Forum posts

Breast working set up

NOICE

Yeah JeffMOD I've had similar dreams where my alarm didn't go off and it was something really important I had to get up for, and I was really stressed out and having an awful day. And then my alarm went off in real life and I woke up. Really freaky, like something out of a bad scifi movie. It's happened mainly when I've been worried I won't wake up on time, or my alarm will not wake me, or will malfunction.

I used Goldwave for audio editing back in the day, but it's pretty barebones by today's standards I'm sure.

To be fair, I think she overreacted.

Or they're misattributing her suicide.

So... not to be insensitive, but what the hell did they say that would provoke her to off herself?

I read The Mist before the movie was ever released, and I wouldn't call it "very different" from the theatrical version. I mean the plot and everything is the same, they changed some details, but you get the basic idea of everything that happened in the book. Even after reading it I'm not sure I'd relate it a whole lot to Half-Life. Sure it's got nasty tentacle monsters and stuff, which might have been the source of some inspiration, but 90% of the story has the main characters being trapped inside a grocery store. It's not what I'd call an actioner, it's mostly about interpersonal relations as people struggle to survive in a cramped area. A nearby military base is only hinted at, but the basic idea is that somebody there opened up a door to another dimension and now there are baddies flooding out. I guess you could call it Half-Life from another perspective, or something.

If you look around though, the whole setup is a pretty common thematic element in the science fiction/horror genre. Stephen King wrote another more recent book, From a Buick 8, which explored the idea of alternate dimensions in a way that I personally found more intriguing - and in some ways comparable to Half-Life.

Dozens? Probably thousands, actually...

Yeah, I forgot to mention that even with only an 8800GTS I could play everything on high, and it was amazingly smooth, no slowdown.

I think this thread needs to be renamed by a moderator or something... it hasn't been called Black Mesa: Source for ages.

people love HL not because it looks good, but because it looks bad.

This is so true. The only reason there's any interest in the engine anymore is nostalgia. It has no PRACTICAL value as a game engine, besides being retardedly easy to make simple, playable maps with, which is good for beginners (no messing around with props in external programs.)

I've played mods that are using souped-up versions of the Goldsrc engine, and their various various improvements feel out of place to say the least. There's no way you're going to get anything approaching a level of "realism" in the HL1 engine. Closest anybody's ever come is with Poke646 - Vendetta, which at its absolute best just looks like an average HL2 map. If you choose to use this aging engine in today's world, I think the best thing you can do fir it is to try and achieve an even visual style. Reflections and bumpmaps and such stick out like sore thumbs in such an outdated engine. I'm sure people have tacked these features onto Doom maps as well, but it gets to a point where it's just plain silly. It's just about the oldest engine available that you can still create reasonably convincing environments with (without having to squint and say "oh, I think that sprite's supposed to be a tree!"), but that's about it.

Even the Source engine from 2004 looks like junk by today's standards.

Shouldn't stop you from developing what you want tho. I make stuff all the time that you could reasonably say is an effort in futility. I'm dropping a built up motor into a car that was made in 1963. It's never even going to handle as well as a Toyota Camry made back in 1995. It's probably never going to be faster than a Mustang from 2005. It's all about the aesthetics. When you're laying on your deathbed, everything's pointless anyways. Might as well spend your life doing things that you enjoy.

You do if you're a ninja chick on steroids.

Nope, they were perfect IMO, X-Layer. I complain about the Marines because they're just supposed to be guys with guns (albeit well trained guys with guns), but the Assassins are like specially trained supersoldier ninjas with high-tech stealth suits or something crazy like that. They're supposed to be inhumanly quick.

Salmon, I think they wanted to give you the crowbar later because they didn't want you to off Barney there like you did in the original. They wanted him to play out his scripted sequence at the reception desk, and he wouldn't be able to do that if you got greedy for a gun. Just my take on it. Feels very modern tho, a bit "on-rails shooter" for my taste.

In Office Complex, I crawled up thru the ceiling after the big Vort fight knowing I would be able to get the jump on that turret and turn it off... and then I went out the vent, back down the stairs, and I'd locked out my two security guard buddies! There was no way to get back! Noooo!!! Never would have happened in HL, it's cool that they changed stuff up so I didn't TOTALLY have the upper hand. It really messes with your head when you're essentially going through the paces of the old game, and then suddenly something's changed.

