Forum posts

Basically, you can set any frame of an animation to do any ingame event. The NPC doing their actual attack, triggering an entity in the map, sounds from the body OR the voice channel, killing the NPC, etc.
If you wanted to, you could make an animation sequence that combines all of those.

Also, if you add an attack animation, as long as the AI is set up to use that kind of attack animation (such as a melee attack), it will add that animation to its list of animations to play. If you remove all of an attack animation, they will no longer attempt to use it. I'm pretty sure that's how Gearbox handled the male assassins having three different variations of melee attack - not through code, but by just adding them in.

Gives me an idea, actually.

Every time I look at Goldsource I see things that are simple yet entirely flexible.
Like the animation event system. So much potential that was never tapped.

It's not a virus. It's just not a valid email address.
If it really bothers you that much giving out your email to someone (Though Urby is quite a reputable person) then just make a throwaway gmail account for it or something.

all submissions should be sent to coffee@scotchandcoffee.co.uk

But don't send them to nondairycreamer@scotchandcoffee.co.uk.
Trust me.

Laurie Cheers, the guy who wrote Spirit, retired from Half-Life modding years back. I expect he stopped paying server bills at some point.
At any rate, it's a good thing to learn, but if you don't want to use use it, then don't. All the original Half-Life functionality is untouched, so you can just use the HL fgd and not have to worry about it not working in the final build of the mod.

List of features? Let's start with:

• Standard HL features
• Model props with env_model
• Fog
• 3D Skyboxes
• Parenting/Movewith (have entities move with others, ie func_breakable glass in a func_door rotating)
• Change the model, skin, blood colour, faction, etc for any individual NPC with no code needed.
• Easy to use particle system
• Change entity parameters on the fly ingame, including model, skin, etc.
• Enhanced math entities
• Classic Quake-Style effects

AND MORE!

Easy mistake when you can't test. Nobody really uses the spy camera and portable medkit, so there's not much reason to remember that the dlls check for them unless they're not there.
For that matter, I'm not positive they've ever been actually implemented besides the model check.

Couple of things missing from the download.
If anyone needs to get this up and running before Urby has a chance to update the download, and they don't have spirit, make the following changes:
w_camera.mdl and w_portablemed.mdl will have to be spoofed by copying and renaming other models, and change your liblist.gam to this:

game "TWHL Tower"
url_info "http://twhl.info"
url_dl "http://twhl.info"
version "1.0"
hlversion "1101"
type "singleplayer_only"
startmap "twhl-lobby"
gamedll "dlls\spirit.dll"
cldll "1"

Which will allow it to load the spirit dlls.

We can use spirit features now?!
This is gonna be sweet.

I was getting invalid solid errors from CSG (but not Sledge's error detector) because I'm a bit rusty at GS. I think I figured out a fix, but when I went to clip the solid responsible into two so it would be valid...

I'm also getting a lot of errors where clipping a brush will reverse the normals on it, so all the faces render inside out. Not sure yet if that causes it to be an invalid solid as well, or if it's just a rendering issue in Sledge.

EDIT: And I just encountered a crash when coming out of sleep mode with Sledge open.
Windows 7 64-bit, if that helps.

There's a reason VHLT is the best set of compile tools for Goldsource.
Well, many reasons.

There's a light_surface entity or something, IIRC. I think it samples colour from the rgb values of the texture. Haven't played around much with it.

Pfffft. Who needs things to make sense?

I swear to god, if I EVER make a mod or game based off of Colony 42, and it gets released, you're going in the god-damn credits.

Alright, no big rush. Still got to do the architecture and textures first. Danke!

Can't stop thinking about alternate ways I could have done Colony 42 if I had known then what I know now. (and possibly had access to a newer engine than Goldsource)

I've already started from scratch and failed at this concept 3 times. I don't want to do it again, damnit!
Eh, I'll just get a design doc going, maybe someday it'll be refined and planned enough...

I blame Urby.

Hey Urby, have you finalized the skybox values yet? I plan on having windows and I'd like to design my floor's lighting (or rather, which of the lights are on) based on how much moon/sunlight is shining through.

Cold damage drains suit power faster than health.
Do a quick burst of that combined with a quick burst of negative fall damage or whatever they used for the healing pools and pods in Xen. 0 suit, 100 health.

Got it. I'll try to remember to group everything I add together for easy copying.

Does "no altering the dimensions of the stairwell" also apply to the size of the doorways? Are there any restrictions on retexturing the stairwell on our floor?

I might be interested.
Got a new method I want to try out involving sledge and obj files...

I may have gotten Axel Gembe to install a bug on your computer so we could access your email and svn.

Yeah, the contents of your .QC and a screenshot of your source file folder would be really helpful so we can see all the info you have at your disposal.

