Forum posts

I'd like to have a try at this too once I finish with all the exams in February.
Why don't we make this a community project? Create one big map/mod that has "rooms" (not necessarily enclosed space, see how Talos has its levels), each "room" being a demonstration for one tutorial assigned to somebody( I didn't think this through, but you guys can, I'm in a hurry). Then the video tutorials could be linked to each "room", where the author explained how everything was created.

Sounds a lot like TWHL:Rooms, only for tutorials :).

You just got Archie burned.

A thousand times yes.

Terminal startup complete...
Initializing TWHL library assistant...
Done.

! 50 6f 73 73 69 62 6c 65 20 73 70 6f 69 6c 65 72 73 20 61 6c 65 72 74 21 !

45 76 65 72 79 62 6f 64 79 20 68 61 73 20 74 68 61 74 20 62 6f 6f 6b 2c 20 74 68 61 74 20 66 69 6c 6d 2c 20 74 68 61 74 20 67 61 6d 65 20 74 68 61 74 20 6a 75 73 74 20 63 6c 69 63 6b 73 20 77 69 74 68 20 74 68 65 69 72 20 6d 69 6e 64 20 61 6e 64 20 6f 6e 65 20 63 61 6e 20 6e 6f 74 20 70 75 74 20 74 68 65 20 62 6f 6f 6b 20 64 6f 77 6e 2c 20 63 61 6e 20 6e 6f 74 20 73 74 6f 70 20 74 68 65 20 66 69 6c 6d 20 6f 72 20 63 61 6e 6e 6f 74 20 65 78 69 74 20 74 68 65 20 67 61 6d 65 2e

They just leave you in awe and give you great insights into how the world works.There are 73 6f 20 6d 61 6e 79 20 63 75 6c 74 75 72 61 6c 2c 20 70 68 69 6c 6f 73 6f 70 68 69 63 61 6c 20 61 6e 64 20 72 65 6c 69 67 69 6f 75 73 references that 65 76 65 6e 20 69 66 20 74 68 65 79 20 61 72 65 6e 27 74 20 64 69 72 65 63 74 20 72 65 66 65 72 65 6e 63 65 73 2c 20 49 20 63 6f 75 6c 64 20 73 74 69 6c 6c 20 73 65 65 20 69 64 65 61 73 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 66 69 6c 6d 73 20 49 20 77 61 74 63 68 65 64 20 72 65 63 65 6e 74 6c 79 20 6c 69 6b 65 Cloud Atlas or A dangerous method.
I found it funny that the days before I started playing 54 68 65 20 70 72 69 6e 63 69 70 6c 65 20 6f 66 20 54 61 6c 6f 73 I was reading something about existentialism.

Here's where it really blew my mind: 68 74 74 70 3a 2f 2f 69 2e 69 6d 67 75 72 2e 63 6f 6d 2f 59 74 36 77 74 76 56 2e 6a 70 67

Took me about 20 hours to finish it I think.

Everybody is over-reacting with Windows 8. I've used it without it bothering me in the most diverse tasks: gaming, engineering, programming, video and photo editing.
It was just the start menu. That's all.

10 is, for the most part, exactly what we wanted - Win7, but far faster under the bonnet.

I think a lot of people now think in these terms, without realizing what a piece of spyware Windows 10 is. Not that the previous versions didn't use some kind of telemetry, but Windows 10 is off the charts. I'm still considering whether I should upgrade to it or not, although there already guides on turning off most of the telemetry settings(even dedicated programs), not feeling comfy yet.

This is the result of us taking technology for granted. But I guess that's what people too lazy to inform themselves deserve. And it's hard not being skeptical once you realize all this... unless you're a maniac you can't really know everything that's happening with the software you use.

Of course, a question remains: should I care if a robot directly sees my activity on my computer? Should I care if an unknown person could potentially gain access to my files because of all these new data being generated and sent to microsoft servers? I don't know, should I?

I'm just sad thinking of a future where we have completely sacrificed our privacy while glorifying convenience.

It is an "after", after I soldered the chip. The next were the pins.
I used some crocodile helping hands( don't know the exact name), that kind of thing that also has a magnifying lens attached.

Yes I did, but I think I was lucky a bit. I constantly have to clean the tip though if I want such results. Here's a macro shot of soldering in action:I used GifCam to capture this from the video.

Soldering job.

Off the shelf: Laravel. It's far too much work to try and maintain your own framework, that's why the last attempt at TWHL4 failed.

