source SDK 2013. Instead, you launch hammer.exe directly from the "steamapps/common/Source SDKBase 2013 Singleplayer/bin" folder. Remember that you must also create a shortcut and launch hammer.exe with the "-game path/to/twhltower" parameter. If it's the first time you're launching Hammer, you'll also have to change the 3D render mode from wireframe to textured by clicking on the text in the 3D view that says "camera".

Sure! There isn't a limit on how many floors you're allowed to make, other than the five month deadline, and collaborations are allowed.

Sure. The official setup guide for using Hammer with Mapbase can be found here: https://github.com/mapbase-source/source-sdk-2013/wiki/Setting-up-Mapbase#using-mapbase-in-hammer
but if you have any specific issues or questions, you can ask here.

One thing to note is that you want to create your Hammer gameconfig for TWHL Tower, not Mapbase itself, and also launch Hammer with the -game parameter set to the twhltower folder.

Yeah, Mapbase is a bit tricky to set up. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here.

Nice! I can't wait to see what everyone comes up with!

Not sure, but I doubt it. But Source SDK Base 2013 Singleplayer is free on Steam and contains all the Source SDK tools you need.

EDIT: Here are some screenshots of the current design for the stairs and hallway

MrFloyd76 said:While I do appreciate the concept, I feel like we'd get a lot less variety. HL2 just doesn't have as much versatility as HL1 when it comes to available assets, and creating new assets is a lot harder than in HL1. Also this community mainly works in goldsrc. I just feel like this wouldn't really get nearly as many people, nor as much variety, as the previous towers

We'll see! I'd like to think the people of TWHL are creative enough to do something interesting with this concept, but I can also see that there might be some limitations. Though, once again, we'll see how many people are interested, and what they can come up with. Frankly, if at least one person contributes a floor, I'd consider that alone a huge success

EDIT: I've started working on a base map which should be done in a few days. I'm having a hard time deciding which wall texture to use from these two:Thoughts?

Edit:
Post template shamelessly ripped off from Strider's TWHL Tower 2 post.Download the base map and mod template here.

Starting now and going until January 16th 2022.

Rules

1. Every member must work from the base map. Stick within the room space - 1280x1280x256.
2. You can carve into the walls, floor and ceiling, add balconies, windows, lighting insets... whatever you please, as long as the player stays within the room space and nothing extends too obviously into where someone else's room will be above or below.
3. Make it as easy or difficult as you like, you don't even need much gameplay, just some reason to enter the room before moving upstairs. It could be as simple as pushing a button to open a door out in the hall.
4. Custom content of all kinds welcome (materials, models, sounds)- However, you should place any custom content in a folder named after you. For example, my name is Dr. Orange, and I have a very cool concrete wall texture, so my files would look like this:

materials/drorange/concrete/verycoolwall.vtf
materials/drorange/concrete/verycoolwall.vmt

The exception is if you're using content from another Valve Source engine game, in which case you can keep the original file paths, as long as it doesn't override any default Half-Life 2/Episode One/Episode Two content!
All custom assets will be packed into VPK files to keep things organized.
5. If you're using third party content (with permission) please include a text file with the appropriate credits, otherwise no stealing, obviously!
6. You can change the hall as much as you please to suit your idea. Add another door, move the existing door down the hall, add lasers, forcefields, anything that doesn't greatly alter the shape of the hall. Just make sure you pass through the teal weapon stripper at the end, where a level change will occur.
7.There're some global environment entities, including light_environment, env_tonemap_controller, and env_fog_controller included right outside where the floor entrance is located by default. Please don't alter the entity properties of any of these. Instead, you may use inputs to change any environment settings specific for your floor. There are some helpful comments in Hammer on these entities explaining how you can use them.
7a. Unlike the two previous towers, TWHL Tower: Source will take place during late afternoon to evening, and the time of day will change as the mod progresses. The sunlight will always come in from generally the same direction, though, and will have a reddish-orange color, which the light_environment entity in the base map has already been set up for if you want to add any windows.
7b. Also please don't edit the default 3D skybox. Mapbase allows for a single map to have multiple 3D skyboxes that can be switched between. If you really need a different 3D skybox for your map for whatever reason, you may use this feature.
8. Final compile will be done with the Mapbase custom VBSP compiler and the Slammin' VVIS and VRAD compilers, with the following parameters for VRAD:

-both -final -bounce 100 -ambientocclusion -aosamples 32

If you're using any specific commands, let me know.
9. Don't do anything Half-Life 2 wouldn't do. By that I mean no porn or sweary tirades, this is a community project. I don't expect any problems, just keep it M, not R.
10. Included in the base map is a Half-Life 2 DVD collectible. Hide it somewhere in your floor. If the player finds all of them, some sort of bonus content will be unlocked. If you don't want to put it in your room that's fine, just leave it out in the hall.11. Have fun! The rules are essentially the same as for the last two TWHL Tower projects, so check out those threads if you need more info.
Please let me know if I've missed something, or messed something up.

Edit:
Don't send your map file to Strider!

Edit 2:
The deadline has been extended until the 2nd of January 2022.

Edit 3:
The deadline has been extended until the 16th of January 2022.

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Original post:

I've finally finished the first beta version of my new map, Canyon 2, the sequel to my first ever Goldsource map, Canyon. The map is far from complete, but it's already come pretty far.

Well, you'd have to also store the time when the player got the powerup, and then remove the powerup state adter 15 seconds has passed. I'm not sure exactly what's the best way to do that, but as Bruce said, look at some damage over time stuff. Maybe there's a think function for the player you could use.

