Forum posts

Ah yes, I know of the Silly CreepyPasta wiki. They're making low-effort games based on those now?

What in the world is the point of that stairs game? Tower evacuation simulator 2015?

It's fine, arse as much as you want. Most of us appreciate criticism from someone who actually has a bit of real knowledge in the field

My suggestions for that map would be:

1. Jump puzzle: Change the "you touched the floor and now you need to reset" sound to a negative-sounding "bzzt" type noise, instead of the positive-sounding "ding" it is now. Initially I thought that sound was required to complete the puzzle since it sounded "good", if that makes sense.

2. Jump puzzle: Put the floor triggers further away from the edges of the tiles, so you can get more of a run up when going for the jump.

3. Ceiling crusher: Add a subtle change to the colour of the "safe" tiles, or some other way to work out which is safe without needing to use trial and error.

Just played through, that was pretty fun

Some general notes:

• How in the world is JeffMod's level so laggy?
• NineTnine has a talent for making amusing maps
• Props to Dr. Orange for actual voice acting!
• Lobby Urby looks threatening (and/or like a heroin addict) just casually holding a syringe
• What's with the habit a lot of you have with spawning enemies when the player has insufficient weapons? Stop spawning alien grunts when I only have a crowbar!
• Malle's map is unnecessarily cruel. It took me a long time to figure out what I actually had to do in the jump puzzle, and even longer to actually do it. The ceiling crusher puzzle is just trial-and-error (not very fun), and adding a diagonal to the mix is borderline sadistic!
• Jessie's map is super cool, but the hallways are too wide! If you move as far away from the doors as possible and shift left and right, you can see the doors spawning in and out. I wouldn't have figured out the gauss jump if I didn't read other people talking about it.
• TJB's map: DOORKNOBS FOR MIDGETS!
• Was initially confused by Muzz's map, but then remembered reading other people talking about hunting for items. Eventually found them all after that.
• Strider's map is fancy and the gameplay is pretty cool. I walked into a camera and got killed by turrets, but the autosave was after the cameras went off, so I was stuck in an infinite death loop
• Speaking of autosaves, there should be more autosaves. At least one for each floor, imo.

Overall, very good. Nice work everyone!

That wouldn't change anything, in C/C++/etc. you can create scopes like that and it'll just run the same as if it was an "if (true)" condition. It's a feature that's rarely useful, but it won't change the way the code works (in this case).

That's very incredibly unlikely

Considering that'd be SO MUCH (seriously, so much) work, for something that's probably a gimmick or toy tech demo at best.

I think both your opinions are far too extreme. Almost every game has its own merits and is good in some way. So what, the games are different? They are both very highly regarded by critics and players alike. To say that either game is "unplayable garbage" or "has nothing redeeming" seems quite ignorant.

You might not personally like a game, but that is often a reflection of your own opinion, not of the quality of the game itself. Of course you're both allowed to think what you want, but I'm equally allowed to disagree

This seems like a good demonstration of why you shouldn't browse TWHL when drunk

That's the best way to play most games, IMO. If you're focusing too much on your opinions of the previous game, you often overlook the merits of the game because you're too busy looking at what's different.

Not that I'm saying that changing the formula is always a good thing. But in many cases, it's not as bad as people make out.

SS2 is one of my favourite games. If you're willing to give it another try, I would recommend it. There's an updated version on Steam that probably won't crash.

There might be a better way, but you can do something like this fairly easily using notepad. If you want to keep your grouping, you'll also need Sledge:

1. Open your map in Sledge, and copy the group with everything in it. This will put plain text VMF format onto the clipboard.
2. Paste into Notepad++ or a similar text editor
3. Search/replace the old names with new names (e.g. light1 -> light2, and so on)
4. Copy the text and paste back into Sledge
5. Repeat 3 and 4 for as many copies as you need
6. Save the RMF and you're done

You can do a similar thing in Hammer, but because it doesn't have plain text copy/paste, you'll need to export as .MAP (which has no groups) to get it into notepad.

