Greetings my name is Johnathan aka Cpl.1nsane or Comrade Badger on steam, I joined the team in 2007 primarily as a level designer. So far since joining I’ve predominantly worked on the chapters Unforeseen Consequences and Questionable Ethics, the majority of that work went towards the second half of UC with the coolant labs & lower canal up to Office Complex and the first and last maps of QE. Intermingled with that I’ve dipped my toes into a few other areas with some texture creation but mostly creating particle effects, many of which are used throughout the mod.
So with that brief intro out of the way I’d like to tell you about some of things I’ve been working on over the past year or so after the initial release of the mod back in 2012. Following that launch I set out to gather and review the plethora of bug reports (which were very helpful!) that had been submitted on both our forums and the community created bug tracker and start to sift through and begin fixing as much as I could. I could not dare guess at the total number of things that have been fixed since then, but It’s a decent amount (150+ level related issues and improvements at least) and hopefully for the vast majority of cases it may only be small visual quips remaining rather than the more game breaking issues.
One such issue that had been reported related to the players weapons disappearing when transitioning between the end of Questionable Ethics and the first map of Surface Tension (bm_c2a4h to bm_c2a5a) The bug itself was caused by there being too much data in the area (in both maps) upon the player moving between maps which caused it to remove some entities in order to make space, in this case it was the players weapons. Ultimately the issue lay within the transition design itself (aka oops, I dun goofed when making it).
(you can click the images for larger versions)
In the original 2012 release version the tunnel section at the end of QE was present both before and after the transition which meant all of the models, decals and other assorted entities were being duplicated from bm_c2a4h to bm_c2a5a upon transitioning, this would continue to happen if the player transitioned back from ST to QE again which would further cause problems. To rectify this issue I elected to go with the simpler enclosed transition with a door closing behind the player at the end of QE creating an airlock of sorts. Once moved to Surface Tension they would only see a closed door behind them rather than the full section of the tunnel. This had Its added benefits In both reducing the map size and number of entities in bm_c2a5a and removing the quirk present in starting ST directly from the menu and being able to transition back to QE causing the player to see npcs that have yet to be triggered to spawn among other things. I also added some extra hard cover for the initial engagement the player has a the beginning of ST.
The player is still able to transition back to QE from ST but only if the player has come from QE and not loaded ST from the menu and has dispatched the near by enemies outside of the tunnel.
Transition before:
Transition after:
The difference in the fog between the before and after shots is due to the tunnel fog that was still active in the old transition, in the new one its only using the actual map fog from bm_c2a5a than than having the tunnel fog just for that small area.
I also fixed this really not noticeable or annoying bug, which I can go into more detail if people are interested.
Before / After
Gallery link for anyone that wants it.
If you have any questions related to the post, feel free to ask.