Interesting, I've heard about this before, but then the only PHP I've ever done was a simple comment system for a school project back in 2012. I now honestly don't know how to write a line in PHP.
Right now I use Java Spring at work, it's a huge framework for backends. You can literally do anything your ass commands(ex: PDF generation) once you've got data in the controllers. And in many cases you get one-stop solutions on Stackoverflow.

Is that the case too with Laravel? I suppose it runs on an apache server, just like regular php scripts? I see it has a dependency manager, called "Composer", which makes me think of Maven or Gradle.
It's a bit offtopic, but I'm interested. I'd love to pick up a new backend framework if its ecosystem is less constrained by commercial applications ( for Spring, you can use the Eclipse IDE, but it's a bit more shitty than IntelliJ which you have to pay for).

Hah, not in a 10^100 years, this site.

Where can you get this?

there has to be a forsaken hard disk in this world that has that map

Only if you eat marinated herrings.

I know this could get boring very fast, but I always wanted to try Half-Life Rally with someone.

Yeah I'm throwing this here since it's apparently not very off-topic.

Still no TWHL tournament moment has ever surpassed this.

That thing is ancient.
If we ever meet I'll force you to eat marinated herring. Then you have my permission to die.

I'm happy with any game. I usually just show up for the banter.

Oh all right. So when do we play some Starcraft 2?

I'd really want to participate in a TWHL project from time to time, I'm really sorry I missed out on so many and will pass this one too, but I just can't find time, even for taking a shit on some days(honestly). Which begs the question Urby: how can a man with a family spare so much of his time for the community?
Is the clock running slower at Greenwich?

That is quite a detailed outdoor for the goldsource engine. Let's see how this turns out!

I posted this and went for a jog. Something was constantly itching my brain.
Now I know what it was!

The stalkers were a little bit more to the left. In the middle there were just some snipers.

The stalkers...They patrol.

That right there is a hazard course level puzzle

Yeah rufee that's why I'm planning on buying laptop purely as a linux machine, so I don't have to deal with the hassle of dual-booting and what not.
I'm looking for some sturdy 12 inchers or around that, 5-6 year olds or more. The prices are still high for how old they are and I'm very reluctant to buy(at least in my country).
Examples include Lenovo X200, Lenovo X61, dell D620/630, Hp workstations or probooks. I've looked into netbooks as well, as that's what attracts me more but I've figured out that people simply sell those things for much more than they're worth( 80$-100$ for models from 2008-2010? yeah right). For the same money you can get stuff from older generations that, while less power efficient, at least have some computing power.

From DiscoStu's journal, Penguinboy says:
TL;DR at the end

MS are just aggressively pushing their new product so they can try to monetise using their app store and Microsoft account integration, plus they want to avoid people getting "stuck" on an ancient version, like what happened with XP. Take off the tinfoil hat, or just switch to Linux already and stop with the paranoid conspiracy theories.

Have you seen a recent movie, Kingsman Secret Service? (spoilers alert!!) Of course, that is a comedy, but there Valentine offers a free service to all users, which is actually a disguise for a weapon of mass murder with the intent of saving the Earth...
Similarly, a story with the Genisys in the new Terminator movie. An operating system that everyone is hyped about but it's actually malicious.

That is clearly fiction, but how fast can parts of this satire become a fact? Since things that are programmed evolve much quicker than laws can be passed to put in place some reasonable privacy limits, one has to be more prudent with these things. Consider the fact that most of the privacy violating processes happen behind the scene, thus are technicalities which outwit most users.
People tend to reside in on of two opposite opinion camps: the paranoid, and the accepting. I believe we need to analyze the situation on a more profound level, and try to understand the consequences.
What is the consequence of having a corporation creep inside your digital home, little by little? No harms are apparent in the present, but what can it lead to?
I deeply understand that the future only represents an even more connected world, that the dawn of IoT means that devices we couldn't think of having a digital utility will in the near future connect to the internet. Windows might evolve into being a truly universal operating system by then, a digital hub for all of your house( this is quite plausible, they have a stripped down Windows 10 OS for prototyping platforms such as Intel Galileo).

In such a world, you'd be crazy to live by the standards of your grandparents. Companies offering modern services know this, and although humans build corporations, I always had the impression that in a capitalist world they don't give a shit about being human. They will chase profit by any means.

Having at the tip of your finger as much informations and statistics as possible of people will grant future companies the power of fine-tuning their products to a plethora of target audiences. This possible future is an attractor, and people managing big companies will surely gravitate towards ideas, concepts and actions which will increase the profits.

