Forum posts

I have an upcoming release that really should have been put out years ago.

And here it is.

Not the best thing ever, but what do you expect from someone with 5 years less experience than me working alone?

Looking forward to seeing how it turns out!

Short answer: No. Especially with things like cylinders or spheres. Doing so will cause unpredictable errors.

Long answer:
Having brush-based objects inside of each other will cause the engine to clip the solids when the map is compiled, so that anything "inside" the shapes is gone and the faces will be cut. Having complex shapes inside of each other like in the above picture will cause these cuts to be somewhat unpredictable and very messy - and due to rounding errors, you're likely to have "holes" in the objects and collision errors that will get you stuck. You can stop this clipping by making some of the spheres a func_detail so they don't clip with "regular" world brushes, but func_details clip with each other as well, so you'll want to make sure they don't overlap.

Models can overlap like that without causing errors, so if you want a shape like that, you might want to look into converting it into a model instead.

^
I liked it, but it was objectively terrible.
Like the Super Mario Bros. Movie.

Don't judge too harshly, done literally 20 mins before rushing out to our regular pub quiz and I only had one reflector.

Looks fine where I'm standing.

Valve is still Valve and not EA.
Today is a good day.

Oh, my mistake. Must have been thinking of trademarks/patents.

For starters, we never filed for copyright.
Also we're using Valve's engine, content, and IP, so filing for copyright would be in a legal grey-area at best.

Is funny because true.

It always made me kind of sad how they put so much effort into making the AI in Half-Life smart and have all these behaviors, but then never got a good chance to utilize most of it.
But I guess they learned their lesson about that.

You could either put a light (point light, that is) underneath the brush with the same colour values as the light_spot but with less brightness, or turn the texture of the light brush into a texture light, which would remove the need for the light_spot as well.
You can modify/use lights.rad as the tutorial states, or add an info_texlights (might not be in your FGD, but should still work with modern compile tools) with the name of the light texture and the colour/brightness value as entries.

This is really good timing, as I have an upcoming release that really should have been put out years ago.
Once I package it up and put it in the wild, I'll get back to you.

Urby, you three take all the time you need. No rush for this when there's more important things going on.

What? Won't it be released today? cry -

These things take time. Especially under current circumstances.

Not sure if this is was your problem, but for it to work I'm fairly certain it also has to be prefixed with { - I assumed it was just a convention when I was making my tower map (blame poor memory on that) and it didn't work, until I renamed it.

I can also confirm any colour will work, since I've seen and worked with plenty of custom texture sets that used pink, green, etc as a marker for 255.

Ohhhh Yes.
Also, I guess Urby releasing part 1 of the highlights means I lost the release race.
C42, still coming eventually!

Haha, I remember those new weapons. They were fun to shoot.
I wish we had all gotten together and actually made Home into a mod with maps. Made it a super TWHL collaboration or something.

Well he did end up playing the entire tournament, so I think that post has been invalidated.
Also, TJB, I'll get back to you once I've made a decision.

I'll go with JeffMOD, because I managed to kick his ass. Sometimes. Occasionally. At one point.

Thank you sir, for your generosity.
Also bullets.

Good game everyone! Had a blast!

Huh. Must have been a client error on my end.
The connect button was greyed out in the server browser, but it's not anymore - I just connected to the server to make sure.
I assumed the 'secure' tag meant it was password protected, but now that I think about it, it probably just means VAC.

The server is currently secure and I can't connect to it.

Yes please. :3

-Autosniper kills grant you 0 tickets

Guess I'll have to go plan B early, then. Which against humans will probably get me killed.

I have two "main" character archetypes.

Jeff
Alignment - Neutral Good [Generally Neutral, anyway]
Basically me. I try to do what's best for the people around me, don't generally steal, and only ever murder people if I feel they really, really deserve it. Except for my first playthrough of Fallout 3 where I murdered silver and then instantly felt extremely disgusted with myself and guilty. (Though not enough to load a previous save - I should get back into the non-habit of doing that.) This sometimes leads to situations like getting the Ghouls in west DC to peacefully move into Tenpenny tower, and then having to bring justice to them later on when they slaughter everyone. Whoops.
I tend to favour heavy armour, conventional ranged weapons, and a wee bit of stealth.

[Name Not Consistent
Chaotic Evil
Female, usually redhead, psychopathic. She doesn't always murder people, but when she does, it's usually because she felt like it, rather than a legitimate reason. Stealing is, of course, always an option, as is trickery. Often employs stealth, unless she's making a ruckus for the sheer fun of it. May or may not side with the "bad guys" when the option is given.

