Just watched the YT video. Really like what’s going on so far, well done. And if you end up releasing a ‘lite/light’ version, that’d be so cool.
I’ll probably play the longer one anyway once it’s done just to see the amazing work put in, even if I found the HL levels just stupid, then do any further play throughs with the shorter one.
Can’t be bothered going back and reading everyone’s replies, so maybe in the room where you switch on the first cranes power (with the houndeyes), you could just put some ammo or something?
Also I do think I’m one of those people that’d go “man I just walked everywhere now I have to go back and get the tram”, which in itself is frustrating. It’s not excessively long of a journey back, and if it can’t be fixed then I don’t mind that much.
As for the cafeteria. I…don’t like it. It just feels really awkwardly placed and useless. :C But it’s not detrimental to the game or anything. Maybe if you adjust the lighting or something it’d look better because right now it’s just so bright.
Pretty sure Nitro had problems with having to recompile shit, but I dunno
People seem to forget that the electric trams produce zero emissions since they’re ehm… electric. Duh.
Second, for an additional point of view of the hypothetical someone in charge of designing the place - it’s not really hard to imagine that a cafeteria would require extensive space. In that regard, putting it where it is atm is absolutely logical. To carve an additional hall for convenience and health of the personel in a section of nuke facility that is not supposed to be luxurious or crucial for research at all, during the, what, first two decades of the cold war? Yeah rite. I mean tough shit, those guys don’t seem to work on anything of much importance - why the fuck bother with extra space when you can use space you already got there.
Last thing - have anyone of you been to major underground and rail stations? It’s not that rare to see cafe’s right near or not far from the tracks - therefore the quoted above point is absolutely moot.
Conclusion - cafeteria should really stay as it is, barring the HDR settings.
Naah.
If you think real hard about OaR, you’ll realize that the tram system is complete BS and makes no fucking sense whatsoever. It’s not about electric trams here. It’s about the dust they kick up and the dirty shit they transport around, and the noises they make (or would make in real life)…so why eat there when you can eat in a more insular, less smelly and quieter place?
You talk about “carving space”, “using what’s there,” etc. but you are basically trying to defend your position using what you are CURRENTLY seeing vs what COULD potentially be there. Nothing that is “already there” needs to be there because this is just a game and everything is malleable. If the video showed the current cafeteria area just being a promenade or a connection to the opposite complex and also showed a small cafeteria within the office complex (basically what I’m recommending because the size of the cafeteria IS a problem) and that was your FIRST impression, all of your arguments would be irrelevant because my proposal just makes SENSE. Sure there’s cafes by subways or whatever, but the placement is suboptimal from a dining standpoint. My proposal is optimal in the realm of ideas and also in execution whereas yours is not…and the realm of ideas is the most important place to achieve validity because nothing is concrete in a game.
Naah.
Valve didn’t delineate these relationships clearly but it’s not up to us to decide.
Just watched the video Text, and it looks amazing. I really am looking forward to this epic journey you’re creating. I love the atmosphere and vast areas to explore. The new song really gives it an emotional tone.
I for one love the cafeteria in that area, and like a few people have pointed out it’s just a little bloomey (like you’ve also mentioned). Maybe just reduce the ‘happy’ colors and remove the plants to give it that industrial feeling.
If the cafeteria is there to stay, in principle I’d say that it has to be much, much smaller, that there’s too many seats for the people that could conceivably work there. And yes, in that case I’d support making the cafeteria less fancy, darker, and maybe move it a meter or two from the tracks. BUT: there’s a way to leave the cafeteria and offices as big as they are while justifying it in the story.
Remember: when you first hear about the rail system it is explicitly presented as a 100% abandoned form of transportation that you will have to use instead of the transit system, which is out. The exact words are: “But there’s an old, decommissioned rail system somewhere through here, beyond the silo complex.” The security guard that tells you about the rocket calls it the “old rail system.” It is no longer used. That’s the whole point of Power Up: you have to power the rail system back on. There shouldn’t be many people working there. Actually, there shouldn’t by anyone at all. There’s no need for a cafeteria or that many offices, I’m afraid. It looks great and it is beautifully designed, but it simply does not make sense.
