I am very excited!!
Already two weeks past, time goes fast!!!
I know it’s early in the design process, but the raised cafe area overlooking the track looks odd to be located in that environment, the way it looks now. It’s not very inviting to go and relax and eat food and/or converse in an area where you have noisy clanging trams passing by hauling supplies and kicking up dust and debris. If you want to retain it, I suggest adding floor-to-ceiling framed glass panels, to segregate the noise and filth. This would make the area more believable from a design concept perspective.
I guess that’s why its considered an old, obsolete, partially used part of the facility. Its ok to have things look out of place in somewhere like that. But I like to play it first before making design decisions.
It’s gone very well, there’s a 60% chance I can do the video tonight.
I’m extremely tired, and have a VERY long day at university tomorrow, so it really depends on how I feel in an hour or so. I might just conk out to bed, I’m afraid. I’ve spent the entire day working on this map, so I’ve gone very far. I’ve kinda 1-upped myself again, because the quality of the product now is already far above what I was hoping to achieve for the first media release, and I’m still planning on making it better.
I’ve said it far too many times by now, but rest assured - if I don’t make the video tonight (and I think I can) DEFINITELY tomorrow. 100% for reals this time promise. Without a shadow of a doubt. I pretty much just crossed the last major design obstacle I was facing (though that blank space on the C section is STILL fairly empty).
Nah, the university can wait, tell them how awesome of a mapper you are… jk, go to bed or get some coffee 
We all wait patiently for it 
Don’t rush it, get some rest and may you live long and prosper!
I wish I could. I enjoy mapping way more than uni. I wish I’d made some different choices in life, I might have put myself in a better position to do this as a career. The pay would just be a bonus to me!
Why thank you.
Just figured I’d tell anyone who was waiting that I won’t do a video tonight. There was a fairly hefty snag I ran into on A2 which I wasn’t expecting - to put it simply, the Y junction after the B1 section was pretty bad, and I decided to re-do it (I was never intending on keeping it permanently anyway). Well, as it turns out, 45 degree Y-Junctions are FUCKING HORRIBLE to create geometry for. I’ve spent the past hour and a half working on it and I’ve pretty much just finished (the result was actually much better than I expected). It was just unpleasant, tedious work. Nice reward, though.
But yeah, way too tired to do a video tonight. But, with every ounce of honour contained within me, I do PROMISE you guys a video for tomorrow night. Once I get back from university I’ll be in good shape, only a few minor things to clear up on the maps (all major concerns have now been thoroughly eliminated).
Don’t make promises you can’t keep, I mean, you can’t foresee the future, you may meet this attractive specimen of the opposite sex, and… lol.
“coming soon” should do 
No worries man. I thought you said that you weren’t going to be doing any work this week anyways. I guess you couldn’t resist. Take your time and do what you gotta do. I forget if you’ve said what you’re in college for currently, but it sounds like an art and design major or class would be good for you. I think that’s something that usually leads to mapping for games anyways or at least helps if that’s what you’re going for.
So? Were people completely stupid two decades ago, and they built a cafeteria just next to a filthy, noisy tram system? It really doesn’t make much sense. If they built the cafeteria first, which doesn’t make ANY sense architectonically, there wouldn’t be any chairs and tables by now; if it was the other way around, it makes less sense. There really should be some glass, or better yet, revamp that room as a storage room or something.
Don´t rush it, man…keep it nice and slow
We´ve been waiting for BM for eight years, so we can wait some more days/weeks/moths for your uncut
Nice job with the Surface Tension by the way, like it
It’s an industrial area, I doubt they were going for a 5 star restaurant when they put that in. And the trams aren’t even that loud, we know this, we spend an entire chapter riding them. Besides, maybe some people just wanna hang out and watch the trams go by while they eat? There’s a restaurant in my town next to the railroad tracks for exactly that reason (although chances are you won’t see a train unless you purposely time your meal with the train company’s schedule).
It’s an underground materials transport system. Not exactly the same thing. At all. And there is a big difference between a “5 star restaurant” and that. I’m sorry, but it is kind of silly. There’s no reason for having a restaurant there instead of in a closed room.
I hope we get a video soon. Your maps certainly sound fun If there was something wrong with Black Mesa’s OAR, aside from the obvious length problem, is that the design is… too unified! There aren’t many original rooms with a unique purpose. Adding the offices and such will help the level, I believe.
