So, hello. I'm Draeger.

I created an account here since I thought it'd be fun to join a forum about modding and journalling it all and making some progress by asking for some help. But nope, plans destroyed right now since:

I have an asshole "friend" who's probably some psychopathic sociopathic own personal hell mix thingy. Not so cool. He's controlling.. well, it's easier to count up what he doesn't control. He doesn't control stuff I do at home when I am offline, well, mostly offline. At least on the 20 things where he's on my friends list, stalking my status.

We met in primary school, obviously a long time ago. It was fun, we were so similar. He was lying a bit to make me like him more, but he said sorry later. But then he started being forceful. Controlling my opinions. Getting angry at me if I didn't come online every day. Or took a few seconds to answer his calls. "I was on the toilet, though..", he: "Well, you should've put your status to idle, then! God, I have to tell you everything...". But then he's so nice again, suddenly I did something bad and he's like "Ah, it's alright. Next time, just tell me immediately. Alright? :)", and that way, I guess he sort of got a mind control on me. When I do something good, he treats me nice, when I do anything bad, he immediately sends me off to personal hell for a while, and then is like "Don't do it again, and everything will be nice and pleasant." and some part of my brain now prevents me from leaving him, since I'd hurt him, I guess. Whenever I try, I just stop again and say sorry 20 times and go off to personal hell again, just to remain his friend, even though it's a very horrible experience that has already scarred me in a way:

One time he allowed himself to do some sadistic prank, where early after primary school, in the school after that (I live in Germany, you change school here after 4th grade) lots of us younger people told stories of older kids punching younger kids for fun and stuff like that. And he told me that someone was chasing us. I have diabetes, so that eventually nearly killed me, since I got a severe hypoglycemia, but we managed to work it out by me just throwing like 10 plates of sugar into my mouth until I couldn't eat any more. Well, after that I had many panic attacks nearly every time I went outside, or stood still, or tried to lie down in bed. After a while, it got better, but I still have agoraphobia and claustrophobia and other fun stuff like that.

Well, and I can't leave him since I get a deep feeling of having done something horribly wrong every time I try it. I feel like I am murdering someone when I try to. So no way I am able to leave him, and every attempts by friends and family to get me to have failed. There's looots of things I'd do to not have to leave him.

Well, why am I not able to get access to Half-Life 2 right now? Well, I have been offline for more than a week now. He's probably very angry, and I am very scared of going online since then he sends me off to our hellish fights again. And since you can't seamlessly go from offline mode to invisible mode in Steam, I can't access anything without going online, and since he'd probably immediately notice it's just not possible.

Which means I'll probably just talk about off-topic stuff here, if at all, right now. I'll be forced to face him because of school anyway, so that's when I'll start Half-Life 2 development I guess, if he doesn't force me to play with him for weeks or even months at a time again.

• You likely played that known game, even be a fan of it and there is even a remaster of it.
• The original source code has been opened recently.
• A libre/free port exists.

If you guessed that game, take the current year (2020) and substract it's release year.

Yes. I even carried it across the field in front of my house.They were a little heavier than I thought TBH.
I am definitely surprised that Gordon could pick these up so easily, albeit, cinder blocks in HL2 are definitely smaller compared to these, lol.

And no, this is not a birthday journal.

approx. $6,222.72 at time of writing in shares of Vanguard S&P 500 ETF

While the pandemic shrouds the world, we welcomed a ray of sunshine into our lives.

We adopted a two-year-old Sheltie-Shiba Inu mix called River. She was found as a stray at the rescue, and it took a Herculean effort to adopt her.

We contacted so many rescues and shelters that we started a spreadsheet to keep track of everything. For every pet that's up for adoption, more than a hundred families apply. The demand for pets is extremely high during the quarantine. I was losing hope when my friend and co-worker tipped me off about River. My friend volunteered at the rescue for more than a decade. Without a personal connection, we would still be waiting for a dog.

