Forum posts

I kind of doubt CC would want to, on the whole they're probably pretty eager to move on to non-HL projects after over a decade of Black Mesa.

It'd be nice to have a playable version of this, but I'll settle for the closure of knowing how it might have played out. Reading this gave me a feeling I've not had for years - knowing a game's plot as a hazy structure, from having read it on a wiki as the ability to play it isn't present. There was a time when HL2 and the episodes were like that, back when I didn't have a good enough connection to actually get the games off the steam server and onto my HDD.

It's nostalgic.

I'm around the 70% coverage zone, waiting for it to start to get dark. It'll probably be around half an hour until the moon arrives here.

EDIT:
Well, I learned two things today. Number one, the pond near residence at my university has fish. Judging by the size of some of them, they've been there for quite some time. Who knew?
Number two, that was 70% coverage? The moon ain't got shit! I didn't even notice it getting darker! A goddamn cloud would have cast a better shadow!
I want my money back.

Storage limit is a different story (Unless you have the cash for Dropbox Pro) but between the basic amount and the additional stuff they give you for referrals and whatnot it's pretty generous.

Prequel, actually.

I'm not really hyped for anything right now, since I'm terribly short on cash and wouldn't be able to buy anything anyway.
That said, F:NV mod Project Brazil is nearing completion, and I recently saw an early access trailer for a game called Foxhole which looks like it might be an MMO I could actually get into.

Oh, and the new Wolfenstein. Gotta pick up the one it's a sequel to first, but that looks good.

I mean, if having two programs is that big of an issue you could buy Sound Forge or something instead of using Audacity and Goldwave.
Or check if Goldwave can record to a specific bitrate/depth format - that should be the case as well, though I've never used it.

Thanks! It's the highly-anticipated (by nobody) remake of This map, which I've wanted to do since Black Mesa came out as sort of a way to vastly improve upon my previous work.

It's also been in development for far too long and I need to finish it up soon.

I haven't been putting... well basically any WIP shots of this up in the past months I've been working on it, but it's getting presentable now.

Only time will tell...

I know the feeling of no longer having motivation or time to work on something. Motivation happened with Colony 42, and both that and time happened on Hazard Course - luckily for the latter I had a team, so when we did have time we could push each other towards getting back on track.

We'll be patiently (for the most part) waiting for The Core until whenever you manage to finish it, so no sweat there. Take as much time as you need, and after The Core, we'll patiently wait for your return.

In the meantime though, I'm gonna work on getting Archie kidnapped and hiring Urby's kid. Possibly in the reverse order, as it's much harder to kidnap a grown man by yourself than it is an infant.

As long as by "finish" you mean something other than "shoot between the eyes", I think that would be an agreeable course of action.

I recently found out about an emulator hack that lets you play Goldeneye and Perfect Dark using keyboard and mouse controls, so I've taken the opportunity to finally try and beat both games on the hardest difficulty, something I've never been able to come close to on the N64.

...Even with the overpowerdness of having precise aiming and quick reaction times, 00 Agent and Perfect Agent are really difficult, especially towards the end of the game. Perfect Dark in particular ramps up the difficulty, with me having my first death in dataDyne Central: Extraction and having to redo Air Force One: Antiterrorism about 12 times.

So really what this proves is that there's no excuse to have bullet-spongey enemies ever. The game can still be challenging, even infuriatingly so, with guys who die after a couple hits.

EDIT: Come to think of it, I never truly beat Goldeneye or Perfect Dark at all on my cartridges - Never unlocked Egyptian through legit means, and I kept dying at the Skedar King boss battle, to say nothing of the secret missions in Perfect Dark.

I beat Skyrim once, restarted it a bunch of times but never managed to finish the main quest after that.
I own Oblivion but never got very far in it and since I bought a retail copy I dunno if I'll ever even get it running again unless I purchase a second copy on Steam.
Fallout 3 and NV I've played through more times than I can count and finished around 2/3 of those playthroughs.
Fallout 4, despite me being disappointed in it at launch, has had some of the issues buffed out by mods (thought not the lack of roleplaying options - ) and I've got IIRC around the hours in that that I have on my Steam counter for NV - though it's important to note that due to my historical lack of internet, that counter is nowhere near the amount of hours I've actually sunk into Obsidian's Fallout.

I'm probably gonna give the next TES game a skip since I can't seem to get into Tamriel as much as the Wastes, and I'm gonna hold off on getting the next Fallout on launch unless there are early reviews demonstrating that they've gone back to making a roleplaying shooter instead of a shooter with minor RPG elements, but for all their flaws I suppose I have to say I enjoy Bethesda's games.

A) I realize how flimsy the catwalks in Black Mesa are, but we're gonna need backup when shit hits the fan.

C)

People, it's just another school map, not a terrorist attack simulation.

