Already 6/14/2020 or 6/15/2020 (I can't remember) I decided stop using Internet explorer as a navigator by reason was very obsolete. I started use it a far time ago to see if was true people said about it (was really bad basically) and for me worked really fine, better than Chrome.

I'll miss it. But now I started use Firefox, which is fine too.

Yeah, I graduated high school or secondary school depending on your preferred flavour of English today!

I'm no longer a student as of about a week ago. I've also got a piece of paper with my name on it. It's very exciting.

For the past week, I've been looking at nothing but Half-Life 2 Beta stuff and listening to the sound effects. There's something about the aesthetic of the beta that I just love. I love the dark steam-cyberpunk feeling it gives.
I've also been VERY busy with music and Half-Life: Zombies Ate My Neighbours. New sound effects, new soundtracks, new models, new GUIs and new levels.The work for it never ends, I guess; plus, to add onto that, I've been busy with another game — Shooter Tourneys. It was released five days and 24 minutes ago on April 15th at midnight. I wasn't able to play it for another thirteen hours though. I had to go over to my studio, the Groovebox, to get some SFX done for ZAMNHL (the codename for Half-Life: Zombies Ate My Neighbours.) There's a few physical equips in there, but I spend most of the time on the computer in there on Ableton seeing what I can do.
I will keep you updated with how my projects go in the future.
Edit: I will be making these journals every ten days.
Now logging off,

BARNEY

One of those cryptic journals :P.

---

Also an update to brag about finally getting a new battle station.

Pic from the testing phase:Working beast:

Hey yall, hows twhl doing these days?
Back in the day i just post long paragraphs about mods i played as journals here. Well this is the modern times now, who would want to read long paragraphs on the internet? Also i havent posted any journals in years. Probably because there haven't been alot of hl1 mods coming out recently. I definitely will stream twhl tower 2 when it comes out, I'm very hyped for it. But until that happens I'll just play some random mods. And this time instead of a long paragraph I'll just put a video link.
Link

Long story short, the mod I'm playing this time gives some extra new weapons and I also like how the soldiers can kill me in like 2 seconds.

Last night my grandfather died.
At the moment I'm not sure what the cause of death was, however he had a heart attack on Sunday, and had also tested positive for the coronavirus.

To be honest I don't feel as upset about it as I would expect, although I think I will later on.
I had intended to travel to see him earlier this year but due to work I couldn't get time off approved.

Sadly my teacher from my current university of mechanical engineering, has passed away, because of Covid19. :,(

You know something's up when I put the uwu in the title.
So, this has been mentioned on TWHL Discord, but it should be mentioned here as well, just in case.

I have 37 tutorials on GameBanana. 8 of them are HL-related and worthy of being ported to TWHL.

Better view bobbing

A tutorial about view bobbing in the HL SDK, covering view.cpp and how stuff works there. Might be in 2 or even 3 parts.

Creating new entities

Penguinboy told me this one could be a start of a new chapter for the programming tutorials. It covers creating a really simple new entity class (which prints stuff to the console) and editing the FGD to add the entity definition.
Tutorials following this one, I imagine, would involve stuff such as targeting other entities, having multiple different targets for each 'condition', checking certain entity properties, finding entities by name or by some other filters, and so on.

About carving

The name says it. A mostly objective view on carving, covering various "manual carving" methods using the clipping tool.

How to fix those leaks

Methods of finding leaks and what can cause them.

Real-life photos to Half-Life textures

No explanation required.

Complete music tutorial

Making music for Half-Life mods and placing it into maps. Can be expanded to an overall audio guide for GoldSrc, covering different uses of ambient_generic and whatnot.

Manipulating light in GoldSrc

All about lighting, different lighting setups, toggling shadows etc.

How to make sprites more flexible

Well, to be exact, this one's originally about sprite orientation, but I suppose it could be expanded to different ways of utilising sprites, e.g. for grass, smoke, light glows, videos even.

Generally, I'm mostly excited about the programming tutorials, not just the couple of ones I'll be porting, but new ones I'll be contributing too.
From general HL SDK tutorials about various parts of its API (engine functions, event API, Triangle API, entity functions, utilities etc.), using certain 3rd party libraries with HL SDK, even touching the VHLT code a bit, all the way to the delicate and fancy stuff like using OpenGL functions, dynamic skies, modifying map & model data in real-time, and a lot more.

Other than said tutorials, I'd of course work on ADM. There are several things I wanna do this summer, mainly working on the vehicle system as well as the FMOD integration. There are a couple of SoHL features and entities that will also be either ported or replicated. I'm really hoping to push out a release by the end of summer. >w<

Also, by that time, I'll probably create a new thread for Advanced Development Mod. Utopia at Stake, while using ADM as a base, shouldn't really have its thread be home to both ADM and itself IMO.

But I cannot do any of that right now. I got a game project to finish.
By the 15th of March, I should be done with my idTech 4 game demo, after which I'll try to release my high school map by June, maybe a bit earlier even. And then, I'll finally get back into GoldSrc business.

I'm just writing this journal to inform people that I've made some model packs for Half-Life, Opposing Force and Blue Shift, and released them here on TWHL. The models are completely free of any UV shifting or other such issues. The OpFor Glock has been vastly improved with a bunch of UV mapping issues fixed, and all the packs use the Blue Shift shotgun animations. The MP5 also had the bogus firing animation that was present in both Blue Shift and OpFor removed. The RPG also had the fidget animation fixed, so it no longer only plays halfway through.

