Forum posts

Yeah, you guessed right. I fried my Hard Drive and two weeks of combined mapping work... Arghhhh.
I will post the rain tutorial tonight, but it isn't the one I had finished, I will just have to make the changes if and when I get a new drive installed.
So yeah, I am off the air for a while.
Back soon,
Hopefully.

Strangely enough, you can place them in with a cycler_weapon. But I am sure there are better ways. You could try monster_furniture.

[Ummm or monster_generic]

There seem to be a lot of double entries in the Vault, sticky Keyboard? or itchy fingers... either way, any chance the member can edit/delete a double post?

Oh yeah, I got the e-mail about taking Seventh-Monkey out the back and stringing him up... but don't you think that is a bit excessive?

Download my entry for the Scripted Competition... There is a sitting Barney in it. But it wasn't my Idea.. The tutorial on the original sitting Barney from HL was posted years ago on 'the spawning tank' and some of the dimensions are not quite right. It works but needs work.
As for the Bomb, why don't you build a small test map and see if it works... if it does you can let us know.

Heaps of stuff in the forum about scripting.
Have a look at the problem map section for: ManfallTlax.
There is a really good series of scripted sequences, some camera work and a moving APC.

Just on the path_corner and monster questions, something I found this morning [that I had forgotten about] was that if you give your Barney, Grunt or Scientist a name, then they wont follow path_corners! Monsters spawned by a monstermaker wont follow path_corners either. And if you want you monster to walk up a flight of stairs... be ready to tear your hair out. It can be done, but some serious patience is required. Better off building a ramp, but make sure it is nice and long.

Try renaming the .rmf race_track before you compile it as Anonymous suggested.

Due to the fact that I haven't got around to finding anyone who will do a decent Script tutorial, I believe the next best thing is to tell you where you can find some...
Collective, thanks to Chris 'autolycus' Bokitch:
http://collective.valve-erc.com/index.php?doc=1047433496-46754900
And 69th, by Vlad:
http://www.vlatitude.com/tutorials.php?tutID=10
Both of these tutorials discuss what you want to acheive.

Good idea... I am working on a tutorial by pepper at the moment, but if I get a chance I will slap together a really basic lighting tutorial... Stay tuned.

What does the error report say?

I am looking for really simple stuff, like, how to control a light with a switch... How to build a rotating wheel ( that doesn't fly off into space when triggered

I have forgotten more than I have learnt, so just go through the available tutorials and see if there is anything that you know how to do, but isn't covered.. or not covered well enough :-).. and write it up in a text file.. This will earn you respect from your fellow mappers.. and give me a hand getting stuff done.

You could try the Spike brush or wedge brush... or you could be really clever and build a series of cylinder brushes that have been VM'd in the shape you want

I don't think there is anything different from setting it up like any other Mod... TFC, DoD
It should compile using the HL settings, just change the Mod directory and include the new .fgd... and textures.
The only thing I can think that might be tricky is getting the command line parameters right, but since OpFor was primarily a SP Mod, I cant see why you cant compile using the standard stuff.

OK,
Pepper is right, you can have fully controlable vehicles in CS.... There are a few extra entities added to the later .fgd's that allow you to have func_vehicle and func_vehiclecontrols. That is how they do it.
This does not cross over to HL. Unless you build in CS and ignore all the errors when you load HL.. Not sure that would actually work though. The only way you can achieve this in HL is with Spirit.

So if you want to make a map where you drive the vehicle, then you should do it using CS.
(can't see the point really, as you can't shoot and drive at the same time...)

Sorry have to disagree....
The contest was rigged,
My entry was the best !!!
I was robbed!!!!

Just Joking people.
Congratulations Tlax and Jakar and DocRock.
It is really good to see the high standard of entries, well thought out.
Any one like to do a tutorial on Scripts?? Let me know.

Let you guy's in on a secret...
I could never get them to work either... But I think SlayerA knows the tricks.
The only Decal I ever got to work was the Bomb Target in CS.

So... If someone does manage to get decals to work, and can put it down in a .txt file, then send it too me and I will post it as a tutorial.. Fame and fortune are yours... Well fame maybe.

(And yeah I think for them to work they must be from the spraypaint.wad or the decals.wad? )

Cylinders are always tricky. You can fix your cylinders with Vertex Manipulation, I suggest you read both of Atoms tutorials on the subject.
Enclosing the map in a box, is a quick fix method. It can affect the performance of your map, But it will fix the leaks. I do NOT recommend this method, especially using Sky Boxes, but sometimes it let's you see if fixing the brush work is worth it. The reason I dont think it is a good idea is that sometimes it creates errors of it's own, that are not associated with the map.
If you get really stuck, upload it to the Problem map section of the Vault and I will have a look at it.

