Forum posts

hmmmmm...It's not so out of scope (or something like that) What if somebody don't know how/manage to make some cool things...

I'm glad I could help. I was lucky enough to stumble across this site also, and my mapping has really improved after finding it. I'll have to leave your 'evil barney' question to someone more knowledgable though. I'll be interested to see if someone has the answer.

Thanks Slayer. BTW, mods such as Sven Coop have an evil barney, would this be possible on a map without using a SDK? You've been a great help, I can't believe I just stumbled across this website.

Well...What if you would make possible to send & Download prefabs and something like that...or do you have limit of size in this page? (Is there any tutos coming?)

[Moved by Andy.... and Yeah, a Prefab section would be a cool idea, but might be a little outside the scope of the site. As Atom said in the last News item, there is another section on it's way (I think it is going to be a Mapping review section) so it might you might be able to post prefabs?]

You can do this with the monster_human_grunt entity (the marine). Build an invisible barrier around the grunt which keeps his AI from kicking in until the barrier is gone. Here's how: Place a func_wall_toggle around the grunt. A hollow cube will do nicely....tie it to the func_wall_toggle entity and place the grunt inside. Leave the grunt's properties on their default. Name the func_wall_toggle whatever name you want. Set up the properties for the func_wall_toggle like this:
Render mode = texture
FX amount = 0
Make sure the 'starts invisible' flag is NOT checked. (The player will not see the wall because of the properties you set for it, but the wall is still there blocking the grunt's AI.)
Then place the gun in your map.
Set the guns 'Target' property to the name of the func_wall_toggle. This will cause the wall to go away when the gun is picked up. That should be all you need to do. The grunt will always turn to face the player, but will not attack until the player picks up the gun. BTW I liked goldeneye too.

I've tried a trigger in the same place as the gun like Jage said, but it didnt seem to work. I was wondering whether it may be possible with the marine though, make him hold back until the guns picked up. If any of you find a way please tell me.

I'm just trying to make a map similar to the archives level on the N64s Goldeneye, as that was so cool.

Cheers anyway.

What if you put somekind of trigger to same place with gun and that trigger would make barney to attack you?

monster_barney is coded to be friendly until you shoot him. I tried a trigger_hurt set to bullets and triggered by you picking up the gun, but it just kills Barney. I couldn't get him to shoot at the player when triggered. There are a few other options but I think it all comes down to the need for the player to inflict damage before Barneys AI kicks in and treats you as hostile. Doesn't help much, but that is the way the game was coded.

I want to make a Barney shoot me when i pick up a gun. I don't know whether this is possible so please help.

Thank you for your input and the link to the Test Chamber. The test chamber is a big help concerning optimizing maps. Since this is my first map, its development is entirely educational. Although; my children seem to like the map.

With compiling, I was using Hammer's run command (F9) to compile and run the map. Today, I did my first attempt at a batch compile and found it much faster. More information is also given when compiling through a batch file (leak info and such).

Thanks again, with the help of this group I have been able ti fix 90% of the maps problems.

13 hours is a long compile.... I normally give up after 6.
If you want, I am happy to have a look at it. I had some success with VooDooPig's recently. Just zip the .rmf and .bsp and e-mail it to me.
On the func_wall debate, Yeah, there are two theories. SlayerA is right in that by making some of your brushes into func-walls, you will reduce the render split caused by that brush when it touches another brush. An entity brush placed on a normal brush tricks the engine into rendering the original (normal) brush as one rather than spliting it into two where a normal brush would join. However.... an entity brush that has a texture applied still has to be rendered, and unfortunatley does not block VIS. So the savings are minimal.
Compile times are not a huge worry (normally:-), wpoly count produced by the amount of textured brushes the engine is trying to render are, and these can only be truely shown after a full compile.
The long compiling times are normally caused by a large lightmap or complex brushes. A single log wall can take over an hour to compile by itself.
I am not sure that the engine renders entities as the player approaches or in the players view, I have never encounted any difference in Normal brushes vs entity brushes and the engine sees a lot more than the player does and compensates by trying to render things it thinks the player will see. In my experience the engine treats them the same. As for entity brush effect on compiling times, I doubt that they would speed it up, unless used to build the map in a better way, nor would they slow game play down.
If you want a better understanding of all this check out FireBinders Test Chamber at:
http://home.att.net/~firebinder/halflife/TestC_01.htm
It is a working example of true results on r_speeds.

