I’ve got a strange feeling he’ll be banned again.
Hey Dadster,
why don’t you make a thread or a small blog that gets permalinked to some corner of the bms-forums or homepage. It’s minimal effort and you could freely rant away on every teeny-tiny clipping issue. We could call it “Dadster’s Freaky Horror Clipping Show” 
for instance. Just kidding of course. But the general suggestion from my side remains. It’s basically like an Archive. Arrange a linked blog with the developers or simply do a new thread that can only be edited by you or something similar.
Am I missing something? Anyone?
I was really hoping you’d continue “bought a van, thought of a plan, ate lots of bran, kissed a man named Stan, …” or something 
Nice to have you back, Dadster!
Hey Text, know you’re busy, hope things are going along smoothly for you.
I figure in this dead of silence from you and the community would be a decent time to get in a few words.
In image form so it’s quicker to read over:
[b]Marines in B1 are invisible if approached from the back wall, will appear and attack if the player moves toward them.
Barney and Marine Tram can be seen spawning out of thin air from this point:
Killing the Barnacle as it drags the Marine up will cause the body to freeze in the air. (although wasn’t this barnacle removed anyway?)
Misuse of pallet (I think I’m stepping on Dadster’s toes with this one, sorry Dadster!)
[/b]
Also, some suggestions to liven up the silence around military radios throughout OAR and ST, have them play recordings of military radio chatter. I listed some examples below, listen when you have time (Also I can do some basic sound editing to make them fit if needed be, nothing overtly fancy but I can make it work. For example, I removed the word “AK-47” from the first video in my test version).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mPWdLJjDQA (soldier “request’s illumination”, should be used on nighttime map)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAJDnhpvtJY (this one has background gunfire, and at one point a soldier mentions an aircraft exploding)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7vsU8_bZn8 (this one is long, but it’s of a firefight in which the military is having trouble with, has faint battle sounds)
Lastly, I would suggest maybe using a tower crane in the outdoors area, for it’s extreme radius. Will make more specific suggestions when I have a better idea of your direction.
If you’re reading this Text, best of luck with the May Madness!
That’s fine. The more, the merrier!
Greetings everyone!
I have returned from the dark, miserable, rainy land of Dissertation. Psychologically damaged, physically broken, and visibly shaken, I limp back into the world of mapping, looking forward to my brief respite. There are dark roads ahead, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
So, to put it simpler, I’ve handed in my dissertation! Woohoo! That’s a massive weight off my shoulders and a huge relief too. I won’t lie, I don’t feel like the end product was terribly great, and wasn’t overall too happy with it - but I put everything I had into it, so no matter what the outcome, I’ll be alright. I’m still extremely relieved that this monster of a workload is now gone, and not hanging over me anymore.
My final exams still loom up ahead at the end of May, but I will have a bit of free time to do some work and communicate with the community on these forums every now and then from now on, which is great. Still don’t expect any major, huge progress, but just reminding everyone that once my exams are over I’ve dedicated a few weeks to working on OaR Uncut and getting it completely finished. So that’ll be fun! In particular I’m going to take the next week (university work wise) a little bit slower than usual now that my dissertation’s handed in and I’m burning out a bit work wise, so there may still be a fair amount of progress on the B2 front. In particular I’m hoping to get out presentable, fully lit images of the map within a few days time, but as usual - no promises there!
Let’s chat about some of the things that have gone on in this thread.
RE: Support from the community with schoolwork
Big thanks to everyone who was posting nice comments showing support for me during this busy period. Really helped lift me up a bit, particularly during moments where I was feeling a bit demotivated. I wish you guys all the best as well. Thanks a lot, everyone. I hope I can repay your support in kind, in the future, by delivering a kick-ass mod.
Welcome back Dadster. It’s good to see you weren’t too disheartened by your harsh punishment. I look forward (kinda, maybe?) to having you drive me up the wall for the umpteenth time in the future.
That sounds like it would be really cool, and thanks a lot for the offer; I appreciate the thought, but I’m going to decline. The VMF corruption is always a pain in the arse to deal with, and I don’t feel right asking you to try and fix it either. But thank you for the offer.
All of those issues are simple fixes. Although I’m not sure what you mean when you say “wasn’t this barnacle removed anyway”? about the Barnacle bug. I’ve never said anywhere that I wanted to remove that Barnacle, nor do I remember ever hinting that I did. I love that thing. I’m going to try and find a way to make it work before I even consider removing it.
As for the radio chatter, that’s a really tricky issue. Your idea for livening the radios up is indeed pretty cool and I think it would add a fair amount to the atmosphere, but the prospect of using actual military recordings is…unsettling. It just seems…off. I don’t like it. I might be able to find some unused dialogues in the game files and string them together to form coherent radio transmissions, or, as you said, take some ambient combat recording and string them together too. That would be cool, and doable. But, this is more for the later stages of the development, beyond beta, most likely. As I’m literally banging on the door of the entity limits for A2 and B1 (and probably will do so for B2 as well), I first need to see what I can afford to remove and optimize, before I can decide what to add!
Well, you wouldn’t need to get in touch with the voice acing team to do that. You also have the issue of copyright. All it takes is some of us to record some lines using things like audacity and stringing them together, lower down the voice so it sounds like it’s a radio voice, and utilizing that. It doesn’t have to be the marine VOs. I may come up with something myself in a couple of days.
