Forum posts

While I never mapped for source myself I talked with numerous mappers that do conduct mapping for source. They claim it's better to use source than Black Mesa especially if you're in a learning phase. Black Mesa allows for much more realistic environments than source does and many mappers surrender there due to the amount of work it takes to create something of a even larger magnitude. At least if you want to make your environments look great.

If you got long term plans perhaps even considering a future job career in 3D level designing then you should possibly start with Black Mesa right away and ultimately switch to modern engines such as Unreal 4, Frostbite, Unity engine.

Good progress... Seems you're 2/3rds done with it.

It was unfinished and abandoned when Solokiller began working on his engine overhaul modification. My coder fell in love with his work and after convincing me we decided to let it rest till Solo finishes his project. That was about 2 years ago.

So if you truly are capable of coding yourself.. Feel free to enhance upon it, finish and finalize it.. The whole project was intended to combine the best community made assets into one pack based upon Op4 although we had plans to implement a hud swap changer... Basically allowing you to change the color of the hud to support all 4 major Hl1 games and own universes, white hud, black hud (but it never got implemented) etc..

If you do decide to use it be advised that there were still plenty of bugs or unfinished content in the build.

See my last bug report I committed to my coder internally 2 years ago.

https://twhl.info/thread/view/19577?page=1#post-340595

And yes it does work as standalone mod. It's a heavily modified spirit engine with countless bug fixes but also still countless bugs remaining.

Again: check out this code.

It contains the most convincing Voltigore npc code replica to date I'm aware of / other than Svencoop and Solikillers upcoming project. 1 minor bug remains that when you run around a corner the Voltigore remains in it's firing animation while he attempted firing at you before you vanished into the corner. But that should be easy to fix for you. Otherwise it's fully working.. Even the explosion death animation is an almost perfect replica.

https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1smLdf_iyg0iZ_p4-v9HCCZJj5vgcSyEQ&export=download

amazing... that sounds almost unbelievable... Good job mate.

These kind of sounds can't get adjusted in their pitch as far as I know.. Pain and death sounds are handled differently. Only solution coming to mind would be a manual pitch adjustments and making duplicate sounds. I might be wrong ofc. but I just checked through my valve sentences.txt and there are no Hgrunt death sounds listed. If memory serves these are listed with the models itself in their animation config files.

That or in the core game.dll's

Hm I tried finding it for you... All known dl links are in fact dead. The only links that survived of this bot are for Front Line Force and Counter Strike.

The original filenames of the bot for usage in "War in Europe" were called : agrobot-all.exe and agrobot-wie-11.exe. You could download the CS version or FLF version of it try adjusting and modifying it for WIE.

But I doubt that this would be an easy task.

@2muchvideogames: Hm be advised though.. The code while working has few bugs and things on the to do list remaining.
In our original plan. We had the idea to add some code that would allow the player later on in the map specific settings - in the editor to choose the color of their hud - green default for op4, orange, blue, yellow, white & red.

Let me recheck through my old bug report lists. There was still be plenty to do:

• scripted_sentences play a spark + sound over the heads of the speaking npcs.

• Part1: hand grenades and satchels, rifle nades which explode airborne create flying stones. It would possibly require a condition whether it's airborne or not. Perhaps reduce the size of the parts.
• sv_grenadegib 1/0 *

• Part:2 The following sound of the falling rocks is unfitting and to loud.

• Grunts fire in rapid fire mode. It's unfitting for them and their animations.

• To walk in water plays a ladder climbing sound.

• Some dying soldiers drop hand grenades but these are sometimes stuck mid air.

• The medic is unresponsive to calls for aid of fellow comrades. Furthermore I suggest to enhance the delay 'cause the soldiers are calling him every 3 seconds when being injured.

• When I walk onto the npcs they crouch and reload their weapons instead of making room for me.

• When firing against walls I get alien blood decals instead of bullet hole decals.

• The Voltigore sometimes acts weird. He turns around and shows me his butt instead his front side. Sometimes his energy balls disappear when you walk around a corner. It means the Voltigore runs around with his charging animation in this instance.

• Sometimes my rifle acts as if it just fired a shot + muzzle flash but without audio. That being said no real shot was fired. A misplaced idle animation no doubt. It seems to happen whenever some trigger activates something. Play in Dev mode to experience this bug.

