Need help with modding Created 1 year ago2022-12-20 17:44:32 UTC by CaptainQuirk26

I am currently trying to make a mod of the original Half-Life. However, I cannot do all of the work myself. The mod will be a single-player AND multiplayer mod called Half-Life: Modder's Cut. The mod's goal is to take the original Half-Life and give it the modder's treatment. And as everyone knows, modders excel at ruining your favorite games.

I need:
Mappers, one or two
Voice Actors, depends on how the actors' voices sound
Testers, one or two
Modelers, two or three

I can do myself:
Texturing, although I cannot retexture models myself, only wads, and I could use another set of hands for that
Coming up with horrible ideas, although if any of you have some, I'd love to hate them
Sound Design/Editing, although I may need help

HELP!!!!!

Bump

If you don't have anything to show for the mod, there may be very little interest. It's simply in people's nature to not be interested in ideas, but in final products instead. Having a bit of a vision of that final product helps attract attention.

My personal advice is: it would be easier to learn most those skills yourself (mapping in particular) than to form a team. Definitely try doing that first, and at that point you'll have actual stuff to show too.

Yeah, to be honest the whole pitch is very vague. Give Half-Life the "modder's treatment?" I mean we've been doing that for 24 years at this point.

What modifications in particular are you expecting to make? Is this an entirely new set of singleplayer and multiplayer maps or simply reimagined versions of the existing levels (which has also already been done a couple of times, just by the by)

In any case, even if I had the time, I couldn't honestly join a project without a clear set of end goals and some examples of the current progress. I've joined mod teams in the past with big crazy ideas and even concept art and they've always fizzled out within weeks.

My intention with the mod is to take the original story campaign of Half-Life and make it weird. I'm talking odd reanimations, new sounds, funny weapon re-skins, the works. I know it's been done several times before, but each mod has a different result.

Just set-up (JACK)hammer editor and play 1998 virtual legos, Wadmaker with (png files less than x512 and dividable by the number 16) will let you paint your legos custom colors from the original play set. From there you can look at the various entities and think about what cool shit you want to attempt to make in each boxed lego room, you will look at the wiki and TWHL wiki and when stuff doesn't work you can seek advice from the old boomer sages in the discord. Goldsrc is a lot more interactive than quake and all of its modern day clones, you can do a lot of cool stuff but you need to understand that the stuff you do in Goldsrc is all smoke in mirrors. It requires creativity and tinkering.

Looking at your post history, you have gone from talking about releasing a mod in christmas, to not releasing it, and now you are asking people to make a huge mod for you, the idea for your large mod is vague and has already been done before. The old timers here will not be interested, furthermore you aren't really offering any help for this mod, even texturing wads and sound design by you're own admission you "might need help with".

So my question for you is this. What is your motive? I got into goldsrc because I wanted to make brush based levels, I struggle to wrap my head around programming so its nice to play with something that has a bunch of built in entities for me to play with, goldsrc has its problems (mostly a lack of modern cross platform support for tools) but its fun to play with and learn.

If you don't want to make your own custom brush based maps, model anything, make custom scripts/entities via coding. Just what exactly is your motive for even getting into goldsrc?

I want to be able to do modding on my own, I've always been interested in game development. I just happen to be severely limited by the technology available to me. I am doing most of this on a Chromebook as that is all I own. Occasionally I will be able to do something on my Friend's computer, but mostly that's all I have. I'm working with online tools, mostly, which are great but almost none of them support the file formats necessary to use in GoldSRC. That is why I'm here asking for help.

Since ChromeOS is a heavily locked down linux distro based roughly on Gentoo you might want to look into installing a different linux distro that has more freedom and support like Linux Mint.

https://youtu.be/AxsckwmRhfw
This video goes into how to do it to get Ubuntu but it probably wouldn't be too hard to tweak it towards Mint (since mint is ubuntu based but more friendly towards windows users). Once you have a proper linux distro with all the packages available you should be able to install JACKhammer for free and start mapping. Most of the tools that you would use for modding should work well enough in WINE.

Okay, I abandoned this project about a month ago to learn the system and after getting some more practice (thanks, twhl tutorials), I'm ready to restart development. Unfortunately, due to a hardware crash between when I scrapped the project and now, I've lost all of the work I had. I've restarted by first raiding the site of any and all BAD models I could import, and I've been messing around trying to alter the maps in Hammer 3.4. The problem is that I can't find a single accurate decompiler to save my goddamn life. I'm currently using WinBSPC which is okay, but it will regularly screw up on things that it shouldn't screw up on, like turning a trigger into a solid brush or horribly misaligning a texture. One time, it completely filled all of c1a0d's hallways with geometry that wasn't even remotely close to being there in the actual map. And there wasn't even a trigger brush or anything there, just straight-up nothing. Due to that, I haven't been able to alter any of the maps themselves. So to keep it interesting, I've decided to add a "respite" from the main campaign in between Apprehension and Residue processing, where instead of loading you into the garbage compactor, it instead loads you into some weird acid trip of maps, which will then load you into residue processing afterward. However, I can't decompile the last map of Apprehension to change the level load target, because then the cutscene won't work. So WTF do I do there?
Additionally, I am still looking for people's help. One thing I have still not yet learned how to do is create/compile models to .mdl format and have them actually, you know, work. I could possibly use some help there. I can make some models but I can't convert them to the necessary formats, and thanks to the continued limits of the tools available to me, I can't even rig models. Let alone animate them.
My attempts to change my Chromebook to Linux were completely unsuccessful, so that sucks. I do, however, have partial access to a Windows 10 PC. At this point, however, I have not been able to get it to do much, as it kinda mostly entirely sucks ASS. So, I am once again asking for help. I have put up a ModDB page that I know Urby has found, and I will link to it here.
Sorry about this Berlinian wall of text, but please for the love of god at least one person HELP ME.

If all you need to change in the map is the name of the next map, you don't need to decompile it - use either Ripent or a hex editor to change the trigger_changelevel. As for your other questions: you wrote a whole novel. Don't know if anyone will read all that

Okay then, here's a TL, DR.
I restarted development after losing all my progress and have had significant issues with map decompilers. I am also still looking for some help. My attempts to change my Chromebook's OS were completely unsuccessful, and I have put up a ModDB page.

Decompilers can't produce accurate results because there isn't enough information in a HL1 BSP file to produce something that can be compiled back into a map. You'll always need to touch it up after decompiling so you'll need a good understanding of level design to work with those maps.

I recently made an improved decompiler which should be more accurate: https://github.com/SamVanheer/HalfLife.UnifiedSdk.MapDecompiler/releases

It still requires work to touch up the maps after the fact. This is not something you can skip, no matter which decompiler you use.