Black Mesa: Source Set for Release! Created 12 years ago2012-09-02 07:49:19 UTC by Daubster

Did anyone give the scientist sitting on the toilet some toilet paper? That sold the mod for me

I did! I also blew up some ones chicken, and some ones headcrab.

some ones chicken

dr magnusson

If anybody is having trouble (game crashes) descending into the hole after killing the tentacle, both Strider and I were able to continue by turning all the graphical settings down to their lowest before going down, and restoring them back once you are in the area with the green radioactive river of goop.

Oh? I didn't have that problem, and all my settings are at maximum. Strange error indeed.

I love how they have those extra options; like upping the gamma when you're near radiation and doing the little blur thing when you get hit, It's truly a great mod. The best hl2 mod I've seen so far, even better than Minerva.

Although it's hard to compare a mod that was made by plenty people over a long amount of time vs. an amazing community mod made by 2 people.

Does anybody else have a problem where chapter titles don't display properly?

If you guys are finding bugs, you should report them on the official forums.

I'm staying the hell away from them until I can play, but I'm sure the devs would appreciate knowing about bugs, so they can patch them out later.

I just finised BMS. I watched the credits until the end, and I am deeply saddened to see that one of the contributors died at just 25.

What a great mod. Just wow. I mean, I thought I've seen all, but when I got to the final part, the Lambda Complex, I was just blown away. You have to imagine the sheer amount of work that has been put into this, besides just the assets.

Does anybody else have a problem where chapter titles don't display properly?

Yes, you downloaded an incomplete version. Can I assume you're also missing achievements?

Well not achievements entirely, but the text for them yes. I downloaded the torrent from the website, did they just forget to put it in or something?

Finished it. The game crashed somewhere in the range of 5-8 times total, LOL,

Xlayer: I believe the first links were fine but after the site crashed some BM devs uploaded their own versions where they copied the files into a rar. One of those rar contained an empty Medal of Honour game folder heh so odds are you dll'd the same one I did which was missing the chapter titles.

Just finished.

Mind blown.

I'm sorry, I have to nitpick.

I cannot, cannot get over how awful the weapon animations are. For all the work that went into everything else, the weapons feel completely half assed.
I was also very disappointed that we don't get to see that glimpse of Xen at the beginning of the game. Kind of important.

Those of you asking if we blew up the microwave make me sad. We did do that. We did it 14 years ago.

As I continue to play, it continues to amaze me.

I do have a few nitpicks though. The cockroaches seem like they're on cocaine or something. They either huddle crazily with each other, or they zoom about like mindless zombies. Oh, wait! Perhaps that's an intended effect. Imagine that, Xen roaches.

The annoying HL2 ladders give me grief at various places--I have to jump off the ladder instead of just walk away. And the female scientist models have strangely deformed arms when the arms are crossed.

Okay, petty complaint time, and spoilerz ahead.

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List of things cut from Surface Tension that disappointed me:

• Tentacle in desert was missing completely
• Scripted sequence with Grunt throwing C4 into pipe was gone
• You no longer have to blow open the bay door with the rocket turret
• There's no Alien Grunt shoving a Marine through the wall
• Two instances of Xen launchpads are were cut (WTF? There's few enough already)
• Large sequence is missing where you had to escort Barney to RetScan a door open for you
• They cut out an optional sequence where Barney could open a secret door
• Multiple buildings and areas were completely cut out towards the end of the chapter, before the Garg chase.

I know this is nitpicking in the grand scheme of things, and you can easily say that this minor stuff was made up for with all the expanded areas that were included, but dammit, Surface Tension was my FAVORITE CHAPTER in Half-Life, and it pains me to see all this completely memorable stuff mysteriously missing. I see why they cut out the escort missions, which I guess some people thought were annoying. That added a lot of playtime in the original in the form of backtracking. But this other stuff, it's all the cool little details that made the chapter so damn interesting. And yet, it's still REALLY hard to talk shit about a chapter that includes set-pieces like an the incredible dam, and the whole cliff battle. Because overall everything's accounted for and done better than I ever could have hoped for.

