Forum posts

Use the AWP-cubehack to noobalize Slowpoke, or call for CT reinforcements

there's also a tut on the snarkpit, although that's really a moot point with Twister

http://www.snarkpit.net/editing.php?page=tutorials&id=182

Use Penguinboy's displacement generator (Twister), if you are doing this for Source. You'll have to generate two displacement domes. One for the outside surface and one for the inside. If you want to have a movable dome or something like that, then you really have no other choice than tedious brushwork or creating a model. With the Goldsource engine, displacements obviously aren't an option.

http://users.bigpond.net.au/penguinboy/Twister/Twister.html

Heres a little example of what you can do with Penguinboy's displacement generator, Twister:

The road you see consists of two 45 degree displacement curve segments (created with Twister) slightly above a standard displacement mesh (created normally in Hammer). By using a blend texture for the road (in this case de_tides/blendgrassstonepath) and a standard grass texture for the underlying mesh, one can achieve a fairly good seam between the two. The edges of the road are lowered to form a seam with the displacement below. The curves are possible thanks to the displacement generator, which saves unfathomable amounts of time.

Here's a link to Penguinboy's original post:

http://twhl.co.za/forums.php?pgt=2&action=viewthread&id=13008&pg=1

http://img122.imageshack.us/img122/587/benthalfpipe2ge.png

Here's one more feature you could add. It's basically a combination of the curve and corner (inside and outside). Essentially it would be like segments of a torus.

One small addition would be the creation of the inside of cones since the outside has already been done, although I can't think of any use for such a feature at the moment.

EDIT: The inside of a cone could be used for the ceiling inside a cylindrical tower.

I suggest that you use a program called Wally to create your own .wad files containing your own custom textures. It's relatively easy to learn how to use Wally.

http://www.telefragged.com/wally/

I think that if ads are used ingame, they should have some sort of subtle relation to the story. Take a look at the vending machines in HL2: Dr. Breens Private Reserve. Ads or products like this add some hidden humor to the experience. In my opinion real ads have no place in a game. I hope we won't be seeing ads/commercials during loading between maps... :

On the other hand I guess developers can throw in as many ads as they want as long as the game is completely free and open source

Here's a German site which offers several texture packs:

http://thedoenerking.myexp.de/textures.php

Preview them with the "Vorschau" button.

Wally was made for creating world textures, not for skinning. Thus you should definitely use gimp or photoshop as Elon said. BTW The Gimp is free so use it.

Here's a tutorial that may give you an idea of how you can do smoke using sprites:

http://collective.valve-erc.com/index.php?doc=1046748015-97868500

It explains how to do steam coming out of pipes but the method should work fairly well for rising smoke as well.

This may also help:

http://www.twhl.co.za/mapvault_map.php?id=2902

I didn't pay any attention to what the extension was. I just saved in paint and let Imageshack do its thing.

I've been using Hammer World editor for a some time. Suddenly this has occured in the 3D view:

The polygons making up the terrorist model and the door are noticebly skewed and no longer aligned with one another. The same thing occurs with virtually all other elements in the 3D view. Brush faces are rendered in the wrong location, and even the parts of the translucent red mask placed over selected objects are rendered out of place.

So far I've searched for driver updates, with no new ones found. I've also deleted the Source SDK after making a backup. The redownloaded files from steam gave the same results in Hammer's 3D view. My video card (Radeon X600) is overclocked, however setting the original clock doesn't help either.

So, any ideas or suggestions regarding how to fix this issue?

EDIT: I found the reason while browsing some slightly related topics. The issue lies with the latest version of Direct X. My video card doesn't seem to fully support the latest version. A rollback to dx8 (-dxlevel 80)while using Hammer fixes the problem. Interestingly however I haven't had any issues like this ingame.

I've used carving on rare occasions where I have to cut through beams in order to make space for a wall. With the wall selected, I tell Hammer to carve. The beams are rectangular prisms and the wall just goes through them at a perfectly perpendicular angle. Thus the wall just deletes the beam sections that it crosses. After this process I have a row of beams on each side of the wall.
The only reason I do this is to save the time of selecting all those beams (forgot to group them doh!) and then clipping them twice in order to delete the section which is overlapped by the wall.
Other than such cases, where the brushes being carved are simple and the result of the carve is simple, I NEVER carve. Besides, the clip tool and vertex manipulation are much more versatile.

Aha! I thought I had already placed the updated wad in all the correct places, hmm must be losing my mind and forgetting things. I recopied and repasted it into my cstrike folder and voila it works as usual. This still doesn't explain why -wadinclude didn't work. I'll refresh hammer's copy of the wad as well and see if cs displays the textures without the wad in my cstrike folder

Several (but not all) of my custom textures do not show up ingame in my CS map, but rather as the pink and black checkerboard. I've tried solutions such as reduced texture size and renaming some of the textures differently (in Wally), then replacing the wad and retexturing the brush. None of these attempts worked. A 64 x 64 texture doesn't show up for example.