Sledge's "Paste Special" feature will make entity names unique, but it will not replace the targetname. So alternatively, you can copy you group, paste special, tick the "make entity names unique" box, and create 30 copies or however many you need. You can put an offset in so all the groups don't overlap. After that, you can then rename the "target" value in all the clones.

This is the setting:

I put a bit more info on the big box method in my last post. It doesn't have to be hollow, you can just throw a regular block in there. The cordon tool might make it a bit quicker, it will do a similar thing for you.

You're not wrong, but that's likely because there's not much advantage in writing loads of documentation for modders. Modding has always been a trial-and-error process, for pretty much any game. As for lack of help and resources, a lot of that is because so many HL1 modding sites are dead and their content has been lost or forgotten.

Anyway:

Using Wadfile: \program files (x86)\steam\steamapps\common\half-life\hrafd\textures\halfrats.wad

Move this file to (remove the "textures" subfolder):
C:\program files (x86)\steam\steamapps\common\half-life\hrafd\halfrats.wad

Wad files have to be in the mod root folder for the game to load them.

Investigate the "big box" method to try and nail down your leak. That is: cover half your map in a big solid block and compile (or use the cordon tool). If you're still leaking, you know that the leak is in the half you didn't cover. If the leak is gone, it's the other half. Now that you know which half is leaking, you can repeat this process with the leaky half until you have the location of the leak nailed down to a small area. Then the pointfile will probably be more helpful.

New compile tools won't stop the leak, that's why you're fullbright. Fix your leak. Also, 5 wads is fine, I think there used to be a limit of 8 wad files, but that mightn't be the case anymore.

In Hammer, use wads from the game files, not from anywhere else.

Instead of this:
C:\program files (x86)\steam\steamapps\common\half-life sdk\texture wad files\halflife.wad

Use this:
C:\program files (x86)\steam\steamapps\common\half-life\valve\halflife.wad

@Archie: Why would you expect Valve distribute non-official tools? Of course they're going to distribute the Valve tools that were created and approved by Valve employees. I assume there's legal implications as well.

@Half-Rats: If Valve didn't give any fucks about the Goldsource community, why did they release the SDK on Steam in the first place? Why did they switch GS engine games to the improved SteamPipe system? Why did they give the Sven-Coop team access to the engine and editor source code so they could mod the engine for SC5? The HL1 SDK is on Github and they're responding to issues and pull requests. Do you honestly expect a company to do more than that to support their games from two generations ago? Can you name any other company that has done more?

Well I backed the kickstarter. I'm not sure I'll have the chance to actually play the originals (never even seen a physical Dreamcast in my life...), but meh, why not.

Yes, but it was hard, so I didn't do it >_>

No ratings, it's all moving to the wiki.

We're going to be changing the way that tutorials are added to the site in a few months, you'll be able to add it yourself without needing any approval once that happens.

It won't fix entity issues, but it will improve your lighting and probably the performance of your map. You'd need to recompile your maps to see those benefits, but the compile would probably run a lot faster using the updated tools. You don't have to recompile all your maps, but after you notice the benefits you will probably want to.

There's absolutely no reason to "go purist" when it comes to the compile tools. The updated ones are better in every possible way, and you don't need to do anything special to get them to work - just point Hammer at the new executables and it works exactly the same.

Right, well that's that. I'm skipping the PC Gamer show, but I expect it'll just be repeats and advertising. If someone wants to watch it and update, I'd appreciate it.

Nintendo went about as expected. There wasn't a lot of stuff, because they limited it to games that are releasing in the next 9 months. Here's what they had:

• Starfox for the Wii U
• A 3DS Zelda game in the vein of Four Swords, except with 3 players this time
• Fire Emblem F is subtitled 'Fates' in the English release, expected early next year
• The astoundingly popular kid's game Yokai Watch is being released in English.
• A clever crossover between Paper Mario and the Mario & Luigi RPG games

Predictions were about halfway. No Smash Bros, no Monster Hunter. There was a few metroid games, but they were minigames and not the proper thing. There was starfox, amiibo, English releases, and the Zelda game didn't appear.