This wasn't a huge issue, but it sure did waste a bunch of my time. Did anybody else notice that there wasn't 100% consistency on the appearance of doors that were openable? They are SUPPOSED to all have handles on them if they are to be used in any way, but I noticed on several occasions there were doors that had no handles at all, and they opened right up! If you consider the amazing amount of locked, inaccessible doors in this game, it's a bit overwhelming, because what I ended up doing was trying to open every single door in the game... and in Black Mesa, there's at least twice as many locked doors as unlocked ones. I've never seen another game do that, EVER, but I'm sure it's been done before. There's a locked door in just about every corridor. It's definitely realistic, though. Half-Life had this plausibility issue where it seemed like the player's path was the only route through the entire facility, which made absolutely no sense at all considering the enormity of it.

Here's something that'll really leave you scratching your chin: Who exactly set those tripmines in the Residue Processing conveyors, anyways? I've been working on that one for the last ten years.

Okay, petty complaint time, and spoilerz ahead.

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List of things cut from Surface Tension that disappointed me:

• Tentacle in desert was missing completely
• Scripted sequence with Grunt throwing C4 into pipe was gone
• You no longer have to blow open the bay door with the rocket turret
• There's no Alien Grunt shoving a Marine through the wall
• Two instances of Xen launchpads are were cut (WTF? There's few enough already)
• Large sequence is missing where you had to escort Barney to RetScan a door open for you
• They cut out an optional sequence where Barney could open a secret door
• Multiple buildings and areas were completely cut out towards the end of the chapter, before the Garg chase.

I know this is nitpicking in the grand scheme of things, and you can easily say that this minor stuff was made up for with all the expanded areas that were included, but dammit, Surface Tension was my FAVORITE CHAPTER in Half-Life, and it pains me to see all this completely memorable stuff mysteriously missing. I see why they cut out the escort missions, which I guess some people thought were annoying. That added a lot of playtime in the original in the form of backtracking. But this other stuff, it's all the cool little details that made the chapter so damn interesting. And yet, it's still REALLY hard to talk shit about a chapter that includes set-pieces like an the incredible dam, and the whole cliff battle. Because overall everything's accounted for and done better than I ever could have hoped for.

And it's pointless to complain now, but I could go on about the scripted sequences that were cut. There's actually a surprising amount, and it left me with the feeling that something was missing. It's still an incredible game in every way, but I'm telling you, I could have waited another dang year if it took them to include all the stuff they left out.

And onto another subject...

If you read on the Black Mesa forums, you will encounter another common sentiment that I share, and that is that the Marines are inhumanly skilled. There's essentially no way to sneak up on them, they recognize your presence from a mile away with you crouched behind a wall, their reaction time between noticing you and firing is approximately zero, and they can spray submachine gun fire at you from a concealed location a football field away with 100% accuracy. See it's not that the game is too hard - far from it. It's just silly how much tougher the Marines are than every single other enemy in the entire game, event the Alien Grunts.

What's even sillier is that the toughest battle in the ENTIRE GAME does not happen towards the end, it's smack dab in the middle of it at the end of Questionable Ethics of all places. Now that's just plain old bad pacing. Aren't games supposed to get progressively harder as they go on, at a fairly steady rate? The original difficulty ramp was perfect in this sense, but they had to go messing with the game mechanics. I shouldn't have to be switching from normal to easy mode every time I encounter a few marines to compensate for poor enemy balancing, but that's what I was doing. And on Easy mode, EVERYTHING is too easy! sigh

And of course, with Xen missing, I found the end to be less of a cliffhanger, and more of an anticlimax than anything. It's gonna suck waiting another year or who knows how long for them to get that together.

Also, it has to be said: With the numerous crashes, missing Xen chapters, and everything else, the first play-through felt a BIT like a well polished, slyly concealed public beta. I feel like maybe that's how it should have been announced, but it would have completely stolen their thunder. Because for a game of this immense magnitude, it is now encountering all the first-day release bugs of any AAA PC title, the only difference is they didn't have a multimillion dollar budget for beta testers.

Finished it. The game crashed somewhere in the range of 5-8 times total, LOL,

I have a hard time believing there's that much difference in quality when these things are being pumped out of the same Chinese factories with different labels on them in many instances.

Yeah, you can actually play FPS games with them. Can't say I feel the same about touchpads....

I actually got surprisingly far with one of those IBM "nipple" pointers, back when I had my Thinkpad. But it's amazing how much dexterity you need just to create really simple stuff.

on a side note, have you ever tried mapping with a laptop touch-pad instead of a mouse? It's an absolute nightmare.

I just have a netbook for the rare occasions I travel, and a desktop for everything else. I still can't see why I'd ever want a full-size laptop. They're kind of a pain-in-the-ass when you're used to the immense luxury of truly full size keyboards and huge screens, not to mention infinite expandability. So much more ergonomic too.

tbh couldn't give a shit if they never released xen, all of my favourite HL1 memories are in black mesa.

