Forum posts

The only differences between Hammer 3.4 and SC Hammer

Not the engine.

I think bevel has something to do with making less clip nodes.

This is correct.
I think the main issue with changing scale (In any engine, not just source) is mainly that the physics are scaled to a certain unit size. This may or may not be possible to compensate for.

Have to agree with Archie here...
I don't think it can really be worded any better than he put it, but to reinforce the point: If you want a different engine--Use a different engine. Outside of this forum, I have never heard of anybody so demanding of the goldsource engine's source code.

Now I'm not even close to being a competent programmer, but I don't need to be to understand the implications of trying to bring an ancient engine in the modern world. Newer engines are designed to take advantage of the countless advancements in the computer world that have been made since the late 90s, even if you don't use "advanced features" such as bump mapping and specular mapping. (Shaders aren't exactly "advanced" features by the way...)
With the amount of band-aiding you're going to be doing to the goldsource engine to keep up with that, you might as well just use the open-source quake engine instead, or even better, use a modern engine if you want modern features.

I think it's great that people can still be passionate about a great game, and more specifically it's engine, but there is a point that you have to push past the nostalgia and accept that obsolescence is in fact real.

@Crypt Haven't forgotten about the threading topology comparison, I'm just really slow. Sorry!

Quite happily surprised that I am not only able to return to this after a week of not doing anything with it, but being motivated enough to continue working on it with no problem. Finished the midsection and I'm almost finished the bottom plate.

The midsection was easily the most difficult piece to finish due to it's complexity, and my inexperience with high-poly subd topology. Once the bottom plate is finished, I only have 5 small pieces left which are going to be a cakewalk (knock on wood) compared to the rest of the mod. This is by far the most detailed model I have ever created.

@Crypt Will do when I get a minute.

This midsection was a real bitch, and will continue to be while I tap the remaining holes on the bottom. Next time I'm not chamfering any edges until I know I will have an equal amount for the holes that will be put in later.

@Victor That is the first time I've seen somebody use func_train for an actual train.

If you're intending to make a HL2-themed mod/mappack then that's great. But I wouldn't get your hopes up for making much more, many of the core game mechanics simply cannot translate into goldsource.

@Admer Nice! Sculpting is yet another skill I managed to miss, so enjoy it while it's still easy to learn.

Found a new way to create tapped holes. It makes the threads slightly less accurate, but decreases my stress and simplifies the geometry significantly.

Thanks guys, it means a lot to me to get back on track after a long period of full-mental block. I suppose if you hang around other motivated people long enough it's bound to wear off on you a little.

Nope, 3DS Max. I still haven't been able to get used to blender.
If I could make something half as good as that in blender, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

Been far too long since I've worked on anything.

For the sake of argument, let's say you have WON, not "nonsteam".
If it is WON, then I would think the game is simply too old to run under 8/10, as microsoft broke compatibility with a lot of old games with them. Try running sven-coop (free game) as it runs on the updated half-life engine, or try running half life in opengl. That should tell you if it's the game or your OS causing issues.

Get a grip.
If your attitude towards school is so poor, how do you expect to excel at the things that don't "kill your creativity"? It certainly wouldn't be hard to imagine that you would continue to blame everything in your environment for your own issues.
I suppose i understand though, if you blame everybody else for your own shortcomings and lack of ambition, then you're likely to find others that support and share your attitude, rather than having to do the hard thing and simply accept that sometimes you have to deal with things not going the way you want them to.

You aren't the only person with a grudge against the bad, corrupt "system", and it's an incredibly cheap cop out. Everybody has had to deal with issues in their environment in some way or another, whether it's been school, work, home life or whatever is relevant to that person. Some of them spiraled into a whirlpool of anger, depression and paid the price, while others simply accept that these things happen and moved on.

You're not special, and if you think that you will be if you just let out enough anger on others, you are sorely wrong.
It's hard to appreciate your life when you're either dead or locked up in a freezing cold cell, being told when to sleep, eat and have "recreation time". I've been there, and it is the last thing I would want to do again. If you go on the way you are you will end up there, and I don't imagine they're quite as cozy as Canadian jails if they're as bad as you claim your schools are.

If you choose to life a life of anger, you're going to run into somebody who's a lot angrier than you, and you can only hope you get your wings clipped rather than completely cut off. You'd be surprised at how humbling the experience is, and how quickly it reprioritizes your life.
Take a deep breath, everything's going to be okay. The world is not going to end if you have to deal with school for a little while, and before you know it you'll be looking back and smiling at how silly you acted. You'll soon be on your way to complaining about bills and work and so on.

If you can launch the game from the directory but not from a shortcut, have you tried running steam with elevated privileges?

If I had to go back and choose what my first 3D modelling application was, it would've been blender. The interface was designed by a sadist, but it's much easier to go from blender to 3Ds max than vice versa.
It's also nice to have a free, open source 3d package that you can painlessly upgrade, alter for your own purposes and receive support for indefinitely so long as you upgrade every once in a while. Not so easy with a closed-source, pirated copy of 3DS Max.