Square-Enix's show was pretty boring. They trolled the audience a bit by getting them excited for Kingdom Hearts 3, and then showed a mobile game instead. But after that, the actually showed Kingdom Hearts 3, so it's okay I guess. The new stuff was:

• More info on FF7 remake coming later in the year. They're still releasing ports of FF7 in the meantime, the greedy bastards.
• Kingdom Hearts 3 gameplay was demoed
• A new game in the "Nier" series. Not much info provided.
• In-game preview of the new Hitman game. Could be potentially a big improvement on the last game.
• A new Star Ocean game called "Integrity and Faithlessness" will be released in English next year.
• A new RPG series from a new studio codenamed 'Project Setsuna'. Not really any other info. Rikai tells me Setsuna means "instant" or "moment", so it might have something to do with time?

Predictions were close enough. No Theatrhythm, but everything else was about right. The new games they announced had almost no information, so they don't count.

That's it for the updates from me! As I said, if anyone watches the PC Gamer show, feel free to add any new info that comes from that show.

As Strider pointed out, Nintendo is starting soon - in about 10 minutes. This will be pretty clinical since it's all pre-recorded. Nintendo typically show off some new stuff, but also new content for already-announced games. Predictions:

• Starfox, probably. Potentially a new Mario game.
• Discussing the already-announced Smash Bros. DLC
• No Zelda, since they basically said it wasn't ready for E3 this year.
• Announcements of some English releases for Fire Emblem and some other 3DS games
• Probably some Monster Hunter stuff
• Lots of talk about Amiibo dolls
• Someone will explain to us that making games takes a long time and they will ask us to please be patient
• New Metroid game? Nah, I doubt it.

Square-Enix is straight after, so I might not have time to post after the Nintendo video. Sqex have already shown most of their hand in the other shows, so they'll probably just expand on those for the most part. Predictions:

• FF7 Remake, of course
• FFXV will probably make an appearance too
• Hitman, Tomb Raider
• Maybe the Dragon Quest Theatrhythm game
• Can't see them having anything that we don't already know about

Ah, it's Dreamcast, is it? I wonder how easy that is to emulate...

Probably a silly question to ask you Archie considering your enthusiasm, but is Shenmue worth playing? I know nothing about the series, what type of game is it?

Also yes, I am willing and able to hunt all the terrors. Ant is well aware of this, it seems that he has been concealing this information from you.

Yep, that was pretty darn unexpected. The other unexpected one was The Last Guardian! Sony's vapourware is actually coming out.

Right, that's Sony done. They did a pretty good job:

• The Last Guardian! Releasing next year.
• Pretty neat looking open world game called Horizon. It has robot dinosaurs and a bow and arrow. Sony knows what the people want.
• Final Fantasy 7 remake - an actual proper remake. Completely unexpected. That's a huge announcement.
• They promoted the Shenmue 3 kickstarter. They stressed that it wasn't a Sony project, so it'll probably be a multi-platform release.
• Call of Duty has switched to Sony as the preferred console. CODBLOPSIII announced.
• Few other bits and pieces, nothing amazing.

Predictions were pretty close. Nothing about non-gaming Sony stuff, but they did talk about their music/tv services and the VR tech. There was a bunch of indie games presented. Nothing in the LBP series but a game called "Dreams" from the same studio. Vita got mentioned once and 3 or so Vita games were included in a montage video - so, it was basically ignored. As for Dimbark's prediction, Adam Boyes did indeed make a fool of himself while talking about Destiny. No Tim Schafer though, and not as much talk about "fan feedback" than the other 3 shows today.

That's it for today! Nintendo kicks off in a bit over 12 hours, with Square-Enix to follow.

@Archie: Nobody invites me to terrorist hunt... Siege is 5 player though, so....

He really is, he's possibly the "coolest" game developer I've ever seen.

Anyway, Ubisoft is done, there wasn't a huge amount of content but what they had looked alright.

