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That's not a decal Stojke, that's a regular transparent texture. Decals are greyscale textures where white is transparent and black is opaque, and the greys in between represent the alpha channel. The final colour in the palette is the colour of the decal in-engine.

I checked out the code, and it looks like the 5-unit box is for testing against something else (my best guess would be perhaps decals showing on models), and then it sends the decal across to the engine regardless of whether that test succeeds or fails. So it looks like the engine itself determines what faces the decal is visible on. I'm going to stick with the 4-unit radius because that's how the engine is behaving in my tests.

@Daubster: Awesome, that makes a lot of sense, the engine behaviour does seem consistent with your explanation. I don't even know what Hammer is doing, but what the engine does is the important thing in the end. Is the decal code you mentioned available in the SDK? Can you point me to the file so I can take a look?

Edit: I tested this theory and it seems correct, except it looks to be an 8x8x8 box rather than a 10x10x10 one. This screenshot has a bunch of brushes with a decal applied to the bottom side of each brush. The decal is applied to the floor for the first three, but doesn't when the distance from the floor is >= 4, which suggests a bounding box of 8 units.

I was wondering if any Goldsource veterans could enlighten me about how decals are supposed to work when they appply to multiple faces. I've been messing with Hammer for a little while now and I still have no idea what behaviour Hammer and the engine use for decals, aside from the fact that the two are quite different.

Let me demonstrate (please excuse my silly example map):Both behaviours seem illogical. Sometimes the decal is applied to multiple faces, sometimes it isn't. And when you try some different angles:The VDC and a few other places say that the decal texture is projected outwards from the infodecal entity, however this explanation seems inconsistent with the screenshots above. Hammer seems to be projecting to all faces in the first and last screenshot, but didn't project at all in the second one. The reverse is true for the in-engine screenshots.

Does anybody have any idea how the engine renders decals like this?

No, these solutions are extremely half-assed and prone to failure. Use a proper version control system like SVN or Git. Both of these work just off your local hard drive or there are services that let you run them over the internet as well. Every time you finish making a change, you commit. Then if you screw up you just revert back to that version from the history.

I like the HD models, personally. What's stopping you from copying over the relevant files from a WON install over the top of the steam files?

Lowest relevance/filesize ratio.

Yep, I understand. I guess I'm comparing it to Source displacements where you can do a lot of fancy things on top of the terrain geometry they were designed for. Having all the generated tetrahedrons share a vertex wouldn't work in some of the cases I'm thinking of. Definitely not the common use case, and this technique is better for compile times so it's the better choice.

That's a good point, I hadn't thought of that. Though I'm reasonably sure that modern compile tools lets you avoid the issue with extra visleaves, you still have the problem of the longer compile time. I guess it's a trade-off between the quicker compile or allowing more complex/flexible surfaces, and the former is probably more important for the people using this patch.

Yeah, I was halfway through typing a support email and just refreshed and it was gone. Hopefully it was just a small change they had to make and it wont come back again. FYI I'm on unlimited storage so we shouldn't be running out of HDD space. Thanks for the alert though, I'm not always around to see these errors.

Cool, that's pretty neat. As a potential enhancement you could compute the tetrahedron point using the triangle plane normal and place it a few units underneath the center of each triangle, then you could avoid the issues with twisting that you described in the first post. I wrote a tool called Twister that converts VMF displacements into tetrahedrons and found that method worked very well.

I guess the biggest issues with this patch are:
1. It won't work with batch compile tools that accept RMF files (like HLFix) and other applications that can read RMFs (and expect valid solids).
2. It generates invalid solids in the RMF and would be problematic if you wanted to release your map sources, as most people wouldn't have the patch installed.

Do you have any ideas on how to work around these issues? Do you plan to have a tool that will convert from a trimesh RMF into a regular tetrahedron one? If it was a command line tool, that would also make it easy to add into a batch compile script. If you don't want to do it, I think it's something that I could knock together after work, as long as you don't mind it being written in .NET.