And it's pointless to complain now, but I could go on about the scripted sequences that were cut. There's actually a surprising amount, and it left me with the feeling that something was missing. It's still an incredible game in every way, but I'm telling you, I could have waited another dang year if it took them to include all the stuff they left out.

And onto another subject...

If you read on the Black Mesa forums, you will encounter another common sentiment that I share, and that is that the Marines are inhumanly skilled. There's essentially no way to sneak up on them, they recognize your presence from a mile away with you crouched behind a wall, their reaction time between noticing you and firing is approximately zero, and they can spray submachine gun fire at you from a concealed location a football field away with 100% accuracy. See it's not that the game is too hard - far from it. It's just silly how much tougher the Marines are than every single other enemy in the entire game, event the Alien Grunts.

What's even sillier is that the toughest battle in the ENTIRE GAME does not happen towards the end, it's smack dab in the middle of it at the end of Questionable Ethics of all places. Now that's just plain old bad pacing. Aren't games supposed to get progressively harder as they go on, at a fairly steady rate? The original difficulty ramp was perfect in this sense, but they had to go messing with the game mechanics. I shouldn't have to be switching from normal to easy mode every time I encounter a few marines to compensate for poor enemy balancing, but that's what I was doing. And on Easy mode, EVERYTHING is too easy! sigh

And of course, with Xen missing, I found the end to be less of a cliffhanger, and more of an anticlimax than anything. It's gonna suck waiting another year or who knows how long for them to get that together.

Also, it has to be said: With the numerous crashes, missing Xen chapters, and everything else, the first play-through felt a BIT like a well polished, slyly concealed public beta. I feel like maybe that's how it should have been announced, but it would have completely stolen their thunder. Because for a game of this immense magnitude, it is now encountering all the first-day release bugs of any AAA PC title, the only difference is they didn't have a multimillion dollar budget for beta testers.

There's always things we're going to be able to point out, but overall I'm extremely impressed by the quality and polish of the whole thing. It's easily the largest and most polished thing to come out of the Source community.

The whole time playing it, I felt exactly like I was playing Half-Life. That made it even better when I came across things that were different. For the most part, the changes were quite good and just served to make the game better. I especially liked the new conversations between NPCs, they were fun.

Of course there were some small issues, most of which have already been brought up above:

• Some weapon animations were somewhat lacking in quality (mostly the crowbar).
• The machine gun sounded like a nailgun from Quake, not meaty enough. The gunplay on it was perfect, though.
• I also noticed some of srry's missing Surface Tension parts (notably the Barney escort bit and the desert tentacle), but really enjoyed some of the changes too. Going into that Garg chase straight from the airduct shoot sequence was inspired. The Garg chase was absolutely brilliant. The manual reload on the TOW launcher was great, too.
• Ladders. If you've played it, you know what I mean.
• Difficulty issues with the marines. The battle at the end of QE was awesome (as was the music), but it took me a whole bunch of tries to finally get it. The post-dam fight with the soldiers and the tank was very hard, too (mostly because of the ladders involved).
• Crashing in places. First crash was a save game not working, had to start the chapter from the new game window. Second was the graphics one mentioned above. After that I got 2 or 3 crashes that were fine after I started the game again.

I'm nearing the end of Surface Tension, and all the missing bits did disappoint me a fair bit. There's a lot of little things to complain about, and things that seem pretty amateur, but as everyone's else has said: compared to what it gets right, it's so hard to care.

My favourite chapters so far are definitely Office Complex, We've Got Hostiles and Questionable Ethics. They just feel like pure, classic, late 90's gaming. In level design, visuals, gameplay... everything. I miss varied, wild, imaginative shooters like this.

Just finished last night, and I agree with most of the nitpicks already said but I can easily overlook them because I really enjoyed playing. After playing the Half-Life campaign more times than I can count, this didn't leave me uninterested or bored ever. While some parts were frustrating (notably grunt battles) overall the gameplay seemed fun and balanced most of the time. I'd give it 9/10. I'm looking forward to Xen, hopefully we'll get it within the year.

