Hi.

Last few days I was busy whipping up some model packs, and I have amassed a couple of releases, so I felt like posting a journal about all that's been released so far, and what's coming up.

Azure Sheep Overfloater Pack:

I know, I know, a lot of people don't really remember Azure Sheep that fondly. While the mod was a corridor-fest, I still enjoyed playing it as a kid, and it holds a nostalgic place in my soul. However, I must say I always disliked a lot of the view models(especially the non-HEV ones), and some of the other character models were also rather jank. Because of this, I've decided to whip up a view model replacement pack, in spirit of, and using some of the earlier model packs I created.

Link to Vault Entry

I tried to remain faithful to the original mod in terms of animations and such, but for the M41A I all-out went with the model I created long back. I already had to apply some fixes to this pack since releasing it, which is kinda the usual for me.

M41A replacement for the MP5:

This model is ancient, I originally came across it in a Firearms model replacement, but I have no idea who created this. I've added my own flair to this model, and originally released it around 2008 or 2009. I dug it out from under the rock where I left it, as I was working on the AS model pack, and I ended up refurbishing the rather dated animations for better ones. Now it's available for release for those who want to enjoy some Aliens vibes.

Link to Vault Entry

Classic Grenade animations for Opposing Force and Blue Shift:

This was more or less done as part of my AS model pack, but I thought some people might enjoy having the OpFor and Blue Shift grenades use the original Half-Life 1 animations. As such, I've turned this into it's own release also.

Link to Vault Entry

Minor update to OpFor grunts pack for Half-Life 1/Blue Shift

I discovered a small issue in the model/dialouge pack I created for the OpFor grunt replacement pack for Half-Life 1 and Blue Shift. I spliced some lines together to be Freeman-specific, but forgot to include the actual samples. Kind of silly that I made this mistake.

Link to Vault Entry

Upcoming

There some tutorials I thought of doing, namely a tutorial which implements a very simple and easy to use weather system that supports snow and rain. I'm working on finally finishing the weather system that I originally did for the dead sandbox mod, Raven Beta. Only snow was working before, and it still suffers from crashes. Once that's done, I'll upload it as a wiki article. I'm not sure when this'll be done, but I'll make a journal about it most likely. Edit: Fixed AS model pack vault link.

According to the theory in question that i will be explaining i will explain how the modding is actually dead.
Nobody nowadays knows how to mod and the people who know how to mod are lost, retired thus making the theory kinda right by it's own.
The people who makes sufficient mods nowadays are just deceiving phenomenons, they just got lucky to have a successful result.
Almost nobody nowadays know how .vta and facial flexes or dmxedit work, almostly nobody is hireable for this.
Even so calles ""mappers"" don't know how to map, they just scatter around prefabs from their favorite prefabs pack and call that a day, no level structure, no creativity, no progressig, just dead npcs fading after death due to the chaos. Nobody has the audacity to act you know "extraordinarily".We don't even have good packs coming out like ambient impact , the rest of the good packs etc. are just deceiving phonemenons as said before.

If you said "TWHL" like it was an ordinary word and not an acronym, how would it be pronounced?

By Inkfury1236 (Or was their name)

So, this is my third journal and I want to address the meaning behind, "Flame" in, "Half-Life: Flame". I've gotten questions asking what the meaning behind the name is.

Let me start by saying, no this mod has nothing to do with "flames". The mod's name actually refers to a group of Raiders that will replace the H.E.C.U in this mod.

Who are these "Flames"?

Flame refers to a group of Raiders that will be the players main target in the mod. Originally, they were a bunch of Robotic Engineers who were part of Cybernetic Mind Electronics (aka CME). Orange Facility proposed a deal prior to CME where they'd buy CME out and combine it with OF. The actual plan was to convince them to sell their company to OF and OF would then shut them down to remove competition of companies that were in their way. However, CME rejected this proposal which later led OF to completely obliterate CME. Some remaining scientists and engineers who survived this attack would seek revenge. By the time of Half-Life: Flame (Early 70s), Flame would attack OF and seek it's revenge by planning an attack on their P.D.U (Power Distribution Unit).

Why are they considered Raiders?

They earned the title "Raiders" after Issac Orange (CEO of Orange Facility at the time) would call them out for "killing his employees, blowing up his work, and burning all valuable and important work to the ground". This would cause the group to earn the title and be unwelcome even in their own home towns. The group ended up setting a camp in New Mexico (not too far away from Orange Facilities HQ) and it would become their established base.

Why didn't Flame seek help from others?