• Sword-fighting/medieval war game called For Honor. It looked interesting, but it's hard to tell how much is scripted. The PvP combat seemed a little like Dark Souls.
• Anno 2205, you can build a colony on the moon. The last Anno game had great music so I'm looking forward to the soundtrack of this one.
• Dancing games and Assassin's Creed
• Rainbow Six Siege has basic single player and co-op in the form of the series-standard terrorist hunt mode.
• Trackmania is getting a console release
• The surprise was an open world Ghost Recon game. Not much info aside from the fact that you can complete missions in several different ways (assault/stealth/ambush was the example in the trailer).
• There was dude singing on stage. It wasn't related to gaming, they just decided to have a guy singing. Good work Ubisoft!

Predictions were a bit off. No indie-label stuff, nothing matching the bullshit sequel, no Rayman. Probably about 50% overall.

Sony's up next in about 90 minutes. Sony usually are the most level-headed of the big three, but Microsoft did surprisingly ok this year. Predictions are kinda difficult in this case, I haven't been keeping track of Sony recently:

• Uncharted, of course.
• Probably some stuff about services - game streaming, PSN, streaming music, and so on.
• Some stuff about Sony's non-gaming hardware, TVs and such. Just so Sony can remind us that they do other stuff too.
• Probably a bunch of indie games showed off, similar to MS's show.
• Perhaps something in the LittleBigPlanet series.
• Vita will be ignored for the most part. Perhaps one or two off-hand mentions of it, but Sony have basically given up on Vita outside of Japan.
• The Last Guardian? Nah, probably not.
• Haven't seen COD yet, so it may make an appearance.

EA just finished, almost exactly as predicted. Here's the highlights:

• New Mass Effect game: Andromeda. As the name implies, it's a different galaxy, so it seems like they're basically rebooting the series.
• Mirror's Edge: Catalyst. It's a prequel, free-roaming. They seemed to indicate that there won't be much focus on guns, so that potentially seems good. What they showed looked fairly promising.
• A demo of Star Wars: Battlefield. Err... I mean Battlefront. It's easy to make that mistake because the formula is literally identical. But it seems pretty solid, if you like Battlefield 3/4 and Star Wars then you'll probably enjoy it.

My predictions were pretty much all correct, with the exception of Battlefield DLCs. They talked lots about sports and they had Need for Speed as well. There was nothing groundbreaking. Free-roaming Mirror's Edge sounds like it could be pretty great, though.

Next up is Ubisoft in 20 minutes. Ubisoft are absolutely clueless when it comes to what people want, but that's the case every year. There'll be plenty of awkward jokes with no laughter. Hell, we've already had one from a Ubisoft speaker during the Microsoft show. Predictions:

• All the usuals: Assassin's Creed, Tom Clancy, dancing/singing/guitar games
• Some stuff from Ubisoft's indie label (team that made Child of Light etc.)
• Probably some Rayman stuff for Nintendo platforms
• Watch Dogs 2 or some other bullshit sequel to a game that nobody wants
• A surprisingly cool-looking new game that will disappoint us all when it comes out in November 2016

DOOM's graphics looked amazing, but the gameplay itself looked terrible. It seems they've just made a game with some blood and guts, rather than a game with fun gameplay and maze-like maps.

Anyway, Microsoft just wrapped up. Here's the interesting stuff they had:

• Halo 5, of course
• Xbox 360 backwards compatibility on the Xbone. Done via downloadable games, but if you have the 360 game disk you can download and play it for free.
• New hardware: Xbox "Elite" controller, with some customisation and such.
• Fallout 4 will have mods on the Xbone. Same mods on PC and Xbox for free.
• Early access for Xbox
• Re-release of 30 Rare games, including Conker, Banjo-Kazooie, and Perfect dark, cost is $30
• Demo of Minecraft on the HoloLens augmented reality hardware. Looks like an interesting tech demo, but it'd be hard to justify spending the cash on something so trivial.
• Gears of War 4 for a release late next year
• Nothing about COD! Perhaps Sony got it this year?
• Few other things, such as a proper Dark Souls 3 announcement, but nothing we didn't already know about.

