(Release) Half-Life: Echoes Created 6 years ago2018-08-10 12:29:10 UTC by Mr Gnang

Hello all - I have finally managed to lift the heavy burden of making this mod off my shoulders and released it to the world!
An announcement post should be up on moddb.com when it has been authorised, but in the meantime you can go straight to playing

https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-echoes

Enjoy!

Once again, a massive congratulations my man. I've played the pre-release through twice, but I'm gonna download and play again tonight for sure.

Well done.

Edit: There used to be some text here where I complained there's no note about "cg.dll" and "cgGL.dll", but I found out they belong to Spirit of Half Life.

Oh boy. That was a ride.
I have to say, this mod is the first time Half-Life has scared me since the first time I played the original a decade ago - there are a lot of tense moments in there that really got my blood pumping. Everything is fine-tuned, balance-wise - I only died a couple times, mainly due to my own stupidity, but there were a lot of encounters I came really close (and then was immediately rewarded with a healthkit or two!)

Really excellent work, definitely among the top 3 Black Mesa Incident-based mods of all time.

Aye, congrats. Always great to finally release something into the wild.

I've posted it on RTSL as well.

I posted it on Facepunch: https://forum.facepunch.com/f/halflife/bszzp/Half-Life-Chat-V10/8/#postcvtdkh

I thought running the game from the Steam shortcut fixes the num_edict error, but apparently I ran into it as well. Just before the vent area with the monster. However what's weird, normally when I hit the num_edict error I get a message, this time I didn't. However after restarting the game I was able to get through the part without the error and without setting the shortcut parameter myself.

I also noticed you can reload the pistol, even if the magazine is still full. Not sure if this is intended, it doesn't remove any ammunition so it isn't really game breaking.

As for the balancing, I played on easy and had situations where I just said myself "oh come on, you gotta be kidding" because at times it felt too easy and then there was passages where I had to quicksave and lure enemys. Propably just my playstyle in general, I tend to stop every here and then to take a look at the level itself, which most games don't accompany for. One situation I remember was the vortigaunts at the stairs, think it was like 4 or 5 of them and I had to deal with them with like 10hp, found a healthkit on top of the stairs though. As for the zombies and headcrabs I usually just passed them.

I really liked the garage fight, since you couldn't just pass that one, same for the special alien grunt.

And not sure if this is just Half Life AI in general, but some times enemys wouldn't attack me at all until I attacked them first.

Edit: I also noticed some slowdowns FPS-wise, mainly in the huge open areas which is either just the GoldSrc engine or my PC I assume? AMD Athlon X4 640, 4GB RAM and a AMD Radeon 6870, I know that it's pretty much outdated and low end, if even.

I've gotta check out this mod. It's been ages since I've played anything HL related.

Not much I can do about video quality, youtoob did something to it and i dunno what.

Note that you can remove the need to launch through Steam by specifying the edicts count using the "edicts" liblist.gam key. This directly sets the edict count, rather than relying on commandargs. The greater of either "edicts" or "-num_edicts" will be used, but i'd recommend removing the commandargs version.

This was very cool to play, the work on scripted sequences is really impressive, and the creative re-use of environments works really well and doesn't feel like backtracking at all. I did encounter a few programming bugs, which @torekk has already mentioned above, but aside from that there was nothing too bad. Really nice work, very impressive!

Aw yeah! Can't wait to play it ever since I saw the update in 2015.

Great job finishing it! It's a rare sight to find mods finished, let alone developed for more than 5 years!

I love it. SO GOOD!!!!!! This mod has a professional quality to it, and I just can't wait to play it and experience this awesomeness for myself!

Thank you for the responses everyone I am just happy that everyone found something to enjoy in this - I did not have any specific goal in mind when I started aside from making something I would like to play! I know there are flaws here and there, but overall I am very content with how things turned out.

A little aside about your video 2muchvideogames, I noticed there is a problem with the lightmaps. Lights which are off and turn on are all on permanently from the start oddly. This means that the car park was all red initially before the flares are dropped by the marines, and the final map with the housing complex is already lit by the massive explosion, sorry if that killed any of the scenes for you! Just curious, did you play on the Steam version of Half Life on opengl?

yeah i turned off dynamic lights at the start of the video because it would lag me horribly in opengl, my computer preferred d3d video mode but valve removed it in steam. I could play in won but obs doesnt detect it correctly

I'm getting a lot of random crashing to desktop with no error message in the map echoes12. I did add the key 'edicts' to the liblist.gam file and upped the value to 3072 (What's a good value?) and I've commented out the commandargs line. Didn't seem to help though.

The engine only supports a maximum of 2048. Anything beyond that will crash the game if it tries to network an entity with an index >= 2048.