In your case, before 3ds max 2010 or so I believe is going to be missing some functionality that's going to make simple 3D operations quite convoluted and frustrating at times. IMO anything after is too bloated even on a good machine, so go with blender.
You have to remember that 3DS Max is not just designed to be a 3D asset creation tool, but a production-level, 3D toolset for professionals in many industries. It's going to have a lot of tools you will never use, along with a lot of bloat.

Thanks for all the advice.
I've left this thread for a while as I didn't want to reply without having done anything, but I have not ignored the advice given so far.
Once I begin a project (soon) I will try to document my own experience and offer my own advice.
The last project I successfully finished only succeeded due to it's own sheer simplicity, and allowing myself to be satisfied with it's simplicity even though I wanted to push it much farther than what I had on paper.
I'm hoping I can do this again.

Have to agree with ArmA being incredibly cumbersome.
There is nothing 'realistic' about a drunk-simulator where every action, including aiming your weapon is met with intentional delay on top of any software/hardware delay. It's simply not fun to play a game that handicaps the good players so that the bad players can feel better about themselves.

Perhaps you could use something like amx mod and write your own plugin for it that disables tripmines being placed in a certain part of the map, or limit how many they can lay at once. This is assuming you're talking about a server you personally own.

Hello,
Some of you may remember me from my silly projects a few years ago, and the rest of you you don't know me. Doesn't matter.
I used to really enjoy most forms of game design--I mainly did 3D art but I started out with level design for half-life (therefor me being here). Never made anything decent, but I got quite involved with the 3D art side of things and made some things I could say I'm proud of.

However, lately I haven't really been able to muster up any amount of motivation towards anything. I don't feel motivation at any point in my day to day life that I'm aware of, and it's very difficult to commit to doing things I want to do or need to do. I used to find myself opening 3ds max only out of habit, trying to do a project and closing it shortly after out of frustration.

Now to be clear, if I was concerned about being depressed I would not be posting here. My mental well-being is not the responsibility of others, and if I feel sad that is entirely my responsibility to deal with.
But I do not feel sad, and I do not believe this merely an angsty\edgy "phase" in my life. I am fully aware that there is joy despite feeling so frustrated all the time, and I am simply trying to figure out what I need to do right now.

I'm interested in what way others may have experienced this all inclusive "writers block", and any advice they may have to give in getting past it.
While I am of course posting this out of self-interest, it may also be helpful to others that find themselves in the same situation.

nfs sucked since underground,
-Elliot

What in christ's name is wrong with the camera control in that demo...

I imagine he created the environment in a modeling suite and baked the lighting into the textures, abbadon.

Look inside half life 2's VPK files. There are many great textures.

Tssk tssk. No problem if you're simply using them as placeholders internally, but please do not plagiarize or suggest it for anything intended for public release. No need to commit career suicide before you even start.

Crazy idea... Instead of not only being too lazy to work for all of 3 hours to pay for one piece of software you never have to buy again, you could also put half as much effort into doing your own research on "special editions" of milkshape 3d or even alternatives for half-life modding instead of attempting to toss your lack of initiative onto others for no real benefit... Which some might say is very greedy.

Search your config files for 2550. Delete the value.

Well, no. The penumbra of the shadow is not the concern, it's the consistency of the resolution on surfaces.
Of course I'm aware that shadows can be blurry, even hl1 from 1998 had a basic radiosity engine... I'm just saying that you wouldn't have a 256x256 unit wall with a 512x512 map, then immediately next to it an identical sized wall with a 64x64 map stretched across it, whether it's a lightmap or a texture.

Am I the only one here who "try" to match the texture sizes with the faces sizes ? In other words, if there is a 2048 units cube, I would use 512x512 textures scaled at 1.0 (or 0.5) and if there is a cube at 64 units, use a 64x64 texture scaled at 1.0 (or 0.5).

While not for textures specifically, I do this all the time within UDK for the lightmap resolution.
It has a very convenient "Texel density" display mode (with colour coding to easily see mismatching densities) that I use excessively to satisfy my OCD.
Looks so wrong to have high resolution shadows on a surface directly next to one with blobby, low resolution shadows...

Go away.

Oh fuck I'm so stupid. I was looking at the syntax and completely ignored the words.

The ? : operator is used to switch between two expressions based on the value of the first expression. If you wanted to express that all of the variables are different, you would simply write the not equals operator, not a conditional.

It's very difficult to call something a useful lesson when it's objectively wrong though...

ARRANGEMENT != Counter-Life != The Core != Half-Rats : A Fever Dream != Half-Rats : Parasomnia != PARANOIA != Sven-Coop != <Insert Any GoldSource Mod Here>.

Uh?

ARRANGEMENT != Counter-Life != The Core != Half-Rats && A Fever Dream != Half-Rats && Parasomnia != PARANOIA != Sven-Coop != <Insert Any GoldSource Mod Here>.

Not sure how a conditional operator is going to work here.

To be fair wasn't there a mod that used a custom graphics dll that vac was not cool with at all?

Of course you could also slap gradients on a poorly designed site and it will look just as ugly.

