No just needs scripting only…Tank would simply drive over the zombie without legs gib that npc and spawn a headcrab… All with info Targets… I think it’s not very difficult to do but I could be wrong.
Just a bit of comedy I guess but I think it would be quite good
Why on earth are we talking about Surface Tension now?
I agree. This is so awesome idea. But let’s see what TEXTFAMGUY1 do.
So how’s work on map B2 going, Text?
Since I am not a game dev, or critic I just wait for the release of the finished OAR uncut mod. If I’d go for alpha or beta, I’d just blow the experience for myself I think.
Say Text; imagine the day when Xen is released! You download it and finish it quickly… too quickly - realizing it too, was heavily cut. “What will you do then?”
Let’s play Xen Uncut then.
HL2 uncut aka. Episode Three, make it happen Text :d
oh god, Dotard, remember last time?
On a Rail Uncut Alpha Feedback for Map B1 (continued)
The music does not play at all when getting back up after dying during the turntable ambush. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHKV1s3FbGk Start the video at 29:00.
After using the satchel charge to destroy those tnt blocks above near the end of the map, the wooden crates will vanish instead of falling apart when you destroy them.
Sorry it’s been a while guys. Been working hard on my dissertation and because university’s out for Easter, also been catching up with mates. Very, very busy.
Slower than I’d hoped. I’m not very good at displacement work so getting the cliffs to look as good as they do throughout the rest of Black Mesa has been tricky. I’m getting there though, so far today I’ve done a lot and the cliffs are starting to look real nice.
The map’s basic layout has been complete for nearly a week now, I just need to start detailing out places now, so far everything’s got mostly very basic detail. I’m having trouble finding a good design for the first room with the overhead crates (the start of HL1’s C2A2F), but aside from that everything else design wise is as I’d pictured it, and going just fine.
I’ve thought up 3 or 4 cool scripts and sequences which I’m going to sprinkle liberally throughout the map. B2’s gonna kinda be like A1 in the regard that if you bomb straight from start to finish, it’s a relatively short map, probably completable in just a few minutes. But if you look around, walk around, find things, there’s a lot to explore and find, and lots of cool stuff knocking around.
The skybox is problematic, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
Nah, I’m not gonna do it. I was never a very big fan of the idea anyway, and introducing an Abrams into On a Rail, however I do it, is wrong in my mind. The introduction of the Abrams is reserved for Surface Tension. Sorry.
I’m going to wait and see how the skybox turns out before I make up my mind about whether to use the skybox flares or not. It could look really cool, but I’m still fairly on the fence about it.
I’ve spent quite a bit of the past week trying to get to grips with the procedural terrain displacement method the BM Devs used to make the incredible skybox on Surface Tension’s C2A5C map. It’s actually a really damn simple but ingenious technique. The entire skybox is just made up of tiled displacements, forming mountains and canyons and land features. That’s not the clever part; that’s just how any skybox is done on Source. The really clever part is that instead of using textures to “paint” the landscape with rocks, sand and grass, like you normally would to create a skybox, they’ve created individual textures for each displacement “tile”. They’ve then very painstakingly used photoshop or whatever to create custom textures for each tile, which paints features like rocks, lighting, shadowing (the shadowing is especially important) and detail. Basically, each small tile of displacement has its own custom texture with all the detail painted onto it, rather than just using the game’s standard textures. It’s a really simple, and elegant solution. They’ve packed tonnes of detail into a large simple mesh. But it’s super time consuming, for obvious reasons.
I -think- I can recreate that method, but slightly differently. I’m not a texture or environment artist, I can’t custom paint and create the landscape to even half the standard the BM Devs made for that skybox. Not even close. They were very particular about making sure that everything to do with that skybox was hand made. What I can do, however, is use Terragen to create a rough draft of the shape of the landscape. I can then take top-down renders of the landscape to get a very detailed texture screenshot of how the land looks in terragen, which gives it a lot more detail and depth than it would in Source with just the flat sand/rock textures. I can use photoshop to stitch them side by side so they form a massive texture to use on the skybox. I can then simple create the skybox using displacements in Source (or even convert Terragen’s heightmap into a displacement), and then overlay the texture I made. It’ll be very time consuming, but shouldn’t be terribly complicated, and has the potential to come out looking fantastic. But we’ll see! You never know.
Interesting question. Firstly, I highly doubt that Xen will be cut, in fact I think most people are expecting it to be extended. After all, it’s been several months in the making now, by a whole dev team, who’ve very specifically set out to overhaul it. I have good faith in the BM Team in this regard.
If it is cut, I’m afraid I won’t do anything about it. Displacement work is probably one of my biggest weaknesses as a mapper and I’d imagine nearly all of the geometry on Xen will be displacements - mapping hell for me. Plus I don’t have the most creative eye with environment design, I probably couldn’t make the environments super interesting on my own. So sorry, Xen Uncut won’t happen.
Then again…I said that when OaR was first brought up too, and look where we are now!
But realistically, almost certainly not.
17 - Bug with all music in Black Mesa, and just the Source engine in general. Happens in all Half Life games as well, and definitely in Black Mesa.
18 - No free edicts. Will probably be solved during optimization pass.
looking forward to this
@TextFAMGUY1 I added 1 more piece of feedback in my previous post.
Edit: Ignore what I wrote above the edit. I moved it to the next page.
Never mind.
-Takes a seat-
I really want to see how he takes this.
Save yourself before it’s too late man!
Would you hire Dadster as your agent if you were in the market for one, TextFAMGUY1? 
Cannot wait for this 
Enjoyed Surface tension Uncut btw.
I’ve been looking for an excuse to say some of this stuff, so here it is.