Well, it's probably a bit tricky since the Half-Life SDK code isn't the most well-structured. You would have to find every place where damage is done by the player and make it take into account whether or not the player has the double damage effect and scale the damage accordingly. For bullet weapons it should be fairly simple, since they all call the FireBulletsPlayer function, which you can modify to scale damage, but for other weapons it might take a bit more work.

People tend to be more active on the Discord than the forums nowaday. Maybe try asking there?

I think you can right click on it and choose a custom image. There is no way for mod authors to distribute a custom library cover in such a way it gets picked automatically that I’m aware of, but you could distribute it with your mod and instruct people on how to set it manually.

Lipsync data is stored in the wave file itself. You'll have to generate it with Faceposer, though I think the process is a bit complicated nowadays to due to missing APIs and the automatic phoneme generation usually needs some touching up anyway.

I'm pretty sure it's the "map description" setting in world properties that sets this for Half-Life 1 maps.

I'd like to suggest adding Black Mesa and Half-Life: Alyx to the list of available games when uploading a map to the map vault.

There are a couple of maps for Black Mesa currently in the vault, and it's also available on Steam, which is why I think it should be added.

While there are no maps for Half-Life: Alyx that I have seen, it is an official Half-Life game, and there might be maps added for it in the future, so it should be added for those reasons. Also, Half-Life: Blue Shift is currently listed, and it has 0 maps made for it on this site

There are a couple other Valve or Valve related games that have been released since Counter-Strike: Global Offensive that might also be considered for being added to the map vault, but these are the ones I think have the most reasons to be added right now, especially since they're both related to the Half-Life series.

The speaker entity plays lines from a sentence group randomly. What you're looking for is an ambient_generic to play the sentence you want. Just use an ambient_generic as you normally would, except instead of giving it a sound file to play, you give it the sentence you want it to play. Just remember that you need to add an exclamation mark (!) in before the specified sentence name in the ambient_generic. So the sound file value of the ambient_generic would be "!SENTENCE_NAME_HERE".

I always thought it was a reference to The Simpsons (sector 7-G).

They always have the default HEV hands.

NPC health and names showing up on the HUD is not a feature in vanilla Half-Life. It was added by Sven Co-op. I definitely think it's possible to add it to Half-Life, though you are going to have to do it in code. You should set up the Half-Life SDK and study some of the other HUD code to figure out how to do it.

Here's something I've been working on on and off for a couple of months now.

It has to be at least 16 units away from any walls on the x and y axes I think? The crossbow ammo might have a bigger bounding box, though I'm not sure. Just place it somewhere else is the only fix I can think of.

Items have this thing where if their bounding boxes intersect with any world geometry, they will just fall through the map :/

Try placing the crossbow ammo a bit further away from the neighbouring crate.

Google "bogus definition"

In this case it basicly means that a value was not what they expected it to be.

The engine uses "!" as a special control character for various purposes. "!" in front of sounds means it's a sentence defined in sentences.txt and not a direct sound file. All sentences need to have an exclamation mark in front of them when specified in an ambient_generic or scripted sentence. "!" in front of a texture name means it's a water texture and will automaticly be turned into a water volume by the compiler. It doesn't really have anything to do with proper punctuation, it's a control character.

Quake's software rendering is actually quite interesting when it comes to lighting. The original software renderer could only render 256 colors in total. That's not 256 colors per texture, or 256 colors * lightmap, that's 256 colors in total on screen. These 256 colors were defined in a single palette that was also used for every texture in the game. Since only 256 colors could be used, they used a precalculated lightmap where each palette index were remapped to another palette index based on its light level. Fullbrights were implemented in a really simple way really; the remapped palette indexes for the last 32 colors of the palette would simply remap to its original palette index no matter the light level. This is why the later released OpenGL renderer doesn't have fullbrights. It doesn't use this remapping since they could just straight up multiply the lightmap with the textures without having to stay to the original 256 color palette.

In Quake, the last 32 colors in the palette would always be rendered as fullbright, but only in the software renderer. I guess Valve were originally going to carry this over, but decided not to since the game has hardware rendering support, and surfaces are lit through lights.rad anyway. Interestingly enough, it seems as though some of the textures prefixed with ~ has their colors in the last 32 slots of the color palette, similar to were the fullbrights were in Quake.

It would be beneficial to have an additional month to work with.

If you're using an alpha-tested texture (file name starts with "~" and it typically have blue areas in it), just tie the visible brush to a func_illusionary with the "Solid" render mode and add a clip brush in the same place. Clip brushes are not included in decompiled maps because they are technically not part of the compiled map.

Tower WIPs!

A while ago I made a HD pack for TWHL tower by retexturing Blue Shift's HD models and recreating the changes made for TWHL Tower (yellow crowbar, duotone pistol). Would it be possible to include this as a HD addon at launch with TWHL Tower 2?

I'd be interested.

MOCOLONI said:I also took a look at an exemplary FGD and noticed that some of them also have 'Sequence' for studios with models - are those for models with animations?

It's used for previewing model animations in Hammer. You put in the number of the sequence (as defined in the model, you'll have to use a model viewer or decompile to model to find a list of all animations for a model) and the entity will play that animation in the 3D viewport.

MOCOLONI said:I'm no expert, but it makes me wonder if 3.5 is actually a Valve product as it can't be found anywhere 'officially'.

It is made by Valve, but it isn't officially supported as it was only released as a beta. I believe it was only ever released on the old VERC website, which has been defunct for years, which is why it can't be found "officially" anywhere anymore.