Thanks,

Was using a custom sky, which once I removed there is a lot less problems up top. Now just need to make a cargo bay area smaller and fix a few leaks. Map is wa too large for anything other than LAN play. A little over 13 hours for a full compile.

Thought about scrapping the map alltogether, but my son and nephew threw a fit when I mentioned that. Map is ugly, but there is definately room to battle.

I will definately keep these things in mind for my second map.

As far as using func_wall, I thought that was not a good idea. I read an article saying that using that method will speed up compile times, but slow down the gaming engine. If I remember correctly, the article said this is because entities are only rendered when the entity is in a players veiw.

Is this accurate, or not?

Thanks again for the suggestions, I am very happy that I happend upon this group.

Tlax is right, Thanks for another great Error Link. The best one I know of is http://www.slackiller.com/tommy14/errors.htm
Another place to look for errors of this kind is the help file contained in ZHLT original file, that came with ZHLT 253 before the custom builds.
Here is what ZHLT say's:

brush 'outside world'
Example:
Entity 10, Brush 0: outside world(+/-4096): (9000, -64, 216)(9000,23,283)

There are a few cases that create the 'outside world' error. The first is an damaged brush, almost always created by a vertex manipulation gone wrong. The coordinates listed in the error are very important in diagnosing the error. If any of the coordinates are -9000 or 9000, then the brush is damaged, and most likely needs replacing completely. The second most common case is actually having a brush near or outside the edge of the allowable region for the world. The brushes are expanded slightly for some of the calculations during a compile, so brushes near the edge within 64 units will cause the error too. The cordon tool creates brushes automatically to box in the cordon region, and their brushes can sometimes be quite large, and also extend outside the world. This can be verified by opening up the .map created by an export with cordon enabled, and looking to see what brushes it made.

If you have a large amount of brushes in your map it can cause the problem you are seeing. The HL engine starts to drop brush faces when there are too many to draw. As an experiment, make a copy of your map and take out your battleship. Then compile it. If the black patches don't appear in the test map, then your ship has too many faces. You can try making your ship (or parts of it)into a func_wall which should cut down on the number of faces. Also, when you compile are you doing a full vis? If nothing gets rid of the patches, it's possible the map is just too big. The HLrad section of the compile log displays the number of faces and the number of patches. Let me know what your counts are for those.

Some attributes can be added by turning the Smart Edit feature off and adding the Key and value you want, however that normally applies to triggers and functional entities like multimanagers, relays and multisources. The attributes that are diplayed with an entity, are there because they are part of the .fgd file and the .fgd file is linked to the hl.dll. So unless you want to do some heavy coding, you have to stick with what you have.

Max viewable distance is defaulted to 4096 units. I read a tutorial recently that explained all this, but hey, I wasn't really paying attentionI think it might have been through the Collective forums, so what I am about to say might be wrong......
There is a Maximum, you can tweak the distance but I think 64000 is above the true max. I have read that 7094.48 is the absolute figure.
So what to do about it?
I think that your best solution is to search for a tweak, or reduce the size of the map.

Compile the map again and post the Compile log here so I can have a look at it. That is the window that comes up as Hammer compiles, it has a button at the bottom that say's Copy to clipboard. Click that, open notepad and paste. If you don't want to paste it here, then e-mail it too me. Don't worry too much, it might not be such a big problem

How do you change an Attribute to an entitty?

Have a slight problem with the map I have created. Things in the distance go black in several places, including the sky.

There are a couple of places in the map that there is no obstruction of sight from one end of the world to another. Map is a battleship, so hard to just throw up a wall : )

sky distances
4997 x 1919 x 1204

Have tried playing with Max Viewable Distance in the worldspawn, but does not have any affect. Have taken it up to 64000.

Any suggestions?

how do you put a background like desert or somthing?

Best way to release a New level, is to release it to your friends... They will be quick to let you know if it is worth playing. Several sites used to review maps, but I don't know of any that still do, especially anything for HL Single Player. You can send it to me if you want, but be prepared for some constructive critisim

Yeah, trying to make natural-looking scenery and stuff is about as hard as it gets. There are a few popular methods but they're all usually the same thing in essence: make a grid of blocks, then manipulate them as simply as possible. The thing is, VM only works to a certain point with ONE solid. But you can do anything if you create lots of little solids that you VM separately.