As far as I'm concerned, Windows 10 is a good operating system as long as I disable all the privacy violating crap. You really don't need an OS that creeps so much into your digital home. There are specialized services which can do that for you, such as Facebook. But that is a CHOICE! Operating systems are a necessity, but we see it become a service before our eyes. And if that's how the future is supposed to be, then at least we should know EXACTLY what data is transmitted between our digital home and a corporation.

TL;DR :

Windows 10 is probably a great OS. What is bad is its philosophy of hiding from the unwitting the information it collects and transmits. The user should have complete control and know EXACTLY of what leaves and enters his digital home.

Scott is 8 years old?!

Oh goodness how time flies. He's so lucky to have a paparazzi dad after his butt. He's gonna thank you later (or file privacy complaints :walter:).

After counting a dozen drives from Archie's screenshot, this is how I imagine hisroom.

How did you take the 2nd last, Archie?

Baby hen! I mean, chicken!

Windows 10 has major privacy issues that you must be attentive with. It's really all over the internet, not going to detail here.
Until things calm down and every minor aspect about how Microsoft put their tentacles in your system, I'm not going to upgrade it. I already read guides and things seem straight forward actually.
Leaving those things aside, afaik, Windows 10 is the best-performing Windows yet.

Evening of 1st July(today)?

The Dawn spacecraft is now orbiting Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt. It is currently at a higher altitude, and just returned some pictures that show in more detail, albeit not enough to guess what it is, the mysterious bright white spots on Ceres's surface.
Not even NASA is sure what's happening, they made a page where you can cast a vote on whatever you think that white spot is,here.
Dawn will progressively be taking photos at lower and lower orbits, and by autumn I expect we should know what that thing is.

The New Horizons probe has been in flight toward its main destination since 2006. Even though now it's very close to Pluto, its distance from it only let's us see 2 pixelated spheres in space. But the Pluto flyby is happening in July, and for the first time in history we'll have pictures taken of the plutonian surface and some of its satellites. After that it will continue exploring the Kuiper Belt, possibly sending image of KBOs(Kuiper Belt Objects). Sadly, because of its trajectory and lack of fuel, it won't perform a flyby of Eris, a Kuiper Belt dwarf planet like Pluto.

Oh and as a bonus, another big thing in space exploration happening is the Rosettamission, launched in 2004 by ESA, which arrived at its destination(comet "67P") in 2014, successfully deployed its lander named Philae, which somewhat successfully landed. I said somewhat because it bounced off a couple of times and landed in an area without sun light, but it had enough batteries to carry its scientific duties. It will awake in a couple of months when the comet will be close enough to the sun.

Saturn? Pluto and Ceres are the hot topics now my friends!

See, I'm genuine, I even liked your image on facebook.

Hello RotatorSplint! Nice to see you back.

For me, college is eating my time right now. Also job hunting.

Relevant: 0:53 - 1:03

I'm posting the journal here and deleting it, didn't notice the thread last night:

In light of the current shitstorm involving mods that can be bought on the Steam Workshop( brendanmint's linked image in the shoutbox explains better), I'd like to address a few points, some of them of interest to this community:

1 - I'm a fan of Valve and always thought they're a company that makes calculated moves. This time something feels off, as a donation model (out of which Valve or a company which uses the Steam distribution platform could get its share) seemed much more logical, at least from the point of view of the modders, right? Also, what the heck is that 25% revenue share? That's crap.

2 - Honestly I don't really care about Valve's monetization politics, but one should be more attentive to the subtle details of an emerging phenomenon. I could easily draw a parallel here with what's happened since PlanetPhilip came here and uploaded some of our maps to his site. Some of the members maps have long been uploaded on his site before he started the thread a few weeks ago, asking for maps. He even said somewhere(IIRC) that if the map had no copyright notices in the description he automatically presumed them to be... free to redistribute.
Of course, PlanetPhilip's actions have had only a positive impact, since all the maps and member names link back to TWHL, so no actual harm, only more exposure, which is nice.
My point is that Steam won't stop here. I suspect they will extend this to a lot of other moddable games, and other distribution platforms or even modding sites might follow this trend. And there will be scumbags, as Penguinboy put it, who will try to profit from the free work of others.

3 - Drawing conclusions from the points above, I would suggest that in the next iteration of TWHL an optional copyright/usage rights notification should be added to each map page. I know this a bit redundant since it can be easily added as text in the description, but a lot of mappers are lazy or perhaps, those usage rights will be hidden in a wall of text.