My predictions were about 50/50. Nothing about WinPhone or ripped off hardware, unless you count the HoloLens. There was expensive tech: new controller, and they name-dropped both Valve and Oculus for VR tech. They were promoting Windows 10 a fair bit as well.

EA is next in just under 2 hours. EA's shows are usually pretty easy to predict, and they usually just keep it simple. Predictions:

• Star Wars Battlefront
• Sports: Madden NFL, NHL, NBA, Fifa, etc. etc.
• Battlefield expansions/DLC/whatevers
• Need for Speed, probably
• Potentially something from Bioware: Dragon Age, Mass Effect
• Nothing groundbreaking.

What's happened so far:

Bethesda showed off:

• Fallout 4, aka The Sims: Apocalypse edition (also starring: Minecraft, tower defense)
• DOOM, aka Canned Animations: The Game
• Dishonored 2, aka Dishonored II: The Metal Age (this one courtesy of Strider)

Microsoft is 10 minutes away. My (somewhat conservative) preditions:

• Halo and Halo accessories
• Half-assed clones of other people's stuff (e.g. VR headsets, skylanders dolls, etc)
• Minecraft - probably not MC2, but perhaps spinoff plot-driven games to compete in the Lego genre
• Trying to convince people that Windows is a good mobile platform
• At least one expensive and useless Xbone hardware accessory (possibly just the VR thing from before)
• Call of Duty

Better late than never! Urby had to remind me two years in a row, I'm getting slack...E3 has already started this year! Microsoft go in in 15 minutes. Bethesda had their turn earlier today.

This year we have more keynotes than usual: In addition to the usual five (Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA), we also have Bethesda, Square-Enix, and a PC show run by the PC Gamer magazine. Exciting!

Begin E3 copypasta:

What is E3?
The Electronic Entertainment Expo, known as E3, is an event that happens every year in Los Angeles. It's usually where the big companies announce new stuff (i.e. Microsoft, Sony, and to a lesser extent, Nintendo) like games, hardware, consoles, and really pretty much everything to do with games. Ubisoft and EA also make appearances, but interestingly enough, Activision do not (though they usually manage to get a Call of Duty trailer in there anyway).

Why is it cool?
If you're interested in gaming at all, E3 is the biggest dump of new information that happens every year. The keynotes almost always feature brand new trailers, gameplay, hardware, services, and of course, new games! It's always fun to hear new stuff to look forward to. E3 is focused on western gaming (Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA), but Nintendo and Sony usually inject some Japanese gaming influence in there as well, so there's always something interesting no matter what your gaming tastes are!

I'll post updates after each keynote with all the interesting stuff, but if you want to watch the conferences live, just visit any big gaming website (GameSpot, IGN, GameTrailers, etc) and find their E3 coverage.

Is anyone else excited about E3? Any predictions you would like to share? I'll be posting my own predictions before each keynote starts.

PS: Before anyone suggests it: Half-Life 3 will NOT be announced this year. In fact, it will NEVER be announced at any E3, ever! (Though I would not mind if I was wrong about this)

End E3 copypasta

Do you mean the 2D grid view? You can middle click + drag to shift it easily, but I usually just zoom out and back into the spot I want to move to. You can also change the settings so that the arrow keys will scroll the 2D views as well (instead of nudging the selection). Scrollbars are unlikely.

Remember not to buy anything until the last day of the sales unless it's a daily/flash sale. Often stuff that's discounted during the sales turns into a daily deal with a bigger discount.

Not with that attitude!

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it only works for the decals.wad file. Though Sven might have something that lets you add extra decals, maybe ask on their forums?

Nobody entered that particular competition, so there's no files to upload.

Been a while since you've been around, welcome back

Wow, they're removing the paid workshop from Skyrim and refunding everybody who purchased a mod. I'm genuinely surprised. Didn't expect that at all.