Even if I put it back at 2048 the game crashes uncontrollably. I'm unable to continue now. I don't want to manually load the next level as I don't want to skip anything.

Hahaha your very funny, My display card is very strong and has not problem with OpenGL because I am very far to Half-Life's OpenGL minimal version. ( possible 3.3 or older than < 3.0 version of OpenGL. ) Why do you not buy new computer or are you jobless

Don't be such a dick, Skyboxer.

I got through echoes12 after reloading from a previous save from a previous map. My game crashed again when playing through echoes12, but then It worked fine and got to the next map.
It's quite a pesky bugger though.

its a kiddie who thinks hes hot shot, going around antagonizing ppl

anyway i must be lucky to have not run into crashes, or video would go down the gutter...
I didnt use the cg.dll or whatevers that came with the game, maybe that had to do with something.

Hi Mad Carrot - sorry to hear about your issues!

I suspect it seems to be some kind of memory leak or similar - perhaps caused by spirit of Half-Life? I used version 1.5 - unfortunately I was a few years into this before I found out how unreliable it was. This was my first big project!
It seems to be related to saving. The more frequent someone saves, the sooner the crash happens during the mod. I never got this issue myself, nor did my testers, and so I really only found out about it on release. I'm not entirely sure how to fix it at the moment, and it is not tied to a specific map - however time wise most people who have it get it around map 12. If anyone has any suggestions, I can maybe work from there.

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?

Those crashes are most probably map/engine-wise and barely depend on Spirit. Using Spirit 1.9 also means you will play without weapon rebalance made for the mod. And Spirit 1.9 is intended to use specific weapon models (not sure how they compatible with models from the mod). I currently want to test Spirit 1.2 with bug-fixes by nekonomikon. If it will work fine, there is an easy way to port the mod on Linux, Android and such.

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.

Those who encounter crashes likely use pirated versions or CD Retail / WON versions lol, dunno why they even still use them, just redeem the key on Steam or buy a Steam copy, it's dirt cheap.

Hmm, who are those QuertyUS and Uncle Mishia, should I call SauceSlyPoxer to ask him about this? Well, if we are talking about Unkle Mike's Spirit 1.9, then yes, he fixed tons of bugs, but he fixed bugs of Spirit, not all the problems in Half-Life world. Most of fixed things in Spirit 1.9 are different problems with entities which didn't work as intended from one Spirit version to another. But those crashes in the mod most probably are not bugs of Spirit. They mostly about default engine's limits and such. Maps in the mod are so detailed, that they're getting too close to these limits and thus provoke crashes in some specific conditions. For example, if you pass from one map to another without saving/loading the game you may have no crashes, but if you use saving/loading crash may happen. And if you tested map with Spirit 1.9 without triggering some specific conditions and crash didn't happen, this doesn't mean, that Spirit 1.9 helped you to prevent crash. Maybe this just means, that you tested problem not well enough. Maybe I'm wrong, and Spirit 1.9 magically helps, but I doubt it.

Well I just finished it. Good lord man. That's all I have to say.

Haven't had a chance to play it yet, but most people on Facepunch are practicslly creaming over the mod. You've clearly done something pretty good man!

Mr Gnang, i'm going to do this here since i've probably filled up the Facepunch thread enough. I ripented echoes12 to see if there are any entity setups that could be causing problems. I found a couple multi_managers that could be creating excessive amounts of copies due to unnecessary keyvalues.

Multi managers blue1_repeatmm and blue1_mm call each-other almost immediately, and both have a keyvalue "m_flRadius" with a delay of 512. I'm seeing the exact same keyvalue and value in a lot of entities, mostly scripted sequences.
There is no entity by that name, but there are keyvalues by that name for entities scripted_sequence, scripted_sentence and env_sound.

I suggest removing these keys. It'll allow the multi_manager clones to be removed much sooner (about 511 seconds sooner), drastically reducing the number of entities and the amount of save game space required. It may also eliminate the need to use num_edicts, but you'll have to test that.

I would also suggest checking all other multi_managers for similar keyvalues, as well as any other entities that don't use such a keyvalue (ammo_buckshot for instance).

If you did not add these keyvalues, whether directly or by copying and modifying other entities, double check your fgd file for incorrect keyvalues and/or baseclasses.

I just found another awesome secret.
Don't click this image if you don't like spoilers: https://i.imgur.com/ZMeFIRP.jpg

Well done - I think you are the first person to post about it that I am aware of

Thank you so much solokiller - I am removing the junk values now and will give it a test!

