Forum posts

I've always liked that area in the original tram ride, it's lass blocky than a lot of HL provided you only look out the right side windows.

And may I ask the purpose of the big vats of green goo in that lab?

Personally I think that while it is a good idea, it might end badly. Think of the game Happy Wheels, where if you play any of the user created levels it sometimes seems you have to wade through a sea of crap to find anything decent. And while you can export to Hammer, I get the feeling a lot of people won't, so maps might end up missing a lot of detailing and such.
In other words, while it makes it a lot more accessible to the average gamer, I think that if regular mappers move over to this the quality of the resulting works might suffer, as while it is simple it appears to have some limitations.

I have already drawn though.
Everyone else, get drawing!

I took part in Archie's game, although I spent too long eating a burger and so had to rush it. D:

At the moment I have only one completed game, but I have a few in progress.
Linky
In my defence I'm left handed and I have a right handed mouse.

Have you clipped those brushes? It can sometimes cause that effect, when the plane the texture is on is very different from the plane of the face it is applied to. Try using the texturing tool to set the textures 'to face' or 'to world'.

(Note: I don't know if this applies to Source, I'm just working off what I know of GoldSrc here)

I don't really know about this, but have you checked the file that it names?

I am really liking those textures noSICK.

No way to play HL unfortunately.

I've been interested all along, I just don't have any means to map at the moment, or even to see the content you've provided. Hopefully in the near future I will though.

I tend not to like that method fsr. Generally I select the entire entity, go into the texture tool, then deselect every visible face, nulling/nodrawing those still selected.
It sucks when you accidentally reduce pressure on the Ctrl key enough, and it's probably an extremely cumbersome and inefficient method, but I like being able to see textures when I'm working. It helps with minor brushwork details.

I've heard a lot of people say they don't like this piece, because 'it's played too much at weddings'.
IDGAF, it's one of my favourite pieces of music, and anyway I haven't been to any weddings.

Pachelbel - Canon in D Major

Not sure if it's needed but "chase_active 1" also works, but the player model blocks the centre of the screen if I remember correctly, which hinders aiming.

D:

Scale the texture to 1.01 or 1.02 or something, then centre it. The line is a result of the fact that Half-Life blends pixels together slightly when not in software mode, so colours can bleed in from the opposite edge of the texture due to the way it tiles.
At least, that's my theory. It seems to work anyway.

That looks amazing. I hope it goes somewhere.

Unfortunately my new HDD died (which I'm particularly annoyed about), so for now I will have to have died in Zen. And I had almost gotten Source SDK working in Linux as well.

Thanks Kraken!

It is a shame about the noise, but it was the only camera I had at the time. Still, I suppose it might be possible to clean them up in Photoshop or something.

What does it connect? Obviously there is a waste station at one end, but what is at the other? That could help.

If the video I'm thinking of is the one Daubster's talking about, then it was a while ago. Definitely not recently, really.

I would be willing to help, but I can only get the 2D views working in Hammer, so no texturing and probably no complex brushwork either. It would work to start off the map but I'm bloody awful at layouts and all that stuff. And I think 2 24 hour spots each might be better, that way each person would get a chance to work on the map at two different levels of completion.

[Edit] Actually I have no idea if Source SDK works in Linux, I was talking about GoldSrc. I might give it a try tomorrow.

Industrious is one of Joe's old maps.
And I like that water tower. It reminds me of the one in the town I lived in when I was younger.

Thanks Striker and Stu!

Is that a remake of Industrious I see?

I can't think of anything to say that hasn't already been said, except good luck.

Very nice. And even though it's supposed to be spring it was snowing for a few minutes the other night. And the mornings are frosty.

Speaking of mornings, I was awake to watch the sun rise today. All I had to take photos was my iPod, so I made use of my fake telephoto lens.

Satchmo messed up the joke.

There's one thing I always found annoying about Hammer, that was if you added a WAD or something, next time you opened up the save/open window it would be in the folder where you got the WAD from. Is there some way to give the window multiple default locations depending on what type of file you're looking for?

Carving actually does work, but only for simple brushes. In almost all cases where you could use carving, you could use clipping to do exactly the same thing.

I can't remember exactly, but I think I found that out from the help file that came with one of the old versions of WorldCraft.

Jizzed on? What happened last night?

You can create new vertices with the VM tool though. Select two yellow centre points on the same face and press ctrl+f.

Weird, I was just thinking about this yesterday. I will give it a go later, unfortunately I don't have time now.

Could it be done with level changes?

I remember seeing a tutorial on this years ago, but unfortunately I don't remember the site, or anything about how it works. At least it shows it's possible.

I realised the other day that I had never finished Blue Shift, so I did a full playthrough today. It's quite short, but I enjoyed it. A lot of the scripting and brushwork was impressive compared with HL and OpFor.

I'm trying to think of some variation of Welcome that hasn't been used already...

Hello!

I found out yesterday that my TV has a VGA port at the back, so now I have a dual screen setup. I would prefer to have them side by side, but my computer doesn't like that.

I don't understand the hostility. I quite like the idea. It's like a text based adventure game, but over chat.

Then everyone fell out of the helicopter.

I remember this. I actually enjoyed it as well. I haven't been able to play due to my lack of a working computer, and since I got it fixed I still haven't been able to play due to the fact that I haven't really gotten around to getting Steam to work in Linux.

Also,

A dwarf who murdered two infamous jesters and was taken to the high capital where he attempted to murder the high king.

