Forum posts

Some FGDs are here, not sure if they're all recent: http://content.logic-and-trick.com/Half-Life/Unsorted%20File%20Dump/FGDs.7z

Of course not. That's his birthday.

Yeah, I'm playing through Rage at the moment, it's great. I really enjoyed the level in the abandoned city, it was very tense.

In other news, I've just finished Batman: Arkham Asylum (finally!). Man is that a good game.

I'm also playing Gears of War 3 - it's good, stupid fun. I've also got the Ico & Shadow of the Colossus HD collection sitting on my desk, I'll start playing Ico in the next few days as well

On the DS, I've been playing through the Final Fantasy series (1 to 6). I'm almost finished FF3 (the DS remake version) - aside from it being pretty difficult at times, it's my favourite one out of the three I've played so far.

There's a sticky topic in this very forum called GoldSource Big Map Toolkit, perhaps that is what you're looking for?

That's fine. Make sure your custom WAD has a unique name so we dont get naming conflicts in our game folders.

Card name: VIA Chrome9 HC IGP
Manufacturer: S3 Graphics Co., Ltd.
Chip type: VIA Chrome9 HC IGP

Have you got a computer with a proper graphics card that you can test this on? Integrated (or whatever this is) graphics usually have terrible OpenGL implementations, which will mean you'll have all sorts of stupid issues trying to use Hammer. It doesn't have to be a good card, just find the cheapest ATI or Nvidia card that works in your PC (20 bucks should get you something, maybe cheaper if you go second hand).

Dont think too much of that rule, I would consider simply walking around the map as "gameplay" for the purposes of this compo, even for a singleplayer map.

Follow the rules or don't enter. It's your choice.

The 'no decals' rule only applies to textures not in the texture pack - you can use decal/overlay entities as long as the decal texture is one of the allowed textures.

What are you talking about? It's EXACTLY the type of inventiveness we want from this competition! You are free to use any and all entities that you want, in any possible way!

The ONLY limitation of this competition is that you cannot apply textures to brushes that are not from the texture pack provided (with the exception of tool textures, of course).

What about decals? Like a crack or something?

No.

custom sounds

No.

I guess I can use hl2 sound for gold. Right?

No.

Don't worry about performance, the judges have decent machines so it's not really an issue. If you do actually resize textures, give the new WAD or VTF a unique name so you don't cause conflicts in my game folders.

I've already said this once before, but here it is again:

No custom content of any kind is allowed.

Also:

No decals or overlays
Using models and NPCs is allowed, but you cannot overuse them
Tool textures are the ones that aren't visible in-game. If you can see a texture when you play it, it must be from the texture pack.
You can use any official Valve game for your map.

Honestly, most of this is in the compo brief. Use your brains before asking questions!

If every texture you wanted to use was in the set, that would defeat the entire purpose of the competition. You need to work with what you have available to create you entry. Now can everybody stop complaining?

And Strider, answer the damn decal question already!

No custom content is allowed at all.

Last time I spoke to Daubster, he was going to try and recruit some new people to take charge of MOTM. Not sure if he's done anything or not yet.

Trigger, clip, null, nodraw, and associated friends will all be allowed - the main focus is the 'visible' textures, not the invisible ones. I suspect that models will be okay as long as they're not overused. No custom content will be allowed, though.

Go into 'Settings > 3D Views' and turn off 'Reverse selection order'

As for your yellow outlines, can you provide a screenshot?

Only thing I can think of is that by deleting those files, you messed up the 'recently opened files' list?

Try clearing out the list in the registry at:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Valve\Valve Hammer Editor\Recent File List

If that doesn't work try deleting the 'Valve Hammer Editor' registry folder entirely (take a backup using the export feature first, of course)

In case it slipped your mind, Dragos, the last compo was entirely community judged. Not every compo is, though, and I don't think that this one will be. Now could you please stop being such an arrogant jerk bag? The admin team puts a lot of effort into keeping TWHL a nice place, and if you keep being such a tool, you'll no longer be welcome. You're free to offer suggestions and ideas, but not in such a rude and offensive manner.

Thanks tons Hunter, Strider and I were scratching our heads about where the hell we'd get a decent texture pack from. It's awesome that you took the initiative and started one yourself, respect++.

Once everyone's reasonably happy with the textures we'll get a compo page up. Thoughts on time limits? I was thinking 2 months.