Thanks for the info. Do you think you could go through the specifics of how your patch detects the invalid solids and converts them into tetrahedrons? Does it just convert all invalid faces when you save to map/compile or does it tag them somehow? Is it just a special case when it finds a solid with a face with just one vertex in it, or is it something more complex? I'm very interested in the details

I asked about HLFix because I suspect Suture might be using it, seeing how he doesn't use the floating point hack. I might be wrong.

Does this patch do anything tricky with RMF files? I mean, would somebody using HLFix or an unpatched build of Hammer be able to edit and compile the RMFs produced by the patched Hammer?

Please don't be hostile towards other members.

Captain Terror, I'm not really sure why you're being a jerk but can you please not?

Trempler, your stuff looks really great, hope you do end up submitting an entry Sorry for CapT being a jerk.

Lajron, I like the textures but that room looks quite empty. I hope you're going to add some variation in there!

Same as Urby, same hardware and OS, and I don't have any issues with either engine's version of Hammer. I'm not running 3.5 under any compatibility mode, but it is running as administrator.

But visgroups in Source are much more useful and flexible than in GS, if I recall.

Blitzkrieg's last post was completely correct. And this thread shows no signs of improving. Sorry for those who might want to discuss the things within this thread, but it's just causing conflict within the community which is no good at all. There are plenty of places you can go to get information and discuss stuff like this in a much more informative and unbiased way, but TWHL is not one of those places.

@hotdog, this thread started with a picture of Hitler controlling Obama. Do you really want the discussion to return to that? Really?

I'm thinking that this thread is better off closed. If it gets any worse in here within the next few posts, don't be surprised.

Well, Valve has just pulled the War Z game from Steam, saying that its release was a "mistake". The drama continues!

That looks like a nice setting for a Myst-type game Moaby, I like it!

They're definitely riding the DayZ wave with a pretty blatant clone, however they're doing nothing "wrong" from a legal perspective. Valve's selection criteria is pretty much: "Will this game get enough sales for us to profit from it?" - Greenlight is for games that they don't know if they will, that's why it basically polls the community to find out how many sales they might expect to see from a game.

Well, they're not doing anything illegal, and it's not Valve's job to tell content producers that they're not being nice. They've since corrected the Steam page and most of the lies aren't there any more (though they made some insulting comments about that during a recent interview, basically claiming that "the users read it incorrectly", even though it contained some pretty blatant lies.)

There is indeed a lot of controversy surrounding that game, here's an executive summary for those who haven't heard:

• The game is not free to play, but also has microtransactions.
• If you die, you have to wait 4 hours before you can respawn. You can respawn instantly using microtransactions. The timeout used to be 1 hour, but was changed to 4 without warning.
• The game is still in beta and yet the Steam page does not explain this.
• The Steam listings page also lies about many things - server size, map size, features that don't exist, and so on.
• It's a total rip-off of Day Z If you want to play a game like that, wait for the standalone release of DayZ.

Custom models are fine Ninja, but make sure you are allowed to actually use them! No stealing models from other games/mods unless you have permission from the creator. Obviously you're also allowed to use models you make yourself too.

My boss at work has that one. I like the stylus input touch screen, even though I don't know when you would actually use it on a tablet

Any custom content should be included with the entry in the correct folder structure, or embedded into the BSP file itself. A mini-mod package is also permitted.

If you want to make a mod, go ahead.

The entire thing is misleading from the very beginning. It's labelled as "Science" and yet is definitely nothing close to it at all. Even the attempted scientific "evidence" at the end of the first episode (where I also stopped) is completely lacking in any scientific process once you actually read up about it. It was just a clever entrepreneur who published phoney experiment results in order to sell ridiculously overpriced water to people who believed it was true.

Until something can be proved by actual reproducible and peer-reviewed scientific evidence, it's just something that somebody has made up. Especially so with stuff that borders on religion, because there's is absolutely no empirical data that can be used to base those claims off. Faith is something that cannot be proved (by definition), and everybody has their own ideas on that.