Not sure why you removed your post Dadster, but I’m going to reply to it anyway.
Dissertation due date: 3rd May
Final Exam period: 24th May - 31st May
Here’s my “formal” schedule for OaR Uncut releases:
B2 Alpha: I don’t know
Full Beta: I don’t know
Full RC: I don’t know
Full Final: I don’t know
Does that suffice?
University ends after the exam period is finished. After this I have set aside a few weeks time to finish OaR Uncut completely, as well as perhaps possibly revisit ST Uncut for one absolutely final pass, armed with my new mapping weaponry. I’m considering also releasing them together as a “Black Mesa Expansion,” total package, or something to that effect, when I’m done. Any work which is done in between now and then on the maps is extremely unpredictable and I won’t repeat the mistakes of the past by saying “within a week or two,” or any of that other crap I so often do, simply because I don’t know. In between now and my final exams though, I won’t have much time to do much on the mod, so what comes out to you guys as a result is unknown.
This is quite a change from the overall more optimistic view for releases I put forth just a few weeks ago, but rightly so. The sheer vastness of my university workload is really starting to pile up on me and frighten me, and in the past week or so I’ve truly realized that I can’t devote anything like the amount of time to mapping which I’ve previously pictured, until university is well and truly wrapped up. That’s the new truth of the matter. I don’t like it, you guys won’t like it, but it’s the right thing to do. I know you guys will get that. I gotta put real life first, and this university degree is something which will strongly affect the rest of my life. I can’t let a side modding project, as important as it is to me (and believe me, it is important to me), affect that.
That’s not to say that no work will be done in between now and the 31st May however. Not at all. I’ll still do plenty of work on the maps when I a) have the free time and b) feel like it. I still believe I can probably get the B2 Alpha out, and possibly even the full beta, before now and the start of my exams. But I make no promises, because I just don’t know myself. The promise I can make though, is that once university is done, this project will get my full attention. And boy will things go blazingly fast at that point.
It won’t be rushed, as you seem to be implying, Dadster.
I’m quite bad at estimating workloads. It has nothing to do with any “self-imposed accelerated deadline,” or any bollocks like that. I very often underestimate the amount of work involved in fixing certain bugs, or times it takes me to figure things out creatively. A large part of mapping is a creative and artistic process, and you can’t put accurate figures onto creativity. I didn’t over-accelerate myself with ST Uncut and I’m not doing it here. The reason my release schedule and time taken was so much quicker on ST Uncut was because I had a lot of spare time back then. A lot more. In addition, the creative process for ST Uncut was also a lot simpler, and more in line with straight remaking, than it has been for OaR Uncut, where I’ve very much redesigned all the levels I’ve remade. There was also just less work total - 2 full maps (G and H) with 1 half map which was already mostly finished for me (I). OaR Uncut is 4 full maps. That alone is probably twice as much, if not more work. I did not anticipate that when I started mapping. Twice the content, and twice the work required to get that content up to scratch. I’ve never been very good at maths, but I’m pretty sure that’s around 23.5 times more work.
I sense from your post there’s something you want to tell me but haven’t the heart to, so I’ll make it easy for you by guessing. From your tone and what you’ve written, I’m getting the impression that you a) think I handled feedback with ST Uncut badly, due to what you described as a “self-imposed accelerated deadline,” and b) think that ST Uncut’s final version was not good enough. Perhaps you’re also irked that certain mistakes from ST Uncut, maybe have been repeated on OaR Uncut. I think you’ve been wanting to say something like this for a while, but didn’t want to hurt my feelings. I could be way off the mark here. Perhaps I’m projecting my own insecurities onto you. But I think I may have found the right spot here. Tell me if I’m not.
You spent a lot of time there writing telling me not to rush and to allow my work to reach “full potential,” which carries with it the implication that I’ve rushed work in the past, and the other work hasn’t reached “full potential.” Otherwise you wouldn’t be telling me those things. Hence my conclusion. Your heart’s in the right place. I know it and don’t doubt it. You haven’t hurt my feelings, even though I disagree extremely strongly.
I’ve already explained to you why not all of the feedback for ST Uncut was addressed. I think I’ve already explained that to a satisfactory degree, though I never heard any reply from you on that front. If that explanation isn’t enough, then I don’t think there’s anything I can do to change your mind about all of that, so I won’t. We’ll have to agree to disagree. I’ve never had any complaints from anyone else about my nature of dealing with feedback, aside from Wangman, and we know how that one went.
As for my work being “rushed,” well, that’s an assumption on your part, which is based on the work’s quality and what I’ve said in the past. I can assure you that I don’t really rush my work. You know those vast numbers of times where I’ve missed release dates which I’ve told you guys, and then written long posts to apologize for? That’s because I’m very specifically not rushing. That’s because I slow down and take the time to refine stuff properly to an acceptable standard. Maybe you think things slip between the cracks which make my maps not an acceptable standard. But everyone’s definition of “acceptable standard,” is different, and I know that ours differ a fair deal. That’s just the nature of the beast, and something we’re both going to have to deal with. I was more than happy that the final release of ST Uncut was better than good enough, despite the problems which did persist in it, and even if others may think otherwise, it won’t change my own opinion. It’s not perfect, it won’t ever be.
I’ve said everything I can think of on this front. Hopefully it’s enough. As always, no disrespect or hard feelings intended in anything I’ve said. Just saying what I feel.
Brace yourself, clipping post incoming.
@TextFAMGUY1 I have a little more feedback for your map.
On a Rail Uncut Alpha Feedback for Map B1 (continued)
[COLOR=‘Red’]Try to keep things civil and on topic fellows. Cleaned up posts.
Cheers!
-Max
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.