I suggest you simply break up the place you want to put the cave into several cubes (use carve to slice a big block up into a grid - make your carve selection, then click the button again and again until its all white - that way you cut the thing up but don't lose any bits).

Then delete the cube that you want to be the actual hole, and manipulate the blocks around the gap. Here's a drawing:

----------------------------------
|            --------            |
|            |_|__|_|            |
|            | |**| |            |
|            |?|??|?|            |
|            --------            |
----------------------------------

Delete the cube with the asterisks in it, and then grab the corners of the cubes around that one, and pull them around to round off the hole. It'll look more natural if you use different sizes of cube.

Rocks... again, use more than one block, and manipulate them as simply as possible.

A tut... yeah, it would make a good one Sometime...

Two really easy ways of manipulating areas are Nemisis and Gensurf19. Both programs allow you to do cliff faces and irregular surfaces.
As for the cave idea, There is a rock model in HL, called rockgibs.mdl. If that isn't what your looking for then you will have to keep going with VM. Try using several blocks on top of each other to get the shape you want, either way, HL was made for flat surfaces, and in short, there is no easy way...
Anyone else know different?

Does anyone know how you can make caves and rocks easily? Is there some trick for it? I tried to make a cave from starting with a simple block and using vertex manipulation, but that doesn't work well, because I don't know how to put in an extra vertex.
I mean, when I try to manipulate a block into a cave im still stuck with 8 vertices (because a block only has 8 vertices) but a cave requires a lot more of them.
(this might be a good idea for a tutorial, too)

TWHL Entity Guide has been updated to bring it into line with the Hammer 3.5 .fgd.
The only real difference is the addition of an Animation Sequence(editor)line that belongs to nearly all the monster categories. Having now started using 3.5, I think most people will find the Animation Sequence addition a great feature. However, this is still a Beta version, and little bug's need to be sorted out. One of concern was that I would be able to see a monster_sitting_scientist so that I could finally get him on the chair correctly, Not so... or at least not yet.
Behind the sceens are additions to the .fgd that correctly identify the model to be viewed when placing things. So now you can see them in the 3D view. It really does make things simple. It also shows you how big the model is. No more guessing.
As for dead things, Grapez will be sad to learn that placing dead monsters is still a bit tricky, the model view seems to stick on the first available pose, but if you save and run Hammer again, the new pose is viewable.
As for LEAK detection.....
I really wish I had this 4 weeks ago!!!!! It is brilliant, but you still need a basic knowledge of how the view works. Tracing a leak in the 3D view combined with the pointfile loaded in the 2D views makes things a lot easier.
Happy mapping.

Errr, me too.
Grapez, is there something we should know... I mean, hanging scientists, slaughterhouse decals? Is an Evil Dead theme going on here.
Having said that I know a person that has a fascination with cooking monsters in Microwaves!!! but it still is the funniest sequence I have seen in ages, and well executed (pardon the pun:-)

err, the second screenshot worries me a bit

Try applying those white textures as decals. Select one of them, then press Shift+D and click in the 3D view. That should work for simple (but dried-up) blood spatters.

I have had a look through the new halflife.fgd apr 15 2003 - 3.1.0.0 - updated with studio() references to enable model display in 3D view.
You can use this .fgd with Hammer 3.4 if you don't want to try out the new Beta. Things that might be of interest are the addition of .mdl choice to most of the monster and weapon entities, as well as a few new entities commonly found other Mod .fgd's. It makes placing models easier, but you won't be able to see them in the 3D view unless you use the Hammer 3.5.
All news so far is that the New 3.5 is excellent and should make mapping easier. I will update the TWHL HL entity guide soon (read after next uni assignment

Try putting the env_blood entity in your map again. Give it a name and target it with something like 'trigger once'. Set the angle as 'down'. Choose red for 'color of blood'. On the flags choose 'spray decals.' For 'amount of blood' choose what you want. I usually set it at 25 and use several env_bloods with the same name to control where the splatter is. But you have to find what works best for your map. Try it in a small test map so you can tweak the look of it without waiting for a big map to compile, then move it into your real map when you have it looking right.