EDIT
Version 1.3 has been released - hopefully the crashes have been taken care of

For those who are interested: I've made a secrets/easter eggs guide in the form of an Imgur album (with the occasional link to a relevant YouTube video). At 93 screenshots, it's fairly extensive. Maybe too extensive, but some players take more time exploring than others.

Most of the screenshots feature secrets or easter eggs, some just show random cool stuff. Read the descriptions if you're wondering what you're supposed to see. All images can be enlarged to 4K UHD size. I had to cheat myself a crossbow to get some zoomed in screenshots early on in the game.

Screenshots are shown 'in order of appearance' and the descriptions tell you in which map precisely you can find the things that are shown.

I'm not sure if my guide is complete but I hope it's useful.

I noticed that the shotgun sound is a bit muffled for some reason, so I checked the file to see what's up. Found that the rate for it was 44khz, which was making it sound pretty terrible in Goldsource. Also found a similar but crispier sound in my folders. Comparison between the original, the 22khz converted one, and the one from my folders is quite significant.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/206490370605973504/481454957124517938/comparison.wav
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/206490370605973504/481456867202170910/sbarrel1.wav

Awesome work, J-M. So much that I missed.

Hi by the way, I think we played quite a bit of Anti-Rush HL in Sven when the difficulty was extreme a while back. I go by Scheherazade in-game.

Congratulations J-M!! You have really done well You have however missed maybe one scene, and perhaps one secret ammo cache. I could tell if you want? Especially as you have done this well!

Thanks for the feedback on the sound ZikShadow - maybe if I do another patch I will fix the quality of it.

Thank you, MrGnang.
Someone notified me of the ammo cache in here that I completely missed in a whopping four playthroughs
I also recognized your fantastic shout-out to Adam Foster's Someplace Else (pic01, pic02).

But yeah, I am curious what scene I might've missed. Maybe it's something I didn't include in the guide on purpose, but there's just so much to find in your fantastic mod that I probably missed it. Could you please tell me?

Your mod is a masterpiece, by the way. Everything has already been said (phenomenal mapping, brilliant scripted sequences, stellar lighting, outstanding gameplay, list goes on) so I'll just keep it short here: 10/10

Edit: Or are you referring to one of these things Marphy Black figured out...?
Edit 2: Speaking of that Someplace Else reference... What is that circular thing visible in the small window in the top centre of the TV screen? Another shout-out to some Goldsource map? I can't seem to recognize it.

@Unq: Hey man what's up? I remember you from the anti-rush server indeed! I don't play there often these days though... got a bit bored >.>

Hello again - the vent cache was one of the things You have done amazingly to find most of these!
Thank you for the compliments

The textures are from the cancelled Nightwatch mod - so the reference is theirs - but I did recognise it as someplace else myself and put it in. I just love that mod. Adam Foster has made some of the best maps I have ever played.

So - the last thing is on map 14. Kill all the aliens, get Agamemnon (the green suited worker) to open the door. Proceed out until you reach the Military arrival on map 14b. Go back into the parking lot on map 14, and look out the giant door near the security booth

Regarding the last image - I could not figure out that one sorry!

EDIT - and yes, what Marphy found! The game over is very hard to get but was included as a fail safe. The Garg has maybe 9999999 HP or something similarly stupid

So - the last thing is on map 14 [...]

Just checked it out. Nice touch!

Android port of Echoes for Xash3D FWGS Engine is released! Now you can play Echoes properly on mobile phones & tablets:
https://www.moddb.com/games/half-life/downloads/half-life-echoes-android-port

Found 2 more sound files with 44khz rate, dweller/stalker_die2.wav and stalker_scream4.wav.

This provided a nice couple of action packed evenings. I don't play a lot of HL these days but a friend of mine pointed me to this and then I saw this thread. I found myself staring at all that eye-candy (for HL standards, at least). Really loved some areas, like the metro station, that glass-tunnel area where some jets keep passing by etc. It made me realize, more than the original HL, just how massive is the Black Mesa complex.
The difficulty was well balanced I think, I did have some frustrating moments but eventually got through them. The attention to detail actually became annoying at some point, in the positive sense (made me shout "what the heck, did this guy really just spend all that time for this?). I think the amount of time that went into this is obscene by my standards, but with sacrifices comes good quality things.

What can I say. It's 2018 and I'm more impressed by a mod for a 20 year-old game than AAA titles - probably because I realize just how much effort went into this.

Gentlemen, if someone wants to help with testing of cross-build version of Echoes, which allows you to play on Win/Linux/Mac, please, let me know. We have the appropriate patch and need more people to check how the things work.

saw this review on the mod recently from one of my favorite YouTubers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nITrAwChI0E

Nice. I also enjoy a bit of Gggmanlives