Does anyone know what could be causing this? Is it perhaps videocard/driver related, or might it have something to do with how i made/edited the textures and saved them into a wad in Wally?

A) He can chat later.

I deleted the brushes with the glassbrick texture and recreated them with the same texture. For some reason when I compile it now finds the texture
I did the same thing with the two other textures that couldn't be found but it didn't work. I've decided to just use different textures for the other two.

If you can make or find a larger texture (512x512) that fits the setting and looks good it should help make the repetition less noticable.

Using wally, I picked and put several textures from different wads together into a single wad to compile into the bsp with the -wadinclude command. I then ran a quick compile without VIS and RAD to make sure everything was in working order. If you look at the compile log it shows that a few textures were not found. I know that these textures are in the wad though and that their names do not contain any spaces or anything that would normally cause such problems. Any ideas why this is happening? The log came out with this:

** Executing...
** Command: Change Directory
** Parameters:

** Executing...
** Command: Copy File
** Parameters: "C:ProgrammeValve Hammer Editormapscs_edifice.map" "C:ProgrammeValveSteamSteamAppsgoliath179counter-strikecstrikemapscs_edifice.map"

** Executing...
** Command: C:PROGRA~1VALVEH~1ZHLThlcsg.exe
** Parameters: "C:ProgrammeValveSteamSteamAppsgoliath179counter-strikecstrikemapscs_edifice"

hlcsg v3.3 rel 3.3 prerelease (Oct 9 2005)
Zoner's Half-Life Compilation Tools -- Custom Build
Based on code modifications by Sean 'Zoner' Cavanaugh
Based on Valve's version, modified with permission.
Submit detailed bug reports to (amckern@yahoo.com)
--- BEGIN hlcsg ---
Command line: C:PROGRA~1VALVEH~1ZHLThlcsg.exe C:ProgrammeValveSteamSteamAppsgoliath179counter-strikecstrikemapscs_edifice
Entering C:ProgrammeValveSteamSteamAppsgoliath179counter-strikecstrikemapscs_edifice.map

Current hlcsg Settings
Name | Setting | Default
--------------------|-----------|------------------------
threads [ 2 ] [ Varies ]
verbose [ off ] [ off ]
log [ on ] [ on ]
developer [ 0 ] [ 0 ]
chart [ off ] [ off ]
estimate [ off ] [ off ]
max texture memory [ 4194304 ] [ 4194304 ]
max lighting memory [ 6291456 ] [ 6291456 ]
priority [ Normal ] [ Normal ]

noclip [ off ] [ off ]
null texture stripping[ on ] [ on ]
clipnode economy mode [ on ] [ on ]
clip hull type [ legacy ] [ legacy ]
onlyents [ off ] [ off ]
wadtextures [ on ] [ on ]
skyclip [ on ] [ on ]
hullfile [ None ] [ None ]
nullfile [ None ] [ None ]
min surface area [ 0.500 ] [ 0.500 ]
brush union threshold [ 0.000 ] [ 0.000 ]

Using mapfile wad configuration
Wadinclude list :
[zhlt.wad]

40 brushes (totalling 240 sides) discarded from clipping hulls
CreateBrush:
10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%... (0.36 seconds)
SetModelCenters:
10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%... (0.00 seconds)
CSGBrush:
10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%... (0.94 seconds)

Using Wadfile: programmevalve hammer editorwadcs_edifice.wad

• Contains 129 used textures, 97.73 percent of map (132 textures in wad)

Warning: ::FindTexture() texture WALL_CHAIRRAIL not found!
Warning: ::FindTexture() texture -0TNNL_FLR1B not found!
Warning: ::FindTexture() texture -4GLASSBRICK not found!
Warning: ::LoadLump() texture -0TNNL_FLR1B not found!
Warning: ::LoadLump() texture -4GLASSBRICK not found!
Warning: ::LoadLump() texture WALL_CHAIRRAIL not found!
Texture usage is at 1.96 mb (of 4.00 mb MAX)
1.73 seconds elapsed

--- END hlcsg ---

** Executing...
** Command: C:PROGRA~1VALVEH~1ZHLThlbsp.exe
** Parameters: "C:ProgrammeValveSteamSteamAppsgoliath179counter-strikecstrikemapscs_edifice"

hlbsp v3.3 rel 3.3 prerelease (Oct 9 2005)
Zoner's Half-Life Compilation Tools -- Custom Build
Based on code modifications by Sean 'Zoner' Cavanaugh
Based on Valve's version, modified with permission.
Submit detailed bug reports to (amckern@yahoo.com)
--- BEGIN hlbsp ---
Command line: C:PROGRA~1VALVEH~1ZHLThlbsp.exe C:ProgrammeValveSteamSteamAppsgoliath179counter-strikecstrikemapscs_edifice