Flame originally went to the US government to report the OF for their actions, but because OF was providing Military Grade A weapons to their military, they would turn them down. This would leave Flame to not trust anybody but themselves. This will lead nobody who was apart of Flame to be spared.

I will release more about Flame soon.

Written by RedLazer5000

Suppose that you just won a considerably large ammount of money. Maybe it was the lottery, maybe a relative died, maybe you found a suitcase full of money (just make sure to remove the handcuffs and the severed hand).
So, the next obvious question would be: "How do i evade taxes?". But, i am yet to write something about that, so we will, unfortunately, have to move on to the next question: "On what should i spend the money?". Many people would first consider something like "mom's surgery" or "electrical bills" or "my son's college". But, for the more exccentric people, the dreamers, the weirdoes that don't know what the hell are they doing here, they might consider buying large, expensive jewelry, such as large diamonds or golden crowns or Lord knows what.
Well, this text is meant for those people. Think twice before you go to your nearest black market salesman!

A reocurrent issue with such items is that there will always be a Doom McEvil or a Thief O'Crime around desperately trying to fill the void their parents left with materialism. It's almost certain that your precious Pink Panther will be stolen, your Royal Crown will vanish misteriously, or your dog will swallow the rubber pig with the diamond (and Oasis will make a banger of a song about it).
While there might be a Hero McGood that retrieves the diamond succesfully, you'll still spend thousands, if not millions, on security, museum expositions, useless henchmen that will get their asses kicked, investigators, lawyers to hide the dead African kids that died in the mines to get the jewelry, and taxes (until i write the other guide). At some point, you will spend more money than the cost of the precious diamond, and i'm no economist, but that is quite the problem.
Unless, of course, the thingy is more valuable than money. You know, maybe it's the friends we made along the way, maybe it has a sentimental value to you, or maybe it's the key to find a cure for that werewolf curse you got a year ago. You were just minding your business when that damn furball popped out of nowhere in that park, and tried to kill you. At least he was polite enough to hand you over a pamphlet when he got back to his old self. Maybe he wanted to avoid getting a lawsuit. It's not like if you can call your lawyer anyways. What are you going to tell him? "Mr. Jenkins? Yes, it's me, i'd like to lawsuit Lupin Night, for passing me the curse. Yes, i know you are busy with the Africa child labor thing, but this is severely more important!".
Or maybe, you are going to buy something that will be much, much more valuable in the future. Properties, stock, an old oil rig that still has plenty of juice left. After all, when the Antichrist comes, he's gonna need plenty of fuel for the Christian-hunting machines, that is, until we find a way to use their blood as fuel.
In conclusion, don't buy the MacGuffin, unless it's more valuable than it's own price.

And with this, i bid farewell. Dr Cunningham is calling me, and he said that if i behave well this week, i'll get chocolate pudding every lunch! Man, being on a psychiatric institution rules!

Explanation

Sometimes during those festive Holidays in December, my old 7-8 Years Old Intel Laptop decided to just commit die. Which meant that all of those content that I've made on the Hard Drive is lost, I've managed to back up my personal project 'Calculus' onto External SSD just before this happened.
(I have a terrible feeling that this would happen again) I've also was lucky enough to drop some of the Hazard Course Map (For Half-Life: Extended, both the Source File and the BSP) to the GitHub folder. Welp not a lot was lost, maybe that Underground Submarine Project thing, but that have been put on a hiatus for sometimes.

Now What?

So... with that old thing retired, decided to buy a decent Laptop with enough power to do anything. (Reason for choosing Laptop over Desktop is for a universities stuff.} I bought this HP Victus 16 Inch Gaming Laptop, and it seemed to be more powerful than the Old Laptop that I used to play. The Old Laptop had this Intel HD Graphics 620 and this CPU only have 4GB of VRAM. So yep, glad that I've made the switch to this Brand-New Laptop.

With Power, Comes Greatness as I could finally open Blender with more FPS than 10, No more lag when playing Half-Life with the Mapping Editor opened. And possibly could venture more into what I could do with this New Laptop. (Becoming a Video Editor???) Can't wait for that.

Gonne make sure to take care of this Brand-New Laptop too, so that it could last longer.

Thanks for reading the Journal, peace out.

-John Pot

Journal 2:

On ModDB, 2 maps are included in the early build v1004. There are 2 seperate builds:

Early Build v1004 (including Custom Models)
Early Build v1004 NO Custom Models (excluding custom models)

Apart from that, Flame also includes custom voice lines/lore which tie into the general story of the previous mod I worked on (Half-Life: Xen's Horror). It talks about how a guy named Walt feels paranoid about the recent importation of the enhanced displays and how they are deemed "unnecessary" because of the two week break they were forced to be on while the core was unwatched. More will be shown soon

Preface

Aaaaand there it is. I had originally intended to write one more after this one to form a nice trifecta, but I can't think of much to write there about, aside from talking about Alkaline maps like a dork.

