Happy Birthday Half-life!

[Hyperbyte]

@Ronster

Medkit your lucky my 3g lost signal because i nearly blasted you but to be honest I just think you need to rethink what you wrote.

To say surface tension does not matter, I am ashamed.

This is not the time, nor the place to discuss Surface Tension. The reason Black Mesa developers have this nearly impenetrable wall of silence when it comes to releasing details about the status of their work, is because people go mad with speculation with every small crumb of information they get.

This thread is a prime example. Go back to page 1, read what the developers actually wrote, then read everything that comes after it. Page 2 has some speculation about the announcement, page 3 has speculation about the speculation on page 2… heck, people nearly went rampant with ‘news’ that Black Mesa will be the first game released on the Source 2 engine (which itself hasn’t even been confirmed yet).

You guys are bickering over speculation about speculation regarding a speculative chapter in a to-be-released game. If you read carefully what developers have said regarding the inclusion of the extended Surface Tension in the past, you’ll find it basically boils down to “we don’t know, it could go either way”.

Now, experience tells us you’re not getting more out of the developers than that. So let’s just leave it at that and wait and see.

[Flafla2]

@Hyperbyte

This is not the time, nor the place to discuss Surface heck, people nearly went rampant with news that Black Mesa will be the first game released on the Source 2 engine (which itself hasn’t even been confirmed yet).

your_name_here said earlier that it explicitly WASN’T on source 2

[your-name-here]

That’s correct. We’re not on Source 2. Yes we had to change engines twice. We ported from 2007 to 2013. Then we went from 2013 to another Source engine. No we’re not going to sell this game for $80. Official status on TextFAMGUY1’s maps still stands. They will be put on the Steam Workshop (if/when that gets implemented) and officially supported via those means. Not to say that won’t change but that’s the stance as of now.

Hope this clears some things up.

[P_PORTAL_RTAL]

so about “when its done”

it says BM will be sold on steam “soon”, but also states xen still needs a lot of work.
does that mean
Steam BM will get xen as an dlc later on?
or
Steam BM will still take a while?

[Maxey]

@P(PORTAL)RTAL

i wonder how they can improve the visual quality even higher…

Oh, they absolutely can. The mod version that is out right now is abusing the 2007 engine to its limits and that’s without direct access to the rendering code and with entity limits. But now they have full access to the latest commercial branch of the engine and the sky’s the limit for them now.

[bur]

“Soon” and “lots of work to do” seem mutually exclusive, so it follows that the first Steam release will not include Xen.

I think DM might be included, since they started recruiting mappers for it a while ago.
Getting a commercial Source license has probably made it easier to implement, too. But don’t quote me on that, I don’t know anything about Source.

[The_Bright_Side]

@your-name-here

That’s correct. We’re not on Source 2. Yes we had to change engines twice. We ported from 2007 to 2013. Then we went from 2013 to another Source engine. No we’re not going to sell this game for $80. Official status on TextFAMGUY1’s maps still stands. They will be put on the Steam Workshop (if/when that gets implemented) and officially supported via those means. Not to say that won’t change but that’s the stance as of now.

Hope this clears some things up.

Hey guys, this is absolutely amazing news. I just signed up to this forum to say congratulations, you deserve all the success you have.

I played Black Mesa when it came out last year but had to stop when I reinstalled Windows and my saves got lost. I figured I’d start again at a later point, and with this amazing news, the time has come!

As for the uncut chapters, I’d like to second Subatomic’s question:

@subatomic

I don’t know much about Source development, so excuse my ignorance. Will all currently available map mods and add-ons to Black Mesa be compatible with the new paid Steam version? I know you’ve said that Surface Tension and On A Rail Uncut won’t be integrated, but will I be able to add them as is, or will TextFAMGUY have to fix them somehow to get them to work?

Forgive me my ignorance, I realize it must be getting tedious by now, but I’m still not sure if mods that were made so far will work in the upcoming Steam version as they used to.

I looked up Steam Workshop and now have a basic idea what it is, but I know that other games which don’t support Steam Workshop still work with mods, so that would mean TextFAMGUY’s mods would still work even without being on the Workshop, right?