Official announcement: http://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWorkshop/announcements/detail/208632365253244218

I'll be interesting to see if they do any damage control, and if they still plan to have paid mods at some point in the future (and what changes they'll make to make the community accept it). The way the announcement is worded, it sounds like they still want to have paid mods available in some form in the future.

The problems are simply extensions of what I know about the modding community and the open-source software community.

OSS has had the concept of "freeware" and "payware" for a long time, and that is stable because open source software is almost always given a clear license, and the EFF can help with copyright/license enforcement. The workshop doesn't allow a creator to choose a license - you upload it to the workshop, and Valve is granted a pretty permissive license on it. This isn't good for modders, and a lot of people won't realise until it's too late.

The creative commons licenses are probably the best options for workshop content. They let you choose:
1. If someone can modify your content
2. If someone can sell your content
3. If someone must use the same license if they use your content

You also probably want control over these as well:
4. If someone with a free mod can depend on your content
5. If someone with a paid mod can depend on your content

Until we have some of this kind of flexibility, the paid workshop is going to be a licensing clusterfuck. Most modders don't realise that Valve can do pretty much anything they want with your content once you upload it to the workshop. If you have a moral objection to something, it doesn't matter - Valve has a license to use your content as it sees fit, which allows them to avoid any legal issues. This is bad - modders need to be able to keep control of their content and enforce their copyright if they need to.

If open-source software breaks, I can stop using it or I can fix it myself. If free (closed-source) software breaks, I find a better alternative. But if software that I paid for breaks, depending on the licensing agreement, there's an expectation that the vendor should fix it. The workshop only has a 24 hour refund clause, not any longer than that. If a mod breaks a week later, you do not get any support, at all. That's ridiculous.

I'm not saying that the system can't work. It can, and the OSS community is proof of that. But the paid workshop needs a whole lot more thought put into it before it can be anything but damaging to the modding community.

@TJB: Most of them don't, and authors can simply edit their maps in the vault to change from the default.

That feature costs $2.99 to unlock.

The thread wasn't there when you posted the journal, not to worry

It's interesting that you mention copyright options in the next version of TWHL, I was actually working on that last night (not as a result of the workshop stuff, it's always been a planned feature).

Here's an example of the copyright notice on a vault page (the black box is a tooltop that shows when you hover):The user chooses the license when they upload the map:This is the default license:
All Rights Reserved - You must contact the author for permission to use this content in your own work.

There was some discussion in the shoutbox about this but it merits further discussion: Valve has recently enabled paid modifications on the Steam workshop. There's been a lot of controversy in the last few days about it - mostly around how there a lot of problems in the implementation.

(right now, paid mods are only available on Skyrim)

In theory, a modder having the opportunity to get paid for their mod is a good idea, but in practice, it's not going to work (at least how it is now).

There are some major problems:

1. The workshop turning into the mobile app stores. Most of you will have experience with the iTunes app store or Google Play - how much of a pain in the ass is it to actually find a quality app? There's a million clones and copies of apps and games, some have massive ads, some are outright broken, some are "free trials" with expensive paid versions, and others are just paid rip-offs of free apps. It's technically legal, but it's a terribly shitty ecosystem and it's absolutely the worst thing I can think of to happen to Steam.

2. Lack of responsibility. If I pay for a mod, I expect it to continue to work for the lifetime of the game (i.e. as long as the game works, the mod should work). If a free mod breaks, well, that sucks. However, if something is paid for, you expect it to continue working. There seems to be a lack of responsibility from content creators to keep the mod up-to-date. Otherwise, someone might cash-in on a quick mod, and then not update it when a future patch breaks it. Why would I want to buy something that mightn't work next week? Where's the support contract? Do I get a refund? How difficult is it to get one?

3. Copyright infringement. Modding is already a problem area in this case - are you allowed to use someone else's free content in your free content? The answer is no, but a lot of morally corrupt modders do it anyway. This becomes an even bigger problem when some of the content is paid. How do you stop someone "pirating" a mod? How do you stop someone putting your free mod up for sale? How do you lodge a copyright complaint, how do you prove you are the copyright owner, who enforces the copyright, and how quickly does it get enforced? What happens to any profit the thief makes from your content? Valve has never had a good track record responding to customer support. This has a huge potential to go horribly wrong.