I want some blood on the floor under my dead scientist but I can't really get it done.
I tried the blood texture, but they look funny because the blood is black and the background is white. Check out this screenshot:
http://home.iae.nl/users/magician/blood.jpg
that's what my blood texture looks like.
I also tried the env_blood entity, but that does not work good.
The gibshooter does, but it's not really easy to put that in.(check out the screenshot, you might start thinking what a blood & dead scientist loving freak I am, but I'm not of course, well, just a bit )
http://home.iae.nl/users/magician/bloed.jpg
but does anyone know if there is an easier way to get this done?

Thanks, helped a bunch

Once you have SlayerA's suggestion working you might also want to consider using the texture lock tool. That way if you move your ladder, the texture will remain aligned after the move.

When making ladders, I have noticed that there are times that the texture does not align as it should. Rail will be in center, with rungs on either side of the rail.

Currently, I am fixing the problem by moving the group over some, compiling, and running the game to see if the group needs to be moved more to get the texture to appear correctly. This could cause problems if I want a texture in a certain spot.

I have noticed this with lights and other texture objects. Any suggestions on aligning textures would be appreciated.

Valve Hammer 3.4 SDK with current ZHTL compiling tools.

Thanks.

I am wondering if that might be the first piece of advice to anyone having trouble with Hammer or ZHLT. Reinstall, somene else had problems that were solved with a reinstall of Hammer.
Also, make sure you have the latest .fgd file, the latest ones come with all the good stuff for ZHLT light effects. I think the most recent HL one is half-life_3x.fgd. DoD has just released a new .fgd, cool stuff in that one, like snow.
Anyway glad you fixed it, sorry about the register thing, It's just that your name didn't highlight, and I was too lazy to check the user list.

Grapez, The only thing I can suggest is that you send me a copy of your .rmf (the simple box one) and a copy of your lights.rad file. I set up a test map like you said, and it worked. I know how frustrating this must be....
Do you get any other errors when you compile? Are you using ZHLT 253 1.7? You might as well send the compile log as well.
It might be an idea to register on this site as well....

The map will only appear in the maps list if it has an info_player_deathmatch entity in it, which defines it as multiplayer... unless they changed something while I wasn't looking.
<P>
The manual method is to go into the console (~) after starting HL with hl.exe -dev -console and then type map mapname.

To start I have the counterstrike retail version. When installed it comes with the files for playing HL, (except for campaign) DMC, HLDM, and some others. I have created several maps for CS, all of which worked fine. I decided to try and make one for HL, just to see. I reconfigured the WC to HL settings. Made the map, exported it, then imported it into Batch compiler, I changed some things in the compiler (where to put the map, etc). Compiled it then started CS, activated half-Life, then went to start up the map, it wasnt listed in the select map list. I double checked that it was in the HLDM maps folder, it was. I tried copying it and placing it map selction of the half-life folder and the valve folder, nothing. I also tried downloading the contest maps from this page(the chopper one) and that BSP didnt show up either. Whats wrong?? Is there some special setting in Batch compiler or Worldcraft I need to set?

Thanks Andy! I too enjoyed looking at the other entries. There were some really good ideas in the mix. My hat is off to Tlax for his winning entry, nice work! The competition is ramping up in these contests. A big thanks to Atom for making TWHL the cool and useful site that it is.

Congratulations to the competition winners: Well done,

It was great to download all the entries and have a look at what everyone was doing. ( I didn't get an entry in before the dead line or I would have won!!!!) joking...
Tlax's map was a really good use of lateral thinking,I liked the way the whole thing worked together.
SlayerA's map had me laughing and then wondering how I could use that myself...
LightForce's map had me totally confused, until I found myself dropping down a shaft.
Bloodlost put a lot of effort in his map and should be highly commended, Is that the start of a level your doing?
NinjaGrinch, what more can I say, good use of the grenade...

Well done,,,,

Thought you were nuts when I saw your drawings. Only realised what was going on when I replied and saw them as a quote

As Andy said, non-visible surfaces are ignored, so I don't think the top one would be any more efficient (maybe quicker to compile). BTW, the top one is concave and therefore invalid as one brush anyway.

More lights definately slow down compile, but I don't think they matter in-game. Models... well, they are lit 'more dynamically' than the rest of the map, but whether lighting them is significantly more work for the computer is doubtful. Their lighting will be simplified.