Current hlbsp Settings
Name | Setting | Default
------------------|-----------|------------------------
threads [ 2 ] [ Varies ]
verbose [ off ] [ off ]
log [ on ] [ on ]
developer [ 0 ] [ 0 ]
chart [ off ] [ off ]
estimate [ off ] [ off ]
max texture memory [ 4194304 ] [ 4194304 ]
priority [ Normal ] [ Normal ]

noclip [ off ] [ off ]
nofill [ off ] [ off ]
noopt [ off ] [ off ]
null tex. stripping [ on ] [ on ]
notjunc [ off ] [ off ]
subdivide size [ 240 ] [ 240 ] (Min 64) (Max 512)
max node size [ 1024 ] [ 1024 ] (Min 64) (Max 8192)

SolidBSP [hull 0] 500...1000...1052 (0.09 seconds)
BSP generation successful, writing portal file 'C:ProgrammeValveSteamSteamAppsgoliath179counter-strikecstrikemapscs_edifice.prt'
SolidBSP [hull 1] 500...1000...1067 (0.09 seconds)
SolidBSP [hull 2] 500...978 (0.08 seconds)
SolidBSP [hull 3] 500...1000...1131 (0.09 seconds)
1.38 seconds elapsed

--- END hlbsp ---

** Executing...
** Command: C:PROGRA~1VALVEH~1ZHLThlbsp.exe
** Parameters: -wadinclude cs_edifice +map "cs_edifice"

Hmm... I wonder if there are any example maps in the vault that would solve your problem. But don't give up. I remember fiddling around with doors for a week or two before really understanding them.

I didn't think it was worth submitting a bsp into the unfinished maps section of the vault, so here's three screenies of what I've been working on recently: cs_edifice.

http://img365.imageshack.us/my.php?image=csedifice00036lt.png

http://img365.imageshack.us/my.php?image=csedifice00056mj.png

http://img365.imageshack.us/my.php?image=csedifice00029rs.png

Take a look at these and give me some constructive criticism.

Yeah uh, you did create those doors with origin brushes as rotation points right?

C) If they are in earshot, otherwise B).

Without that trigger you can only open the door from one side with the "use" key if the "one way" flag is checked.

Ok, just texture a brush with AAATRIGGER and turn it into a trigger_multiple in the area that you should stand in to trigger the door. Set its target to the name of the door. Make sure to set the delay before reset on the trigger to a positive number like 6. Also make sure to set the delay before close on the door to a positive number such as 4. The "one way" flag when checked will open the door then close it like most doors do. If unchecked, the door will swing either clockwise OR counterclockwise to the amount of degrees you specify. So you'd get a door that opens out of a room, then closes, then opens into a room, and closes. Dang, I hope this isn't confusing. Seriously though, there's a lot of tutorials on how to make these things work. Just find a thorough one.

http://www.twhl.co.za/tutorial.php?id=5

Covers both sliding and rotating doors.

You can use the arch tool, then make sure that EACH vertex is on the grid. Or you can construct the cylinder from scratch with wedges as BrattyLord suggested. There's a tutorial on hollow cylindrical construction.

http://www.twhl.co.za/tutorial.php?id=32

For a texture with transperent areas make sure to use pure blue in color index #255. I had that same exact problem using wally. The reason was that even though I was using pure blue (red:0 green:0 blue:255) it wasn't placed in color index #255 on wally's color palette (I think it was in #250 or something similar). When changed and flood filled color index #255 into the regions of the texture that were supposed to be transperent it still considered it color index #250 (or whatever the other index with pure blue was). Thus, you should only have index #255 be a pure blue while changing the other pure blue color index to something else such as slightly red (red:1 green:0 blue:255 [This is of course assuming you still want to have a nice blue which isn't transperent. Otherwise you can just change it to anything you want]) Hopefully that is understandable...

I've played the trenches a few times and it looks to be a very promising mod. The rifles in the beta version are a little on the "too accurate" side even though they are bolt action types. Getting headshots was simple even with high ping and lag. Great work on the map pepper. It captures the look and feel of a WWI battlefield. Btw, mods such as the trenches as well as the battlegrounds prove that Half-Life's engine can be pushed to a certain extent in order to allow wide open areas. However, one must sacrifice quite a bit of detail to avoid excessive r_speeds as most of the map is rendered at once.