Less boring job talk

It's kind of a weird place, though I believe it highly depends on the exact office building. One thing that immediately stands out is what I like to call the "TLS handshake": upon entering the office building (which is actually pretty small and cozy), and then the room belonging to your department, the first thing that you do is go around employee desks and exchange handshakes or high-fives. If feeling communicative, also perform the ritual on anyone who's shown up later while you were gone on a break or something. Everyone seemed to do it, so I couldn't really not do it without feeling weird.

People don't seem to view the presence (or lack) of an assigned project like a mark of status there, which is major luck. In fact, during one of those times when I felt brave and adventurous enough to take a trip to the kitchen and did some small talk with a colleague, he told me about being assigned to a project, paid appropriately, but not having to do much.

That leaves me with a lot of breathing room regarding what I can do or make during all that time.

Dimension hopping

Having this much leeway at the workplace, I often get a chance to sneak in an hour or two of playing Quake 1, if I'm not busy doing anything else worthwhile. All that on a company-provided laptop, which could probably run S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 if you tried hard enough. But I've chosen to instead give another go to Arcane Dimensions - because it's a classic at this point, and because I absolutely love it.

For me as a mapper, Arcane Dimensions has been, if not a turning point, then at least a huge influence. It is an assortment of extremely high-quality maps, each of them an enormous vignette that could compete with a Dark Souls level (I may be exaggerating). Each map is tight, consistent in design, and a treasure chest of things to both learn from and gaze at obsessively. There are gameplay enhancements and dozens of new enemies on top of that, but they don't feel like an inconsistent mess and work really well with the rest of the mix. Arcane Dimensions' style is probably best described as "amplified vanilla": it relies heavily on textures either taken directly from the base game or the expansions, or created manually while using the vanilla assets as a source of inspiration or a style guide. It adheres to the same levels of pixel density, too. Also, you will often see several textures, - like a window and a brick wall, - combined into one to allow for small neat effects like fake ambient occlusion around the window.

On top of that, Arcane Dimensions goes wild with Quake 1 particle effects. They're sprinkled throughout the entire mod and look delightfully crunchy, especially if you play without texture smoothing. Fog is heavily relied upon too. I don't know if most levels there would ever be the same without the fog - it works really well. However, if I had to extract something truly important that I'd learned from Arcane Dimensions, or at least what it'd highlighted enough for me to notice and add it to my bag of tricks, is... Well, since I don't know and can't think of a prettier term for this, let's call it "material depth(?)".

Material depth is about making a brush face feel less like just a polygon with a picture glued onto it. It means that, if a face has a stone brick texture, then further behind it there must be more of that stone brick. You're not just trying to depict a stone brick from one side - you're trying to do that in all three dimensions.

Failing to maintain material depth throughout your map will result in it looking like a papier-mâché rather than an actual place built of stone and wood and iron and whatever other substances you decide to throw into your mapping cauldron. There are other things that contribute towards reducing the papier-mâché vibe, but I won't go into that here.

Anyway, Arcane Dimensions is a hell of a ride, consisting of around twenty maps, give or take, which are either gigantic epics or smaller and focused pieces. Many of the smaller ones are "covers" of existing maps or even classics like Doom's E1M1: Hangar, but some of the epics fall into that category too, Necromancer's Keep being pretty much a cover of Quake 1's Gloom Keep and barely trying to hide it.

There's actually a way to beat the mod: you have to collect the four runes (yes, again), meticulously hidden as secrets in some of the maps, to open a portal to the ending. I've never actually managed to get them all, but I can't bring myself to cheat around it and changelevel myself into the end map. But hey, how about you give it a chance - maybe at least you will get to see it!

Quakeroach blog

Although I'm not worried much about my job security for the next one-and-a-half years, I was worried a lot more a few months ago. One of the reasons for that has been my lack of knowledge of any web frontend tech, and a lack of experience building a full web app consisting of a frontend and a backend.

On top of that, after leaving TWHL at the time, I still had the urge to post WIPs, as people's reactions are a big part of my motivation to go on with the mappack. I needed a place where I could still post these and link to. Maybe my own personal page, too. I began thinking of building a simple blog website, using something basic and often required in interviews. My choice ended up falling on using React.