There are also some other teething problems:

1. Mod dependencies. If Mod B (paid) depends on Mod A (free), should that be allowed? My opinion (and Valve's) is that it should be allowed, but only when the free mod is a separate download. The free mod is not affected by the existence of a paid mod that depends on it. However, the creator of the free mod might get upset about it (this has actually happened recently). However this creates a moral problem, with the "app-store-ification" of the workshop with numerous rip-offs and clones trying to cash-grab using a small modification of someone else's work.

2. The Steam Subscriber Agreement. Workshop creators are not lawyers, and they won't be able to fully understand the subscriber agreement without one. Big companies have many legal resources, but modders can't afford that for the most part. In the above link, the mod creator was upset that they couldn't fully delete their content from Steam (people who already downloaded the mod could still use it), but the licence they agreed to very clearly stated that this was the case. It applies to big companies too - for example, even though EA pulled a bunch of games off the Steam store, people who already owned those games can still download and play them.

3. The modders only get 25% of revenue. This isn't a bad number considering the circumstances, but it seems bad from the users' point of view since 25% doesn't seem like a lot. This number was apparently decided upon by Bethesda, Valve have a standard cut they take from all microtransactions and the publisher chooses how much of the remainder they want to take.

In Summary:
1. People are scumbags and will take advantage of the free content to make money in an illegal (or at least morally incorrect) way
2. Modders don't have the resources/money to enforce (or even understand) their copyright rights effectively
3. Valve's support is not good enough to effectively enforce copyright violations or ensure that workshop items are compatible (and there doesn't seem to be any way to get a refund if your paid mods are no longer working)

What does everyone else think about this "paid mod" thing?

@Jeff: You don't need to "file" for copyright. It's automatic and would indeed apply to a mod (doesn't matter that the engine that runs it is somebody else's). There's no grey area, it's 100% clear that a mod is a copyrighted work.

See Wikipedia:

In all countries where the Berne Convention standards apply, copyright is automatic, and need not be obtained through official registration with any government office. Once an idea has been reduced to tangible form, for example by securing it in a fixed medium (such as a drawing, sheet music, photograph, a videotape, or a computer file), the copyright holder is entitled to enforce his or her exclusive rights.

Whether or not it's an actual copyright infringement depends on whether fair use (fair dealing) can be applied to re-hosting a free download. It varies per country and each case needs to be investigated by lawyers, which makes it difficult to find any information on the subject.

However, the best you could realistically do in this case is request that the other website takes your content down. If they decide not to, you can't do much about it.

Yep, start preparing feature requests. Don't post them in this thread though, I'll probably create a thread for twhl4 stuff next month sometime.

Yep, I just tried it, looks like you're right - the solid is entirely gone. I think know why though - and if you have the VMF (or an autosave) from immediately after you saved it (and didn't open and re-save), I can tell you how to recover the lost solids. Otherwise, the solution is still to use RMF instead, it's very much a problem in the VMF loader. Load up an autosave or a backup from before the brushwork disappeared, save as an RMF, and you'll be able to carry on.

It's not deleted, open the map and save it as an RMF instead. It's a known issue with VMF and visgroups. Just use RMF for the time being.

The number of HL1 deathmatch levels is pretty limited, how about "any map from any game released before 2000"?

If it's working the way you want, I'm pretty sure you can ignore the sparks. Somewhere in the code you should be able to find the code that generates the sparks - it'll probably be wrapped in a "#IFDEF __DEBUG__" macro (or something similar). When you build the final version of your mod, make sure you unset the debug variable so the sparks go away.

I believe that the sparks also happen on NPCs when the current AI sequence (or whatever it is) is not valid. Sometimes it's an AI programming error, but sometimes the current plan invalidates and it thinks for a second before finding a new plan.

The Express Editions of VS are free and they work with the HL SDK. There's no need to pirate anything.