In Office Complex, I crawled up thru the ceiling after the big Vort fight knowing I would be able to get the jump on that turret and turn it off... and then I went out the vent, back down the stairs, and I'd locked out my two security guard buddies! There was no way to get back! Noooo!!! Never would have happened in HL, it's cool that they changed stuff up so I didn't TOTALLY have the upper hand. It really messes with your head when you're essentially going through the paces of the old game, and then suddenly something's changed.

This wasn't a huge issue, but it sure did waste a bunch of my time. Did anybody else notice that there wasn't 100% consistency on the appearance of doors that were openable? They are SUPPOSED to all have handles on them if they are to be used in any way, but I noticed on several occasions there were doors that had no handles at all, and they opened right up! If you consider the amazing amount of locked, inaccessible doors in this game, it's a bit overwhelming, because what I ended up doing was trying to open every single door in the game... and in Black Mesa, there's at least twice as many locked doors as unlocked ones. I've never seen another game do that, EVER, but I'm sure it's been done before. There's a locked door in just about every corridor. It's definitely realistic, though. Half-Life had this plausibility issue where it seemed like the player's path was the only route through the entire facility, which made absolutely no sense at all considering the enormity of it.

Here's something that'll really leave you scratching your chin: Who exactly set those tripmines in the Residue Processing conveyors, anyways? I've been working on that one for the last ten years.

Administration set them up to discourage workers from playing on them.

Also I wanted to ask, did anybody else think the Assassins were a bit too quick? They seemed a little super-human to me.

Where is xen?? Are they going to do xen or already working on it? Man what a total anticlimax

Here's my opinions on what could have been improved:

• Why do I kill zombies with flares in the start? Just give me the crowbar already.
• plastic and cartoonish looking npc models. Aliens have too big eyes and bright colors.
• no xen, no ending.
• Could use more voice actors.
• I've played half life enough to know all the rooms and enemy placements. So it's kinda a downer not to have the element of surprise and discovery like if it were new.

Nope, they were perfect IMO, X-Layer. I complain about the Marines because they're just supposed to be guys with guns (albeit well trained guys with guns), but the Assassins are like specially trained supersoldier ninjas with high-tech stealth suits or something crazy like that. They're supposed to be inhumanly quick.

Salmon, I think they wanted to give you the crowbar later because they didn't want you to off Barney there like you did in the original. They wanted him to play out his scripted sequence at the reception desk, and he wouldn't be able to do that if you got greedy for a gun. Just my take on it. Feels very modern tho, a bit "on-rails shooter" for my taste.

Yes I like it. Make Gordon Freeman seem more badass. But it bothered me how they jumped around and did backflips. Why? You are in a firefight, you don't do that shit in a freaking firefight.

You do if you're a ninja chick on steroids.

Why nawt? It sure makes it harder to shoot them.

In the cliff level, where you see 3 fighter jets fly by as you come out of the tube, has anyone noticed that graphic/visual glitch where the detail textures on the terrain in the 3D skybox disappear when you turn on your flashlight?

I also don't like that scientists don't heal you if your health is 50 or lower.

Out of curiosity, does anyone ever use the Mp5?
(I'm disregarding from the grenade launcher here, which obviously is very useful)

I almost never used it in the original, and I find I barely use it in Black Mesa either. I've always felt that it wastes to much ammo in comparison to its accuracy. I'd rather pick my enemies off slowly and accurately from a distance with the glock.
I do sometimes use the Mp5 in "panic situations" where loads of spraying in a short amount of time is called for. For example, when a barnacle grabs me.

I tried using all the weapons in the possible limits. I mostly prefer the shotgun though. I also used the pistol weirdly often.

The mp5 is more efficient in close quarters than the shotgun when you're fighting more than one enemy.

I've been painting.

I usually just use the shotgun and the magnum. Shotgun for single enemies and the magnum for multiple

I generally stick to the magnum for long range and shotgun for close, but sometimes I do feel the mp5 is better like if I'm fighting a bunch of enemies at close range.