I don't particularly think that 'Make a Theme Park' is a particularly good idea for a competition, it's not abstract enough and entries would tend to be reasonably similar, which makes for a boring competition.

'Map a Story' probably falls into the same category, unless the story is very abstract, but if that was the case you could just make it a compo based on that abstract concept, rather than adding the unnecessary wrapper of the story to hold people back.

'Texture Pack' is obviously the most popular, but nobody has suggested any texture pack to use. Remember that it would need to be built for Source first (due to normal maps and increased resolution), which we could then port down to a Goldsource WAD format. If we can't find a suitable texture pack, then obviously we can't do this one.

Jeff: Here's a link to Spirit that you can use:

http://files.logic-and-trick.com/Half-Life/Spirit of Half-Life

@Kraken: You asked for it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hapCuhAs1nA&t=17m13s

Text transcript below:

Okay, for one thing, I think it’s important to separate the notion of infinite detail and Voxels. You can have Voxels [that are not infinitely detailed] because many of the Voxel engines that I’ve written have been at finite coarse levels of detail. The fact that you can instance detail in [Voxels]... in may ways it sounds awesomely cool: “infinite detail,” but if we look at all of the trends that we’ve been doing and Rage epitomizes in many ways, procedurally generated detail is usually not what you want. This has been an argument going back decades: “now is the year of procedurally generated textures and geometry.” We’ve heard that for a decade and it never has come true. What has won is being able to manage the real data that we want. Procedural-ism is really just a truly crappy form of data compression. You know, you have the data that you really want, and procedural-ism makes you something that might resemble what you really want, but it’s a form of extraordinarily lossy data compression that lets you produce something there.

And that really is the problem with the voxels. Infinitive detail is basically procedural-ism and you can do that with polygons, voxels, atoms, splats, whatever. They are tied together now with people talking about the recent demo that came out, but they are really orthogonal topics. I don’t think the notion of infinite detail is actually all that important. It is more important to be able to get the broad strokes of the artistic vision in there, and if you take uninspired content and look at it at the molecular level, it is still uninspired content. It’s not really going to make a big difference. What is potentially useful about voxels is that it allow you to access them in a certain way that may be more efficient than say a rise pipeline of dicing polygons, doing displacement mapping, and things like that. They are both ways to give huge amounts of geometric detail, which is obviously the next frontier after we uniquely texture everything. We want to uniquely “geometrify” everything. We all want to go there, but it’s also important to realize that I was showing MegaTexture demos five years ago. It took five years for it to turn into a production quality game, and you could make a cool, flashy demo of like “look, isn’t this amazing, we can stamp down stuff and everything looks totally different? There’s no tiling, and we can use procedural information to generate all of this,” but there is a huge amount of work that goes into building a robust production quality system that you can build real game worlds with.

I’ve revisited voxels at least a half dozen times in my career, and they’ve never quite won. I am confident in saying now that ray tracing of some form will eventually win because there are too many things that we’ve suffered with rasterization for, especially for shadows and environment mapping. We live with hacks that ray tracing can let us do much better. For years I was thinking that traditional analytical ray tracing intersecting with an analytic primitive couldn’t possibly be the right solution, and it would have to be something like voxels or metaballs or something. I’m less certain of that now because the analytic tracing is closer than I thought it would be. I think it’s an interesting battle between potentially ray tracing into dense polygonal geometry versus ray tracing into voxels and things like that. The appeal of voxels, like bitmaps, [is that] a lot of things can be done with filtering operations. You can stream more things in and there is still very definitely appeals about that. You start to look at them as little light field transformers rather than hard surfaces that you bounce things off of. I still wouldn’t say that the smart money is on voxels because lots of smart people have been trying it for a long time. It’s possible now with our current, modern generation graphics cards to do incredible full screen voxel rendering into hyper-detailed environments, and especially as we look towards the next generation I’m sure some people would take a stab at it. I think it’s less likely to be something that is a corner stone of a top-of-the-line triple A title. It’s in the mix but not a forgone conclusion right now.

I'd rather listen to Carmack, who's been in the graphics business for 20 years (and is a fucking genius in the graphics field), as opposed to Notch, who made one simplistic 3D game in Java.

He doesn't disagree with Notch, but he has some more sensible comments on the tech in general.

"No chance of a game on current gen systems, but maybe several years from now."

"I do not think non-polygonal renderers will be the winning choice in the next five years, but someone will probably have a go at it and learn something."