• Another glitch is that my body armor loses 1,2 energy points at random. I wasn't attacked at that time nor were any enemies nearby.

• Sometimes player weapons disappear entirely out of your own hands. Maybe Spirit tries loading some none existing idle animations?

• Some of the explosion effects are simply put to massive and fill half the map with it's effect. I also recommend to tone down the AOE explosion effect. Maintaining a certain balance with default hl1 mods. In case other people may eventually want to port their mods over to your version.

• It happens sometimes that your night goggles won't remain active after a map change. While you do have the green screen is still present but the light of the googles is missing what effectively turns you blind. in that case x2 F.

• Self placed tripmines are like 20cm away of the walls where you placed em.

• The op4 ammo spores are not working yet. As they won't keep sticking on walls.

• The baby headcrab uses the regular headcrab model. Easy to fix with a model swap inside your pak.

• Serious bug: After loading a savegame all Zombies in a map are invincible. That being said Zombies gave 0 damage to me and I was unable to give 0 damage to them. It seems as some values in the skill.cfg were all the sudden ignored. Other monsters were still functioning normally.

• Baby Voltigors use the wrong death animation.

• The grapping gun still misses it's alternate fire mode.

• I recommend fast weapon switching.

• The knife is identical to the crowbar and requires visual and sound adjustments being made to it. The attack distance is also not the same at the moment.

• Sometimes your guns aren't reloading automatically. But that bug was also present in default hl1.

• The Opfor Engineer still requires his Sprites while welding.

• Noticed that the original default desert background has been swapped. To maintain compatibility I suggest restoring the default one. Additional ones can get added for mappers after release.

• Encountered a bug in my ported mod maps: Map6 und map14 crash and are unplayable : Wrote erroneous message to buffer.dat

Host_Error: PF_precache_sound_I: Sound 'houndeye/he_blast2.wav' failed to precache because the item count is over the 512 limit.
Reduce the number of brush models and/or regular models in the map to correct this. If possible for you enhance the pre-cache limit. The mod worked fine in Steam on default op4/hl1. So it should be possible.

• The particle system is still none functioning. All files delivered are present but in game you just get little error message models popping up while they are supposedly playing.

• The Shock_roach is not yet catch-able/collectable the first time.

• The shock roach it's turn rate is too slow and should get adjusted to op4 specs.

• All human grunts wearing helmets can still get head shots at the moment. Bullets need to bounce off on their helmets.

Wishes for next version:

Please add the Black Ops and working spore ammo asap. So that I can continue testing on my mod port.

Like he instructed. According to him to you have to delete all following files

in

*Half-Life\MYMODNAME/Sprites*

• 640_pain.spr
• 640_train.spr
• 640_hud1.spr
• 640_hud2.spr
• 640_hud3.spr
• 640_hud4.spr
• 640_hud5.spr
• 640_hud6.spr
• 640_hud7.spr
• 640_hud8.spr
• 640_hud9.spr

It will then auto load the default hl1 orange hud sprites instead. That is once these opposing force sprite files are no longer present within your mod sprites folder.
If it doesn't work make sure you're actually play testing with your mod folder and not the gearbox folder.. And that your maps are getting compiled into your mod/maps folder and not into the gearbox/maps folder.

Good to know 2muchvideogames.. Thanks for that info.

I'm afraid the sprites + flashlight + hev sounds were exactly what he wanted. How ever seeing that he also no longer replies to follow up posts I assume he scratched that idea or moved on entirely.

Custom code aka spirit it is.

Hehe no sweat Jeff.

Ya we abandoned the project when Solokiller began working on Hl Enhanced. My coder was so exited about all the things he was working on that he decided to rather wait for him to finish and then make the required and necessary adjustments afterwards based upon his code version instead of regular spirit. Seeing how 2 years have passed by now and solo began working on an even newer but yet much better version of his project. I'm a little saddened to say the least. Even if in the end we all will get happy beyond imagination, it delayed my efforts. I was planning on having that arriving with an enhanced version of Military Duty that also includes assets of Firestorm (Want to merge these 2 mods into 1 huge mod.)