I remember that day.

I got 60%, and the only one of those mods I've ever played was MISSION: MC POKER.

~What made you start mapping in the first place?
I always enjoyed creating things. I didn't have a computer as a child but I saved up my money and bought an X-Box. There were a few games that had map editors, and I tended to spend more time playing with the editors than I spent in game. This didn't really stop at maps though, my brother had a number of WWF/WWE games, and I spent ages messing around with the create-a-character options in these. I also borrowed Driver 3 from my friend, and would spend hours using the video editor to make car chase scenes.
I got a laptop for Christmas one year, and while it was relatively low end I didn't really figure out what that meant at the time. I bought Prey and Just Cause, and neither of them ran at all. This was the end of my laptop gaming for a few months.
Eventually, however, I got talking with one of my school friends about map creation. He said that he had a copy of Half-Life, and that came with a program called WorldCraft, which one could use to create maps. He apparently found it around the time he first got the game, and while he messed around with it for a while, he didn't much understand it, so it lay forgotten until now. He burned me a copy of the disk (something which I felt somewhat guilty about, but I reasoned that if I ever saw the game in a shop I would buy it, so it wasn't piracy)
We spent the next few weeks messing around with it. I remember going to his house with my laptop, we would both sit in the same room and mess around with WorldCraft on our computers. At the time we were incredibly noobish. RAD was turned off by default, and we hadn't figured it out, so all our maps were fullbright. The fact that we didn't have any lighting anyway stopped us from realising the importance of sealing maps from the void. In fact, I actually made a map in which you have to fight and climb your way from one end of the map to the other, on the outside surface.
We figured out how to use entities, but not how to do much else. We tried to get the lighting to work, to no avail. We tried to make transparent glass, without success. I remember my stroke of brilliance, to try func_illusionary, see if that worked.
It didn't.
Eventually, during on of these trips to my friend's house, he compiled a map, and it came out pitch black. Not good for gameplay, but it showed that he had managed to get the lighting to kick in. He showed me how he had been messing with those little check boxes in the compile window.
Neither of us had internet connections at home, so we used to go onto the computers at the town library and look up mapping tutorials. I stumbled across TWHL, and I took it for just another mapping site, and so soon forgot about it. However my friend saw it, and joined up, and became this guy.
A few days later, he told me to join, and so I did. At some point later, he stopped mapping. I haven't seen or spoken to him in ages, so for all I know he has completely forgotten about it, however I haven't. And here I am.

~What was your first map?
Depends how you define map. There were a number of test maps I made. A single door, a vending machine, things like that. I remember making a massive vault door, a func_door_rotating. Unfortunately I didn't know about flags, and it rotated the wrong way. I hastily changed the surroundings to make it look like it was supposed to open that way.
My first actual map was a godawful abomination. Two rooms, with a vent underneath going from a raised section in the middle of the floor in one room to the opposite wall of the other room. I didn't have any idea how big the player was, so the vent was about the size of a corridor. I didn't have a clue how to do anything. I made steps up to the raised platform by making a wedge shaped block, then using the carve command with another block to cut out step shapes. The clipping spazzed out when I tried walking up these steps (not surprising), so I just placed a few crates to climb up.
I wanted to make a ladder from the vent to the other room, something I didn't know how to do. There was a func_pushable stepladder prefab, which I placed in the vent and stretched to fit. Every time I tried climbing it it just moved away, so I jammed it in a wall to stop it moving.
I can only say it's a good thing I abandoned the map at this point, and it was likely lost when the old laptop succumbed to a ridiculous amount of viruses and stopped working. I did burn a few things onto CD's to save them, it may be on one of those. If I find it maybe I will upload it someday.

~Where did you get inspiration for your first map?
From anything and everything. I find my level of mapping inspiration is inversely proportional to the amount of skill I have. Back then I had millions of ideas but I couldn't do anything with them. Now I have no ideas.
Although whenever I am unable to map for a long time this inspiration comes back. Since my HDD failed I've had loads of ideas, which I've written down for later.

~To who did you show it & how did they react?
Anyone I could. MY friend, TrooperDX3117, who thought the whole thing was brilliant. My other friends, who didn't really get the idea. Anyone who I sat beside in school classes, I would show them the floor plans and such I'd drawn. Some thought it was cool, some didn't care.
My parents, my mother didn't really get it, but my dad thought it was an excellent hobby, and encouraged me to continue.

~Your advace to future mappers/current mappers?
Try hard, don't be afraid to ask for help. Don't be embarrased, most mappers were bad when they started. Save your earliest efforts so you can laugh when you see them in a few years time. If you're stuck for ideas then don't allow yourself to touch Hammer for a few days or weeks. If you enjoy mapping as much as I do you'll be itching to start using it again, and your head will be full of ideas.
Don't eat yellow snow.

Judging from that video I think Nipper is my hero too. That was awesome.

40% on the first, 60% on the second. I feel ashamed.

Hello there.

If it fires a rimfire round then I could definitely see that design working. Centrefire might be possible, but I doubt it would be.

Well, I've just added this thread to my tracking list. Also, I ended up drooling all over Archie's keyboard.

Looks good, but I'm wondering why the scientist in the office is wearing a hazmat suit.

Very nice. The upgraded shotgun and the assault rifle are very reminiscent of the Huot rifle and the Chauchat, I really like the way you guys have went with the design. And that grenade launcher is fuckin' awesome.