The only other thing I could think of is to utilize the flares to light up the room a bit more. Instead of firing at the player’s location, fire them around the room instead. You can also MAYBE put in some pickuppable flares laying around the room for the player to grab and chuck around. It could give some light and allow for some more tactical play.
Edit: Another advantage to throwable flares is I THINK you don’t need to fool around with the light map as much… I could be wrong though. You may want to check the light setup on UFC and see if the pickuppable flares fuck with the light map… and keep the current setup if you so choose.
Using the throwable flares is actually a very clever idea, which I will definitely try. If I give the player 2 or 3 of them it might help them out a bit if they have the wherewithal to use them. They use dynamic lighting which should leave the lightmap just fine. Cheers!
I’d say more than 2 to 3 is needed… it really depends on the size of the room and where the flares are located. 2-3 per GROUP and maybe 2-3 GROUPS laying around the entire room could be good.
Edit: The main reason I say there needs to be more is that by the time the player can chuck it again, they could take a boat load of damage from the marines before they get to the flare to chuck it somewhere else.
It’s great to hear things are coming along so nicely, and that the explosion room worked out so well.
What if some of the flares start to dim and burn out (not affect the lighting, just the sprites), so the soldiers above toss down a couple more flares before they begin their descent? The flares falling from above could help draw the player’s eye up increasing their chance of seeing the soldiers come down.
Unfortunately true. While I wish the .50 Cal wasn’t so crappy in… every other level it’s featured, in this instance it’s necessary, because if it was too good, there would be no reason to use it.
Oh, maybe they’re not included? They were in EP1, and they even played in my test map (which is combine soldiers in ep1 because I don’t know how to use mods in sdk). Do any missing sounds errors show up in the console when they rappel? If they do, it should show the directory they should be in. But you’re right, it would be difficult to hear it, hence my above visual cue suggestion.
That sounds pretty, a nice way to lead into the surface maps
I think the military’s ‘tactical’ flares should be built into the map like the Nova Prospekt flares, while the player can find additional emergency flares scattered around the arena.
Also this which I forgot to respond to before:
Most of the leanwall animations are for crouching and exiting crouch, those could be nice to make the initial ambush seem a bit more ‘dynamic’ than simply everyone just standing up. After that, they may behave as normal, crouching and uncrouching. It’d just be a nice bit of eyecandy I suppose.
Above all though, I think at least one soldier needs to use “leanwall_corner_right_idle” and “leanwall_corner_right_exit” for the ambush start, that one is the most obviously noticeable and would look real nice. If giving them all animations is too much of a pain, this one should at least be put in.
It’s stupidly late so I’ll reply to peoples’ comments tomorrow.
I do have a problem though which someone may know the solution to.
The flares the marines throw at you are currently prop_flares, which are the flare type that Black Mesa use (the ones you can pick up and throw). They work just fine…for 30 seconds. Then the flares extinguish. I want them to last for 3 minutes or more. This doesn’t actually affect the room’s lighting - which is handled via a flickering red light I made, but it does mean the flares appear to be extinguished while still somehow lighting the entire room. Their ends don’t appear to be burning like they should after 30 seconds.
I have spent hours upon hours (seriously, at least 4 by this point) trying to fix this. There seems to be no way to make prop_flares last forever. As far as Hammer is concerned, a prop_flare is just a physics prop.
I’ve tried all manner of crazy workarounds. I’ve tried env_flare, which is the flare type which HL2 uses, but it’s been coded out of Black Mesa and doesn’t work in game. I’ve tried attaching env_sprites to the ends of the flares to make it seem like they carry on burning but it looks bad because they don’t animate. I’ve searched high and low for the particle system which flares use (spent an hour or so hunting through Black Mesa’s particles, in the hopes of being able to use an info_particle_system), and haven’t found it.
I’ve tried sending the TurnOn input (which is the input used to initially ignite the flare) to the flares once they’re extinguished, which does nothing, presumably because they’re “burned out”.
I’ve used ent_dump to check spawnflags before and after “burning out”. They’re the same. I’m thinking perhaps my FGD is bogus and it’s missing an important keyvalue for the prop_flare. Does anyone know what that would be?
Anyone have any insight? I’m looking more specifically at the fellow mappers/modders. Is there a way around this? Is there some hackish solution I can implement? Does anyone know the name of the particle system which Black Mesa’s prop_flares use?
It is probably because the devs hard coded the 30 value into the entity. Thats why there is no key value for diration in hammer; theyve already stated the duration in the source code
It might need some work with cpp files (through Visual Studio, I reckon). I want to say it would be simple, since in theory this should be a copy/pasting/renaming sort of deal, but looking around I honestly can’t be sure. If there was a way to find the flare’s cpp file then the whole issue could be put to bed.
In the meantime, I’ll go ahead and post this to see if this helps any.
