Programming video tutorials Created 3 years ago2020-10-20 19:02:42 UTC by Admer456

Excellent work! Half life is my favourite game and it's exciting to play an ancient game with an modern apperance not belonging to its age.
I plan to make a modern renderer for HL recently. Although I'm a programmer but I don't know much about GoldSrc Engine. Looking forward to your future work on this topic.

That would be trigger_camera. And yes, it does actually do that.

Is there a way to fix it?

Oh, I didn't see your post @Lucida, welcome!
I have a similar ambition, I wanna experiment with writing a renderer that uses NVRHI, so I can have Vulkan and DirectX 11/12. GoldSRC is closed-source so you generally have 2 options: hook into the engine (something like MetaRenderer) or write the renderer inside a mod (something like Trinity).

@Meerjel01
That'd be a topic for a new thread. I think there is a way, but I never looked into it.

@Admer456
Thanks for your reply. I have learned about these two projects you mentioned just now. They are all great works. Is it equivalent for these two ways on the capability for implementing any graphical features? I was wondering that the new renderer is opaque for the original gameplay (i.e. without extra work to use the renderer for any existed mods inculding vanila ) if it's written in a single mod.

Is it equivalent for these two ways on the capability for implementing any graphical features?

Yes. Both approaches allow you to do any feature, whether it's PBR, shadowmapping, post-processing etc.

The difference is in the level of control you have and what amount of work you have to do.
With hooking, you are overriding parts of the engine. You get partial control or full control, depending on what you override. In some ways, it might be easier, in others it might be harder.
In a single mod, you need to write the entire renderer from scratch. The game state is already there in the form of client entities, i.e. their transformation data & which model they use. You get full control by design, but it also takes the most amount of work.

I was wondering that the new renderer is opaque for the original gameplay

In the case of hooking, it should generally work as a simple "addon" to most mods and vanilla games, so it shouldn't affect original gameplay whatsoever.
In the case of a single mod, it can only be ported to other mods if they are source-available or they don't use any custom code (so you can simply insert your own DLLs there). It's more useful to people who are making mods, so they can have rendering features out of the box and not worry about DLL injection and other stuff that may potentially trigger VAC.

There's a 3rd option, and that is using Xash, which will give you complete engine-side freedom to implement things. It is a Quake fork that mimics GoldSRC, but there are some grey area legal issues.

New one! Attachments, controllers, hitboxes and animation events in a nutshell.

So, the introduction video has been remade:Happy belated 2nd anniversary, my HL SDK Programming series.

And now we got a video about temporary entities:

The source code from my videos is now finally available:
https://github.com/Admer456/hl-sdk-videos-src

Some of it could be useful material for TWHL Wiki, temporary entities in particular.

New video is out~

Weapons, at last.

After what felt like thirty years, here it finally is: A bit rushed, and has a little audio bug somewhere around the 10th minute... d'oh well, mistakes are made. I'll have to see if new versions of DaVinci Resolve have this audio problem.

It's that time of the year again.