To answer a few things, yeah, the focus here is on preservation. This is a really massive undertaking, and it's gonna look kinda sad and silly until we get further in. The site's only been up for literally a month, so as far as content goes, we have a decent amount of it.
I don't see the issue with "all these sites have tutorials of varying accuracy, timeliness, and completeness, so let's create a central, fact-checked resource for it all". For now, linking to other sites is good enough, but I think we can do better, to make sure it's still around in the future. I can't guarantee TWHL's continued existence, or Interlopers, or the SC forums. I can guarantee our own site.
And so far, we're really only touching the stuff documented elsewhere; there's plenty of cracks in the documentation, like the aforementioned NPC persistence issue. It's stuff we take for granted, but would confuse anyone just starting out. I want our knowledge of GoldSrc and Source to be airtight one day.
GoldSrc, by nature of its documentation being so spotty, is a key focus of mine. This site came out of my own personal need for it, and I figure someone else could get something out of it too. If not now, then at least in the future.
I personally have been writing daily for the site, but my knowledge only goes so far. If you're interested in helping, I'm far more active on our Discord server, which I'll leave here. I'll be working on coordinating some way for other people to contribute. Right now, it's literally just "send me a text file and I'll edit it and put it up". Maybe I can get our webmaster to code in user roles or something (weird custom NodeJS install), or at least a submit content page.
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ValveDevUnion
Apologies if this seems a bit spammy. We do have a good reason for coming here, and I'll try to keep it brief.
We're in the process of launching a new site, one we're calling the Valve Developer Union. In the process of doing up a custom map for Quake (and then looking into Half-Life 1 mapping), I noticed that a lot of the sites with modding tutorials are either outdated, no longer being updated, are dead or are in danger of disappearing (the former Half-Life Editing Resource Center is a good example of this), are just plain poorly written, or any of the four. Sites like Gamebanana are more focused on hosting user mods than the know-how. That's perfectly fine, but these engines deserve better.
Given how Half-Life and Half-Life 2 jumpstarted some of the biggest phenomenons in PC gaming, we decided to create our own site to make sure modders in the future aren't lost digging through the Internet Archive or guides across YouTube and Google. At the same time, we're not quite sure where the community itself is at this point. They seem to be splintered all over, on lots of little fansites.
Here's where you all come in. TWHL has a wealth of information and talented people still doing their thing after all these years. We have a lot of ground to cover. We're hoping people here can look through the site, suggest major topics to cover, and maybe catch any inaccuracies we missed. We're new to this website stuff and how to get people's attention, but TWHL seemed like a good place to start. Apologies in advance.
https://valvedev.info/
We're in the process of launching a new site, one we're calling the Valve Developer Union. In the process of doing up a custom map for Quake (and then looking into Half-Life 1 mapping), I noticed that a lot of the sites with modding tutorials are either outdated, no longer being updated, are dead or are in danger of disappearing (the former Half-Life Editing Resource Center is a good example of this), are just plain poorly written, or any of the four. Sites like Gamebanana are more focused on hosting user mods than the know-how. That's perfectly fine, but these engines deserve better.
Given how Half-Life and Half-Life 2 jumpstarted some of the biggest phenomenons in PC gaming, we decided to create our own site to make sure modders in the future aren't lost digging through the Internet Archive or guides across YouTube and Google. At the same time, we're not quite sure where the community itself is at this point. They seem to be splintered all over, on lots of little fansites.
Here's where you all come in. TWHL has a wealth of information and talented people still doing their thing after all these years. We have a lot of ground to cover. We're hoping people here can look through the site, suggest major topics to cover, and maybe catch any inaccuracies we missed. We're new to this website stuff and how to get people's attention, but TWHL seemed like a good place to start. Apologies in advance.
https://valvedev.info/