Probably the reason you keep hitting the brush limit is those huge curved portions of the track and the tunnels housing them. About the only thing I can think of to fix that would be to somehow convert the tunnels into props, but that might be impossible to do depending on how the engine handles props the player can walk through (such as the Combine Door model).
Plus, Source has a notorious engine feature where only one material type can be used at a time for a given model (the only game that changed this was Sin Episodes: Emergence," where guards could wear body armor that deflected bullets. Black Mesa might have something like this for the agrunts, at least as far as I remember from pre-release material.)
It’s fine where it is, at least for now. As Someguy said, the tram’s aren’t loud, nor do they kick up dust and shit like Dadster said (baffles me how that conclusion was drawn seeing as that’s never seen once throughout OaR). The terrace has a nice bit of open space, why not use it? What DISADVANTAGES does it mitigate against, considering we’ve now determined the sound isn’t a problem? What major advantages would there be to having walls there? It has a nice sense of open space, which is something I’d like in a cafeteria. Add to that the fact that it’s a large cafeteria in a shitty OFFICE COMPLEX (it’s not on the transit system, it’s next to it), and I don’t see why you’re taking issue with it. Plus, like in reality, there’s a bit of a space issue. The Office Complex is massive, and thus they need a massive place to put it, to accommodate everyone. I originally had the cafeteria where the break room was, which is the largest room in the complex, and it had a total of about 24 seats, which, given the size of the complex, simply didn’t make sense. You could argue that I should have made a bigger room for the cafeteria and put it elsewhere, but I really liked the idea of a balcony over the rails (which is also something which was in HL1 so that’s another bonus), and the space was available. Real life has similar compromises too. I really like the fact that it overlooks the rail, it seems unique to me and not “silly” at all.
I’d also appreciate it if you held off such design objections until you’ve seen it in action, which should be fairly soon. The map’s are basically ready now, so I’ll have the video filmed within a couple of hours. I do have plans to play some good ol’ vidya with some friends later, so I probably won’t upload it until I go to bed tonight. Just letting you guys know that it probably won’t be readily available until quite a bit later, even though I will have it filmed and completed shortly.
While all of what you’re saying is true, that’s not the main reason why turning the tunnel into a model would be horrible. It’s also because of lighting. Simply put, large static props don’t tend to light very well - vertex lighting is inferior to lightmapping in terms of quality and flexibility. It would look A LOT worse. The other disadvantage would be that I would be unable to freely modify sections of tunnel as I please and when I want to, as I’d have to edit the model in order to do so. WAY too many disadvantages compared to just using 2 maps with brushes.
I’ll call it “Black Mesa Uncut: Storage Room #24521”
:jizz::jizz::jizz: enjoy
I would really enjoy it if I would see these things (Not my imagination, it appeared in Half Life) :
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One hecu fighting headcrabs in silo room
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Extended night time battle (including sniper)
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Two zombies covered behind walls or spawn when player uses health charger ( Attack when player refill health in health charger )
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more soldiers using rocket launcher
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And the best thing would be if you add night vision googles to hecu soldiers in night outside ( I think it’s the best implementation for it, cuz it’s night after all and they didn’t have flashlights)
Not having the first one. That scene’s gone.
The night time battle will be extended, in a sense. I’ll probably move some of the G map outside and incorporate the “quiet” area, before you head back over to C.
The Zombie ambush was cool, I’ll probably have it somewhere, if implemented differently.
There’ll be 1 HECU using the rocket, at most.
No NVG soldiers. While I think it’d be great to use them too, if I use them on my maps, it’d be a bit weird when you get to C and there aren’t any (I don’t plan on decompiling C). It’s a shame.
I’ve just done the first FULL compile of A2. Time to test it out! It’ll probably take me a while to edit out all the kinks, so bear with me. I’m nearly there, though. I just spent the past hour fighting a compile-breaking bug, but I got there eventually.
EDIT: BAHAHAHA. I compiled the map without any ambient lighting by mistake. The only lighting the map received was from the lights I’d placed myself. It looked dramatic and dark AS FUCK, like the Office was SERIOUSLY dramatic, but it also looked totally unrealistic and wrong. It was really, really contrasty. I’ll see how fixing it works out!
Nah, Half-Life always had a little of this survival horror vibe to it