I very much agree that there are most likely parts of the universe that we do no have the technology or knowledge to detect, but to use that as "proof" that some sort of mystical ESP spirit world exists is complete nonsense. You'll find that the so-called "interpreted brain waves" are really just a combination of familiarity with that person, knowledge of their thoughts or beliefs, and recognising tones in their voice and body language. It's pretty cool that we are able to do that with the senses we have, but there's no evidence of any sort of collective consciousness and it's silly to assume that it exists just because you think it's a nice idea.

I fully respect people who choose to believe in whichever religion they want, it's their choice. However passing it off as science is just ridiculous unless you have evidence that can be reproduced via the scientific method.

There's a 10" Nexus tablet that came out recently, so take a look at that as well if you're going for a larger size tablet (personally I'm not a fan of them myself, they're too heavy!). Google updates their software much faster and on a more regular basis than Samsung do.

I was looking at both of these a while back, and got the Nexus 7. I have to say, it's better than the Fire in almost every way in my opinion:

1. Google updates the Android version on a regular basis, Amazon do not
2. The Nexus can access all the Android stores, the Fire is locked to the Amazon store
3. Amazon has a pay-to-opt-out advertising scheme, Nexus has no ads
4. You can still download the Kindle app and read Kindle books on the Nexus (which makes your one advantage of the Fire meaningless)
5. You can also download other e-reader apps and read books from other sources on the Nexus (I use FBReader)

The only "downside" I know of is that there's no 3G version of the Nexus. But if you're getting a Wifi one anyway, the Nexus is by far the better choice.

On a side note, I have no issues reading on the LCD screen.

Let's put the server in Australia because screw you guys!

Change your update preferences to notify but not download or install. I thought most people did this already...

@CapT: Make sure you keep your anti-virus up to date, or at least be very careful about what sites you visit and what you download. People who make malicious software analyise the patches to find the exploit and specifically target people who aren't updated, so you should probably do an update every now and then.

@Stojke: Please be quiet, you sound like an idiot.

There's a "challenge mode" (time trials and such) DLC coming in December with story DLC coming next year.

The game I'm probably looking forward to the most right now is Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward for the 3DS. It's a graphical novel and room escape game, a sequel to DS game 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. It's out in the US already but I have to wait for the European region release which is another 2 weeks away

I assure you our connections are fine for anything other than gaming on the other side of the world.

I don't know enough about the compile process to know for sure, but I would guess that at some point the small rounding errors are corrected or smoothed out during compile- or render-time. I can't say for sure but I would speculate that these issues are unavoidable. I would have thought Hammer would round the numbers a bit (at least to the closest 0.125 units or something) but I guess it doesn't.

This is due to how the VMF format works when compared to the RMF format.

VMF looks something like this (sorry if this is a bit wrong, guessing from memory here):

solid {
  face {
    "plane" "(0 0 0) (0 0 512) (0 512 512)"
    "material" "tools/trigger"
    // Blah blah more stuff here
  }
  face {
    // And so on
  }
}

The important thing with this format is that the brush vertices are not actually stored in the VMF format, just the face planes. When Hammer loads a VMF, it performs a plane intersection algorithm to obtain the values for the vertices. Because it uses floating point calculations, you get the small rounding errors you see in your screenshot.

The RMF format, on the other hand, is a serialised binary C++ data structure, the very same structure that is used in the Hammer code for display and calculations. Roughly, it's something like this:

class CMapSolid {
  CMapPlane plane;
  CMapVertex vertices[];
  CMapMaterial material;
  // And so on...
}

This structure of course has the actual rounded values for the vertices and these are used when the map is loaded. You still get rounding errors when the vertices are off-grid and when converting to the MAP format (which is what HLFix partially mitigates), but if your vertices are on the grid you won't ever get any rounding issues in Hammer 3.

As a bonus, let's look at the MAP format (too lazy to look it up but it's something like this):

(0 0 0) (0 0 512) (0 512 512) "AAATRIGGER" [0 1 0 0] [0 0 1 0]

The MAP format only stores the planes, just like the VMF format. The interesting thing about this is the MAP format is what the Goldsource compiler actually uses to compile the map, which means that the advantages of the RMF format are lost when compiled. This is still better than Hammer 4, where the precision of the vertices are lost in your VMF file, rather than just in the compiled BSP. If you saved your Goldsource maps in the MAP format instead of the RMF format, Hammer 3 would have to do the intersecting planes algorithm to calculate the brush vertices, resulting in the same off-grid issues that happen when using the VMF format.