Okay, so first impressions from playing from Inbound to the surface lift in WGH (Approx. 2 hours gameplay for me)

Fucking Yes. The scientist dialog in AM gave a lot of character to specific scientists, such as the fashionista in the locker room. (Who I have nammed Stone, after the closest locker when I was racking my brain for a name) He goes on and on about the uniform, then when you put on your suit, he'll reminisce about the old HEV models.
The disaster was well scripted, though I miss bullsquid lake.

Gameplay all the way though was fun and intuitive, and the NPC's scripted scenes added a lot of depth that just wasn't t here in HL.

Two things I wasn't expecting were getting the magnum instead of a shotgun, and the Mp5 being set to burst fire. But that's okay with me.

Burst fire? How?

It's burst fire all the time. Three shot bursts. Try and fire a single bullet and you'll see it.

The gameplay was improved in many aspects, but I haven't gotten to Questionable Ethics yet. It sounds like a lot of classic HL was eliminated. I suspect it was due to lack of resources and time toward the second half of the development.

The first few chapters are brilliantly designed. In fact, the redesign are vastly improved compared to the original and official HL layout. It generally cuts down the frustration, and made it a bit more challenging where the original was too easy.

I'll pass more judgment when I get further into the game.

Questionable Ethics and Surface Tension are my favourite chapters in Black Mesa. Lambda Complex is also great. I can't say that at any point the quality of the mapping drops any considerable amount. It's consistently great.

Surface Tension was such a blast to play through. One thing I will say though is don't even bother with the RPG. Found it to be beyond useless.

I can't say that at any point the quality of the mapping drops any considerable amount. It's consistently great.

I felt the start of Blast Pit was extremely poor. I may have been tired but I swear I saw pipes made with brushes when they had all those fancy models to use. But the opening is by far the best mapping in my opinion. I just wish the tram wasn't so fast so I could look at it all

The ai_monster and the ai_nodes need to be tweaked.

At its current state, it's common to get into the situation where all the houndeyes or all the grunts would rush to the player's position. This either makes the gameplay too easy or too hard, but definite unbalanced.

When I choreographed the combat for my map, sp_justice, I carefully arranged the soldiers into squads and I intentionally separated some of the ai_nodes so that the soldiers would not mindlessly rush to a single position--either to be eliminated with one grenade, or overwhelm the player at one position.

The squads must be separated. In real life, the soldiers would coordinate their attack rather than simply rushing. If you know all of your buddies were killed upstairs, a sensible soldier would wait downstairs until the player comes to them rather than walking upstairs to a trap.

Has anyone found the hat and send it to Xen? I actually found TWO hats but was only able to carry one with me to the teleporter to Xen because i lost one. I didn't get the achievement though. Maybe i had to carry the first hat that i found with me and not the second hat?

I heard the hat you have to carry has 'gullible' written on it, and is found in the quantum cooling area.

So basically the equivalent of Episode 2's garden gnome?

Gameplay is absurd: i never turned off always run, grunts are OVERPOWERED, guns are inaccurate except for the 357 :). I am frustrated from replaying ambushes until i don't die. Practically everything apart from the design (levels, textures, sounds...) sucks.

I'm playing it at hard, I don't have any problems.
Sure it's a bit hard sometimes when 5 grunts rushes you (as Satchmo pointed out) but I can live with that. I think the gameplay is pretty damn good.

I finished on hard difficulty and I have to say, fighting grunts is a lot harder than in vanilla HL, even with 100 hp and 100 suit power, the grunts blast you away in no time at all.

I also find aiming with the scope of the crossbow really hard, it's very difficult to get the crosshair exactly on the target, because of how it seems to jump several inches in any direction as you try to aim at something.

So basically the equivalent of Episode 2's garden gnome?

Correct.

Bow also fires a bit too low, i wasted a lot of shots just firing from cover because the dart came out too low. Scope is rediculuos.

At least the scope looks nice, not like the classic circle of vision with black surrounding it you get in every other game these days.

I've only played to around the place where you first see houndeyes. I've decided I will wait until I get Windows before I continue. It runs in Ubuntu, just not very stably.