The issue of hosting came up soon after. Gladly, Quakeroach agreed to help host it, which sounded like a pretty good idea, considering how we have a good cadre of networkers around. After some pretalk and basic planning, the work on the Quakeroach blog started. Initially the idea was having it bound to a single user, but supporting multiple accounts was decided to be more natural to implement and having long-term benefits.

Now, if you're a fellow code conjurer, you might be thinking: "Isn't React a little bit overkill? A blog could do with serving content statically, and it'd be better for search engine indexing too, which is a thing you'd want for a blog website. Besides, there are solutions around, which were made specifically for creating your own blog websites. Why bother?". All valid points. But overcomplicating things is how I learn, and React seems to be a very frequent requirement.

I've considered rewriting the blog in a more fitting manner at some point in the future, using a simpler approach, maybe learning some PHP or Blazor. However, that was back then. Ironically, I've come full circle now and am pretty much writing blog posts here. I do plan to carry this project through to the end, though, as I'm sick of leaving things unfinished. Maybe we'll do a full-blown website once I'm better at this, who knows?

btw you can check it out here (it's a mess, pls don't hit me)

Uhh

Yeah. That's pretty much it, so far. I could talk more but I'd prolly bore you to death. Anyway, see u when I see u!

So since I feel like I've more or less wrapped up all the features I had planned for Pathos, I thought of posting this just so people are aware of what the standing is with the Pathos Engine. I know there aren't many users of it, but well, this is for those who are using it, or are considering using it. Recently I've been re-evaluating how I'm spending my free time, as well as the fact that Pathos has been in development since 2019. I feel like five years is a very long time already, and too much to spend working on an engine, when I have a full game to finish making levels and other content for. I also have obligations towards some other projects I help out with, and because of this, my efforts are kinda split in multiple directions recently. Eventually it all becomes too much to deal with, and ends up becoming rather overwhelming at times.

This is why I've decided to freeze any new Pathos features altogether, and from now on my focus will be on maintaining what I have released. I had ideas for some other features, like a detail prop/sprite system similar to what Source had for grass, and some other things which I feel can easily be applied by a talented mapper if needed. They're not essential features. That's what I've done since I can remember. I consider Pathos to be more or less done, featuring a wide variety of features the original GoldSrc Engine had, plus some Source-like ones as well. I think that maybe some documentation might still be needed, but that'll come along as I dedicate free time to it. For the most part, the engine is pretty stable and doesn't have major performance problems, and I want to free up spare time to actually do some more meaningful work.

Another source of grievance for me, has been the cycle of changing anything in the engine, or adding some new feature, and having to deal with bugs caused, or revealed by said changes even weeks after. One aspect of working on GoldSrc I liked - That is until Valve started doing their updates that broke mods - was that it was a stable base to work on. Even with the custom renderers I didn't have to deal with issues as low-level as I do now when I change something. It's not that I hate the work, because I enjoy programming, but the time poured into it, for me, is less and less worthwhile. I could spend that time literally doing anything else, including activities that don't leave me exhausted by the end of the day.

Consider this a bit of a rant too, I'm just compiling my thoughts at the "end of the day" as I wrap things up. If I had to do it all over again, I would still do it, honestly, but goddamn am I glad I don't have to. I had fun designing the UI, I enjoyed working on the networking code, even if it is basic at best, and I could go on about this endlessly. I enjoyed working on this engine. I was less thrilled when I had to reference code either because I had no idea how to do something, couldn't do the math, or I needed to maintain compatibility. That's one thing that's kind of a miss for me, but then again, trying to do this all from the ground up would've taken me five years more, at least, and math that is way above my head.

Overall, I am happy with what I have created. It allowed my game to truly take off, without the frustrations and limitations of GoldSrc, and in the end I was able to make a few folks happy by open-sourcing it. That for me was worth it. Thank you for reading my ramblings.

The YouTube algorithm pushed me Half-Life stuff because of the anniversaries, and that brought me back here.
I'm downloading a bunch of the latest competition maps. Congratulations, everyone!

Preface

Now, I'm not exactly comfortable with infodumping personal stuff onto people. We all got our problems, and offloading mine has always felt like an impolite thing to do. However, I would occasionally see other people do it, so maybe it's not so bad after all? Hey, maybe that's even a healthy thing to do? I don't know, and I've never really had a chance to ask anyone.

To further try and justify the following mess of codepoints: for quite a long time I've been finding myself talking to a mirror, or a wall, about a curiously recurring set of topics. It would always kind of occur on its own, take a lot of time, and give no sense of resolution whatsoever. At some point, it became clear that feedback was needed.