Say Jeffmod if you would want to fix it and turn this thing release ready I wouldn't mind at all. Be my guest. After all my coder (he is the guy behind the op4 recreation code btw.) invested so much time and effort into this. It would be a shame to let it go to waste. Not to mention seeing how new comers still arrive here on a daily/weekly basis re-assures us that Hl1 is by far not dead yet.
Having an Op4 Spirit version available certainly would avoid these common Op4/Hl1 mix questions like tie one here. Not to mention we will all get to see much better more varied mods in the future. Might be useful till at least Solokiller hits us with his master piece project. In the hopefully not so distant future.

As for holstering weapons etc.. Yeah there were some bugs remaining he intended to fix. But never actually got around in doing so as development ended at that time.. As for the movement in general. That's how Hl1 played in the very first versions back in 1999 but these features were disabled one by one and patch by patch. He felt the need to re-implement those features. It's actually kinda nice. Adds a little more realism to it and it dissolves bunny hopping etc.

Probably this @Jeffmod:

https://www.moddb.com/mods/home-sweet-home

@Dr.Cola:

Personally if you do lack coding knowledge you're best advised to either modify your story slightly.. Create a situation early on that your Scientist slips into a Uniform he finds and then he just plays soldier.. The normal Hecu grunts are still in it. The greeting Scientist sounds can get easily replaced. Eventually the soldiers would find out about this and on this part it would be technically the same thing story wise. The Hev sounds are not that important if you ask me.

It might not be the best situation but also allows for new possibilities regarding npc encounters with voices. Either that or use Spirit of Half-Life but then you will be limited to the Pit Drone & the Gnome. I believe Spirit contained all op4 weapons except the grapple gun.

If you can code check this out:

https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1smLdf_iyg0iZ_p4-v9HCCZJj5vgcSyEQ&export=download

It contains working code for all Op4 monsters and weapons. It's then just a matter of implementing that in your every day regular spirit source code version and compiling the whole thing. Some minor adjustments may be necessary. Perhaps somebody could help you on that. For a true coder that would be possibly a matter of 1 or 2 hours.

And the source codes for the various spirit versions:

https://www.moddb.com/mods/spirit-of-half-life/downloads

Wow. Thanks for letting us know about this in such great detail @Solo.
That indeed sounds like a better deal for you - for all of us. I'm happy that this new project makes things so much easier for you. It certainly sounds like a dream come true. Sounds even better than source engine does regarding it's freedoms. As always best of luck to you.

So Solo,

tell us none coders more about this new thing of yours. The way I understood it you switched codes but it's essentially still the same Hl: Enhanced is that correct?
I understand that the new code basis provides even more possibilities later on, or at least for coders like yourself. But tell us how will us the simple mappers benefit of these changes and how did it affect your total schedule regarding a full alpha or beta release?

Will this switch won't set you back yet another few years? Or is it actually the opposite. So that you're actually managing to get things done and implemented a lot faster than with c++ before?
In either case I do hope you will get a build out that SP mappers can actually use with hl1,op4,custom npc content usage. For me it seems you're stuck and limiting yourself with MP features at the moment. A thing that's totally fine of course . Yet I still do I wonder about your ultimate goal here.

Sven Coop is an established IP by now. It is doubtful that anything can push it away these days. So naturally I fail to see the focus on MP based content not that I complain. Competition is always a good thing for business. How ever only if it makes sense.

Also keep in mind that TWHL. is mostly focused on SP scenarios and so are the remaining HL1 fans. People that do love Half-Life and it's MP usually only play counter strike global offensive nowadays and that isn't even Gold Source anymore. Instead it is Source 2 or Source 2.5 as some people call it.

Tell us about your current plans and goals... Anyway I do appreciate you and all your efforts.. So don't get this the wrong way in any aspect.

Honestly I read both here and and on moddb about crashes. For the record I had 0 crashes throughout the mod. It's reasonably possible to assume that these people that had crashes occurring either used very old Windows versions, graphic cards, or potentially used radical changed Hl1 main versions with model replacements, anim replacements etc.. Simply put - Things that might break the mod.

Lets not even mention WON. My own mod didn't work for WON initially without 3 of the maps crashing on it.

