Text, in your B maps “lighting” picture example, all those yellow-black caution markings are jarring/overdone. Can they be reduced or are they there to signifying the dangers within the materials transfer areas?
He already said not to comment on anything but the lighting, nothing else is done.
Getting a bit sick of having to repeat myself. People not listening to what I’m saying, and having to answer the same question again is getting rather tiring.
Not ever happening. We’ve already had a pretty in depth discussion about this, it lasted several pages. The options are, Apprehension tunnel lighting, such as the one I’m using now, or Black Mesa Rust Red. Those are the two options. Nothing else. Both options maintain consistency with the rest of the chapter. Any other option, destroys consistency. I don’t consider that acceptable. I’ve explained the reasoning for the blueish lighting. It helps distinguish a segment of the maps which are already separate from the rest of OaR thematically, it brings back the HL1 OaR mood which was missing from Black Mesa, is consistent with other part of OaR/Apprehension, and also helps alleviate some of the “chapter boredom”. Unless lots of members of the community take issue with it, it’s going to stay that way.
Besides, the lighting is those early WiP pictures is pretty bad, I’m very glad they changed it. It has very little character, and most of them look like a generic, unedited light entity. Much better now.
Haven’t seem 'em if they are, but just from that picture alone, it looks to me like it’s brush based anyway. That’s a guess though.
There… is a flatbed tram model, but it doesn’t look like how it does in the picture. It’s a bit closer to how the current trams look (with the slotted floor). But I second it; I haven’t seen that flatbed from that picture anywhere in the game files either.
I just brought it up because I thought that old tram model (brush?) would fit in the B maps, I was going to suggest using it if it still exists.
Hey Textfamguy great to see you keeping up the mapping and attempting on a rail uncut been a bit busy recently but I watched the media release and looked good!
I would like to highlight to you what I think are the parts that were cut that are most memorable.
1.Ducking the crates while riding the tram
2.The elevator that you can send a satchel up in to clear the traps and kill HECU
And that is it… These 2 things I did not see incorporated into your map I realize you will be doing some different versions but this for me are the 2 main points.
I really liked the running over a hECU Marine part and generally thought what you have done is good. Although for me these 2 things should be both incorporated into the Lite and full versions as at least they were the most memorable for myself.
Keep up the great work and I’ll be back later to check on your progress…
I’ve handed in my final essay for this week so pressure’s off a little bit. I will have a bit of free time this week to crack on with the mapping, which is good because my song is due for completion within a week or so, and I plan on having B1 complete by then.
Got one more essay due next week and after that I have about 2 weeks break before I need to start finishing up my dissertation. This means I can make 3 weeks / a month’s good work on this project before I have to buckle up and bury my head in the books again. In this time I will CERTAINLY get the B maps finished. The only basic architecture left to do on B1 is basically the vertical aspect to the turntable room - all the other basic architecture is finished. Detailing it and scripting fights should be a cinch, though the other 3 trams present on the map might be a bit painful to script, and I’m not looking forward to scripting the destruction sequence near the beginning. Those aren’t fun to work with.
What this means is within 2 - 3 weeks you will certainly see an alpha for the B maps, and maybe even a beta (of all 4 maps) if I make really good progress.
I am currently thinking through my testing cycle a fair bit, however. Because of this song my workflow has been different to how it usually is. I normally like to finish basic architecture on all the maps before I start polishing them up side by side, at the same time. Because of the song on B1 however I’m basically going to finish B1 before I even start B2 (still haven’t done ANY work on B2 yet). I’m wondering whether this means I should do a separate alpha for B1 and B2. Would you guys be cool with that? It might help me to identify general problems with B1 before I start mapping them into B2, but on the other hand it will certainly not leave as good an impression than if I’d released them both together (B2 will be really cool). I’m quite happy to go either way, as a result. Just bear in mind that if I were to release B1 and B2 separately, neither of them would link to the main BM campaign. They’d be standalone products for the purposes of testing. I’d like to hear what you guys think of this.
I’ll probably go back on my word and release a video for B1 too, regardless of how I do the tests. Don’t want to miss the opportunity to showcase the song and the turntable room scene. It’ll probably just be of that scene though, when it’s ready.