Well, the mod is about a scientist escaping Black Mesa Research Center
So, Black Mesa Research Center is a different place than Black Mesa Research Facility

The player had a mission to investigate the Black Mesa Research Center, since they never update their status about the ongoing project last week
So, one scientist has been send to the place via helicopter and landed on the roof of the building and proceed to enter a elevator that lead to room
that had been completely destroyed.

Now.... the first map i made is in a finished state and can be played but need some changes, next level will be a sewer system, cause i don't know
I already made a idea about the level and drawn the level, so i can re-created it on Valve Hammer Editor.

So..... this is the early title screen.....

https://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/47/46651/Mod.png

You can share this picture, cause why not?

I like modding, i started working from the beginning... i'am weak at scripting, but i can do a mapping... i will use prefabs that people made and i will credit them one by one

Also English is my second language, that's why i always ended up talking nonsense.

Today is a sad day. My cat Nahmbo had heart disease complications and had to be put down today. Lyssa and I are hurting badly because he was only 9 years old and was the best cat we’ve ever had. Even when he had to take heart medicine, he didn’t fuss at all about it which is unusual. He sat with me while I worked from home every day and would sit in my lap while I mapped On the weekends.

We’ll miss him so much, our house is more set up for him than for us and without him, we just don’t know what we will do.

For the past 2 months I've been working on a custom compile tool named MESS, short for Macro Entity Scripting System. It enables the creation of templates that can be instantiated throughout a map, and provides a basic scripting language for entity attribute customization. It works by modifying the exported .map file before the other compile tools get to process it.

I'm specifically designing MESS for the following use-cases:

• Treating complicated entity setups as a single 'composite entity' that can be duplicated and customized without having to change entity names and other attributes in each individual entity.
• Sprinking small func_details, models or sprites across a surface or area without having to manually place each object.

You can think of it as something like Hammer's prefab system, except that when you modify a prefab, all instances of it are updated as well, and that each instance can be customized by giving it different attribute values. The trade-off is that you don't get to see the actual result until after you run MESS on the exported .map file.

I used a very early version for my Buddy competition entry: the electric slug and teleporting enemy setups were created in separate template maps, and were inserted in the main map with a special macro entity. Based on that experience I decided to improve on it with a couple of other ideas. Hopefully I can create something release-worthy in a few more weeks.

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Macro entities

MESS will provide the following entities:

• macro_insert - Point entity. Creates a single instance of a template in a specific place and with a specific orientation and scale.
• macro_cover - Brush entity. Sprinkles template instances across one or more surfaces (brush faces).
• macro_fill - Brush entity. Sprinkles template instances within an area (inside a brush).
• macro_template - Brush entity. Anything inside its bounding box becomes part of a template that can be used by the above 3 entities.
• macro_remove_if - Brush entity. Used inside templates. Anything inside its bounding box can be excluded from an instance, if the removal condition is met.

Templates can contain insertion entities, so it's possible to create recursive templates. It's also possible to use other map files as templates. I'm also thinking about creating a custom .fgd system that lets you create your own 'entities', which act as aliases for insertion entities with specific attributes (e.g. an 'env_warpball' entity would be treated as a 'macro_insert' entity that references a 'warpball.rmf' template map).

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Scripting system

Here's an example of how the scripting system works. Imagine a 'rat hunt' rat template that consists of a model, a func_breakable 'hitbox' and a trigger_relay that triggers something when the rat is 'killed'. The scripting system takes the attributes of the insertion entity: and makes these attributes available to all entities in the selected template: Anything between curly braces is treated as an expression, and will be evaluated to produce the final attribute value. I'm also working on various utility functions, for things like fetching a unique instance ID or generating semi-random numbers.

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I still need to finish up the scripting system, and each of the insertion entities requires some more work to make them fully functional, so it'll be a couple of weeks before I can release anything. Please let me know if this sounds interesting or useful, or if there are other tedious things you wish could be automated when creating a level.