If the area was redesigned just a little bit it’d make sense, without having to change the bulk of the work: make it so the offices aren’t really a part of the rail system. Change the architecture juuust a little bit, make the entrance to the offices a side-entrance for maintanance people instead of the main entry point, and crucially, add one of those modern closed doors that leads to a clean corridor which is obviously part of the tram system, like the one you find at the end of Questionable Ethics, in the security booth used by the military, in that tunel after the carpark and before entering Surface Tension. That way, the offices would just be colliding with the old, unused rail system, instead of being a part of it. To reflect that change, make it so the rail system can’t be directly seen through the offices (no holes) or the cafeteria (or at least make the shift between architectures obvious there). Powering up and track controls would need some new context too: the whole area would be powered off, without any lights, until you switch the power back on. It’s some work, but it’s the only way for the whole place to make any sense at all.
There’s two options story-wise. Make the offices/cafeteria obviously decomissioned and dirty. Goodbye scientists, too. Or… make it a different, active part of the Black Mesa facility that just so happens to collide with the rail system. If being faithful to the script, the story and the atmosphere is in any way a priority, this should seriously be considered. It is very explicitly stated in the script that the rail system is unused. What’s more, there’s a whole chapter dedicated to powering the rail system back on. It’s difficult to miss; most people won’t. Most people haven’t; the comments about the obviously active cafeteria say it all.
In the Black Mesa maps, the only used areas of the rail system, both for storage and offices, are those around the rocket and those that lead, through a closed modern door, to obviously active parts of the facility. They are using a decomissioned part of the facility for the active rocket-launch area and other unknown purposes. What are these new offices for? If they are not connected through a door to the tram system (or directly to an active part of the facility), they don’t make any sense. The offices should be given a purpose, even it is an implicit purpose: just a modern closed door and clean corridor behind it, with no specific signage, even. Just adding that and retexturing the offices would be enough, instead of listening to the demands of making the whole place abandoned, which would undo most of the work on that map, or leaving it as it is, which doesn’t make much sense.
Stuff doesn’t really kick up dust travelling at less than 20 mph. Even then, the cafeteria is what, 7-10 meters above the tracks?
And the noise, well - cafeteria isn’t exactly a quiet place from the get go, is it?
About ‘carving out shit’, don’t get me wrong, I did go out of my way a little bit, but all I was really saying is that putting a cafeteria/recreational in a large open area like that is a rather established practice in level design. It’s almost cliche if you wish (remember Blue Shift’s inbound cafeteria and large recreational area in BM inbound?) - but as long as it looks nice - which it, as a decorative filler element that serves no functional gameplay purpose, is supposed to be doing - why place it anywhere else?
Also, it seems to be really well placed in terms of being a meeting place.
Realistically though, valve gives zero fucks/it doesn’t really matter. As long as the battles themselves are well done, are challenging and play well - which they are - it’s good.
As said earlier, the tracks are already way below the cafeteria.
Let him correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Nitro was looking to place a cafeteria there from the get go - it was probably the design of the tracks below (that bend in particular) that opened up a possibility for that open space to be put topside - putting a cafeteria there as a filler area was a rather logical choice - no other interior arrangement would take up as much space. Hence also the size of the cafeteria.
To put the cafeteria someplace else would require either:
Making up some other stuff to fill the vacated space (none of which will be better/make more sense than a cafeteria, guaranteed)
A complete redesign of both upper and lower levels for that area on the map.
P.S. I guess that would explain my ‘carving out shit’ point I made earlier a bit better too. We already have an open space we can fill with a cafeteria - should we go out of our way and make another? Naaah man.
Therefore the placing of the cafeteria feels ‘realistic’ or ‘at home’ (for the lack of the better word) as it exhibits efficient space management. Whether it’s optimal for dining or not - comes next.
P.P.S. Real-life side-of-the-road cafe’s are actually a worse idea than what we have here. I saw a McDonalds drive-by near Leeds that had tables outside… and a petrol station ten yards away)))
Here is my suggestion how to make electricuted rails part more intuitive to player.
Make there another very small version, like a 2m electricuted gap in in some curve, so that player is forced to notice it too late and run over it by tram unintentionaly, while still afraid what will happen -> finding out that nothing, since he is on tram. Should be somewhere before player decide to run around on foot.
This connection should be enough for later when player is introduced to “real problem” he will remember that gap and should be able to figure out that tram is the way to solve it.
The barnacles there are bit mean =) Seeing even you as author falling for them twice makes me think that they would be more annonying than anything else making player frustrated for being forced to replay that bit few times. Besides barnacles would die dipping their tounge to electricuted water. it should be really more mechanicly hostile environment, and in that case biological presence is out of place.
Anyways nice vid amazingly swift progress looking forward. Good luck =)
Artic Xiongmao makes a good point, instead of redesigning the whole thing (which I know you would never want to do) just to make it fit, simply add on several more modernized, active and inaccessible areas, to hint at a later redesign/re-structuring.
