Journals

What do you guys think? Is it cool looking or horrible looking? I say the latter one.

A month has passed since I migrated. It only took two weeks for Malta to feel like home. It is even more beautiful than I remember. And so warm. I cannot believe I wasted one third of thirty years being cold and depressed in Sweden.

I started a new job. Colleagues are nice. They like to go out for drinks... maybe a bit too often. I should be careful.

I found a friend to go hiking with and I reunited with some nice people I met when I visited last winter. And I found someone to celebrate Christmas with... I hope it will be the first of many together.

I brought only one game with me, a chessboard, and I have already enjoyed some great games. Still... I think I will build a PC soon I miss the people I love that I left behind. I promised I will always come back to see them during summers, but I might go and see a couple of them before that. Still. Life feels good right now.

Just wanna share some goodies I put into uBlock Origin (uBO). This is partly an exercise to explore uBO's CSS capabilities which I recently learned is a thing, so you can just use uBO for simple CSS injections without requiring a user style extension.

! exclamation mark at start of line marks a line comment
! similarly you can comment out entries below by prefixing with !

! 26/12/2023 https://twhl.info

! these 2 lines remove the background for a better Dark Reader result
||twhl.info/images/body-background.png$image
twhl.info##body:style(background-image:none !important)

! this makes textareas use monospaced font
! trust me, you're going to need this!
twhl.info##textarea:style(font-family:monospace !important)

! this compresses entity guide's attribute value lists into 3 columns
twhl.info##[id^="Attributes"] + ul ul:style(columns:3)

! this compresses Render FX list into 6 columns
twhl.info##[id^="Attributes"] + ul li:has-text(/^Render FX/) > ul:style(columns:6 !important)

! this hides the bloated TFC entity guide panels below most entity guide pages
twhl.info##[id^="Team_Fortress_Classic_only"]:upward(1):style(display:none !important)

Here's a preview (Dark mode achieved with Dark Reader extension):

Lookin for something to do with free time.

It has been a while since my last journal. I've mostly just been busy with work and being exhausted and had all my project on hold except for my part in this year's Ragemap (a mapping collab for Sven Co-op).

I brought up the fact that func_illusionary will produce cliphulls came up earlier today when helping Sassy Boy with advice on reducing clipnodes, which came as a surprise to some. Understandable, it's always non-solid so why would func_illusionary need cliphulls for in the first place? I thought a journal might be a tidier format for talking about this.

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So the thing is, the CSG compiler that comes with the HL SDK makes no classname checks, it's pretty much entity-agnostic in this regard. So the compiler generates clipnodes on all HULLs for func_illusionary just as it does for any other brush entity. It doesn't become non-solid until it's spawned in-game and the game code gives it pev->solid = SOLID_NOT.

Big waste of clipnodes if you ask me.
Surely those who've worked on ZHLT and VHLT would have thought about this too and made sure to skip cliphull generation for func_illusionary. I opened up the source code for VHLT v34 and searched for "func_illusionary" and just as I expected I found a conditional checking for that classname and flagging those entities as "noclip" (which will make them skip cliphull generation). Though then I remembered I had this habit of adding zhlt_noclip 1 to func_illusionary in my FGDs, and I was pretty sure that even in VHLT the entity will still have cliphulls generated by default.

What better way to check than testing it?
So I set up a basic room. That's 6 faces with a clipnode each, times the 3 clipping HULLs, for a total of 18 clipnodes for the room itself.
A box is created and tied to func_illusionary. 6 faces on that one as well, so we can expect an additional 18 clipnodes if the generation isn't skipped. Run compile, and... We have 36 clipnodes total, what we expected if func_illusionary's cliphull were generated after all.
Doing another test with zhlt_noclip 1 on the func_illusionary, and without the entity at all, as controls we get the total of 18 clipnodes we expected to see if it was skipped.

So this confirms that func_illusionary does produce clipnodes in both the HL SDK CSG and VHLT v34's CSG.
But why?

Unfortunately I do not have that answer yet, but I'm curious about finding that out and so I started looking into it today.
I tested the conditional in VHLT's CSG where it checks the classname in isolation and it worked, so that can be ruled out.

I'll be sure to update this journal if I find out more, and if anyone reading this happens to know anything about it, please let me know!

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Update:

Oxofemple brought to my attention that the -clipeconomy must be on to skip generating cliphulls for func_illusionary (and similar entities).
This was strange to me as I was sure it should be on by default, which used to be the case for ZHLT. Solokiller helped me confirm that the flag was changed to be off by default for whatever reason somewhere early in the VHLT branch.

So to sum it up it's not a bug but rather a change in default behaviour from earlier versions.

I Open "Half Life SDK on steam
I create a basic map after following a tutorial.
I have a problem and ask around
I get told to download J.A.C.K
I Get some weird thing called a "Leak"
Here I am

I made this to get my head around the structure of a BSP file and its lumps. Updates:

• 2023-12-20: now has data from all 15 lumps
• 2023-12-22: cleaned up. lump references explicitly marked, and implied to be index into lump struct

So basically, the highest level data is the models lump. Its items have indices into the BSP tree and to the faces that comprise the model. You can safely and completely bypass the BSP traversal by directly retrieving the faces, but that means you're drawing absolutely everything. The world is the first BSP model, and every brush entity is its own BSP model referenced by its index into this lump.