Though it’s good to see you again Ronster, I’ll just point out that pretty much the entirety of your post is already addressed in the OP. Read it if you haven’t.
That’s good. I have no problem splitting up the maps. It would mean the finished product would get to us more quickly (I think). Can’t wait to see the map.
Sorry Textfamguy I know I am late to the party… I am admittedly a bit confused as I really have not looked into it in too much depth and all you lot are way way ahead of me.
You said in your media release about the cafeteria section and you were unsure what to do with it?
I think it’s ok but the palm trees are really bordering on day-glow fluroscent and perhaps looks out of place but that is the dynamic lighting causing this … But it is interesting and a bit whacky.
I’ll say now I would personally choose to fill this area with a generator or 2 and keep it Industrial but apart from this area you are doing a great job again and like I said I’ll look forward to any new media releases.
I’ll have to go through the OP more thouroughly when I have time But great to see your still Modding Black Mesa 
If the feedback you’ll get in releasing B1 separately, aids you and makes the development of B2 better/easier, then that’s what you should do.
Figured I’d post a proper progress update.
Made a LOT of excellent progress today. The basic design and concept for the turntable room is finally complete, it’s really looking good. That was the biggest obstacle I had left to overcome before the scripting/polishing phase. There’s still one more bit of basic design I need to do (the turntable lift at the end of B1), but aside from that (which is really simple, the design will copy HL1’s) - basic layout complete.
The turntable room has TURNED OUT (GET IT!?) very well. It’s pretty radically different to my original concept for how I was going to vertically expand the room, but it’s actually for the better - it’s current design has the perfect balance between the original and room for extras, in my opinion. It echoes its HL1 version pretty well, but it certainly has expanded a fair amount. You’ll get to see it for the first B map media release, which I’m hoping for within the next week.
I’ve already started polishing up areas. Once I’ve got basic polish and lighting applied to the entire map, that’s when the scripting/encounter pass starts. This is when I add enemies, script any scripted sequences, and create the nodegraph. It’s time consuming, but ultimately it’s a phase of production I’m pretty good at. This is a VERY iterative process, constant testing and refinement.
What this all means is that I want to do an alpha release (B1 only) sometime next week, probably the Saturday. My friend writing the song has been a bit slow this past week, so hopefully this will give him a kick up the arse too to get a finished product out.
The general feedback I garner from the B1 test should be helpful to making B2. As I’ve introduced a basically entirely new style of tunnel system for B1, having some feedback on that before I start mapping them out again on B2 should prove most useful. I don’t forsee B2 taking anything like as long as B1 did. It should actually be a fairly basic job.
Once the alpha for B2 is out of the way, that’s when the beta phase will begin, and I’m hoping to have a first beta version ready in 2 - 4 weeks. This will include all the A maps and B maps refined with the community feedback.
Hopefully this gives you a fairly clear picture of how I want things to run. Progress has really heated up again.
EDIT: Oh, I thought of a question I was going to ask you guys. A LONG time ago (at least 30 - 35 pages) I outlined my plans for how the turntable room ambush would play out, and be expanded from the original (aside from the new song too). I figured I’d ask you guys about an interesting design I was thinking of. Here’s how the ambush is currently going to play out:
-1: Gordon arrives in the turntable room. If he arrives from his own tram, he ends up running past a sentry (should inflict SOME damage) and gets stranded in the center of the room. If he gets off beforehand, he ends up in a poor tactical position (no cover), but IS able to move pretty quick to get to a good position. If he was quick and stole the enemy tram beforehand, he arrives next to a 50 Cal position with some cover.
-2: A hidden Marine shouts something or other, and several of them run out from behind cover, as the power goes out. They throw flares into the center of the room (where Gordon is), leaving you to fight in relative darkness. You should still be able to see pretty much all of the room, but it will mostly be illuminated by a VERY faint red light.
-3: When there are 1 - 2 Marines left, reinforcements arrive from above (3 - 4 Marines), some of whom rappel down, and others jump.
-4: About 5 - 10 seconds after the wave of Marines arrive, Vorts start to teleport in. They engage the Marines, and Gordon cleans up the rest.
