Forum posts

9 or 10 judging by his join date and the age on his profile, yeah.
Time sure does fly.

We've had to endure much, you and I, but within the week we will have Bob Page.

I played AM2R a few days ago as well. Either I'm rusty, or the game has a more severe difficulty curve compared to the other 2D Metroids, but either way it's still balanced - I got frustrated plenty of times in my first playthrough, but never enough to actually ragequit.

Atmosphere, lore, and gameplay are all well-tuned and exactly what I'd expect from a 2D Metroid game (Except the ice beam. Being used to the ice beam in SM I was not expecting it to be that hilariously and satisfyingly overpowered)

I hope that someone at Nintendo other than their legal department noticed this remake and realized that there's still a massive market for Metroid games, so long as it doesn't center around Samus waiting for Adam to decide she's in sufficient danger to be allowed to use a damn missile.

Sweet! Even though I don't tend to map for Goldsource anymore, I do browse through the models from time to time for one reason or another. I'll be sure to use this version instead of Jed's from now on, especially since you've fixed the bug Jed's has where it doesn't actually stop the process on newer versions of Windows.

Here's the documentation site for ZHLT
And here's a comprehensive article on the various kinds of lights in Goldsource
As long as you're running RAD and have some kind of light in your map, it should have lighting - unless your map has a leak, of course.
If it's completely dark as opposed to fullbright, then all the lights in your map must have a low brightness setting - adjust any point lights or texture lights that you're using for illumination, rather than just to have a glow effect in the dark.

Have you tried using texture lighting with a very low brightness? I expect that would be an easier way to get the effect you want, without using up a bunch of func_door entities and making hidden rooms.

You wouldn't even need a lights.rad file if you're using a modern compiler, just use an info_texlights and add the textures you want affected with smartedit off.

I didn't see it, but if that 'old meme' was a shock image, it has no place in polite society

Everyone always does this to me.

Not being a particularly competent programmer, I only really understood the high-level stuff for this, but it sounds quite useful for anyone still using goldsource - heck, it might convince a few people (maybe myself included) to come back for a spell!

But... Gabe is still at the company, and Harrington left in like, '02. I haven't heard of any illnesses from the company, either.

Also there's no such thing as Unreal 5.0 yet. Version numbers don't follow decimal float format, we're on 4.12.5 - and that shouldn't have any bearing on Valve not being able to make an engine. They have programmers, they didn't all to to Epic.

I remember the one with the vivid description of shooting a metrocop in the leg, wherein the main character died 5 seconds after doing that.

I literally forgot this was a thing.

sapient potatoes

I seem to recall Crypt having bought it and being entirely disappointed with it in every way possible.

That's neat.

Also I can't help but laugh at the guy in that thread who's complaining about a 22% reduction in frame rate when it's still running at far greater than 60fps.

try NOT to use blinking lights, a.k.a "lightstyles" in lightmaps. Because OpenGL doesn't support them well enough, so it does lag a bit.

Wait, what? I'm not sure what's wrong with the X3100 if that's the case. Granted, it's been years since I've properly mapped for goldsource, but back when I did I used lightstyles all over the place, and while it definitely impacted my compile times, it never introduced a framerate drop on any of the machines I used to map on, none of which were supercomputers for their time.

In my opinion, it would be a smart idea to make 1 texture with 2-4 resolutions, like: 1 floor texture, with a 128x, 256x, 480x and a 512x variation.
So, use the 128x for the non-detailed, non-reachable areas, and use the 512x (and/or the 480x) texture for the "obvious" parts, where the lightmaps should be detailed, for example.

An interesting idea, but I wouldn't go too overboard with it. The additional memory usage probably wouldn't be an issue to modern machines, but the compile tools do have a texture limit built in. I'm not sure if modern variants have upped it, (they probably have) but the original distribution of the tools defined it as 512 textures used. Using a bunch of different-sized variants of your world textures will drastically cut down the ones you have free for brush-based props and the like. Something to keep in mind when doing it, at the very least.

But rly? cuting on texture resolution just to get a low wpoly on SP in 2016? i dont think its a isue i 2016 even for goldsource.

Unless it's super impacting your performance, wpoly isn't really an issue these days. I don't think it's been an issue for a decade or so, so unless someone's maintaining an authentic 90s or early 2000s machine to play classic games on as a hobby, they should be able to keep up. As long as it compiles you should be fine.

why you say the texture resolution must be same as units?

I think he made the assumption that you were working with a 1.0 texture scale. You can certainly use 0.5 (or 0.25 if you really want to try pushing the engine) if you want higher detail and crisper shadows, (As lightmap density is directly tied to texture resolution, unlike Source) just keep in mind that in goldsource, the flashlight's size is also tied to lightmap density, so the smaller the scale, the less light you can shine on it.