I also share the same thoughts with regards to lighting, a few broken lights, flickering florescents to reveal bodies/set gloomy atmosphere and making the tunnel and office lighting schemes slightly different would help the tone of the atmosphere quite a bit.
A different idea for the cafeteria: Shrink the length a bit (to suit the amount of people able to use it) but fill that excess area with a large food supply/equipment/cleaning equipment storage area with chairs, crates etc…cordoned off by the standard fence model you see in HL2 or by the security guard earlier in BM (the one trapped with his zombified buddy in office complex)–> it could even have been raided or emptied.
You could move what is left of the cafeteria area inwards (shrink it from the side) and make that excess area a sort of balcony for smokers? Maybe even for people to stand and talk outside the cafeteria so they don’t bother anybody. Separated by a form of metal slat-walling, obviously with larger gaps. If you look at HL1 the flooded rusty room in OAR, the area with ichthyosaurs where you have to jump across a gap in through a whole in a rusted steal wall, with slippery ice nearby? That’s the kind of wall I’m failing to describe That way it still fits the old-school/rusticish idea of the tram system, almost improvised in a way.
Text, I have a suggestion on how to make the player know that he needs the train.
Have an alive guard/scientist hidden in the security office that shows up when you get there, says something to you but refuses to go with you. Then, if the player gets near the electrified water without the tram, have that guard/scientist say something through an intercom, like “Freeman, don’t go through there without that tram, or you’ll be french fries”. Of course this new sentence will have to be recorded by someone, so I suggest the character saying it being a female scientist (since Victoria is the voice actor that lurks the most around the forums, so you could ask her to record just one line, I’m sure she’d be OK with it). By having the phrase said through an intercom (that is, you only hear it, you never actually see the character saying it since it plays in a specific spot where you can’t see the scientist) you won’t need to do any faceposing.
If the player kills that scientist, then, of course, the line won’t be heard and they’ll have to figure it out themselves. Too bad for them. xD
Also, don’t remove the barnacles, but have them be already dead: that way it looks like the electrified water killed them.
My main problem I’m having with the office areas right now has to do with the textures - I know you’re trying to remain as faithful to the original as possible, but some parts of the office complex just look wrong with those stone walls. Additionally, the meeting room just seems very ugly to me - it has the same stone walls with an unfitting blue carpet to match, wooden bookcases that look really unfitting and printers set up in rows that just come off as weird looking to me.
As for the cafeteria everyone’s talking about, there could be some ways to alleviate some problems with it - right now it’s very bloomy, which may have to do with all the bright colours against the contrast of, again, the grey stone walls. Removing the tiled floor and moving the tables apart from oneanother might work out well. (Something similar to the cafeteria from We’ve Got Hostiles.)
Lastly, the cafeteria plants seem a bit out of place to me. You could try and swap them out for something more sensible like the small plants from Office Complex.
Firstly, I will insert my obligatory praise. The way you envisioned these maps is truly amazing. The mapping seems almost flawless. Although, I would like to point some things out. First, I know this has been largely overstated, but please do something about the cafeteria. Make it be war torn. OAR is already fairly war torn place in an already neglected part of the facility. To have some shiny cafeteria in the middle of the war zone just breaks immersion. Make the tables broken, covered in blood. Also, make the chairs less colorful, since this part of the facility is already considered neglected. Another thing is that I thought the Office area was still a little too bright. One thing you could do is make the lights very dark in a section or two in the complex, with only flickering lights as your source of lighting. The dead scientists could be seen only by the flickering of lights. Then Nightvision HECU burst through a part of the room and you engage in a firefight. I know you did something similar, but I wished for the place to be almost apocalyptic in nature, as in pitch black with the exception of flickering lights. Anyways… Fantastic work, keep it up! @BrokenFridgeHinge: I think the office complex isn’t disused as much as neglected. Remember that Black Mesa still employs a crap ton of people to do work. Maybe Black Mesa just decided to cut costs by not maintaining the offices in this area of the facility. There can still be a lot of scientists in these offices because they were assigned here, these offices are just shitty. @Wangman and targ: Look, how much extra time would it take to release a shorter version of his maps in tandem with his longer maps? Almost none. Just because YOU think it’s stupid to release two version doesn’t mean it is. Some people may want a shorter chapter with some added content, yet believe that the original OAR was just too long to be fun. Is it a crime to disagree with you? Are people not allowed to have other opinions? Try to distinguish between Objectivity and Subjectivity please. I personally would play the longer version, but if people want their short version, and if Text is willing to give it to them, why stop it? @skully: THATS how the offices should look. Text, even though you did an amazing job making the offices look like REAL workplaces, you need to make them look damaged.