Given how the site is designed now, I'm sure the new site will look good with or without gradients. It's a matter of design.

Very true, but that's a complaint for Windows 10 and it's awful forced updates, not Win8 I was referring to there.

To make a better example, I use 3ds max and can't stand blender or maya because the user interfaces are dramatically different.
They're all 3d modeling software so they do the same thing, but I don't say that blender or maya are bad simply because I am unfamiliar with the UI, I just simply use 3ds max instead.

For comparison, it's always fun to read about my Windows 8 experience.

Not to open a can of worms, but what exactly were the issues with it other than the UI?

I see no actual reasons for your hatred of the OS other than "I can't take the time to learn a new UI because it needs to be identical to the last iteration of windows"...
Windows 10 is what Windows 8 should have been from the start, but to say Win8 was garbage simply because Microsoft attempted to compartmentalize things into more logical places is quite silly. (I won't defend the start menu however, that was very poorly thought out)

If you want to have a familiar UI, use an OS with a familiar UI.
You wouldn't buy a bicycle and complain it doesn't have 4 wheels like the vehicles you are used to driving, would you? It's nonsense.

In terms of Windows 10 however, I love it but I do have to warn that the forced Windows update can range from mildly irritating to completely breaking your system with bad drivers or forced new builds (Which you cannot revert back from without reinstalling, by the way).
I've had to re-install Windows on my tablet probably about a dozen times since I've had it installed in July because of new builds, and in fact even right now my build is partially broken already, and I've simply been procrastinating re-installing it because it usually works okay.
On my desktop, I have to completely disable Windows update because it installs bad drivers for my hardware, and there's no option to disable the forced automatic driver installation without disabling Windows update entirely. Very irritating.
EDIT: It appears this may have been fixed.

Most people don't have patience for OFP.
Granted the game is very rough around the edges and it is a very frustrating game, but it is a very enjoyable experience if you can slow yourself down enough to keep yourself from getting killed.

Repurposed a [useless] LCD panel to be a softbox light for video work.

Fairly disappointed at the light output, expected more light from it without the LCD panel, but it's better than not having a cool, soft light at all.

Tried to make the M4A1 a few times before but couldn't do a very good job.

Hopefully I'll be able to create the whole thing in a reasonable amount of time.

EDIT: For comparison (M16, but same basic shapes):

DX11 is supposed to be backwards compatible with all DX10 hardware, but I could never get any DX11 games to work on my gtx 280 when I had it.

Let's play Ricochet.

The main reason I started with an anticipated polycount of <1k is because I wasn't treating it as a showcase asset, but an unimportant prop amidst other props.
A bit unrealistic since I don't actually have any use for this specific prop, but it's just meant to be practice.

I hate the concept "polycounts are expendable", and out of sheer frustration from endless awfully optimized PC games I condition myself to get by with the bare minimum, and only then if there is performance to spare begin adding more polys etc.
(Keeping in mind I of course have higher resolution textures and highpoly models to fall back onto if I lower resolution too far.)

Unless it's in first person view, or an important prop that the player will soley be focusing on (pick up the lens objective etc), how important is the outline of the [small] mesh?

In all fairness though, I do understand that this isn't 1999 anymore, and ideally I will need to be making various levels of detail [at least for the models] that can be scaled by the end user should they have more graphical power to spare. Apologies if this giant wall of text seems a little defensive, I try to be thorough with my answers to even simple questions.

Not much worth mentioning other than a Nikkor 50mm f1.4, Minolta 50mm f2 and a Dimension 135mm f3.5.

I have another Nikkor (300mm f4.5) and quite a few more Minolta lenses but I don't usually use them as they are simply too slow in anything but the best of lighting conditions.

EDIT: Went for a walk today.

Thanks Disco, updated the original images:
-Fixed normal maps
-Added new details (lack of filter threads most prominent)
-Fixed proportions of aperture ring
-Tweaked lens elements material to be a little more realistic (hopefully)

Almost done. Looks pretty poopy up close like this though, I underestimated how limiting 500 polys would be. Looks a little better from the side:

Finally got a new body.[approximation, not my photo]
Only has 23k on it, so it should be good for a while [not counting disasters].

I did always feel that the interactive surfaces in games was vastly underutilized.
Perhaps in the future more gaming machines will have touchscreens that you can use to interact with ingame keypads etc. Using interactive screens with a mouse is pretty awkward.

Thanks Striker.
I really do appreciate the kick in the ass from the other members when I first started posting [and even still so] because I couldn't really see how my fixation on the one photo style was so awful after 30 images. Now I try my best to really fine tune it to not only be as best as I can get it but also be unique from any of my other photos.

If you're going for a 'realistic' look, goldsource won't have the fancy shaders needed for physically accurate lighting, but the good news is that it has (for it's time especially) an excellent radiosity engine that will yield very realistic results, even if watered down by low resolution and compression.

However, if you want to make the most out of the radiosity engine, as with any physically based rendering, you need to think physically.
Where are the lights, what are their properties, how will they interact with the scene. Ask these types of "physical questions" first, then place your lights. The lighting engine will take care of the rest.

Fuck stu.