Except that he's chosen specifically a school famous for having a shooting. Columbine isn't really notable for any other reason, nor do I expect he goes there as a student. There is no legitimate reason to want to make a map based on Columbine, only "shock value".
It's in poor taste because of context.

B)!

Blade of Agony went and released Chapter 2 while I wasn't looking - If you want something to scratch that old-school mechanics itch or need your fix of shooting Nazis before The Colossal Order and CoD:WW2 come out, I highly recommend it. Plus, the current release is a standalone using FreeDOOM so you don't even need DOOM or DOOM2 to run it. (Though if you don't have DOOM or DOOM2 what are you waiting for - they're dirt cheap, modern source ports like GZDoom and Chocolate Doom are a great way to play without going through DOSBox, and you get access to decades worth of mods!)

One word of warning - some antivirus software might flag Blade of Agony's launcher as a Trojan - this is a false positive, but if you don't wanna risk running it or your antivirus flat out won't let you, you can just drag the .pk3 onto the GZDoom .exe - it'll do the same thing as running the launcher would.

New Metroid.
Two. New. Metroids.

Welp, guess I can't skip the 3DS after all.

I feel like their objective was less to show their games and more to generate PR by taking the piss out of E3.
I'm fine with this. I'm also fine with Sony's method of having a guy come out to talk for 2 minutes and then doing nothing else but back-to-back trailers of games that looked quality.

Microsoft's method of having a guy say "Exclusive" in front of every trailer, even if it actually wasn't, not so much.

Ah what the heck, I've been considering joining this for weeks now.

Smelly
pizza
assassin
John F Kennedy
surprising
pie
moldy

---

potatoes
slice
de-flowered
hear
see
I love you.

---

keyboard
Major Tom
phone
quietly
ruined
dusty
gattling
lungs
shotgunning
stapler
Crazed Gunman
Deku Midoriya

Decimal loss is a plague on mappers.
Hammer 4.x has per-vertex snapping with selected verts in VM mode, would definitely endorse Sledge adding that functionality. It's really a lifesaver when microleaks manage to happen.

Yeah, you can work wonders with GZDoom if you know what you're doing.
I tried it out myself and couldn't quite get the hang of it, but you know, maybe you can do better. It's certainly possible to - and you shouldn't have FPS issues with Doom no matter your hardware!

Probably because their publisher owns Frostbite and doesn't want any of their studios using anything else that might be an additional cost.

From what I've seen and heard, the issue with ME:A's animation seems like a mix of rushed development due to EA's business practices, a less experienced staff than the one that created ME1-3 (Being IIRC the first title from the Bioware Montreal office) and animation tech that doesn't quite act the way it's meant to when blending stuff together ingame.

These days the amount they make from Goldsource per year will probably be around what they make from CSGO in five minutes of in-game purchases.

Hell, the amount they make from goldsource per year is probably less than I spend weekly on lunches.
Pretty much everyone who wants Half-Life/CS 1.6 has it, and even back when the engine was high tech there weren't many people lining up to license it.

It doesn't really make business sense for Valve to care about goldsource. Besides, if recent interviews are to be believed, they're actually making a new engine anyway.

I remember when I mapped with a standard of 6-unit thick walls.

...I'm glad those days are over.

I've been re-playing Fallout 3 using Tale of Two Wastelands. There were a few bugs involving missing voice lines, I got attacked when I went to Tenpenny Tower because I defused a bomb earlier in my playthrough (Maybe not the best use of the factions system from NV) and the combat was brutally hard at earlier levels (Don't even think about going to DC until you're level 12 and have plenty of ammo!) but I'm really having fun now that I've gotten my repair up enough for handcrafted ammo.

They also made a minor change to Operation: Anchorage that really opens up your possibilities during the DLC.

I once tried to rack up exactly 1337 kills.
Didn't work.

I've never mapped any of my schools.

Taken architectural inspiration, sometimes, but never tried to 1:1 the layout. That's just... no. Don't do that. If you hate your school that much, talk to someone about it, and switch schools if possible.
And if you're stressed out and angry, do what I did when I was around your age and make a HL mod that's literally just funnier models and sounds and go through c1a0 with impulse 101 a bunch of times to blow off steam.
The scream from Immigrant Song makes for a good grenade launcher sound for these purposes.

EDIT: Actually, I don't know if you have access to an N64, but playing Goldeneye on Runway with all guns, invincibility, and infinite ammo also made for a good stress reliever, what with the infinite spawning enemies.

That crossfire looks as sexy as the Black Mesa remake.

I don't understand the fuss. He'll be out before you know it and little will have changed.

Well I mean in his first week and a half he cut funding for international aid programs, signed an order for a wall that will put the US (which many countries have tied their currency to) into debt, banned refugees for entry, including those who have already been through a 2-year vetting process, banned normal travelers from various countries, threatened war with 2 countries, one of which is a nuclear power (Mexico and China) and sent Seal Team 6 into Yemen to commit actual war crimes which resulted in the death of at least one comfirmed child and countless civilians.