I kinda departed from this place not that long ago, but soon I ended up coming back over and over, and I'm still not sure what the reason is. I don't know if I'm still welcome here at all, but whenever I thought about screaming into the void in text form like that, the journals section always seemed like the best kind of void that came to mind.

I apologize for being a long-time annoyance.

Boring Job Talk

I seem to be doing fine. Probably better off than many, which makes me feel all the more guilty while writing. I'm currently employed in a software outsourcing company, which I've gone through an internship in, in parallel to completing my last 1.5 years of university. Soon after graduation, they agreed to sign a distribution document, which meant that I'm guaranteed and forced to be employed there for at least the next 2 years.

It's a pretty weird place to be employed at, however. Shortly before the final exams hit (and waaaaay before I was officially employed or even getting any kind of payment at all), they'd put me on a project as a proxy developer - that meant I'm doing the actual programming while someone makes appearances on calls and meetings. It was quite a mess, but eventually I got used to it and even got some industry experience getting messy legacy backend code to work.

As autumn military drafts were getting close, I got a pair of notices that required me to show up at my assigned voenkomat, to determine my suitability for army service. Spoiler: I was deemed unsuitable and rescheduled to show up 3 years later. However, as soon as I received the notices, I notified my management and they decided to move me off the project.

The normal scenario of getting a project here involves going through an interview with a client and lying a lot. Ever since losing my shadow project, I've been consistently (and unintentionally) failing these, so all my obligations really involve just visiting the office twice a week, appeasing their homebrew working hours tracker, and telling their status check bot that I'm still alive.

Now, with the boring stuff out of the way...

Personal Projects: Mappack

The progress on the mappack can be described in two words: slow and steady. Well, that was three words, but anyway: I'm working on it, on and off.

I've thought a lot about its overall structure, and decided that it's set somewhere during Surface Tension, probably right after the section with the helicopter and the minefield. Except Gordon doesn't immediately end up at the cliffside soon after descending into that tunnel. Instead, possibly after crawling for a little while longer through a small tunnel network and letting some time pass, he ends up near what appears to be a Weather Monitoring Station (the one with the dome, if you remember).

After finding out that the thing's just a cover for what appears to be a long way down into the guts of Black Mesa, Gordon descends into the hazy Maintenance Tunnels (the shots of which I've been shamelessly spamming the WIP thread with (sorry!)). There, the player gets introduced to an actual character - yeah! - a scientist, which, without spoiling too much, will accompany Gordon indirectly throughout most of the mappack.

The next chapter is the Optics Department. That one will be all about colorful crystals, gigantic laser machines, and all sorts of cool lighting effects. You'll even get to burn a giant hole in the Mesa itself (after the obligatory Half-Life-esque powering-up process!)

The final one is Administration Offices - yup, the place where Dr. Breen is! ...Or, well, was supposed to be. You won't actually see him (no way I can find a VA for that one :v), but you'll have to grab a certain something from there.

One idea I keep thinking of is related to that one scientist character. I'm thinking of trying to record the lines for him myself - although there's, like, an astronomical number of things that can go wrong - or I'll just ask someone. Don't know who yet, though. The more fun thing, however, is you'll be able to shoot him dead and the game won't end. Quite the opposite - the rest of the mappack will subtly adjust to it. After all, Half-Life really has always been an RPG .

The toolchain for the mappack is something I've never really thought I'd end up using, and is actually fun to experiment with. It's your classic favorite VHLT v34 for doing the heavy lifting, but on top of that, there's MESS by Captain P and Half-Life Featureful SDK by FreeSlave.

I've used MESS before, and made two grave mistakes back then: make all my mapping revolve around it (bad idea!), and - albeit somewhat unrelated - implement very detailed entity setups during the grayboxing stage (very bad idea too!). Now, however, I only use it on very specific occasions: duplicating small lights across very long surfaces, saving very sophisticated setups to reuse them and easily tweak them if need be, etc etc. It's a very big help this way.

Featureful is to thank for enabling the usage of fog in Maintenance Tunnels. But it also adds "upgraded" versions of multi_manager, which I've grown quite fond of using. It also gave me the idea to incorporate some of the Op4 enemies into the mappack, like the Black Ops.

I'm going to have to touch up what I have of the tunnels, and also the weather monitoring station. After that, I'll finally be able to move onto the optics department, and trust me, it's gonna be epic! I'll make sure to share some shots as well .

Wrapping Up

Not too much, but enough for tonight, I think. I had kind of cut myself off from the people here for a while, for better or worse, but I'll talk about it more in the future. Right now, I kinda just wanna establish contact, that's all. A new beginning, in a way. See u later!