Spirit 1.9 had tons of features that were broken unless you're speaking of yet another 1.9 release that I might have missed.

Anyway many things didn't work that did work in 1.5 though. I can't exactly give you details right about now of what didn't work 'cause that's few years back to me. But I do remember that the features that didn't work were vital features. I believe one of those features were about working "Fog". not sure though.

Either way I believe despite him using spirit 1.5 the results went beyond and above the call of duty a mapper has towards a fan base and community don't you think so @SourceSkyBoxer?

That's for sure.. Still waiting is such a b****.

Sitrep: Situation report how are the tests progressing testers?

Don't keep us waiting so long.

Edit: Making a big mark in my calendar on friday, August the 10th.

I had this bug too in the old days..

It usually means you've got to many entities in one place or have reached the maximum amount of entities and texture limits / and or model limits per map.

In that instance I separated my map into 2 sometimes even 3 pieces aka maps. I never experienced this problem again when I upgraded to these compilers :

https://twhl.info/thread/view/17830

Be advised: These compilers will most likely break most your maps as they're much more accurate than the ones you might be using right now. They find leaks the older compilers wouldn't have found. Anyway it'll just help to make your maps even better so don't worry about it. In either case they provide much greater model and texture caches in Megabyte for any map to use. That alone makes it worth it.
Not to mention couple new entities - faster map compiling, or better light and shadow settings. Things that are making your maps look even greater than before.

You're welcome. I hope you can and you will finish what he started with this and then release it separately public some day so that all might benefit of it.

Good luck!

Ok no problem. I'm uploading it right now.

The intend of that project was to provide a fixed up spirit engine (version 1.9 not 1.5) that adds - fixes and removes potentially unnecessary features.

We also tried to include the best hl1 assets the community ever came up with in a single and easy to use environment.
Be it npcs such as Barniel, new Zombie variations etc.. All in all nothing spectacular but for the simple mappers that lack coding knowledge it would've been a nice thing as all the new npcs would've been easily select able in the mod.FGD file + their sounds. While you can replace models easily in Spirit having them select able is just a mere Bonus. Not to mention that some had unique AI coding.

The project was abandoned when Solokiller began working on Hl-Enhanced and now SharpLife. Makes me wonder if we ever gonna get something usable. Seeing how he keeps switching and swapping projects or starting from scratch idk. We can only wish him best of luck.

The npcs are usable and the engine contains many play able features. Some old hl1 features were re-enabled especially regarding the movement of the player. Still it was unfinished. Reloading a weapon produces a spark for example that was used for testing various things. The Voltigore explosion effect is not a precise re-creation due to math. But other than that each opfor npc behaves the way it did back in Opposing Force just with better path finding.

If you would fix up the "player visible bugs" you might as well use it and progress from that state in there. The coding conducted by Hammermaps was very clean. So it should be easy for you to comprehend his style. Credits in general will have to be given to the model authors (Romka mostly) and him as main coder naturally.

EDIT: Whoops I provided the wrong link before.

Download: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1smLdf_iyg0iZ_p4-v9HCCZJj5vgcSyEQ&export=download

Do you conduct the coding aspect yourself??

If so I can send you a source code of this project here: (abandoned for now)

https://github.com/Hammermaps-DEV/opposing-force-rebuilded-sdk

My version is just x10 newer of 2017. It might safe you huge amounts of time. Plus the fact that it is based upon spirit 1.5 which by itself adds tons of new possibilities - it's a very clean code with countless bug fixes and so on. That plus the fact that it contains some of the finest re-creations of Op4 monsters I'm aware of to date. Sven Coop & Hl enhanced aside.

And that is something that's not pleasant trust me. I reconstructed once the Blue Shift map where you pass by the cafeteria inside the train and rebuild it brush by brush while making enhancements and adjustments to it.

Although I read somewhere recently that somebody wrote a new de-compiler that claims to decompile maps without producing brush issues. (Normally you get a mess when decompiling maps with 100 if not 1000 of 1 unit sized brushes. Not to mention countless brushes that didn't decompile properly at all as they were vertex manipulated.)

It's time to choose...

Back to Black Mesa.

I can hardly wait.

As already written on moddb. These mod screenshots are indeed amazing..

