Forum posts

Why??? Don't.

Make your server support no-steam

Nah just buy the game

What?

May I suggest you put in code to write messages whenever the relevant functions are called. You could have the messages include the values of the of the variables. This should help you follow the flow of the code and figure out what's happening.

So much this, any time you are having issues with a block of code or function you need to find a way to visually show you exactly what is happening at every step of execution.
IMO even if you aren't having issues you should be doing this anyways just to make sure everything is actually working as intended.

groan

I feel like you've posted that verbatim before Dimbark.

In

\common\Half-Life 2\hl2\hl2_misc_dir.vpk

You will need a program like GCFScape to export them.

Screamer, you've been given advice to just stick to one project an amount of times I couldn't count. (In this very thread it's been brought up.)

The community here is very patient and forgiving, but until you show that you can work even a very simple project to completion, nobody will bother to give advice that you will simply ignore and move onto something else. Whether you intend for it or not, it's incredibly disrespectful of others free time to give you advice time and time again just for you to decide it's no longer worth your effort.

Pick a very very small and simple project, one that you can absolutely finish.
And once you've finished it, make something slightly more complex that you would need a little bit of help with and complete it as well. And so on.

It's great you have ambition, really. But you're just setting yourself up for failure undertaking projects that are far beyond the scope of your capability right now.
We've all had years of experience so of course it looks easy for us to do our respective hobbies and skills.
Some learn faster than others, but I'm telling you we've all had to take things one step at a time to get where we are.

And we've all had to deal with the frustration of not feeling like we're not good enough to continue trying or that we overestimated our ability to do something. But once you've involved other people, it no longer becomes your choice to decide that it's not worth your time.
And forget mapping/modding/custom game engining or whatever for a moment, in life in general you're going to need to learn to respect and value other people's time or life is going to be quite the uphill battle for you when it doesn't need to be.

You also need to learn to not take criticism as a personal attack... I don't know if you're incredibly young or just naïve but for personal growth you need to take constructive criticism as somebody caring enough to take the time to tell you what you're doing wrong and what you could do to improve.
If you can't do that then you will be stuck exactly where you are, for however long it takes for you to realize how much time of yours, and everybody else's has been wasted.

I have no idea what Intel Optane memory is and searching around I can't find any definitive answer on whether or not it can be seen and used as actual system memory, only that it can be used to accelerate a storage device. Worst case I imagine it should at least work to hold a pagefile of virtual memory I suppose.

If the 16GB Optane can be used as memory for the programs, it's a very good deal for a productivity machine. 16GB of DDR4 ram alone would take the bulk of that cost and my gaming+productivity Ryzen system is already well beyond 1K and I still have components I need to upgrade.

Otherwise, 4GB of ram will not be enough for anything but the lightest of productivity on the 3D side at least. Archie can give his experience on the photo/video side of things or somebody else with experience in those fields.

EDIT: Another thing to be careful of is to make sure the screen will be good enough for what they're after, since you mention they'll be doing photo and video work on it. If they require color accuracy, having to get a separate monitor might dampen the benefit of portability if the built-in screen isn't up to par.
Again, somebody with experience in colour-critical work will have to share their opinion as I've never had much of a need for colour accuracy.

Good eye, used a reference image to correct the proportions.
Completed the most time consuming internal pieces, now I just need to add some more components and apply decals.

EDIT: Diaphragm is a fair amount too large but I'll correct that later.

What an enormous pain in the ass. 5 or so hours of fucking around to finally get this:

Fortunately the internals shouldn't be too much work, so other than decals most of the work is already done.

Should be in a maps/workshop folder within the game directory.

Been a while (over a year!) since I worked on anything, so I figured I should start with something simple.

All of the non bug related threads for twhl4 are closed due to inactivity, so hopefully it's possible to merge this into one of those...
Anyways, I just noticed the twhl logo is designed to look like the menu items on the half-life menu (even has the mouseover bloom), and it looks quite nice. I think the site overall would have a more polished and theme consistent look if all of the buttons (on the header at least) were also styled similarly.

You could also end up with one (or more) maps loitering on the front page with regular updates.

To be fair, wouldn't this be one of the main purposes of the front page updates? Otherwise people would have to upload separate versions of maps in response to [constructive] criticism.

Questionable Rail

Have you ever considered writing a pen and paper journal?

Said a man who's never lived life to its fullest.

I can't be much help with this as I have absolutely no idea how things work in goldsource, but what I would suggest is finding a way to output the return of all the variables in your function on screen.

I find it's a lot easier to find out exactly what is going on in the code visually rather than trial-and-error, maybe your function is running multiple times, or there's an issue within the function running one time, or it's elsewhere.
If you can output the functions in some visual form, at least you'll have some idea of what's going on.

SketchUp + Blender ( Import SketchUp skp in Blender )

This is a HUGE no no. Don't do this, kids.

Unfortunately your link has expired, so I can't look at it.

Hmm try putting all of your source files into a zip, upload it and link it here.
Will take a look at it.

Not to be an ass, but you're gonna have a really hard time if you don't put the time in to understand what you're doing. Learn the basics of skeletal/bone animation and you'll very quickly learn where you went wrong, and where you will go wrong in the future.
Otherwise we'll give you the solution and you'll just end up coming back time and time again with other issues that could easily be avoided.
EDIT: Did not see that you did in fact read tutorials already, but either the tutorials are completely wrong or there was some stuff lost in translation.