I don't know if this is a good suggestion or not, but I know this community will go on and maybe great projects and different tools/assets will spawn from it. The community should be protective and specific about what it lets out in the world.

You, sir, are a master of doodads.

Thanks a million for this!

Can't wait to see that map Instant Mix. Maybe post a video with that doodad?

Displacement Frenzy:Just subdividing such amounts of displacements takes almost as long as compiling a small map :D.

But Source AI is much more configurable.

I absolutely love your photos Elliot. You're like a master of the macro world.
Each macro shot of yours seems to be meticulously fine-tuned, and has an interesting atmosphere. I've been using one of your photos in my wallpaper-shuffle folder for over a year now.

*checks planetphilip

wow, it's on the site!
there are screenshots!

There's a playthrough!
There are reviews!

Haha, I got that unique fuzzy feeling when I see others playing it. Unfortunately it was a rushed map( done in about a week), and most of the members there don't know that so they judge accordingly. I don't feel bad about that,such good criticism helps you discover your weaknesses. The map has those weird lines and missing textures because it also uses ep1 content.

Another question, I'm currently working on something. You said:

I don't currently cover upcoming stuff on the site.

Do you mean by that that you don't release "anticipatory" content, or that you curate content?
Do be clearer, can members submit content there? For example I'd almost always like to have a link back to TWHL if I post maps there, since this is my home community.

If you ever feel the need for a 2nd reviewer you might want to reach to Archie. He's great at making videos reviewing stuff, has all these cinematic skills and such.

Well, I'd post Kleiner's Secret Lab, but it was a "secret santa" gift for DiscoStu, one of our colleagues. It's also kinda short in duration, has incredibly condensed gameplay, has some obscure puzzles and might be annoying with all those manhacks.

Anyway, I've put that for you to say if that's a "not one like this".

What about upcoming releases?

Yep, I'm using it.

le teaser:I have now been working on this 14 hours str8.

It's a WIP :P. [EDIT] I hate this. Half-way done and 42 minutes a compile.

Now it works! Thanks, man.

Well, Valve used a relay too. I initially didn't use one, but I thought there might be a bug with my initial setup.

I use a trigger_multiple to trigger a scripted_sequence which brings alyx in front of a wall, makes her do an animation and then on the beginning of the sequence triggers the relay.
The relay triggers the env_alyxemp, parenting it to alyx, then after 0.2sec parenting it to Alyx's righthand attachment. After that, it starts a discharge with a parameter of 0.5, then a discharge at a delay of 0.6 from the discharge trigger.
Then it stops it after 3 seconds.

Hey guys, I'm having a bit of a problem with the env_alyxemp entity. I'm recreating that sequence where alyx is shooting her emp gun at a button, but I can't seem to turn off the effect afterwards.

It gives me this error:I don't understand, the rest of the outputs work. The "Stop" input of the env_alyxemp gives this error though. I decompiled a hl2 map and they do it the same.

What's happening here?

The maps were a bit weird to me but I learned them fast, there were a couple of clear confrontation spots where all the funny action happened.

It was really nice and I hope we do this again.
I was a little disappointing with the teamspeak server, felt a bit left out.

Welcome to this warm community!

When I started making photos, I believe in 2010 when I got my first camera, dedicated camera equipment was still miles away from what you could find integrated in mobile phones. But now, there are pocket cameras that arguably perform worse than a camera on an S3 phone, which is 3 years old already. Even if their performance is marginally better, their price and practicability doesn't justify buying them.
Bridge cameras, the kind that I have, unfortunately use the same shitty small sensor so they only compensate through more professional features and better lenses, better zoom.
So the only kind of camera used for what you could call "Photography" is the DSLR. Even here prices, the simplification of them and introduction of lots of "autos" has made them accessible to a large public.

Photography isn't what it used to be. 50 years ago photography was truly an art and you'd get respect for doing that. Now anyone can be a photographer. You just need some money, and a one month crash course, or even less. Heck, you only need a good phone.

The only thing that, I think, separates amateurs from professionals is experience and dedication. I no longer consider myself a photographer as I used to in high-school. I am also appalled by the fact that anyone can make a mindless photo and call it photography, and that could apply to me too when I don't know so...

Or perhaps I'm just confused about this art where nobody makes the slightest effort anymore.

Don't get me wrong, this is just some rant. I still see magnificent photos, and on this thread too. I just consider true photography an exquisite art suited for the adventurous, the enduring and the risk-takers. Qualities that not all photographers have, especially zillion wedding&events photographers(but that's business, not art...).

The sky is over