Like others have pointed out for 1 week of experience this is groundbreaking. Can we at least assume that you're a mapper for other games & engines then? 'Cause if not then you must be a genius with some sort of photographic memory and a fast track learning ability, am I right?

Either way I'm looking forward to seeing your mod. If you started with this a week ago then you're most certainly on a good speed train right now.
Make sure to drive with said train as long and far as you can get before it runs outta steam. I started similar. Constructed more mod maps in the first 2 weeks than I did over the duration of several years.

You will never get that motivated again than in the first few weeks of your mapping career. So make good use of the time.

Hi

here is a basic tutorial explaining how to get started with Hammer Editor.

http://twhl.info/tutorial.php?id=25

Just use default Half-Life.fgd.

No need to worry about a mod folder yet. Best to start with few simple maps first.

To bad that the unofficial uncut chapter packages wont benefit from the new graphic effects and seeing that the author of these is now a long term dev member himself I doubt we will see em anytime soon.

As for the related grunt aim question:

In recent patches their accuracy appears to have been slightly nerved. And in this patch finally the A-grunts as well.

Yap win defender is rather good nowadays.. It's enabled for me.

Next to Adwcleaner I also recommend to install Anti-Ranssomware by Malwarebyte as well.

Well it certainly is evolving to what we know of scifi movies of the 80s / 90s full observation and control over you and your activities.

But for the most part the spyware can get disabled and muted sometimes even safely deleted.

Few basics for a fresh win10 install:

• Disable Cortana and various other resource hungry junk that's not needed or just spying on you.

• Get Classic Shell if you prefer your startmenu to look and behave like in XP, Win7 etc.

• Get Mozilla Firefox or Chrome as Microsoft Edge sucks.

• Make sure to check in your control panel for your virtual ram and your cpu cores. By default settings it lists only 1 primary core but not 4, 8, 16 or what ever you got. The benefit will be increased speed in win10 afterwards.

As for Admin privileges assuming you use Win10 Home I believe you need to apply a work around to grant yourself greater access to your own system. The advanced admin features arrive first with the Professional version, enterprise and so on. But things might have changed considerably since release so that info could be outdated. Should you be using any crap such as "Bit Defender" deleted it. That blocks many of your own admin rights as well because at least the free version considered it as possible attack on your system or as protection that you don't ruin critical system files and registry entries. I suggest Avast Antivirus instead.

Ya remember the good old saying "Put old ghosts to rest." The past is the past and can not be changed. For me personally sven coop was ruined after any release that followed 3.0 anyway.. Just didn't feel like hl1 anymore but more like some mini Serious Sam. Although the new implementations were ground breaking I didn't like em much grunts firing at you while running and all that stuff.

As for the sound engine no need to prioritize anything.
If I had it my way you would've to prioritize all default entities + op4 stuff. Luckily things don't go my way am I right?

Btw. did you ever get the Rosenberg sounds I sent you? Hope they're useful to you for a universal Rosenberg entity at some point in the future.

No worries Solo and I do understand your frustration. I once spoke with some of the Sven dev team about them having access to the engine. Apparently contracts were formed between the dev team and them. Maybe they feel that 1 single person is a greater risk at spreading leaks around idk. You also didn't depart with them on good terms did you? Honestly But honestly I don't think so. They probably just don't care no more, simple as that.

Either way in regards of a custom sound engine why don't you make it simple and just use the method Spirit used with Fmod I believe and some pre-coded custom monster slots and name variables for custom sound folder copying sound entity groups for name xzy? Spirit had that feature it was kinda easy to use.

Anyway I proudly present my female scientists:

http://www.moddb.com/games/half-life/addons/female-scientists

Go get em peeps.. Now we just need a native American voice actress to assure accuracy and a finalization of that project.

Kinda cool and good to know.. But what about custom sound groups for custom models in that case? Same method just linking to a new sound folder?

Anyway I wait till you're entirely done with it before moving over to your engine. I suppose it may take you 1 or 2 more years till completion calculating morale and family off time & job along in the equation. Would that be a somewhat realistic estimate?