Nick
Lawful Good(ish)
This isn't a standard character by any means, but I like to tell the story.
Nick (named after the recently-transferred CSI character, because Vegas) was my attempt at a cowboy build in New Vegas, as something new do try. I was also trying some new mods to make things a bit less forgiving. The net result of this was that shortly after passing through Primm, I was ambushed by some powder gangers, blown the heck up, and, due to lack of doctor's bags in my inventory or anywhere between Primm and there, I had to limp, crying and bleeding, with my right arm busted up, the entire way through Nipton into Novac.
Was quite invigorating, and also a very large relief when I finally got to Novac's quack doctor to set my broken bones.
On subsequent a playthrough with my "Me" character, I also had a mod that adds lens overlay effects while wearing headgear, which had the effect of me having to go on a desperate search through various ruins for the first 4 hours of the game or so to find parts to repair my cracked prescription lenses so I could actually goddamn see. I really like experiences like that in my games - small, self generated quests made by various game systems interacting together in a way that nobody explicitly intended.

Thanks. First time I've been told that.

Hopefully my floor is somewhat as good. ^_^

Just popped you an email with my entry. Cheers!

I just looked it up, and apparently it was the younger brother of one of Ken Birdwell's friends, who he recalled the work of years afterwards when they were making the game.
That brother was Ted Backman.

Just gotta re-do the nodes and do a little bit more polish.

The first section of the music you used in the background for that announcement video makes me keep flipping between "This baseline is from the Halo Theme" and "This baseline is from Zanzibar Breeze from Metal Gear 2"

You know a song is good when it reminds you of multiple other good songs simultaneously. Or maybe I'm just crazy about the similarities and it's just good.

Extra time means I can add extra things!
Now if I can only think of extra things!

Harry S. Robbins, of course.
"I beleive the administrator smells quite foul."
rimshot

Been a while since I've seen you around. Guess it's going to be a while till I see you again. Hopefully you'll drop in for a post or two sometime in the future though. Lots of people have said they're quitting TWHL only to come back later. ^_^

Best of luck, and goodbye for now!

I've still got entity work and some polishing.

Thanks. I wanted to make something with a high ceiling, since maps (or, at least, my maps) tend to be really cramped vertically.

Right now I'm debating on whether or not to resize all my monitor textures to better fit the brushwork - it would make it easier for Sledge to accurately scale them without messing up the alignment, but it would also mean they wouldn't be square anymore, and thus less efficient memory-wise. What do you guys think?

A little bit out of date, but here's some media.
The layout feels a bit uninspired to me now...

I hope you realize you just said there are no good singleplayer Source games.
Because I've looked at the DOTA 2 tools firsthand, and they are drastically different.
Primarily using meshes instead of brushes, for instance.

It also takes a lot longer to make something in Source and the tools are always broke.

Pretty much.
It's a pretty easy way to get circular scratches and such from a base photo that has horizontal scratches.
I can think of a few different things that would be handy for, now that I know that's a function - for instance, making a scratch decal for detailing under a door's rotation area to make it look like it rubs against the floor when it opens would be a heck of a lot easier with this.

I'm interested, though it remains to be seen if I'll be able to compete.

Dang, I gotta step up my game.
Even though I'm making a more exporation/setpiece floor, your gameplay filled ones are putting mine to shame.

Not at all! Literally one person has finished so far, and we've got until the 28th IIRC.

The very point of the engine Valve made in the first place, was to make creative stuff out of brushes.

Technically, the point of the engine was to make games. Making creative stuff out of brushes was not so much a choice, but rather adapting to the limitations of the engine to still crank out good detail.
There's certainly an art to using brushwork for things like that, but I think TJB's adding a few too many smooth angles and scaling the jet down a bit too far for it to be able to be properly represented by brushwork.

Neat.
All I have is a graphics design company.

Unless you mean Blue Shift specifically, the current Steam version is exactly the same now as it was.
The WON menu really needs to be seen in action to be fully appreciated, though.

IIRC they've fixed the HUD colour. Pretty sure it was blue last time I went through.

I expect the menu options were all designed separately, before BS was made into a standalone expansion. It being standalone is also probably the reason for the crash when you try to play it as a mod - unlike mods and Op4, the dlls are probably made to only work from a modified HL executable, and the base HL.exe is missing something - If I had to guess, I'd say they moved a function from the game dlls and put it into the exe specifically to prevent it being run as a mod.

However, the only thing I know for a fact is that each time I see the old WON menus, I cry a little inside because they aren't in the Steam versions.

I did a neat thing today.
But it's a suprise. Still nothing else worth showing off.

I hope one or both of those will make an appearance in The Core.