Hello!
Couldn’t find another place to put this, as it is a minor cosmetic issue, but here goes!
I noticed that in the chapter “Residue Processing”, the signs that say “Maintenance Access” look like they’ve been taken straight from Half-Life. Possibly a placeholder that never got replaced by saucy Black Mesa graphics?
Thanks.
You’re wildly misremembering how low-res the HL1 textures were.
That sign looks about on par with the rest of low-priority textures in the game.
I mean, look that the door texture.
I think we probably deem that one “acceptably old”.
It’s one of the downsides to having a game which has been in development for 10 years. Some assets undoubtedly look better than others (and all of our modern, within the past 2 years assets completely blow away any old ones).
One of the big team discussions we actually had prior to release was how much longer we plan on redoing/improving old assets. It is a bit of a vicious cycle. It would be very easy to fall into the trap of endlessly redoing old/outdated assets, because as you make new stuff, the older stuff which was kind of acceptable before winds up being not good enough by comparison to the new stuff. And given the time and effort it requires, very often you don’t even catch up. We’re trying to reach some kind of reasonable baseline for everything, I would say that sign is acceptable, but right at the bottom end of what we’d call okay.
That said, there are still quite a few low quality (mostly HL2 stuff) assets in the game we do plan on replacing for the next SP update, but there will come a point where we draw a line, and we’re approaching it. We don’t want to be redoing assets ad infinitum. And we certainly don’t have the time, manpower, or desire, to bring absolutely everything up to our modern 2015 standard. We have new, cool things to be making!
You still have to work within a texture budget tho. You can’t just make every texture at 2K resolution or something, so some textures always end up looking worse than others.
I don’t think there’s any point in re-doing ALL assets, but those which are significantly lower quality than the 2015 ones should definitely be redone, because there’s an obvious difference compared to the newer ones.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying all textures should be re-done at all. FAMGUY, thanks for the response - I can understand how much you guys are doing right now (playing through the steam version is amazing to see the differences in lighting, etc. with the legacy mod). I just thought this one looked very Half-Lif-ey to me (the font and background). But with regards to BossN00b’s post, I do think lower quality textures/models should eventually be re-done.
Thanks anyway guys! As I pointed out, it’s a minor cosmetic issue. Maybe one day it can look saucy again! Haha.
Don’t worry, I know you weren’t suggesting we redo all assets, and was just pointing out a single instance and a bad asset. Thanks for the report, regardless.
It was just an interesting topic which I hadn’t talked about before so I thought I’d share my thoughts! Give a bit of insight.
I actually enjoy seeing some assets, like this one, that appear old. Kind of ties into the story of the story.
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.