See, I feel like everyone thinks this except me... But there was some badass stuff in Xen. Half-Life wouldn't be the same without a giant testicle spider.

I think it's kinda cool they're not releasing Xen now. Leaves us more to look forward to.

However, it was one of those parts that I was looking forward to seeing revised, simply to see what they did with it to improve on it. It almost won't feel right to have to play the game in two parts, it's gonna totally fuck up the pacing to have to wait months or years to play the last section of the game.

I almost wouldn't mind if they just threw together a shortened version of the Xen episodes and just called it a day. It wasn't the most exciting part of the game, but even though people seem to hate it I thought the environment was really cool and creepy. The jumping could get frustrating, but the level design was pretty innovative nonetheless. I just love how totally inhuman it all felt. Read Stephen King's "From a Buick 8", and that alternate universe is exactly my vision of what Xen is supposed to be.

My idea really isn't as resource-heavy as you might think.... at least, depending on the application. If we knew EXACTLY the setting this was meant to be used in, we might be able to come up with a suitable alternative.

Bruce, I don't think that's gonna work at all... { textures don't have any semi-transparent areas in them at all. The pixels are either "on" or "off". Texture filtering doesn't change that.

You can POSSIBLY use some kind of a dithering effect with a transparency texture to do something similar, although it would probably look like crap.

The best thing you can do is actually layer up a whole bunch of brushes that are textured pure black, and set them each to an EXTREMELY low visibility. You can create a gradient effect if you have enough of them, to the point where you can barely make out the edges of each individual brush. Better yet, this same effect is used with non-solid brushes to create pure black tunnels and such that you can walk thru without actually being able to see the other side.

DiscoStu, I'm not sure there's any way to put supports or girders in there without totally ruining the whole feel of the place anyway... unless you went with overhead rails hanging down from the ceiling, that COULD be cool.

I love the way the rails are just FLOATING there unsupported like they were in the original game... hooray, physics.

My bad.

Seriously though, this is really disheartening news. I don't know where I'd go anymore if I wanted to find actual reviews of HL1 mods. I mean most of them can be looked up on ModDB, but frankly they don't have any kind of dedicated HL SP community. Ten Four Maps stopped reviewing mods LONG ago, although last i checked they're still being hosted at least.

Hopefully Phillip will see the response of the community and realize what a giant mistake he made in blocking all access to the site... although I'm sure he's predicted our response.

The confusion is in you and cstriker having indistinguishable avatars.

I never asked for this.

What a shame.

Or computers.

I pay 15 bucks a month for my Net10 plan. They give me... I wanna say... 200 minutes a month for that price. It's just talk+text though, no data. I love it, since I basically never use my phone, and texting does not interest me. It's just a regular old flip phone, cost me about 20 bucks outright and I'm not locked into a plan.

I've never had the inclination to use the internet on-the-go. If I want to do that, I can just sit down at my desktop.

Especially since the room probably has like 400wpolys to begin with.

I hope she wiped.

I'm actually a fan of skewing brushes myself. It's what Valve did for rock formations. Worked pretty gud for them.

Honestly, it reminds me of the UNATCO building from DX for some reason...

I don't want to be a debbie downer but that water looks sooooooo out of place next to standard-scaled textures and low polygon maps. You'd really have to build your maps specifically around this if you wanted it to look right.

The vending machine might not be out of place, I just can't tell what kind of overall environment is going on here. I don't know what's beyond those doors, so I can't make a call like that. It might just be a rest area within a more industrial setting. I've no idea. But it does look odd there, and it's way too thin. You shouldn't back it up to a staircase with the top half of the backside exposed like that. It looks like a meaningless prefab totally just thrown in there because you needed to liven up the area. If you decide that it actually belongs in its current setting, then build a recess into one of the nearby walls and house it in there along with maybe a trashcan and shit like that so it doesn't look like it fell out of the sky.

I also recommend spicing up the cradle structures that those tanks are resting in. They look kinda odd and blocky right now. But then again, that might fall in line with the rest of the architecture if you're shooting for a very Half-Life-esque feel.

and collapse is right, you need light fixtures even if there's no light emitting from them. I can't think of a single situation where a room would be left intentionally unlit in a facility like that.

I'd say you need more signage and little superfluous details like that (fire extinguishers, alarms etc.) And vents. I love me some vents. Floor drains never hurt either.

The thing is, I don't feel that a little room like this is all that deserving of intense critical analysis, since it will probably only be seen by the player for a matter of seconds as they walk through it. It's not the kind of major area I'd stress about. But aside from the base architecture it is kinda bland at the moment.