Like anyone who has watched videos from the likes of Adam Savage’s Tested or Punished Props Academy I've always been interested in the idea of making irl versions of things from games and movies, so with the extra time I've been spending at home recently I've bought some supplies and had a go at it.
I had thought it would be cool to make something Half-Life related, but my 3D printer has been acting up recently so have a look at this toy bear I've copied.

I'm making a two-part mould, so the first step is to half submerge the object in clay. This is special sulphur free clay for this type of work, as normal clay contains sulphur which interferes with silicone curing.Mainly you want to make sure that where the clay meets the object, it does so perpendicular to the surface. You also want to make sure that when you take the object out of the mould it can do so freely, without being trapped.
The indentations are registration marks, which are there to make sure that when you put the two halves of the mould together they line up correctly. Unfortunately the smaller ones didn't work, as when pouring the silicone in later most of them ended up trapping bubbles so that they didn't leave much of a shape on the convex side.

Next I cut the sides of the clay straight, and used skewers to make fill and vent holes.When they are taken out, they leave channels in the mould. The larger one is for pouring resin in, and the others are to allow trapped air to escape, so as to make sure that the limbs properly fill with resin.

Next I use foam board and hot melt glue to build a dam around the sides:And pour in silicone:Note that silicone is not cheap, so I was overly cautious as I didn't want to waste any. I ended up pouring less than I needed and had to mix more. You can see I tried putting some blue dye in one of the pours, mainly to see what it would look like as this silicone is normally orange.

Once that is cured, the walls are pulled off, and the clay is removed.It is cleaned as best as possible before being sprayed with mould release, as silicone will otherwise stick to itself. More walls are built up, and silicone poured.Once that is cured, the mould is (mostly) complete. I later ended up cutting a funnel into the fill channel.Here you can see what the material looks like fresh out of the mould:There is some excess where the channels were, and where some resin has seeped between the two halves of the mould, but they clean off fairly easily.

You can achieve a fairly decent level of detail with this process. Note that the grid in the background is at 1cm, so I was actually very surprised that the copyright information was still legible.You can also see how much bubbles can be a problem. Ideally I would use a vacuum chamber (if I had one) to draw out as much air as possible after mixing the resin, then once poured into the mould I'd use a pressure chamber (if I had one) to compress the remaining bubbles enough that they are no longer visible.

A cool thing that can be done is cold casting - metal powder can be used to give a surprisingly good finish.

First the mould is dusted with metal powder.That picture shows graphite powder (from sanding the tip of a pencil), but it would look similar.
Then resin is poured in. For a small mould like this you can just mix metal powder into the mould, but for a larger one you would dye the resin black instead.The above shows a raw cast where I opted for a mix of the two. I dusted the mould with copper, however the copper powder is fairly expensive and I didn't have any black dye, so I mixed the resin with powdered iron. I like how it ended up as it's fairly weighty. A downside of this is that you can't do too much cleaning of the line where the two halves of the mould meet. As the copper is only a very thin layer, any material removal risks removing the copper layer as well.
Normally you can polish these to some extent, however this bear is not the ideal shape - it polishes up fine at the high spots, however the wavy grooves everywhere make the low spots fairly inaccessible. They stay looking much like plastic and there is too much unpolished area to sell the illusion. Luckily you can corrode the metal which really helps.
Following this tutorial, I wet the bear with a solution of salt and vinegar, and suspended it in a jar with a bit of ammonia at the bottom. To speed it up a little bit I put the jar in a bowl of warm water so that the ammonia would more readily make fumes. Note that I also covered the top of the jar with plastic wrap, as the fumes aren't nice to breathe in.After about ten minutes it had corroded enough, so I put it in a solution of baking soda to halt the reaction.Afterwards a light buffing with the rough side of a kitchen sponge was enough to brighten the high spots.I'm pretty excited about this, as the whole process is actually fairly easy. The biggest obstacle at the moment is getting the materials.
I have a fairly big project for this that I'm working on at the moment, but I could see this being good for making any number of small knick knacks.

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 graduated too. I've got a bachelors in accounting now.

oorah

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.