I appreciate your optimism, but If he does all that in less than 2 weeks, all of which affects the outside world, imagine the kind of havok he could wreak in his full 4-year term.

If you can't run Blender, you'll probably have a hard time running max as well. I don't think there are GPUs, even integrated ones, that support DX9 but not an equivalent version number of OpenGL, unless there's some really weird 'microsoft-only' deals going on.

Wait, you can load pointfiles ingame?
How have I not learned this after 9 years?

I always just load the .lin instead of the (default) .pts. Wraps around forever as well, but it's colour coded so it's easier to follow. Just look for the red.

The Black Mesa forums are pretty readable, don't leave too much whitespace (blackspace?) and have a sidebar with additional links and content like current TWHL has. Might be able to take a few bits and bobs from there.
Here's what it looks like when you're logged in:

I've heard nothing but good things about No One Lives Forever, and will probably never get to play it unless I learn to torrent stuff because the companies that might own the rights are too pigheaded to check and sell them to someone who will actually distribute it.

Despite only having played it this year, I have to say the original Deus Ex is one of my favourite games of all time. And this is after having abandoned my first attempted playthrough after the first level due to the clunkiness.
There's just so much life to the world, despite all the technical limitations of the time.

Also, played Blade of Agony because I thought it looked interesting from Strider's post. Really liked the core gameplay, (aside from the near-total usefulness of the kick and how short the stamina bar was) but there were a few bits that were not well designed or telegraphed at all. (I'm looking at you, rock traps, bridge bombs, entrance to the paris catacombs, and large portions of the bonus level!) And this is ignoring the few bits of Duke-like lack of class, 70% of which I think Strider showed in his post.
They made some really neat workarounds to engine limitations, though, and there's a lot of destructible/interactive props and the like scattered about - plus who doesn't enjoy shooting Nazis? Hopefully the next episode of the mod comes out relatively soon and has the kinks ironed out.

Also hopefully it has more levels where you get the Sten. I love that sprite.

Also been replaying Fallout 4 with some mods, hoping to fix the experience a bit - unfortunately, mods can only do so much without a complete overhaul - Dialog options and quest outcomes are of course still severely limited, and despite installing various weapon mods, homemade pipe guns are still the most common thing out there, even in pre-war caches where they have no business being.
But I have a Chinese Assault Rifle, and a BAR, and the .45 and 9mm Pistols from New Vegas, (1911 and Browning Hi-Power) so at least my arsenal is more in line with what I expected from previous experience when I bought the game.
Sure wish more 9mm ammo would spawn, though. I've gotten like, 70, tops in my entire playthrough.

And then there's ironic stuff like this:

I do love the teleporting func_trains method.
I don't suppose sven-coop has fog? Could maybe use some of that to simulate a/the sandstorm and mask the draw-distance point (unless that's just where your skybox bounds are?)

IIRC some of the barney button pressing animations have the beeps and boops in their animation events.
But someone accidentally put them in the speech channel instead of the body sound channel.

Picked up Battlefield 1 yesterday. (Well, when I say 'picked up' I mean "would have picked up on the 25th, but they were out of stock so I got it digitally")

Lots of fun, though it's a bit solitary not having anyone to play with. Urby, it's a damn shame latency is still a thing that exists in large quantities, because it would be an honor serving with you otherwise!

Holy crap that's goldsource.

The engine can probably support it on a technical level, but source character models, especially ones from the time CS:S was developed in, tend to not exceed 4-8K polies.

I'd recommend you save your high-res model, and bake a normal map from it down to a low-poly version of it.

HUD and lighting would indicate so.

Very impressive work. Nice clean, yet complex architecture. The textures look a little under-detailed, but then again looking around the room I'm in right now there's not much of a 'grain' on the walls or ceiling, and you wouldn't want any grunge on a house like that, so I guess that's a non-issue.

Also I wouldn't say 1998 engines can't support vertex animation - Half-Life was, if memory serves, the first game to use skeletal animation. Quake had vertex animation ONLY, for instance.

Don't worry about the repetitive textures, I'm going for the method used in the first DOOM games.

Psuedo-3D?
Hidden areas marked with discoloured sections?
No Filtering?
Sector-based lighting?

There were a lot of methods used in those two, you're gonna have to be more specific.

See, that there is far, far better than any of the models in DUSK.
Good work, I have no idea how to put that much detail into that few pixels.

The gameplay looks suitably fast-paced, but the trailer didn't really show whether or not the enemy AI was a good fit for that kind of gameplay, and the art style is... Well let's just say they're putting too much effort into keeping with the technical limitations of the 90s, especially in terms of colour palette.

Deadlocked looks beautiful, though, and I suspect it has something to do with being based on a 2D prototype, and them trying to keep that aesthetic while jacking it up to 11 in 3D. Them pixels are great, and the colours are nice and vibrant while still being clean.