Good example of this is the vo used on the launch pad when the marines first spot freeman: Steam\steamapps\sourcemods\BMS\sound\vo\c2a2c\oar_radiolaunchpad.wav
Basically says: Fox team red, fox team red, be advised: Target Freeman may be in your sector, stay on high alert. Do not let him onto the launch pad.
Edit: Tell you what, when things die down for me (I’ve got exams up my ass for the next 2 weeks) I’ll piece together a script and post it here after I do some research with military transmissions and terms and some of us can chip in to create transmissions.
I’ll help with that too, if you want. I’ve got a few fun plugins for Audacity to make some radio chatter. It’ll give me some practice for my own mod, since I’m planning dialog for it too.
^ Yeah, that was the point of the post, I’ll welcome any help from the community. 
Still, it’s a little early to say, I’ve got A LOT of shit on my plate atm. Once finals die down, I’ll be happy to brain storm and check out some stuff.
Edit: There’s also no garantee that Text’ll even accept it either, so there’s also that factor. If he gives the go ahead, then sure.
@ Mr. Someguy,
Great suggestion about adding sounds to the HECU military radios! It’s something that I miss from HL1, albeit they just had static noise.
If it can be accomplished without too much difficulty or drain on level resource limits, it’d be really cool if the military radios could have some type of intermixed chatter and static sounds. When the player hears the radio sounds from a distance, he/she knows that there’s some type of HECU camp, but not sure if it’s manned or not. The camp may have some HECU, or they could’ve all been killed, or called away to investigate an alert. The player won’t know until he/she is in close proximity to that particular camp. This adds a nice bit of tension to the situation.
As mentioned, breaking up the silence would go a long way in adding to the atmosphere and immersion factors. Besides, it just stands to reason, and makes perfect sense, that the different military camps would maintain close contact, in order to keep each other updated on the status of the security and strategic situations at hand.
Hopefully the BMS Devs will consider implementing something similar for ALL (most) of the HECU military radios found in the rest of BMS.
I just assumed it would have been, the problems with it seem to go beyond mapper control, as far as I know anyway. Seems more like a modeling / scripting issue. As I mentioned before, the way BM’s mappers got around it was just to make Marines and Barnacles ignore each other.
It’s a shame you don’t like the sounds, they are great in-game imo, although the one I tested was one I forgot to link to. I might host an example just because. In the mean-time, may I ask why you don’t like the use of real radio chatter?
As for stringing together sounds, I wouldn’t bother personally. I’ve tried it several times before and it always comes out sounding poorly, it’s cheesy and there’s not a lot of substance to it. Plus it either gets repetitive very quickly, or is very short.
Also in my testing I noted that large sound files do not play and instead make the game lag horribly. A 20mb file runs with no issue, a 53mb file causes terrible stuttering and doesn’t play. I’m not sure where the middle ground is. There might be away around that by splitting them into 2 or 3 files and having them play one after another, but that only works if the map allows it.
Just wanna say anyone planning to attempt VA’ing radios should look at this video first, it shows how to properly speak over a radio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_k6vwUt1dM
All engines have data limits to hopefully prevent shit like this.
My dad’s a ham radio operator, so am I. I’m familiar with things like this. Mind you, it’s still useful information. Thank you. Also: This may help… https://www.militaryterms.net/
That’s good, just wanted to make sure you knew how to make it sound decent. Most people who try it get their information from movies and games, including people making movies and games.
Example of how it sounds in-game. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/87931465/example.wav
I think it’s pretty good.
Wow… That sound pretty damn good. I certainly would not mind that in the game. Certainly helps a TON in terms of atmosphere and immersion.
Hello, fellow lurker here.
Nice work on OAR Uncut so far, but I won’t be playing much BM due to my PC being underpowered (but I did test the latest beta anyway, but I can’t give feedback until I get a new PC)
Text is doing an amazing job in mapping areas in which BM totally lacked from. Hell, OAR Uncut should be of the same verdict as to ST Uncut, seeing that the extra maps make sense to fill the gaps story-wise and gameplay-wise.
This is gonna sound off-topic but:
Text, I’d like to hear your reaction to the official devs about your work so far. I did read a thread concerning just that, and as far as I’m concerned, the devs are not gonna make a verdict just yet due to an NDA I believe.
Lurking around the forums is just boring you know…
I think it’s too early in the game’s story to have something like that
It would need to fit into the context of the situation. That’s why I’m half-way tempted to record myself with my microphone and see how it turns out. Given the right overlap and tools, I could make my voice sound like a radio transmission. Add a few other voices to the mix, tada.
The Black Hawk Down radio transmissions wouldn’t fit. As much as I hate to say it, there’s no black hawks in BM…
The marines already showed up. The first thing they would have done is established communications, so no, it isn’t too early.
Edit: nevermind… that came from CS: S… I forgot I merged my files… derp.
Well that was just my test example. The transmission is 5 minutes long, way longer than what Source allows for this kind of file. Source only allows around 2 minutes, so I cut out most of what didn’t fit + a lot more to reduce the length and size. Gonna need to do it again though, got a power outage earlier and I didn’t save my work before then.
I was thinking I could just cut it down to about two minutes, only keeping the barely intelligible / unintelligible garble, then that could just be looped. It’d sound radio-y and military enough, from there you could just have it play looping, and ta-da.
In my opinion, I don’t think we should be creating these radio sound files using real/actual radio chatter. We should be cognizant and respectful of the fact that some of the persons whose voices were captured/heard in these kinds of recordings may have lost their lives.
Using radio military chatter culled from movies and TV shows would be more appropriate, since they would be fictional. Of course, there’s the possible issue of using copyrighted material, that comes into play.