These extra command lines come with the Zoners reference, but you have to go backwards and get a copy of 253 before the custom builds to get the extra refrence information.

-sparse
Enable low memory vismatrix algorithm
The original vismatrix algorithm was limited to 65535 patches due to its design. Its memory usage also grew exponentially with the number of patches (patches * patches / 16 bytes). This option enables a compressed vismatrix, which at the cost of extra CPU time, breaks the 65535 limit, and also uses about 10% of the memory the vismatrix would.

-extra
Turns on 9 point oversampling for lighting, making it look much better.

Almost, CS is dependent on it's .fgd file. And that hasn't been officially updated for ages. CS has some specific stuff, Bombzones, Hostages and that sort of thing that only relate to CS maps. And the entities are similar, The CS .fgd incorperates many of the HL entities, but adds CS specific stuff. So Yeah, basically CS tutorials are the same. CS Sites normally post CS specific stuff, that deal with their unique entities, and let sites like this deal with the basics of Mapping.

Be careful with the prefabs from this site, it looks like it hasn't been updated in a while, although it is a good place for Ideas...

Best thing I have seen for modeling is MilkShape3D. But I haven't actually used it.
There are a lot of Prefab sites out there, but I haven't come across one that is current. By that I mean that the prefabs are old (pre 2000) and sometimes do not work well with Hammer and HL.
If you find a site that has NEW prefabs, or just really good old ones, please let us know.

Good Question.
If you download the r_speeds tutorial and have a look at the .rmf file in Hammer you will see a trigger_teleport brush and a info_teleport_destination entity. The combination of these two create that effect. The portal is just a sprite added to liven things up. That is one way to get the effect, the other way is to use the trigger_camera entity to make it look like you have been somewhere.
I think SlayerA is writing a tutorial on Teleporters, I might do one on simple cameras...one day.

As for the custom game short cut, depends what you are trying to acheive, but if you are trying to create your own custom game you might want to have a look at 69thVlatitude: http://www.vlatitude.com/tutorials.php?tutID=43
because they have a few really good tutorials on Custom Game stuff. The other place to look for step by step instructions is FireBinders site... Lot's of really good stuff there: http://home.att.net/~firebinder/halflife/proj_04.htm

PS: I did answer your question about Half-Life being the best... it's in the !Stuff forum

Yes, I agree JALF-AIFE.
HL has had me enthralled since I got my first copy back in '98. I was an avid Doom and Duke fan. But WorldCraft changed all that. I think the sucees is due to the mapping community. I also think that HL lives on because of it's duality, being Multiplayer and single. I was stuck in a country that didn't have an internet connection until 2000. So I stayed alive, building and releasing maps to my friends not knowing if what I was doing was right, or for that matter knowing if there was a better way of doing it.
There are millions of mappers out there that do not have a link to the massive rescources available. Let them know we are here....

Great minds think alike Skeeve.....
By having a new comments section, the actual views recorded would indicate the true views, and not me just looking at my entry every 5 seconds to see if someone had made comment Actually I was waiting for a flaming, because, as with all concept maps, the idea is there, but the architecture sucks !!

This really is a touchy subject... When WinBsp first came out there was an outcry in the gaming community. The reason being that by decompiling Valves maps, you are infact breaching the copyright. It seems that has died down since.
My suggestion is not to modify a map or level, but decompile it to find out just how they managed to get something to work.... problem is that WinBsp has a tendancy to leave out a lot of entities after decompiling, and sometimes you can't tell why something works. But from a brush building view, it is a great tool. Alternatly you can download maps made by a pro and see how they did it, just visit Dave Johnston's old site (http://www.planethalflife.com/davej/). He distributes some of the classic CS maps for free, and in RMF format.
Normally, because HL is 7 years old, anything that might add to enhanced a map has been tried. But if you are just modifying things to help you become a better mapper, I can't see anything wrong with that .... Well, apart from it being Morally and ethically wrong

Sounds and Custom sounds are not all that difficult, I will have a look at getting a tutorial done, but while you are waiting, check out Handy Vandals almanac for sounds, and also FireBinders Site, also the entity guide here for Ambient_generic. Or check out:
http://www.vlatitude.com/tutorials.php?tutID=7