Resistive touchscreen

Some people (e.g. Ant) like to bitch about how "bad" resistive touchscreens are, but I love the damn things. For almost all touch-related input you want to do on anything, using a stylus is superior in every way. Poking and prodding with my fingers at a phone or tablet annoys me when I compare the experience to my beloved DS and it's brother the 3DS. The stylus is a precision instrument that will strike fear into the hearts of your enemies, but your fat prodding finger is a blunt instrument that fails at the requirement of even the slightest bit of precision. Stylus input is no good for multitouch, however I pretty much never use multitouch on either of the two capacitive touch devices I own. The function multitouch provides can easily be replaced without much trouble with zoom buttons and so on. Also, the Nintendo DS is the best thing in the universe, and it uses one, so there you go. And on that note...

Nintendo DS

Wouldn't have been me, I used to have a super messy desktop so I don't judge people. I put games I need to finish on my desktop, there's starting to be far too many of them...gotta clean up my backlog!

Questionable Ethics and Surface Tension are my favourite chapters in Black Mesa. Lambda Complex is also great. I can't say that at any point the quality of the mapping drops any considerable amount. It's consistently great.

It's burst fire all the time. Three shot bursts. Try and fire a single bullet and you'll see it.

There's always things we're going to be able to point out, but overall I'm extremely impressed by the quality and polish of the whole thing. It's easily the largest and most polished thing to come out of the Source community.

The whole time playing it, I felt exactly like I was playing Half-Life. That made it even better when I came across things that were different. For the most part, the changes were quite good and just served to make the game better. I especially liked the new conversations between NPCs, they were fun.

Of course there were some small issues, most of which have already been brought up above:

• Some weapon animations were somewhat lacking in quality (mostly the crowbar).
• The machine gun sounded like a nailgun from Quake, not meaty enough. The gunplay on it was perfect, though.
• I also noticed some of srry's missing Surface Tension parts (notably the Barney escort bit and the desert tentacle), but really enjoyed some of the changes too. Going into that Garg chase straight from the airduct shoot sequence was inspired. The Garg chase was absolutely brilliant. The manual reload on the TOW launcher was great, too.
• Ladders. If you've played it, you know what I mean.
• Difficulty issues with the marines. The battle at the end of QE was awesome (as was the music), but it took me a whole bunch of tries to finally get it. The post-dam fight with the soldiers and the tank was very hard, too (mostly because of the ladders involved).
• Crashing in places. First crash was a save game not working, had to start the chapter from the new game window. Second was the graphics one mentioned above. After that I got 2 or 3 crashes that were fine after I started the game again.

If anybody is having trouble (game crashes) descending into the hole after killing the tentacle, both Strider and I were able to continue by turning all the graphical settings down to their lowest before going down, and restoring them back once you are in the area with the green radioactive river of goop.

My laptop is HP and I haven't had any problems with it

I would get the more expensive one, and throw in the extra few bucks for the RAM upgrade as well. The other one only has 1/2GB RAM which is a complete joke. The smaller screen size and especially the smaller keyboard will be a big pain if you're using it for any length of time.

You might also want to consider a different screen size. My laptop has a 13" screen which is a reasonably nice size. My last laptop was a netbook and a 10" screen is just too small IMO.

I have the same opinion as Grim, more RAM and the better GPU is more important than a slightly faster CPU, I think.

If you go with the first one make sure you upgrade the RAM immediately. I would get the more expensive third option, personally.

The best way I know of to make good textures is to be Strider. Unfortunately, making textures and actually using them in a released product are two very different things.

Lots of people seem to hate on Xen but I thought it was fine
Looking forward to playing their re-imagined version of it, too bad it'll have to wait!

I think my favourite track is Questionable Ethics 1.