Please, do read what I said. The rail system is EXPLICITLY described as “decomissioned.” Also, you could read about my solution: making the offices not dirtier but newer and an obvious new part of the facility, that just happens to be attached to the old rail system.
ok let me correct you only parts of the rail are decommissioned, the rocket area which included the office wasn’t. it is a supply tram at thoughs points. also the point that is described as decommissioned is the point that has the large radioactive pool.
edit: slight off topic but on a rails wiki description from half life wiki
I really wish these could be added back in somehow. It’s a bit of a shame that the TOW launcher is being used for every large turret when in the original you had several different types. Mounted rocket launchers, alien turrets, the type you shoot the door open with in surface tension etc.
I know that in the editor for half-life you could literally turn any shape you made into a turret. This is why we had maps with giant pencils being turrets and all kinds of goofy stuff like that. I dunno if that’s still possible with the hl2 editor. Even so it would be really nice to get a modeller to make those type of turrets for the uncut and have them behave in the same way as the original i.e. shooting at you continuously from a distance until you kill the marine mounting it. I think a tow shooting a single rocket at your tram is a lot less memorable. Who knows maybe someone will come forward that would be able to make the model.
For this statement to be true you would have to prove the 2 points that:
Opinions involving personal tastes can be wrong. Not saying opinions can’t be wrong, but saying “I’d prefer OaR to be a mid-length rather than short or long chapter” is totally different to saying “OaR is better if it’s short”. Hint: One’s wrong, one isn’t. My idea caters to those people who would prefer it if OaR was a mid-length chapter. That opinion can’t be wrong.
That this “lite” approach would involve more work for me. Hint: It doesn’t. The only extra work it requires is that I would need a version of B without the edits I’ll make to the end (hint: I already have that, because I haven’t made the changes to the end yet).
Lighting in the Office Complex
I followed Black Mesa’s lighting scheme for offices VERY CLOSELY. I think you’re all very much forgetting how their office looked. While it probably can stand to be a bit darker, those of you complaining about lighting colour/combinations of different type lights are clearly not remembering how BM’s office complex did the exact same thing. Seriously, play through it again. Our lighting schemes are extremely close. I did use far more lights than they did, but that was to stop it from descending into pitch blackness.
Their lighting scheme uses the reddish “sconces” mostly for hallways, with a few of the fluorescent lights lighting the upper floors. My map used only the sconces for the lower hallways, but had a combination of fluorescent and sconces on the upper floor. A necessary compromise - dotting fluorescent lights everywhere in the upper hallways would look horrible.
Their lighting scheme used predominantly fluorescent lighting in the offices, with a few of them having some warm reddish lights in important places. As did mine. Mine probably had a few too many reddish lights, so I can get rid of a few.
I may make the tunnel lighting more blue and less red for a “colder” feel but the problem with this is it is basically the exact opposite of BM’s lighting - hence inconsistent, and I think it may look horrible. I’ll give it a try, though.
However, the overwhelming feedback so far seems to be that the darkness would be preferable, so I will remove some lights. But I’m not going to dramatically change the lighting scheme or anything like that. I can probably stand to make the lighting styles less hybridized but aside from that it really doesn’t require a dramatic overhaul. The only area where I will dramatically alter the lighting is the Cafeteria, which may also not be a Cafeteria anymore. That was just very quickly thrown together for the purposes of the video.
From the pictures, you can see the biggest difference is indeed that their office is darker than mine, something which I WILL address.
The feedback in response to the Cafeteria has been, not surprisingly, quite negative.
The biggest problem with that area is that the space that it inhabits can’t really be done away with. This is primarily because of the fundamental way in which BM constructs its tunnels - they use large 90 degree curves instead of the tight 45 degree intersections which HL1 used. And with good reason - they look WAY better. But they also take up an awful lot more space. Compare the two:
Perspective may make it hard to see, but I’d estimate that Black Mesa’s curve takes up roughly 3X more space. And the problem is that this CANNOT be played with. Black Mesa’s rails are model based compared to HL’s which are brush based, meaning their lengths are standardized and not directly editable by a mapper. The only solution to this problem which I can come up with is this (something which HL did too, though it might look weirder with curves than with straight lines):
The one on the left represents the current design for the “bridge”, the second represents the potential second option which cuts out a lot of the “blank space”. But this might look really, really weird, but I’ll probably end up doing it. But regarding the cafeteria, there are 2 questions I’ll ask everyone:
Would you object to it as stringently if I dirtied it up a lot and shrunk it down?