Update:

• The Python had it's speedloader fixed for all versions, and the reload sound plays properly now.
• The crossbow's clip has been fixed, so the top of it is no longer invisible like before.

HD Gordon hands on LD view models for Half-Life:
https://twhl.info/vault/view/6401

LD OpFor Grunt models and sounds for Half-Life and Blue Shift:
https://twhl.info/vault/view/6402

Fixed and improved LD view models for Opposing Force:
https://twhl.info/vault/view/6403

Fixed and improved LD view models for Blue Shift:
https://twhl.info/vault/view/6404

Some screenshots:Hope you enjoy using these model packs.

Edit: Uploaded the zip files to TWHL's vault

How's everyone coping? I'm doing good, same old same old. Just practicing social distancing and using hand sanitizer more. Stocked up on grocieries yadayada.

When fate and destiny aren't on my side, and when luck doesn't happen to have anything to give me at the moment, then I know for sure, time is only on my side.
And that's gonna take a while. I'm definitely hoping for a miracle to happen, you know. I don't know when it'll happen, I don't know IF it'll happen, but I'm certainly hoping that it will. The two greatest things in life I've ever had experience with, are both words that begin with F.
It's not fraud (never had that), it's not fire, it's not fu--ing (heck, I never experienced that either), it's not fish either, even though it's pretty good, especially trout, mmm, but rather, it's forgiveness and friendship.
There's hardly anything in this world I wouldn't forgive to someone else, and there's hardly anyone in this world who could make me feel as good as a true friend could, someone I feel I don't yet have. Well... at least yet.

Those two words kept appearing in my dreams in one form or another, and almost every time it's the same story. I either ask for it, or beg for it, and then everything seems to become positive, go back to normal. Then I wake up, sweating and in fear. I don't know why, because I don't remember most of the dream. I sometimes really wish to cry or at least sob silently. I can't scream because my soul is already screaming. It's been screaming for weeks...
All I know is, something, or someone, haunts me. It's not really an "it", to be exact. God knows what could've gone better if I hadn't said the right thing in the wrong time. It might be too late now, but at least I've learnt an important lesson.

Who knows, maybe it's not late yet. After all, time is on my side. Time knows what the best moment will be. Time has brought back a lot to me, that I once lost. In turn, time just took... time. My patience, my will to wait for things, that's gonna remain infinite. I'll let time take as much as needed, since both of us need it.
Heh. Time... I feel like someone out there likes testing my patience for certain things.

Always remember to forgive each other, people. Forgive, but never forget.

Speaking of time, today I became an adult. Damn. Wish it came sooner.

In late 2019, my PC suffered a major blow. Several power failures had crippled the PC, and it required immediate maintenance.
During the long absence, The Graphics card was burnt and had to be replaced. (an AMD Radeon HD 7000 for those who are curious)
In order to bring myself back in action with Hammer, I used a laptop to substitute the PC for a while....

Thankfully, It came back today with a new Nvidia Geforce card. (not a good one, but that's alright for now.)
I ported all of my work on the laptop to my computer. Things are finally back in shape!

What a wild new year this is gonna be.

So, some of you may know that my style of studying is based on 3 principles:

• study as less as possible at home
• try to understand and memorise (if needed) as much as possible in class
• study at home only when you really don't know (e.g. for Democracy class)

With this style of studying, I achieve a GPA of up to 4.63, which is amazing considering I didn't do homework 30% of the time, and 80% of my time at home was spent using the PC (excluding sleep, eating and that stuff). If I wanted a 5.0 GPA, I would have to say goodbye to my free time that I get (which I'd end up using to work on mapping, modding, programming or gamedev projects).

In other words, I wanna work on projects as much as possible, while studying as less as possible, while still maintaining a 4.50 GPA at least.

Now, here's the thing. The 1st semester ends on the 31st of December here, and then the winter break starts. The problem is, my GPA is 4.28 at the moment. It used to be 4.4 until I ruined my score in Electrical Measurements and Digital Electronics, decreasing them both from 5 to 4.

(quick reminder: 5 here is A, 4 is B, 3 is C, 2 is D, and 1 is F)

So now, instead of improving Electronics and Democracy, I also gotta improve German and Bosnian to pass with a GPA of 4.50, which is the bare minimum to pass with an excellent status, otherwise it'll write "very good" on the paper, which my parents, grandparents, and the whole family would absolutely hate.

Well, today I managed to improve German, at least I believe so. We had a written schoolwork and I did it for an A.
Tomorrow, however, is the judgment day.

I got an Electronics test, Democracy test, and a Bosnian oral exam. The chances of me getting A's in all three are 15%. Lol.

The day of judging all my sins (of me not studying). The time will come very soon, unfortunately, but at least I've been preparing. I hope I'll survive, and if I do, then my winter break starts right on the 27th of December, cuz' I got no exams left afterwards.

Merry Christmas folks, happy holidays, I wish you all the best, soon it'll be 2020, it's been nice and everything, blah blah blah, I don't even celebrate Christmas, lol.
Now excuse me, I gotta go study for once. :3