If you are stuck for ideas, or just general know how check out these sites:

http://www.vlatitude.com/tutorials.php?tutID=9

http://www.vlatitude.com/tutorials.php?tutID=10

http://www.vlatitude.com/tutorials.php?tutID=15

http://www.vlatitude.com/tutorials.php?tutID=32

http://www.karljones.com/halflife/almanac.asp

http://collective.valve-erc.com/index.php?doc=1047433496-46754900

http://collective.valve-erc.com/index.php?doc=1046839948-87698400

http://collective.valve-erc.com/index.php?doc=1045177834-81552500

I was thinking that there was a site that I had seen some good prefabs at and it took me a while to track it down:
http://home.worldonline.co.za/~TLove/prefabs.html
Have a look there, you never know, something might take your fancy.

Great, we always like new input.
You can submit the tutorial directly to me, my e-mail address is in the members section.
What I prefer to work with is a .txt file from NotePad or similar, But if you can't do that, a Word document is fine. Get the text down and indicate where you would like any screen shots by just putting a line in the text [Image door.jpg here] or something. As for the images, I am not on broardband or cable so I would appreciate them in JPG or GIF format and about 600x480 but if you can't crop them or resize them, then just send them full size and zipped with the text.

What will happen next?
I will format your words, insert the pictures and upload it all to a test page. Once our massive staff of highly trained editors (Atom, SlayerA and I ) go over your work with a fine tooth comb, checking validity at each step, and approving content, then I will send you a copy of what it will look like before it goes live, and give you the oppurtunity to make last minute changes. After that it will be posted and you will be famous in the mapping community.....
Well maybe not, but what a rush....Your Tutorial.
It really is that simple.

This requires a tutorial in itself. The monstermaker [which is in the 'misc' section of the entity guide] is a great entity, until you try to spawn something like a grunt.
The Childrens Name (netname) property allows you to give monsters spawned by a monstermaker a Name (targetname). When the monsters have a name, you can target them with a scripted_sequence and get them to perform that sequence, I haven't tried path_corners with grunts, As far as I know they are only good for Scientists and Barneys. Grunts respond really well to Aiscripted_sequences and scripted_sequences, It is basically a way to override their AI, as long as you don't killtarget them, and then the seem to freeze.
So as to the rushing the room, yes I think it can be done with a series of scripted_sequences even if they are spawned with a monstermaker, but the guy who has done this stuff recently is SlayerA. Can you add to this Slay?

Sorry to say this, but you are just going to have to site search for code specific stuff. Are any of our members coders? If so, can you point Jage in the right direction.

Check out the forum posts for In the Beginning Part 4. They might help. But basically, Hammer, during compile will look at your lights.rad file, unless you have told it to look elsewhere by using -lights file, on the HLRAD compile command. So your Lights.rad file should be in your WorldCraft/Hammer tools file as Tlax suggested. If it is there... consider copying the contents of your valve.rad to your lights.rad....
If that doesn't work, make sure the light texture you are using is actually listed in the lights.rad (This surprised me at first, I thought that textures that looked lit in the game would be in the lights.rad.... Wrong).
If it is none of the above, then I am out of Ideas....

I'm not familiar with IRC, I have a Bearkey account somewhere? but can't see why we can't get together on-line, maybe MSN Messenger or Yahoo if it is more convienient.
I think it might be a good Idea, I am willing to give it a try, we just need to find a timezone friendly time, if that makes sense.
I am GMT+10

The most current link I have to a site that details all the available monster scripts (coded animations) is:
http://www.planethalflife.com/workshop/models/ssec_main.htm
The article is by Otis and was written in 1999. So I am not sure if all the sequences are still valid. Probably not. There are sites out there that deal specifically with Coding and that sounds like what you are asking for. I don't touch code, so I can't really point you in the right direction, but Collective.valve-erc.com is probably your best starting point.

Have to e-mail Atom on that, I haven't got access yet..

Yeah, good point...
However, we are trying to get the tutorial section going so that we can get the best information possible, so when I said Scope, I think I meant that I just haven't got time at the moment

My biggest concern with prefabs is that most of the one's I have looked at are really bad, don't work, or have invalid brushes. Models on the other hand are a different thing and if I ever get time I will play around with the copy of Milkshape3D I have had for about 6 months. I find with prefabs, that it is easier to make a shelf or chair yourself.

Do you have something you can't make, but would like to see how to build it??

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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:-)

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

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.

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....

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,,,,

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.
<http://www.mrman58.freeserve.co.uk/spawningtank/tutorials/tut_chair.html>