What did you export the edited SMD as? It needs to match what the QC file is trying to read in or it won't be able to compile.

Great, now I feel terrible.
I can guarantee that you wouldn't have liked it as much as you think you would have. The Core it's not.
I'm trying to think of any solidified mod ideas for source that I had, but I'm coming up blank. I know I had stuff, but I can't recall any of the actual concepts.

Mod: USS Bravo (?)
Details: Shortly after finishing my first playthrough of USS Darkstar, I thought to myself "Wow, this is really cool, but I wish the maps were a bit less dark." With that as the only motivating factor (and planning) I started making my own version from scratch. I don't think this was actually called USS Bravo, but I can't recall what I actually called the vessel.
Reason for cancelling: A decent sized mod with no planning whatsoever, from a mapper that very nearly started mapping yesterday. It never had a chance.

Mod: 7 Hours
Details: Set during the interlude between HL1 and HL2, this mod was to star an average gamer who just so happened to be unwittingly living in the world of his favourite franchise and had just received his order of a fully-functional HEV suit replica.
Reason for cancelling: Again, there was basically zero planning involved, I just went at it. With little experience gained from USS Bravo, and no endgoal, I only got halfway through the second map before getting bored. I later deleted the mod entirely by accident, though if I recall correctly I was able to salvage half a .map for entry in castle disposed.

Mod:USS Bravo
Details: I still for some reason wanted to do this mod, so I started V2 from scratch. With a new christening for the ship and a new, still unplanned layout, I was sure this would be the one. I made a custom splash screen, took LD character models from expansion packs and other mods to bolster the ranks of the ship, and got less far than the previous attempt, but with a much more polished map (by my old standards)
Reason for cancelling: If memory serves I ran into some easy to fix error that I had no idea how to fix at the time, so I scrapped it.

Mod: Prison break
Details: I honestly remember nothing about what the supposed plot of this was, but I do recall a custom build of SoHL (1.7, I believe?) that featured some reflective surface entities, a pistol supressor, and a dual-hand viewmodel system for both having the HEV suit and not. The supressor came with the 9mmhandgun no matter what, and I didn't want the HEV viewmodel system because I wanted to use custom viewmodels eventually.
Reason for cancelling: The custom build of SoHL, which was the first build I got my hands on, didn't suit my purposes. Also lack of planning meant I only got halfway through the first map before canning it. (Starting to see a pattern here)

Mod: [Untitled Janitor Mod]
Details:Set during the Black Mesa incident, you were an average janitor in a (very small) dormitory. When you got to your nearby office and picked up your keys, the resonance cascade starts, setting off tremors in the underground complex. Escape.
Reason for cancelling: Despite having a couple of setpieces I was quite proud of at the time, the mapping was overall bland, unplanned, and I got bored. I may have also accidentally deleted it at the same time I lost the 7 hour mod. A partial source file from early development was recovered, and appears in Castle Disposed, sans custom and gearbox poster textures and a couple models I got from online.

Mod: Foothold
Details: A foreign power invades the country, and it is up to you, as a soldier/average joe to fight back, using an Op4-style arsenal of weapons and help from various people such as Dr Keller from Half-Life Decay as the warm-spirited CEO of a corporation developing power armour and/or Dr Rosenberg as a researcher at a university who needs help defending his lab while he does a research data backup to a secure offsite location. Other features would have included friendly grunts and an urban environment.
Why it was cancelled: Never got past the concept stage, though I had about 5 of them. I had planned it to be my big project after I finished the next mod on the list, but, well... That never happened. Also, half a year or so after I came up with the concept, they came out with Homefront, which kind of stole my thunder. (as well as my idea! :furious:)