From the bms.fgd
[code]@PointClass base(BasePropPhysics, Targetname, Angles, DamageFilter, BaseFadeProp) studioprop() = prop_flare : “Flare Prop”
[
model(studio) : ‘Model’ : ‘models/props_junk/flare.mdl’ : ‘Model to use for the flare.’
input TurnOff(void) : 'Extinguish flare'
input TurnOn(void) : 'Ignite flare'
output OnPlayerUse(void) : 'Fired when player instigates +USE.'
spawnflags(Flags) =
[
1 : 'No DLight' : 0
2 : 'No Smoke' : 0
4 : 'Infinite' : 0
8 : 'Start off' : 0
]
input Start(float) : "Starts the flare burning. The flare will burn for the specified number of seconds (0 = infinite)."
input Die(float) : "Causes the flare to fade out over the specified number of seconds, and then die (0 = die instantly)."
input Launch(float) : "Launch the flare forward with the specified speed."
]
[/code]
Ugh, the more i think about it, the less feasible the option is. I really doubt the devs included a solution file for the mod, and that is required for the game to recognize new enities. Just… damn.
That’s why I said to put in a few groups of them if you can spare the entities. I wouldn’t mind them lasting only 30 seconds per flare if you can’t manage to change the duration.
You know, one alternative that does occur to me is if you managed to find the prop_flare cpp file (or whatever it is named), you might be able to just change the hard-coded 30 in that to a variable. Then just go over to the fgd and set default to 30 (to preserve the flares seen in UC). And then when you are using the flares in your maps you manually change the duration value to 180.
The only drawback I foresee is possibly having to entspy UC incase the flares end up not working, and then packing the maps with yours. If entity properties update correctly though then this shouldn’t be a problem.
Possibly. We don’t even know if this file is even available to us. That’s why I said “if he managed to find it” because for all we even know we might not even have it at all.
EDIT: …Doesn’t matter. Even if you edit the file you would have to completely rebuild Black Mesa for it to work. That is way too far outside of scope. Just… there is no good way to legitimately make three-minute flares. >_<
here is a hackish fix put flashing red dot on the ends of the flare props (the thing used for the flares in half life 2). the flares would just look burnt after 30 seconds but that would explain the light.
Nope. Changing the fgd would only tell hammer that we want to run for 180 seconds, and it would not tell the engine, since the purpose of the fgd files is to tell Hammer what entities it has available to it. You can’t use fgd to create or edit entities. And unfortunately, since the 30 seconds for Black Mesa’s flares is apparently declared within the engine, there’s nothing we can do about it via editing the fgd files.
This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if they had let the duration be a variable, but apparently the devs decided that it should always be 30 seconds and never deviate.
What about them originally having it sealed off (the opening for turntable) and when they see the fight going sour, maybe they blow it and the rappel down? That would definitely catch your attention (sound and some debris). Probably simplier to do as well.
I wonder, is it possible to have prop_flares, but make them appear with no collision and immobile, then just have several “waves” of them? So like, after 25 seconds, the first set of flares are deleted and a second set is immediately spawned and fired in their exact place. Would that be possible?
To reduce the size of the client. Compiled code takes room. Little things add up over time.
It’d be doable. I was thinking the same thing, but keep the burned out husks. There obviously needs to be a limit to how many will spawn though.
@Text; I was thinking of having some placed flares inside of the room that the player could just naturally grab and throw around. Not just having the marines chuck them.
Additionally, you could use red emergency lighting to illuminate the room just slightly. In case of power outages, those things are installed everywhere and automatically come on when power goes out… whether the circuit gets cut or gets nailed with a power outage. In this circumstance I THINK it may keep the atmosphere while illuminating the room just slightly.
It could also add a slight dynamic to the fight by having the marines target the emergency lights to darken the area to their advantage. Have a dynamic light attached to the prop and have it wink out when shot by either the player or the marines? There’d be quite a few dynamic lights though…
Edit: Another solution would be to have the emergency light(s) flash occasionally. That might cause seizures though…
Makes sense I guess, it just seems like they went out of their way to scrap things that could be useful to potential modders.
Also, I wouldn’t keep the husks. I meant like, when a flare is near the end of it’s “life”, it is deleted and a new one is spawned in the exact same place as the old one, so it looks like the flare is burning for a long time. Do this about 6 times and let the final set burn out. That’d be a total of 180 seconds of burn-time (25 x 6 = 150 + 30 (last set, burns out) = 180)
That’s because that’s exactly what they were trying to do. The Black Mesa Dev Team didn’t think of themselves as modders, they thought of themselves as AAA-game developers - to be specific, some kind of bizarre AAA-game developer who takes nearly a decade to produce an incomplete game. They did not share Valve’s attitude that the modding scene is something to be promoted, and consequently, they designed their game to be as unmoddable as possible while staying in the Source engine. That’s why the source code hasn’t been released - if they had any other attitude, there would be no controversy within the team as to whether it should be released.
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.