"You can real time ray trace a static world on high end hardware today as a demo, but there is a long path between a demo and something that is competitive with rasterization in a real product. My plan for such technologies has always been to emit a depth buffer as well as color from the voxel/point cloud renderer and continue to use existing technologies for characters/particles/etc."

I've always thought that if done right, Mirror's Edge would make a pretty cool sandbox game.

The correct way is for me to make my own decision, which I did. It just so happens that somebody else had already explained why it's not happening. So while you may say it's based on "2 minor opinions", it's really based on one major opinion: mine.

Comments on profiles would just be used for spam (even CapT seems to agree with this, considering his initial example). Not only that, profile bio's change often so comments on them would just be irrelevant and not make sense after it changes.

Not gunna happen. See the two above posts for reasons why.

My guess is that this will be a free-to-play game, same as TF2.

Also, what the hell Striker? Just because you don't like CS doesn't mean that another CS game shouldn't be made. There is absolutely no "shameless" element to a multiplayer sequel released SEVEN YEARS after the last installment.

Also, everyone, Valve don't just have one game team. They work in smaller groups, each on a specific game. CS development wouldn't be taking all that much time away from HL stuff (assuming HL stuff is happening).

350,000,000 million guns

That's a lot of guns!

I'll see if I can increase the file upload limit later so Daub can upload it himself. 16MB sound okay?

I'll consider it, CapT.

Take it elsewhere, people. Thread is about games, not bad grammar.

I've been replaying the Mass Effect games on the PC, Infamous 2 on the PS3, and Donkey Kong Country (GBA version) on the DS. I'm really shit at old-school side-scrollers, so after I die a million times I give up and play some nice hand-holding modern games

I don't dream - none that I can remember, anyway. On rare occasions (two or three times a year) I will wake up in the middle of the night with a huge jolt, for seemingly no reason at all. I can only assume that it's because of a dream, but I guess I'll never know, because I can never actually recall any sort of dream.

TWHL4. (ETA: September 2019)

It's happening when there are new threads in the new forum widget on the main page, it goes away as soon as somebody replies in that thread. It's a simple fix but I cannot access the FTP from work, so it will have to wait.

Fixed now. Thanks everyone for letting me know.

How the hell did I manage to do that?
I'll take a look at it tonight.

There was a third being developed for a long time, but I haven't heard anything about it for ages (thank god). Last I heard, it was on the Source engine.

Sigh, Urby. When did you turn into such a troll?

As I said, everyone's gaming tastes are different. To me, 200 hours of Fallout or CoD sounds like a whole lot of boring, repetitive gameplay. To others, they love playing CoD and/or Fallout. People who buy the next big CoD game are getting it because they liked the last one, and think that it is worth their money.

Again, stop being so ignorant. Tastes differ, and we're in the minority of people who don't like CoD/Halo/Killzone/generic FPS #593. Just because you like different games doesn't mean you can discount the opinions of millions of others.

Except Call of Duty players get their several hundred hours (and then some) in the multiplayer portion of the game. Just because you don't like a particular game (or series) doesn't mean that it's not value for money.

Can't say I'm all too fussed about MW3 either, but you can't be that ignorant when offering criticism. And let's not even get into the numerous singleplayer-only, 8-12 hour games that are far better than 200 hours of either CoD or Fallout...

Hell no. The code is too shit.

Though the same could be said about the Source engine!

Thanks. It's going to take me a little while to get used to the new home page, though

No, GNU is a recursive acronym standing for "GNU's Not Unix". You probably mean the GNU/GPL, which is an open-source license wich specifies that any application that uses GPL'd code must also be released under the GPL. It's called 'copyleft', and is an important ideal of some open-source enthusiasts. You are, however, free to sell the software that uses the code, but you still need to provide the code to anyone who buys it.

It's a good point, and it's been brought up a few times now, so I guess I should do something about it
Stay tuned.

It's interesting that identical models perform differently based on where on the drive platter your partition is, or where the available free space is. The last drive of mine is a very old 500GB drive, I'm almost done removing everything I need from it, then it's getting retired forever.

Also, why does Windows rate your hardware out of 7.9? What a random number. Why not 10, or a percentage value?

Delete ClientRegistry.blob, restart Steam.

Try verifying the game files by right clicking TF2 and clicking the appropriate button in the 'local files' tab.

No it isn't, Joebama. Sure, we focus on Valve games, but we support and encourage the discussion of other games and engines. Don't spread that nonsense through the site, please.