Other than that, I can't recall if there's a drawback or not to using rectangular textures - there might be a small memory or vram hit, but I reckon it should be acceptable in the few cases you'd need it. Other than that, just keep everything a power of 2 size like Shephard listed, and keep the scale as consistent as you can.

Bonus Archie texture tutorial.

DOOM 3 is one of the worst games I've ever played.

DOOM 3 was a mistake as well.

(Also, I was never a big fan of Duke's personality, but DN3D had interactivity on a level that I don't think has ever been matched to this day. Someone should fix that.)

I could rant about how much the new Doom is a disappointment to me some more, about how the gameplay totally misses the point and the developers seem to have only a surface understanding of literally every aspect of the original games, but Strider said basically everything I need to only more concisely and diplomatically.
So instead, as always I'll post this great video by Gamemaker's toolkit about what the original games did great with their enemies, this quote from the Doom wiki about Doomguy with my own emphasis to show how he's not supposed to be a 'roided rage machine that kills everything in sight 'just because',

The character's personality is never examined to any extent in any of the games, though he appears to have a strong moral compass, as it was his refusal to fire upon civilians and subsequent assault against his commanding officer who gave the order, that got him stationed on Mars in the first place.

and, as not always but ever since I played the demo, I'll begrudgingly admit that if I weren't viewing it under the lens of a game in an established series that needs to live up to its predecessors, the new Doom would have been kinda fun.
Glory kills are a dumb mechanic though. Give us environmental health and ammo bonuses instead of making us sit through the same few canned animations, damnit!

I think there's one or two animations that you could kind of cheese soldiers pressing a button with using a scripted sequence.

Just checked. Turns out there's actually one that was meant for this exact thing - WM_button. You could also maybe use bustwindow if they're meant to be in a hurry.

Also, this mention of the Day One demo having extra animations has piqued my interest. Anyone have a build of it? The HL wikia had a link but it was to Gamefront (RIP) I found a build and am in the process of sifting through the files after playing.

This is true.

In the education world, though, getting caught cheating is generally punishable by death. (metaphorical death of your degree, not physical death)
You're very lucky to have not gotten caught, and I would suggest not doing it again. (Though I know how you feel when it comes to math)

Add in some func_detail/func_wall chunks or something, that should break it up without making the underlying brushwork too messy.

Looks quite nice so far, though.

And they open immediately with actual gameplay (!) of Man Who Kills Everything In A Rage 5.
Which is somehow tender.
EDIT: HIDEO IS BACK!

I said semi-competent. I had a little bit of fun. Didn't stop me from hating the game for being what it is, which is what you've described.

Hey PB, could you just pop a close bracket into my URL tags? Didn't notice that until my post was locked off from edit.

This is all I have to say about the Scorpio reveal.

Bethesda conference was overall between underwhelming and whelming. Prey looked decent, Dishonored 2 looked good. More paid-for DLC for Fallout 4 that does things mods already did months ago is eh.
My roommate downloaded the DOOOOOM demo on his Xbox after the Beth conference, and neither of us having played it prior, we both took turns playing and reviewing it, him under his standard criteria, myself as the "Second Coming of Classic Doom" it was hyped as. Findings were it's a semi-competent game on its own, but as a successor to Doom it fails, ending up feeling more like a checklist of surface-level knowledge of the game rather than something that's been constructed after careful analysis of what made the first two games great.

Welcome!

You know, there is a such thing as doing something purely because you enjoy it.

There's also a thing called a "day job", which is what Urby has so he can make money and still do awesome things in his spare time for free.

It's been a long time since I've peeked into the HL1 WADs, but I'm 99% sure there isn't.

Odd that they'd put functionality like that in and then never use it.

Yes. Name the frames of your animated texture under the following format:
+0_texture
+1_texture
+2_texture
[...]
+9_texture

Where "_texture" is the texture name. You can also have an "off" version if you use +A.

I believe the limit is 10 frames (0-9) but I could be wrong.

Trying to make a map?

team_control_point for Dr. Orange.

Mine should be fairly easy.

Holding Tanks?

I've always wondered, do the portable medkit and camera even work, or are they just dummied out but the models are still precached? I don't recall them ever being in the spirit fgds or getting them to work.

To be fair, that content is over 10 years old. I hardly think Valve cares about HL2 anymore.

They'd have to go buy some bleach and lye, and get out the heavy-duty shovels, and that would just take all day.

Yay, we're relevant!