This tutorial seems to hit most of the marks for a basic knowledge of skeletal animation: LINK

Hey come on now, we understand you're frustrated but nobody's trying to disregard the information you've provided or insinuate that it's your own doing... We can't provide you with guarantees on our suggestions as they are just that, suggestions.
If they don't work, then we move on to different options, no need to react so strongly.

Right click->properties->unblock

But... Ok.

Wasn't happy with how the PVS-5 turned out, so spent the day touching it up and reworking some things.

Why do you use cropped porn photos as your profile pictures...?

So any plans to visit Canada, Archibald? Permanently?

If you're not signed in, then deleting cookies should suffice.

Can't agree with the notion that it isn't possible for information to be too scattered and disconnected there Crypt. I also don't understand the gilbert grape "I work in a grocery store so I can't shop at the supermarket" mentality. We can be constructive and open to other communities and still be friends with people at twhl, no need for hostility.

I don't think people would have imagined that goldsource modding/mapping would remain as active as it has, and there's certainly going to be tutorials/other resources that are inconsistent with [relatively] more modern techniques and workflows.

Hell, just recently we had Dr.Cola and all but a few people (who responded) confused about how level changes work in regards to npc persistence. The Level change tutorial here on TWHL makes no mention of npc persistence.
It's great that people donate their knowledge to a free community, but confusion about basic things like level changes shouldn't be possible in an engine that's been around for 18 years. That's older than some of our members.

I can't personally comment on the state of the 'community' as you call it since I'm a 3D artist not tied to any particular engine, but if you can pull this off I think it'll do a lot of good for newcomers and I commend that. Just make sure you're ready to do a lot of research and triple-checking for accuracy or you'll just end up making things worse. It is a massive undertaking that will require not only that but also updates as the community releases new tools, discovers new tricks or finds out that previously held beliefs to be incorrect and so on.

Looks pretty good Ninja, however you should really relax those edges up.
If you look at any professional 3d art, you'll notice they will have very exaggeratedly smooth edges. This helps translate the edges at lower resolution and/or when not very close to the object.Racer445 is a great asset to learn from even if you don't intend to create 3D art for video games. He has worked in the industry for AAA studios and has a wealth of knowledge to share for it.

Make half-life 2 in half-life 1.

What? The openGL renderer has terrible performance compared to the old d3d one... It doesn't matter on modern hardware, but if you only play older games and don't need to upgrade it certainly does.

First serious project in blender.

It's a pain not knowing the hotkeys yet, but the tool set is surprisingly well-featured and makes more sense IMO than 3ds max in some ways.

I think twhl members themselves spamming memes would be the issue, not randoms...

It does say xash3d in the corner though... I don't know how it calculates lighting but I imagine direct lighting isn't baked.

Bringing up a really old post and an even older tutorial, but...

funny that you bring up Jedi Academy - it was the first game I created custom assets for outside of the HL universe.

It's also BSP based - you could create that screenshot in Goldsource pretty easily. I have a tutorial on how to create textures for brushwork like that:

Click!

This absolutely is the way that assets should be made (and are made in modern engines, where custom static meshes are used instead of BSP geometry and tiling textures), but I would strongly disagree with manually doing the maths in photoshop to unwrap the uvs when you can just export the geometry and do it properly in any choice of texturing software.
I don't know if I can muster enough motivation to get an entry in for the pockets compo, but if I do I'll be sure to elaborate on a (hopefully) better/simpler method to do this.

Another upside of exporting the geometry is that you have the geometry and can do fancy stuff with it as Instant Mix has discovered in Competition 34, but more on that later.

It's probably because he doesn't want to fixate on the fact that Vodka's making a map of columbine high school.

Okedoke, this is... Yeah.

It would be better to learn some traditional texturing techniques as well as what modern shaders are attempting to emulate, rather than to try and aimlessly slap together shaders and materials. If you make materials based on a "looks good" metric then you'll be kicking yourself later once you do learn how shaders work.

You don't. You learn how to play the game without looking like a fool.

Why are you making maps for GSU? Slade makes his own maps, doesn't he?

Ahahaha, my game was acting very weird the entire time, so I assumed my bodies were only doing that on my screen.

Gordon Freeman
tired
Black Mesa
test subjects
massive
platform

---

door
Bob
cripplingly depressed
her
tiny
Kleiner's cat
average

---

runned
lasers
sharks
stopped
shot
headcrab
move
sleepy
blast pit

---

loose
pills
quiet
puke
dildo
I am mentally ill!

---

floor
dying
headcrab rabies
killed

Slot the barnacle into Barney's Monocle.

No thanks.

As for the texture maps...
Diffuse is the base color map of your texture, and it is lit by a dot product and does not take into account the perspective of the viewer.Specular is a texture map that defines how might light is reflected back to the viewer when viewed at the correct reflected vector of the light source.Specular exponent defines how rough or smooth a surface (or in this case, pixel) is. This is to emulate varying surfaces which may be matte, semi-glossy or glossy.As seen above, a diffuse (rough) surface will scatter light in every direction, while a smooth surface will only reflect light at certain angles. It is common to see highly reflective surfaces to have a dark or entirely black diffuse, and a bright specular map.

Diffuse, specular and glossiness are all outdated and antiquated, if possible it would be more beneficial to learn PBR. PBR is easier to understand, more accurate, and has real-world values for different materials.
The old diffuse/specular shading model required a lot of tricks and trial-and-error to get textures to look correct, and even then wouldn't look consistent across different lighting environments due to how they approximate lighting.

Neither. Both are fully-featured 3D content creation toolkits and will do the same thing with different interfaces and workflows.