For the hole:
1) Make the hole in a block that it just the right size, then build the rest of the wall around that.
2) Vertex manip. is best
3) You could divide the block into smaller blocks, and then VM the verticies in the middle. Pull them outwards.

So here's a drawing from the front. You'll need to click reply to this message, then click the quote button to see it correctly.

---

| -------- |

| |__/ __| |

| |_| |_| |

| |____/__| |

---

The VM tuts here at TWHL might help.

Getting more points can be done by splitting faces. In VM mode, select two vertices or two edges and press Ctrl+F. I think its mensioned in the first VM tut. BUT, doing this is perhaps the easiest way to get invalid solids. Rather just use more blocks.

Ok thanks for the info so far, I expected lighting to decrease speed if only because the models of the player and monsters are always dynamically lit (well as far as I can tell) but I guess I was wrong. So it could be texture lights are even heavier on the engine than normal light ents.

Coming back to the hole in the wall, so it would be more efficient for making the edge to have a single brush with more points to do something like this:

_

/

_/_/ ___
| |

---

rather than have multiple cubes like this:

_

/|

_/_/ | ___
| || | | | |

---

I hope you can make out what I'm trying to explain.
Also is there a way to add more points to a brush after it's been created? Thanks again

Hey I was just wondering 2 things about map efficiency.

First say I want to make an irregular hole in a wall, is it better to make one polygon with many points to model the edge or to make every point its own cube? Does it make a difference? Maybe VIS works that stuff out anyway?

Second about light entities, I know they make the map slower the more you use (obviously) so is it easier on the engine to use texture lights or are they just as bad?

Yeah, If this little problem didn't drive me mad originally...

So Check out this link, it's old.. It needs some tweaking, but it does work.
&lt;http://www.mrman58.freeserve.co.uk/spawningtank/tutorials/tut_chair.html&gt;

how do you make it a scientist sitting on a chair look realistic? I tried to place him over the chair but he always
gets his ass stuck in the seat.

At that last reply about geting the scripted_sentences to work. Yup there working now. hey i will post stuff daily and talk to you guys. And if any questions come i know who to ask. But about myself im only 15 male and live in sc I surf the web every now and then and i think i found this site by mistake but when i saw it i just stuck around so here i am! i think i sent a map that i needed help on to adom or you i forgot see if you can get any info on that. thanks well i got to go.

See you later

angel of darkness

Atom does all the work, I just add some misguided comments now and then, Oh, and e-mail him at least fifteen times a day with ideas....

I stumbled into this site from a link someone sent me and couldn't believe my luck. Finally there was a place you could ask questions without being flamed, and everybody was really helpful, and I keep learning things every day. So I wrote a few tutorials based on the original WorldCraft help files, and help out where I can. I know a good site when I see one, that's why I stick around.

Did you get the scripted_sentences working?

thanks for the txt file that file is located at the bottom of the Pak file under sounds i never looked at that file before so when i saw that file u gave me i looked for it in the pak file and shure enough there it was! So it really helped. you also said you got together with Atom and have been working on the site together that sounds cool, keep up the good work.

well got 2 go later

Angel of death

Hum ?For Half-Life I think you can make it with, item_security, env_render, func_wall_toggle, multisource, func_door and trigger_auto.
trigger_auto:Target: key_render.

     Delay before trigger: 0.5.
     Trigger State: Off.

Flags: Remove on fire.

env_render : Name: key_render.

     Target:  sec_key. 
     Render Mode: texture.
     Fx Amount: 0.

Item_security: Name: sec_key.

       Target: M_sec.

Multisource: Name: M_sec.

     Target: key.

Func_wall_toggle: Name: key.
Made from a brush, locks as a key.

Func_door: Master: M_sec.

   Speed: ...
   Sound: ...
   Locked Sound: Latch Locked

Trigger_auto start env_render, env_render do item_security invisible, when player pick up the key item_security, item_security activate the multisource and it activate and give func_door master on, multisource do the func_wall_toggle to disappear.
Place item_security and func_wall_toggle on same place.

Can it bi some help? I hop so.

Ok this is a basic worldcraft question but i cant get a grip on how to do this. When i want to make a scientist talk or anything else for that matter, I forgot, you are suppost to use pak explore to find the sent. and put a ! in front of it but then what, I know you cant type in the whole sent like it is in the pak file. There was a certan way 2 do it i just forgot

thanks

Angel of death