I want to be clear on fgds Created 3 years ago2021-01-19 18:19:52 UTC by SirCobalt

So this mod I'm making, it's going to use the same armour mechanics from blue shift (as in picking up vests and helmets as opposed to suit batteries or chargers). I've worked out I need a blue shift fgd in order to gain access to the required entities, which I have, but I'm rather confused. Can it/does it have to be loaded alongside the half life fgds? And would it make any difference? Or do I actually have to have only bshift's fgd loaded?

There's also two half life fgds and I don't know if I need them or not. To be honest I don't really understand anything about fgds to begin with and I'm flying completely blind so to say. What's also annoying is that if I loaded any other fgd besides the base ones, the models of entities are not rendered in the 3d viewport I think it's called. That includes half life's models and the models for the newly added entities. That's how I am able to place them accurately.

Also, after taking a look at the first map from blue shift I noticed the info_player_start entity has an item_suit placed within it, no doubt to facilitate the hud showing up even though barney doesn't have an hev suit. But how does one make it so it plays no sound when one picks up said suit entity? Without of course, going directly into the game files and replacing the sound file with a half second audio clip of nothing.

The fgd file only lists the entities for use in map editors; the actual logic behind them resides in a game's server dll. Using the blue shift fgd by itself won't add the entities.

There are multiple versions of fgd files out there. Some of them include editor properties that allow the rendering of models and sprites, others do not.

Blue Shift implements armor by giving the player the HEV suit, which enables the HUD and sets a flag used to indicate that the player has it.

The sounds are silenced by setting the sentences to an empty sound file in sound/sentences.txt:

HEV_AAx common/null
HEV_A0 common/null

It can be changed in the source code by removing the lines that play it: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife/blob/c7240b965743a53a29491dd49320c88eecf6257b/dlls/items.cpp#L191-L194

So instead of basing my mod on half life I have to base it on blue shift? In order to do that, do I have to swap out the dll files in my mod folder with the ones from blue shift? Or something like that? Least that's the rough idea I have gathering from the response.

If you want Blue Shift features you will have to do that. I don't know if those dlls work when used in a mod, otherwise you'll need to use a custom built version of Blue Shift. I don't know if there is one available at the moment.

There are probably ways to fake Blue Shift features in vanilla HL but that's a bit of work to set up.