Elon, I believe Saco is refering to the "tracer" streaks that you can see when being shot at and not the shells that fall to the ground. But come to think of it, I have no idea what exactly those tracers are. I imagine that they could be sprite based. If this is true then all you have to do is change the sprite.

The database of satillite photos is a compilation of several sources. This is why you get different qualities and resolutions for each region. If you live in the middle of nowhere chances are you won't be able to see your house or even the immediate area around it. However if you live near a landmark or large city etc. then you can probably get a pretty decent view of your house. My house in the U.S. was pretty easy to find and the resolution was superb. When I looked for my house here in Germany I could barely even make out the town I live near. So as you can see it all depends on your location.

I think cylinders are fine. Just vm the vertices to insure that they are on the grid. But you should definitely be carefull about how the cylinder is positioned because if it touches a wall, floor, etc. then it will certainly split it up into several pieces (use func_walls or position your cylinder one unit away from whatever it's touching). As for carving, I never use it due to the way it splits brushes up (simply disgusting). There are a few situations where the carve tool "could" be used to save time and would probably split brushes correctly, but it's much better take the time to clip/vertex manipulate your brushes and insure that all vertices and such are on the grid as well as used efficiently.

I believe there is a setting for the max model render distance or something similar under Hammer's options which can be adjusted so that it displays models rather than boxes at greater distances. This of course will only display the models if you are using the latest fgd as well as having the model files from the pak0.pak extracted into the correct directory as Muzzleflash said.

Remember though that it has to be a func_monsterclip because a clip brush alone will only restrict the player.

You can get the wanted fgd. at the Maverick site. Actually they use another site to host their downloads. http://www.3ddownloads.com/?directory=telefragged/maverickdev (maximize the window to see the list of downloads)

If that doesn't work then type "wanted half life western pack" into google to get to their site.

And you can also get another version of Wanted there which includes a singleplayer mode.

With controls or without? If not then set initial speed to zero and set the other speed setting to whatever you want it to be when u trigger the train. As far as I know, an initial speed setting with a value other than zero will make the train start when the map starts. Then like Daubster said, make sure the entity that triggers the train is set up correctly (i.e. the delay before trigger value).

Lebt hier jemand in der nahe von Wuerzburg?

Of course Source has 2D skyboxes. But er, I think that's hl1 in the screenshot Elon.

Hmm...

Nope. They can in fact be used with func_trains and func_tracktrains, etc.

I got the synchronization down nice and pretty by triggering the train body 5 hundreths of a second earlier than the windows. Not sure how the trains will behave on a different PC though.

Clip brushes wouldn't require 2 trains. The tracktrain entity allows them to by tied to it with normal brushes. But that's not the point. The train is supposed to have glass windows.

And making the windows larger does help a bit. However, when the train goes around a turn or gets trackswitched the glass gets a few degrees ahead into the turn, thus popping the windows sideways out of their frames. Maybe the train has to move at like 2 units per second for it to look right lol.

Yeah but then they don't even look like windows with the glass texture. Then they are just invisible.

I got everything to work with 2 trackautochanges and path_track sets for both trains. Funny though that the train body lags about 1 unit behind the windows when in motion. I compensated for it by moving the windows 1 unit backwards from their origin.This is probably why vALVE didn't use windows in their train.

I'm trying that right now and triggering both trackautochanges is somewhat iffy. Although i suppose a multi_manager might do the trick. Otherwise each train will need its own set of path_tracks.

Edit: the multi_manager doesn't seem to solve this either. Unless I'm not using it correctly it looks like each train requires its own set of the whole track sequence.

I have 2 tracktrains using a trackautochange at the same time (a train and its windows) the trackautochange only moves the train body (not the windows). Is the func_trackautochange entity only supposed to be used with one tracktrain?

Hmm, drivers maybe. Check windows update for new ones.

If you have to scale the brick texture to 2x, then it might be worth it to use wally and make a texture that looks right at that scale. Or you could create a larger texture that covers more space (not sure if that reduces polys though).

Infortunately I didn't even play Half-Life until around a little over a year ago. I think I got into mapping by finding Hammer or some mapping tutorials while searching for some help on a few puzzles in HL (lol).

I remember always wanting to create my own 3D enviornments. I had this ,cheap, $10 3D:CAD program which I picked up in the bargain bin at Office Depot. The dang thing kept crashing and such. So then I found out about Hammer. The first few times I got frustrated setting it up with all the correct files, so I quit for a while. Then I found some thorough tutorials somewhere and was on my way...

I think i may just go over to their site when i've got some spare time and spam the forums with some random German articles.

However, on second thought it's not worth my time. How about we do a clan bashing compo eh? And how about we stop blaming Germans and instead more specifically only their clan.