I guess my basic question is, and I haven’t seen it answered in this thread yet:

Will the upcoming Steam version be fully backward compatible?

[P_PORTAL_RTAL]

mods will work without the workshop, the workshop is jsut an easy accesable platform to share altered content

currently existing mods might still work, but they can also be broken it, its not sure at this point.
forexample if a mod just replaces the models & sounds then that will likely still work unless the BM team decided to chance the folder structure of the mod
if more complex stuff is modden it will probely need tobe updated to work with the new version of the mod

its unlikely they the new version will be backward compatiable, as developers want to move forward. implement new stuff freely. and not have to rethink every step incase they might break a 3rd party mod

[Ulrik]

@P(PORTAL)RTAL

mods will work without the workshop, the workshop is jsut an easy accesable platform to share altered content

currently existing mods might still work, but they can also be broken it, its not sure at this point.
forexample if a mod just replaces the models & sounds then that will likely still work unless the BM team decided to chance the folder structure of the mod
if more complex stuff is modden it will probely need tobe updated to work with the new version of the mod

its unlikely they the new version will be backward compatiable, as developers want to move forward. implement new stuff freely. and not have to rethink every step incase they might break a 3rd party mod

I’m not sure mods like Uncuts, uplink or hazard course (still in dev) will work since there are developped on Source 2007 not Source 2013. Modders may have to do the same conversion as the BM team did.

By the way, I think all questions found answers so it’s not necessary to, as Hyperbite said, speculate anymore.

[jessiestorm88]

Does this mean that we’re going to have two communities for deathmatch, the free version and the paid version?

[your-name-here]

So a lot of people are asking about the content in the paid and free versions of our game. We’ll be announcing that information in the future so until then, I’m not authorized to answer or give out information about that.

In regards to backwards compatibility: 2013 should be backwards compatible with the mods out there for 2007. While we certainly won’t intentionally break backwards compatibility with mods, we can’t guarantee it for the commercial version.

[Tuskin38]

If black Mesa is on a newer version of the engine wouldn’t you need to release. SDK compatible with that version of the engine like valve did with Portal 2?

[SergeantPancakes]

So the commercial version’s engine is more different than base Source then we thought… hmm… interesting… We need to speculate further

[Tuskin38]

@SergeantPancakes

So the commercial version’s engine is more different than base Source then we thought… hmm… interesting… We need to speculate further

That’s not surprising the base source engine that modders can use isn’t even as advanced the source engine portal 2 uses. AFAIK

[Kazioo]

@Tuskin38

That’s not surprising the base source engine that modders can use isn’t even as advanced the source engine portal 2 uses. AFAIK

Yup, the free 2013 SDK is just a modified Source 2009 with added VR and Linux support. Even the Alien Swarm branch is in some ways more advanced (and SDK was available years ago).

I guess the retail Black Mesa will have the same engine that all new Source games use (Dear Esther, The Stanley Parable, Titanfall): Portal 2’s branch.

Respawn has big budget/team/experience, so they modified the engine pretty heavily (DX11, multithreading), but the base was just Portal 2.

[Pyroclase]

Alright guys, I bet that the new release will include several new levels with audio diaries containing official plot that delve deep into the backstory of black Mesa, the resonance cascade, and even the G-man, setting up the story for the release of HL3.

But seriously, I regret even mentioning Source 2.

[Dr_Maxwell]

I bet there’ll be a hidden message in the new release about how Half-Life 3 is cancelled. :fffuuu:

[bur]

The twist is that in HL3 some weird timetravel accident happens where Gordon is forced to go through all of it again. BM = HL3.

[sgt_McMuffin]

@your-name-here

That’s correct. We’re not on Source 2. Yes we had to change engines twice. We ported from 2007 to 2013. Then we went from 2013 to another Source engine.

hmmm you’ll have to forgive my speculation on the matter. so judging by your mentioning that being able to modify the engine as one of the benefits/reasons for the second porting aside from being able to sell the game, it could be safe to assume the engine is either a further modification to the CSGO branch or an all new branch of the commercial engine maybe?
I don’t really expect any kind of answer or confirmation tbh the last thing i want is to get the black mesa dev team in trouble… anyways all things in due time

“God speed, brothers”

[jambo]

Money hungry bastards.