Black Mesa Mod Publishing tool Guide - How use and edit workshop submissions.

Interested in modding? Made a mod and want to share it with the world? Here’s a guide on how to use the new Black Mesa Mod Publishing tools. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in this thread.

To access the Black Mesa Mod Publishing tool:
Navigate to where you have Black Mesa installed in the Steam Apps folder.
Double click on the bin folder. (So the file path will be Steam Apps/Black Mesa/bin
Double click on“blackmesa_publish.exe” - this is the mod uploader for the BlackMesa Workshop.

What each thing does:

Your Published Content is where all the mods you’ll upload will go. When you want to update your mod, its title or its thumbnail image, you can relaunch blackmesa_publish.exe and select the mod. Reupload whatever you need, then click “Apply changes to UGC”

In the “UserGenerated Content Title:” field, put the name of your mod. This is the display name of your mod. Keep it short!

In the “UserGenerated Content Description:” field, put a description of your mod. You will be able to edit this later, on the mods Steam Workshop Page. You can just put something short in there to remind you to update it later.

In the “UserGenerated Content Tags:” field, write tags that describe your mod. These will help players find your mod! You can put whatever tags you’d like in, but it helps to put the ones we have officially supported on the workshop. For example, Single Player or Multiplayer tags will automatically be picked up by our workshop system. If you tag your map as “Multiplayer,” then when someone selects“Multiplayer” as a search term, your map will be in list with all other mods of the same tag. Our currently supported tags for the workshop are: Multiplayer, Singleplayer, Weapon, NPC, Environment,Creature. We will be expanding upon this in the near future. If you’re going to be adding multiple tags, separate them with a comma.

In the UserGenerated Content folder path:” field,you’ll locate the .vpk of your mod and tell the uploader whereto upload it from. While we do support non-vpk mods, it’s strongly and very highly recommended that you use a .vpk! If you don’t know how to create a .vpk file of your addon, read the section called “Howto make a .vpk.”
Step by step instructions on how to add your mod to be uploaded:

  1. Place the .vpk of your addon into its own folder.
  2. Click “Choose Content Folder” in the Black Mesa Content Publishing Tool.
  3. Navigate to the folder where your addon’s .vpk is.
  4. When you open that folder, you will see that it is empty. THIS IS NORMAL. When you’re inthe folder, Click “Select.”
  5. When you’ve returned back to the main publishing tool window, click “upload.”
  6. The file will be uploaded to the Black Mesa workshop, as a hidden file.
    In the NewThumbnail path:” field, you’ll upload a thumbnail imageof your workshop item. This is an important image! You should makesure that it clearly shows what you’re mod is. This is the firstimage people looking for mods will see, so make it count!
    Thumbnails need tofollow certain rules for uploading, or uploading will not work.
  • The thumbnail imageneeds to have a 512x512 resolution.
  • The thumbnail needsto be of the .png or .jpg filetype.
    To access/modifyyour mods workshop page:
  1. Go to your Steam Profile, click “Workshop Items” on the right hand side of your profile. You will see your mod on the list of uploaded files!
  2. Click on the image of the mod to be taken to its page. From here, you can upload screenshots, edit the description, add contributors and more. You can find all these options on the right hand side of your mods workshop page.
  3. When your mod is ready to be seen by the world, change the visibility settings to public, and it will show up for everyone on the workshop.Congratulations! You can also set its visibility to “friends only”if that is what you prefer.
  4. When you subscribe to a workshop mod, it’s not placed in the black_mesa/bms/addonsfolder like before. It is put in the Steamapps/Workshop/content/362890 folder. It will appear in a numbered folder.
    How to make your mod a .vpk
  5. Make a folder thats the name of your mod.
  6. Inside the folder,place the appropriate files in their proper folders. For example, if you’re releasing a map, your file structure would look like[[mymodsname]]\maps[[mymap.bsp]]. If your mod is replacing existing assets, then the mod files need to copy over the files you’re replacing. This means they need to be the same name, and with the same file path.
  7. Once you’ve done that, navigate again to the SteamApps/Black Mesa/bin folder.
  8. Scroll down and find vpk.exe
  9. Click and drag the folder that has your mod in it on top of vpk.exe
  10. A few seconds later,a .vpk file will appear in your mods folder (the folder you just dragged the mod from).
  11. Congratulations,you’ve made your first .vpk. It’s that easy!
    Other notes:
  • The old bms/addons folder is no long supported.
  • There is no filesize limitations on what mods can be.
  • If you want/need to modify existing official Black Mesa maps, checkout the mapsrc folder in the Black Mesa steam folder. We have the source files for all the single player earth-bound maps there.
  • For development of mods, you’ll want to work through the workshop system. This helps you test and develop your mods in the environment that those playing your mod will be getting it. Lots of things can change when you upload a mod to the workshop. It’s best to work through that, to eliminate any possible bugs that could occur.
  • The workshop addons menu addition doesn’t work at the present moment,this will be fixed in a subsequent update.

Publish tool stops at half load and crashes .Also i cant change the visibility of my content

The not being able to change visibility of your content is on steam, not us, unfortunately. You should be able to do it via the option on the right side of the workshop addon’s page.

When you say the publish tool stops at half-load and crashes, is that when it boots up for the first time, or when you’re loading a mod onto the workshop?

First time . Here is page of my map and there is no visibility option

Is anyone else having this issue? I can see the visibility option (heh) on my workshop pages.

So you understand what is here on Russian language?

May be you can see that option because you are developer?

I don’t know Russian, and it’s not a developer only option, it shouldn’t be at least.

I’m having no such issue. It does appear he only has two options below the delete button instead of three.

Yea. It’s definitely on the end of things. I wonder if it’s a Russian Language/localization thing? I’ll see if I can find an email for someone at Valve who can help.

This is all what I got after uploading some files:

Workshop page of other items. everything looks fine.

Make your thumbnail 512*512.

Yea, that first one is a blank file because you didn’t use 512x512.

Publish tools crashed after updating my sound mod, but my sound mod still broken after the update.

I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.

Oh, I found out they start working if I type snd_restart on console, but it’s needed every time you launch the game.

Some subscribers said that my creations stopped working so I deleted them and uploaded again. As soon as they were uploaded, I subscribed them to see if they worked. They didn´t. Both of my mods contains sounds and when start BM, the replaced sounds are just muted.

Crypts´HD-sleeves, for example, works just fine. There should be nothing wrong with my folder-structure. Am I doing something wrong or is this just a steam-thing?

Here´s some details about one of my mods: it contains bsp´s and wav´s, and they are all in one vpk-file. There should be nothing wrong with the structure. It worked before.

Direct me to the mod and I’ll take a look, but I’m going to guess that it’s the “snd_restart” bug that we’ve been getting reports of. Type snd_restart into console and see if that helps your sounds out. We’re looking into getting this all fixed. (It’s really werid it’s broken because OAR has custom mods and it’s been fine)

Sure! Is there a way to direct you to it without making the mod visible in Workshop? I´d like to publish my mods when they work without problems.

Pretty sure he has Workshop admin permissions, he can probably see whatever you have hidden if you link him.

Basically this.

NOTHING CAN HIDE FROM ME. MUH HA HA HA -cough cough-

Yea, you can just PM me a link on the forums and I’ll take a look at it, see whats up.

No need for such secrecy, I just don´t want to publish these before they work probarly. Sorry for the hold-up, I spent my whole day at the university. Here´s my sound mod and here´s my menu mod.

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.