EDIT: Looking at the screenshots, a more overall criticism I can give of the architecture in The Core is that it is overwhelmingly square. Refreshingly, this room doesn't suffer from that, but most everything on the ModDB page is just so... boxy, clean cut. Like you took an empty box and then added a bunch of pretty details to it, but it's still just a dressed up box. Very realistic, I suppose. But the eye needs more variation. I can only assume that what you have up there is not an accurate representation of the mod as a whole, but more likely a lot of pictures of a few select areas and that's just the architectural style you were going for there. But if it is, well, you might want to change things up.

That is one helluva exclusive club. Sounds like you have to be a legitimate genius to get hired there.

Seriously, that shit is so far out of my league. Not in this lifetime. Not even in the next. Not if I'd continued pursuing game design.

Great. Now do Hyrule Field.

Do it Resident Evil style with still camera views that change from shot to shot. Nobody else has done this before that I know of. And you don't need any special coding. aiming would be kind of a bitch though, you might have to lock the up and down movement for it to really work.

On the plus side, you could pack every scene with incredible amounts of detail and not have to worry about slowdown, since you control exactly what is on screen at all times.

burn the witch

I hope not, considering that what it would amount to is basically an off-the-shelf PC with Steam library access and nothing else, albeit optimized for a singular purpose. I don't see the advantage to that... like, at all. If I wanted to do that I could just plug an inexpensive computer into a TV. It's the kind of cheap corporate ploy that I don't associate with Valve, who have a pretty solid history of innovation.

Sure, there's advantages to a streamlined experience, but the end result is still nothing like a proprietary console - if they're going to adapt a store full of PC games, they're all going to be keyboard-mouse deals primarily. That doesn't really hold up on the couch,last I checked. Also, all the inconveniences of PC gaming, both perceived and real, would still manifest themselves in such a system if it were to play straight up PC games.

I don't remember.

How did you know that they were giving out beta keys to begin with? I don't keep up with Valve news.

Not to be an ungrateful bastard, but do I have to thank you at all?

The End.

BUT THEN DIMBARK WOULDN'T BE ABLE TO REPLY TO HIS OWN THREAD!!!!!

I got my F3 for 60-something a while back, doubt I'll be replacing it in the next four years unless it fails. Awww yeah.

Jesus ninja, don't you have an AA meeting you're supposed to be at or something?

Of course NineTnine, there was no time for TWHL with all that going on!

The story is not very complicated

Pffffffff! I don't want to know what your idea of a complicated story is!

I'm going to try to say this without being condescending or discouraging, because I have a real problem with that.

Start over from the beginning. What was the first thing that came to your mind when you got the idea to make this mod? What was the INSPIRATION behind it, the main IDEA? What was it that you wanted to achieve with this mod? Think about it hard, because that's what it boils down too. You need this main idea, because you will find that the precise story, the sequence of events that take place, and their details... well, they aren't really that important when you begin, if you have an IDEA that's truly compelling. The details can be modified, and they should be easily modifiable around this main idea. I'd suggest doing this to avoid getting trapped when you're mapping. Get stuck? Don't like a chapter/section? Bored of it? Ditch it, think up something else. Mapping around your writing is VERY troublesome. Writing around your mapping, well, not so much.

Think about the chapters of Half-Life. Would it matter if On a Rail and Power Up were switched? Would it matter if Residue Processing simply didn't exist? Well, in terms of pacing and coherence, maybe, but the STORY of Half-Life would remain unchanged. That's because the game was not dependent on precise plot details. That's a good thing, because too many all-important, game-changing details in an action FPS bog the player down, majorly. Furthermore, the game was not DRIVEN by these precise plot details either. The player had one major reason to keep going - he was trying to escape.

That was the beauty of it. You could enjoy the game without paying too close attention to the details. They were there for you if you wanted, and the game invited you to be sucked into the story, but you weren't required to understand it to have a comprehensive, enjoyable game.

Thing is, words are so deceptively easy to put down. They're addictive. You can write for a few minutes and come up with a whole new chapter easily. Now try translating that into actual playable material. you'll be at it for months, easily, just to create a section that took mere seconds of thought. Don't get bogged down in that. Rigid, unchangeable storylines must be the death of so many mods... I'd implore you to first understand your main idea, or main theme that you REALLY REALLY LIKE, and stick with that. Then, play fill in the blanks, and write as much as you want. If an idea doesn't make sense at one time, write it down anyway. Maybe you can fit it in somewhere later, who knows? But don't write yourself into a corner to start with, because you're really going to regret it later, when you're into it four or five months, working on your fourth or fifth map, and you realize you're bored of the story and it's become a chore to work on. That's when you're going to wish you could mix things up and map whatever comes to mind.