The BSP tree has a lot of academic literature so I'll just skip it.

One unique property BSP leaf is the contents, describing whether the volume is air, water, ladder, etc. The marksurfaces info translates to face entries. There doesn't seem to be an offset of leafs from the Model struct so tracking the sum of all previous models might be required.

A face defines a plane, its edges, texture information, and lighting style. There is only a pointer into the lightmap data; the exact shape and size of the data is inferred from the plane, its closest axial orientation, texinfo vectors, and the styles (non-255 value means there's 1 lightstyle of the calculated size, up to 4 lightmaps)

An entity can have the model reference the internal BSP model of a BSP file with the *N notation. Interestingly it can also reference external BSPs, in which case it'd load only model 0 of that BSP afaik.

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This is just tentative information as of writing. My end goal is to understand enough to be able to completely translate a BSP file into a 3D scene for rendering. I would update this page as I learn things as I go.

References

• https://hlbsp.sourceforge.net/index.php?content=bspdef
• https://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/spec/quake-spec34/qkspec_4.htm#CBSP0

First off, I'd like to say that this is my first journal that I am posting to both TWHL and SoFurry. I'd also like to add the disclaimer that I am not encouraging anybody reading this on TWHL to seek out the SoFurry platform, as that would violate the site's rules. In fact, I'm going to say that if you're not there already, you're not the kind of person who should go there. Anyway, onto the journal.
So I recently started drinking coffee, which is of course much higher caffeine than my previous go-to, Dr. Pepper. Well, last night I drank two coffees and failed to fall asleep at all. It's now five in the afternoon and I'm still not "tired." Which means I see a high likelihood of this becoming a recurring problem...
Why do I keep doing this shit to myself? I'm easily the most self-destructive person I know. I'm going to end up working myself to death, or lazing myself into morbid obesity. I can't find a middle ground in anything. I like to say that I don't think in black and white, but I can't seem to find the gray...

Hey there,

Finally another journal, and it is of the lighter kind this time around. I have finally got the courage to start moving the information about Deleted Scenes towards the TWHL wiki!

This is pretty big for me as generally I don't feel very comfortable writing things up in the proper, professional way. I feel as if I am not good at structuring things. But, I do understand that this needs to happen eventually, even if it is just one wiki entry a week or a tutorial a month on the weird stuff that Deleted Scenes can do.

I started with the special items in Deleted Scenes, like the "Tools" and the brush entity that is required to use them, that being "trigger_usetool". I hope that I can stick with this for a bit and migrate all the knowledge that I have in my head to a more stable and helpful place, which is in the TWHL entity guides section.

Anyway, that was all I wanted to write about.

See ya later!

(I know that it's suppose to be on the 6th of November, but there's a high chance that I'll forgot about it tomorrow, so I'm posting about it now)

I kinda forgot that I have this account until someone on Discord mentioned seeing me in the Shoutbox. So I decided to change up my account a bit so that it isn't looking like it was made by a 5 year old and then I suddenly realized that it's 2 years of me having this account.
So uhhhhhh, happy anniversary or something, idk I don't celebrate things.

Hi everyone,

Just thought it would be impolite not to share some auto-pro… website you could be interested in!*

With a few (or rather a lot of) months in the making, behold Mapping-Fusion! As you expect the site is centered around GoldSource and Sven Co-op modding. Its aim is very modest, it is just to share our thoughts (Neophus and I) on the mods and maps we play, but also to try to promote and encourage GoldSource mods and modding in the French-speaking community. So far we’ve posted a few tutorials as well as some unbiased reviews of randomly selected maps cough.

Apart from reviews and similar articles, we make sure that anything we create is already present on more widely known websites, so to avoid contributing to the scattering of GoldSource resources.

I’ve also taken some care in implementing microdata. I have the vague hope that at some point, an extensive database of annotated GoldSource resources could really help put some order and help people find what they need as well as new interesting stuff (mods, maps, tutorials…). Not sure how this could materialise though, and it’s obviously a long way from here.

Feel free to share your thoughts! (Either on the website or on anything else if nothing comes to mind)

*: Oh, did I mention, it’s better if you speak, or at least read, French. Here’s a tutorial.

EDIT: We did it! Scroll to the bottom to for the final result!

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We're two Mappers who haven't released a map for a while and have left many of projects to collect dust, especially our joint projects. Though we have learned a lot from our failures, we still have a lot to learn from successes too, and that is why we're here today.

Oxofemple and I, Chimz, have decided to bring to you a new Sven Co-op map in just 2 weeks! That's right, just 2 weeks.

Why are we telling you this? Well that's because we're counting on you! Not for support and having an audience (though we would appreciate it) but we're asking you to hold us accountable!

We have started work on our project today and are scheduled to release our map on the 10th of November. There will be no delays, no date changes or anything. Come hell or high water, we will release our map in whatever state that is, and to keep our dignity we will do our best with what little time we have and release it.

If we miss our mark, well then, we're asking you to yell at us until we release it in whatever state it is.

So tell us, can we count on you?

Track No. 4

What the hell

For US residents: What kinda zombies do you think we'll turn into later today after the announcement test? I'm hoping I'll be a Return of the Living Dead style zombie. That'd be so cool!!
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Also it just so happens to be my birthday.