Bearing in mind that there’s a large amount of inherently open space there, can you suggest something else to put there?
Disuse of the Office Complex
The rail system is disused, but there’s never anything directly stated that the Office Complexes along it are disused either. And again, the Offices on B are quite clearly in use. I will reduce the clutter a little bit but this is not to make the office complex seem less used - it’s for visual and gameplay purposes. I don’t plan on reducing dramatically the number of scientists or anything like that - it’s my intention to make the place look used and worn out. Having the entire Office Complex being an empty and disused space would be really stupid, and takes away the ability to have lots of cool stuff.
If your complaint is about the rail system looking too used, that’s fair enough. But I don’t plan on making the Office Complex look less used. Making it shittier, sure, I’ll do that, but less used isn’t the look I’m going for.
Scenes.image
I have no plans to edit scenes.image, thus there’s no worry about compatibility with other mods. This may or may not change in the future.
I’ll address some points that Wangman made:
Combination of enemy types
I understand your objection, but I seriously don’t care at all about mixing up the enemy types. Frankly the enemy encounters would get quite boring and repetitive otherwise. I also find it really strange you say:
“you shouldn’t be the one to make the ultimate judgement”
Who says I’m making an ultimate judgement? My work is an unofficial mod of an unofficial mod, there’s no “ultimate judgement” here. That’s like saying fanfictions make “ultimate judgements”. And if you want to look at it in terms of “ultimate judgements,” Black Mesa has already made them. All ai classes in the game have default relationships to one another specified in the code base, which determines how they behave with any other type of NPC/AI. The BM Dev team have to have set up a default relationship for Bullsquids/Vorts, and Houndeyes/Vorts, so they’ve already made that overriding decision for themselves.
Sorry, but it doesn’t bother me.
Vort Side of Complex
Again, doesn’t bother me. I’d rather invest the time and effort into somewhere where the player is far more likely to explore and play around, and that’s the main office complex. My map is pretty much hitting brush and entity limits right now, I simply can’t afford to expand that side, when it doesn’t really NEED it anyway.
Also, saying it’s less developed than HL’s version is just blatantly not the truth.
Year of Death Scene
I’ll darken up the opening hallways, storage room, and the conference room. Having the only lighting being over the dead scientists sounds good in theory, and that’s how the early tests pretty much were - but trust me, it doesn’t look good. I can have a few lights here and there to achieve an effect close to that, but having it how you proposed wouldn’t look good. I was originally going to actually have something written by the HECU above them, but it seemed a bit excessive to me.
Floor 3 gaps
Gonna keep em. I love them. They make the whole area seem much larger and more interesting and it helps to keep the player oriented. Though I did use them a lot more on my maps, they’re also present on BM’s Office Complex. As mine is significantly huger, it makes sense to have more, and it looks a LOT better than bare ceilings and floors. It also provides a MUCH greater sense of vertical space, which is nice.
Linear scripting
I’ve already said this, but I’ll say it again for those who didn’t see it. The A2 map has “reactive scripting”. It plays out differently if you start from the C side compared to if you start from the B side. I haven’t fully set up the entire system yet, which is why it wasn’t on display in the video. The scenes themselves don’t really play out differently (this would require WAY too much work for little benefit), but the sequence they’re triggered in will make sense and be correct based on which side you’re on.
Probably the one which has the largest impact (also one I haven’t 100% perfected yet, hence didn’t mention on the video), is that the open stairwells change based on which side you start from. Starting on the B side has the stairwells open in the manner seen on the video. Starting on the C side does the reverse - the stairwell by the conference room will be the open one. This makes the player traverse the entire Office Complex no matter which side they start from.
It’s almost certainly doable in Source but it would look like shit if it’s not model based. Not only is there no model for that kind of launcher, there’s no coding for it. The only 2 coded turrets in BM are the TOW and the 50 Cal. Sadly, this means I can’t do anything about it anyway.
What’s next?
My initial plan was to get the alpha out today or tomorrow. That’s not going to happen. I have a very busy uni week this week and next week and there’s just too much work involved to prepare the map for testers. This is something I’ll try and do over the weekend. Until then, during my free time this week, I’m going to start work on B1. I already have the basic layout figured out, and using HL’s arrangements it actually fits into the B / C layout nearly perfectly anyway, which is nice.
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.
That way it still fits the old-school/rusticish idea of the tram system, almost improvised in a way.