Update:

Hey just wanted to show you an update of my female scientists... They're almost release ready.. I'm particular proud of bringing a new female face for quite some time to the hl1 community. While I didn't create the face myself nor the textures I enhanced upon the original. As it was previously only a re-skinned MP face for CS-Source. That means:

I added teeth and working facial animations such as eyes, eyebrows and of course an animated mouth.

From left to right : Colette, Barniel, my new one Katja, Gina.
Against my better judgement I kept em in typical Black Mesa employee male clothes to remain true to the Black Mesa dress code. But modifications can be made easily enough if there's any desire for it. I will release the Blender files along with the models once ready and hopefully a full set of voice files containing anything appropriate for Blue Shift, Op4, Hl1. So that any mappers can kick off with them straight away in Spirit and hopefully soon enough Solo's Hl: Enhanced.Now we just need some voice actresses. Unfortunately I don't know any native American girls/women... Americans I call upon you to enlist your wife's.

Uncle Down needs you.

Ya that was our plan... Not sure if he is still up for it though as we haven't spoken since then.. Now I read that he officially cancelled his project 2 months ago without telling me anything about it. He might have moved on.

Ps: Download it anyway just to be on the safe side.. Source codes of any sort are rare.. There might be nice goodies in it saving you as coder massive amounts of time... And my guy - he was damn good.

You could always try using the Opfor_Spirit Engine.
It got cancelled and is still unfinished but for the coders among you probably only a matter of few hours/days to fix things up. Things such as the few monsters that are yet still missing or adding any last missing spirit features, fixing few sound bugs. My coder did his work in a very clean fashion. Cleaning up 100s of lines of code of the original spirit releases.

The future intend of it was to release an enhanced spirit version that would've utilized all the useful additions of the later spirit versions while also expanding upon it with own content and features be it female scientists, Rosenberg npc etc. you name it we had it planned.

So the goal basically was to provide the community with a complete service kit for mappers to work with. But when Solokiller began his work on Hl-Enhanced we ceased all activity and the project died off and even got cancelled.

Seeing how he goes way beyond the call of duty and over the capabilities of what even spirit ever offered it was only logical for us to stop even though I feel very sad for my coder. Because he spent so much time and great effort into it!

Should any of you still want to expand upon his work make sure that Credits are given. Both to the original coder "Godkiller_NT aka hammermaps" as well as the countless model authors and even voice actors in cases of custom content: Content such as Barniel for instance.

The aim of opfor spirit was to provide a full package or in short: From the community for the community. Show casting and granting easy access to all of the communities best. Excluding sven coop content as that might very well be a retail product in itself.

Some of the planned features were:

[i]- Incorporation of all Op4 content, hl1 content while also adding the communities best such as Kate and Barniel, my wip female scientists (with their own unique voices), few extra monsters (re-skins mostly but with their own unique sounds), Rosenberg NPC with snipped sound files out of Decay & BS.

• Switchable arms per command and or drag in drop, Hev, Scientist arms, Hecu, Black Op, Security, female arms military & scientist.

• Most common spirit features including some fixed ones which never really worked before.

• Expansion on the sound engine to not just allow custom sound groups for humans but also aliens to make model swapping more lucrative.

• Implementation of some cut hl1 monsters.

• Restoration of cut Hl1 weapon and strafing animations due to Steam update.

• new lightning and explosion effects enhanced over original spirit versions.

• extensive tutorial map package to show cast new features.

There were more things planned but I can't recall em anymore.[/i]

WIP unfinished contains dll's and SDK:

https://www.file-upload.net/download-12829936/sohl_oppfor.rar.html

The official website:
Contains a very much older release candidate.

hammermaps.de/sohl_oppfor.7z

Honestly Idk. I never fiddled with that before. What you could try it to setup your trees closer to each other and then use clip brushes ingame around the trees. So in essence going completely without any hitboxes. It's ofc. most practical solution in regards of bullet impacts.

As far as I know Hl1 creates these hotboxes automatically and without using any custom code you can't get around that.. But I might be wrong. Solo should know more.

Be advised : Models too have a limitation Hl1 Engine wise. You can't exceed the rough number of 1000 vertices per SMD. file. Otherwise the model will crash your game. Or the model won't even get compiled at all.

There's a limit for as many entities a map can hold. Once reached you get these invisible models or other scripting related entities simply not firing as they too are in a sort of invisible state aka not properly compiled along with the map.

