Been playing around with our ladies of science a bit. Seems some issues have been plaguing Black Mesa’s feminine side with severe cases of same face. Upon some careful skirting around the 32 materials per model limit of Source, I’ve been able to bring the four (out of seven skins total) previously unusable skins the female scientists had hiding away in their models to use. Still working on things, have a few bugs to squash, but this are looking bright:
Nice work! I’m assuming you’re using the bms/custom workaround to get the character manifests to load?
Also, I’m not especially well-versed in how Source engine models are created and compiled so I can’t figure this out myself, but how hard would it be to create a female security guard model and does anyone else want such a thing to exist? Half-Life Italia’s highly-respected mods (Azure Sheep and Point of View) featured “Barniel” NPCs that were pretty well-done, and I for one would like to see them make the transition over to Black Mesa. Including them in main-story maps would probably be more trouble than it’s worth (although the character manifest system is way more powerful than I thought!), but I would be more than willing to use them in BMPD (especially since I am already planning to include unarmored security guards as “office workers”.)
Yes I am, hence why this isn’t already up on the workshop (since getting updates to people there is easy).
Speaking of, here’s a link. Includes the changes necessary to the gameinfo.txt in the download, just extract to the “Black Mesa/bms” directory. Please let me know how it works, anything you’d like to see, etc. This release tweaks a lot of the named female scientists to use more randomized skins, so you can get the newly working skins mixed in without all of the previous ones vanishing.
As for getting female guards modeled, depends. If it were just stitching the female heads/hands onto the guard bodies, with a few tweaks to look more feminine/fit the female rig, would be easy enough. Making an entirely custom model of the guard uniform for females is another story, though, certainly not impossible. Bigger issue would be the lack of female guard lines and things of that sort. While I wouldn’t mind seeing them myself, like I said, without the support files/likely some programming, would mostly just be a model that’d see more use in SFM/GMod than Black Mesa itself.
Yeah, I imagine the character manifest could be used to get the models into the game with minimal difficulty (it might be possible to do it without modifying the BSPs, even, although I’m not sure how doing this would affect animations), but I suspect the voices were the main reason female scientists were a separate entity to begin with. It might be possible to do this with heavy modification of the response context system, though…
Should look at how Half-Life 1 handled this, since I recall the male and female Citizen NPCs were randomized there.
Sorry for the late bump. Wasn’t there women who made custom voice lines for the female TF2 characters?
Maybe we could reach out to people in the community for that.
Assuming you guys are still interested in this.
Yeah. I was going to have to track down voice actors anyway for BMPD anyway, including the extant npc_human_scientist_female characters, so finding such people would be doubly useful.
Apparently the original female scientist voices were recorded all at once by the mother of one of the devs, so I don’t think we could get the same VAs for fan projects, but I bet we could get good approximations. I wonder what the Hazard Course modders did about voices for that mod?
Going off of precedents, I can safely say that having the same voice actor for the security guards and the scientists would not be in our best interest anyway.
DustyOldRoses did, yes, but I’m doubtful she would be up for this.