Mod: Colony 42
Details Hoo boy. This was my most ambitious project. It was also the evolution of two prior attempts. (You know this can't bode well) The space ship was turned into a space station, given an arbitrary number that I would have changed if I had ever thought of a better one, and made to run off of Spirit of Half-Life with HD models. Unlike all my previous mod attempts, I actually worked on this one for multiple years, rather than a matter of a couple days or weeks.
Reason for cancelling: Figuring this out was actually really helpful. There was, of course, the lack of planning. I had a rough plotline and planned setpieces, but it was in constant state of flux as I modified stuff, and there wasn't really enough for an entire mod - I planned out the beginning and the end, but had nothing to put in the middle, which lead to dull, nonsensical environments with no purpose in either the universe or the gameplay. I learned a lot about level design and the goldsource engine while developing the mod, usually in large incremental bursts. This lead to newer areas looking and being constructed much better than older areas, which in turn made me want to rebuild the older areas because they were absolute crap. I realized that this would become an endless cycle, so I just kept working with the intention of redoing the beginning later, which was also a mistake, because it made the task of eventually redoing the old areas seemingly insurmountable.
But the biggest mistake I made was probably limiting myself in the setting. I had a very simplistic architecture style because of my lack of skill at the beginning, and no custom environment textures, which lead to everything looking boring and samey with few exceptions. I also had no defined size or shape for the station, which meant I couldn't often do anything interesting with outer bulkheads and portholes, and when I did, it often turned out not making spatial sense in relation to the other maps. Fighting nothing but the invading forces of vorts and the occasional grunt, with their bioweapon headcrabs in these samey environments lead to little of the enemy variety that made Half-Life great, and even my crude attempts of making an interesting story (or rather, shoehorning it in) were limited and bland. I had planned to kill off a character you meet early in the story, but I had decided to have the player spend most of the game alone, so when you met up with him and he died, there would have been little reason to care, since you had spent all of 2 minutes with him.
During the entire development of Colony 42, I craved hgrunts and concrete, because they were two things I couldn't put in the mod that I could have done really cool things with. In the end, between the amount of work I would have to do to finish the mod alone, and the limits the setting had imposed, it became painful to work on and I just lost interest. I still have a zip of the source files kicking around somewhere, and a full build on one of my computers. I'm probably never going to finish it, but the source files and all (ha) the related documents are in there too. Maybe those will eventually see the light of day...

That is what the RAD portion of the compile process is for, after all.
If Goldsource actually did radiosity lighting real time, I would be really impressed, seeing as that would mean Valve had figured out a way to efficiently do in 1998 what we can't properly do at anywhere near an interactive frame rate today. Even the modern AAA engines that advertise radiosity aren't doing a true ray-traced lighting sim with multiple bounces (never mind that beautiful light bleed that VHLT added)

This isn't Goldsource, but Unreal does this;Lightmap samples are made on a grid for dynamic things such as models. I imagine Goldsource does something similar, since lightmapping isn't exactly a new thing, the only thing that's getting more advanced with it is the quality of the samples.

Nodes are stripped out of the map when the nodegraph is built.
And unnamed lights are removed when they're baked into the lightmaps, because they don't need any logic in the engine to have them switch lightmap pages.

Just because something is internal to the compile tools doesn't mean it's not an entity. If Hammer treats it as one, and it affects the finished map in some way, it is one.

I feel like I should point out that by that definition, info_nodes and unnamed lights are also "Not entities"

And yet it doesn't.

I feel like we just got major spoilers for the plot of The Core.

Exactly how old are we talking about?

I suppose I should be getting my passport in order so I can legally leave the country.

Does it fire tranquilizer darts?

^_^

I often see faces on terrazo flooring.
This also happens to be used in a lot of the public bathrooms I've used, which is kind of disconcerting when you think about it. Last thing you want to see when pooping is faces looking up at you.

In order to maintain your coffee grinder and keep the quality of your coffee high, it is wise that you each month about 200 grams of rice pulls your mill. This ensures that all coffee is removed and thus there remain no residue, making you less tasty coffee become natural. Sinpel but effective!

Needs a bit of interpretation due to the shoddy translation, though.

Also, voted.

There's a thread for this?
Taken directly from a different, bluer site that will remain nameless:

This year I resolve to colossally fuck up less often and not take shit from people.
[+10 Renegade]

And on that note, Jessie, you're always welcome anywhere, and if I hear anyone say otherwise I'll punch 'em in the face.

just realised that I can't actually see JeffMOD's image

Huh. I made 8 edits to try and get it to display in the forums, and I finally got a link that worked for it on my end. I had to use dropbox because everything else is timing out on my slow-ass phone connection.
Here's a direct link.

I got an Album for my band name and the same quote as Urby. I remember years back, I played this, and I got

Howa Type 64
Holds The World Together

as my band and album, respectively. They worked pretty well together, I thought.

EDIT:

These seem to randomise only when using the button at the bottom. Refreshing does nothing...

And that would be why, I guess. Oops.

Looking forward to the video, especially as I completely missed that this was happening due to my staying with family over the holiday season.

Heavy WIP. Hopefully It'll turn out well.

I should find time to draw.
After exams, that is.

Thinking about my need for employment got me to wondering what you all do for a living.
So, what job do you have? What jobs have you done in the past? And what kind of training or skills are/were required?

Smash 4 is great fun, unless I'm losing badly and repeatedly to a certain roommate and/or his Marth Amiibo.
Another roomate's Pikachu AI is adorably passive-aggressive, plopping along behind you until you attack him.

@Jeffmod: There's a checkbox in Sledge that does that.

Sweet, already thought of! You're the best! <3