Having 250 models in a map is way way to much. Why do you think did most mappers while we're talking about a forest using impassible routes, diverted with rivers and impassible hills? All that while the actual walk space is almost corridor thick? Just because of that very same named entity limit.

Best you use forest background textures and create a wall on the outer map edges with some isolated trees before and behind that forest texture wall in order to not make it to obvious for the player.

HL engine limits for ALL entitys - 2048
HL in-game temporary entity engine limit (part of the 2048?). Used for breakables, sparks, gibs, ect. 500
data memory limit for entitys ~0.5M
MAX_MAP_ENTITIES Compiling tools limit for ALL editor placed entitys in a level, incuding brush, models, sprites & point entitys like lights (mod limits may vary a bit lower) 2048
MAX_ENGINE_ENTITIES (light, light_spot and light_environment entities that have either a targetname or a style attached to them (ie. all switchable lighting in the map). 1024
compiling tools sub-limit of brush based entitys (part of the 2048) 400
possible model & sprite entitys sub-limit (part of the 2048?) 400
specialty entity limits

By now it's a little more if you use these compilers
https://forums.svencoop.com/showthread.php/42174-Vluzacn-s-ZHLT-v34-Update

But the limitation is still present.

There's also the possibility that some of the models are stuck half inside the map or that there are micro leaks nearby or created by the models themselves which could also ruin their appearance and the compile log won't display it then. I had such a case once and redid the specific section in order to fix it.

No VM is required at all to run VHE. It ran & runs perfectly for me on win7 & win10.

Personally I'm using this:

https://gamebanana.com/tools/5538

Read the changelog. The nice thing about it is that it fixes dozens of crash bugs as well as adding 64bit support resulting in much greater compile speeds.
It also uses a much larger grid to do your mapping on. Usually the default grid is enough but sometimes you might need more.

Combine that with these compilers and get the show on the road.
additional info: https://forums.svencoop.com/showthread.php/42174-Vluzacn-s-ZHLT-v34-Update
direct dl link: https://forums.svencoop.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=16257&d=1439879328

In case you can't move in the 3D window it's probably because you're using a ATI graphic-card in that case download these dll's to fix that:

https://gamebanana.com/tools/5586https://gamebanana.com/tools/5586 But I believe that issue has been fixed by now, a long time ago.

If you're doing model work - like adding skins or new animations to preset models get the new and latest studiomdl file which fixes the famous texture shifting:

https://gamebanana.com/tools/6236

In my opinion the perfect set to do your gold source mapping unless of course you prefer JACK then you're probably better off with that instead as it adds countless more advantages to make your mappers life easy.

As far as I know support for sledge ceased a long time ago. Jack is still under development although even hear the last version was mid 2016 if not mistaken. The dl link on their main homepage doesn't even work anymore.

I believe Jack is superior in anyway judging by their features list. I personally still don't like it as much. As it is somewhat lagging unless hammer that moves around in the 4 windows without any frame drop.

Wow.. Thank you. I probably would've never found out about that myself..
Attempting to fix it now..

But as far as I know I did exactly that.. For example with the mouth meshes linked to a vertex group which has the same name as the bone "mouth" so it's linked is it not ?

Am I missing something else Tesu0? It's been a while since the chopper haven't I worked much with Blender. But as far as I remember that should be all that's required no ?

Ah damn my apologies I uploaded a wrong test build. Here is the correct one:

Blender file included.

dl link: https://ufile.io/d23rq

Update:

Ok I managed to fix the texture issues on 1 submodel. I haven't come around of fixing the 2nd one just yet but that's no problem.

I'm facing difficulty to get the eyes - eyelids and mouth animated. Now here comes the strange thing. I rigged the bone structure to the head and in Pose mode I can even move the mouth / eyelids but once compiled nothing works in Modelviewer.

Any idea what might have gone wrong??
In other news I begun adding modified heads (with different hair color) of Barniel and Kate to the female science team as well.

Dl below: https://ufile.io/jsxch

I'm really at a loss and appreciate any possible help here.

Uh I didn't know that.. That's very informative - nice intelligence indeed. Thanks for that. Time to update Blender..