So my question is - during stage 3, should a Marine turn the power back on? My original plan was to keep the lights off throughout the entire battle, leaving the player to turn the power back on at the end (or they could choose to turn it on DURING the fight, if they don’t like fighting in the relative dark). However it comes to my attention that the darkness may overstay its welcome if I leave it like that. For the 3rd stage of the battle, should the lights come back on, or stay off?
Leave the lights off. It makes no sense for the marines to turn power back on during the ambush. I mean, they did turn it off for their tactical benefit and in the heat of the battle I think they’d be hard pressed to turn it back on. Unless, of course, the player ends up hiding somewhere, then it would be cool if the marines turned the light back on to make it easier to spot him.
Also, with the vorts coming into play, I think the theatrical look of the red flares, vort beams, etc. would make for a very interesting and chaotic situation which is probably how it should feel.
It does make sense. When they turn the lights off, they know where Gordon is, they have the high ground, and they can see him with the flares.
When the Vorts show up, their opponent (Vorts now) is now behind them, and have the option to move to any position, and the HECU don’t have torches. It would make complete sense for them to throw the lights back on in that situation.
Both options are plausible from a realism perspective, I think.
So I think the big question here is gameplay/aesthetic. While I agree the dark/green/red combination could look really cool, it really depends on how quickly the dark fight wears thin. I know lots of players HATE fighting in the dark, no matter how well scripted or whatever it is.
Maybe have the lights controlled by two switches, situated next to each other, with each switch controlling a portion of the lighting in the area. Then during the 3rd stage of the battle, have a HECU switch on one section of lighting. It’s like they want some additional lighting, in order to determine what the status of the battle is and to regroup, without fully illuminating the whole area. This will keep the area partially illuminated for gameplay/mood/aesthetics and quell the concerns of players who don’t like fighting in the dark. The lighting design could be minor/major, upper/lower, equally left/right or peripheral/central, whatever looks better.
It wouldn’t work, for very complicated VRAD related reasons. You cannot have multiple instances of switchable lights in one room, VRAD can’t generate enough lightmap pages for it. They all have to go off and on at the same time or they don’t work. Plus it seems overtly complicated from a gameplay related perspective anyway.
Really? I think I did a test map a while back with two separate sets of lights- one is the normal lighting, and the second is the red flashing, “emergency power” lighting. Not in BMs SDK, but it’s a bit surprising that VRAD can’t handle it. Granted, it was only a couple of lights and not a big huge area with eight or so light sources though, so I could be full of shit and just not know it.
I’m going to assume you know how lightmaps work seeing as you’re a mapper. When you have switchable lights, VRAD calculates lightmap “pages” for every possible combination of lights. Once you have more than 4 - 5 lights the amount of calculations it needs to do per light increases exponentially, and IIRC the maximum limit VRAD allows is 32 “pages” per face, which you hit after…4 switchable lights, IIRC.
This is worked around by giving lights which go on and off at the same time, the same name. VRAD merges their pages. Even this has problems though, namely the lack of bounce lighting and weird lighting artifacts this can create. When you combine different sets of switchable lights, things get quite funky, particularly if each “set” of lights consists of many light entities.
I will have 2 types of dynamic light “states” on my map.
-Lights on
-Lights off, flares on
You’d think this would require 2 pages per face. It doesn’t. VRAD doesn’t see it that way. VRAD will calculate pages for:
-Lights on, flares off
-Lights on, flares on
-Lights off, flares on
-Lights off, flares off
As far as I know, there’s no way to stop it from doing this. Adding yet another state (“emergency lighting”, or whatever Dadster proposed), will make…9 pages. This will massively bloat file size (way more lightmap data), won’t look very good (no bounce lighting, lighting glitches, faces missing some lightmap data), and will complicate I/O a fair bit, where I’ll probably already be pushing entdata limits. VRAD could probably handle it in all fairness, but it has a lot of downsides.
I also don’t like the idea much.
All these factors combine to make it a pretty big no-go. Hopefully this has helped explain why.
Leave the lights off. What could always happen is for it to be required to turn the lights back on in order to proceed (because they didn’t just cut lights, but the electricity in the room) Also, I think the set piece would work best when you cleaned everyone up, and its just you surrounded by dead marines and vorts, and it is silent apart from the sizzle of flares… speaking of flares, how will you deal with the fact that flares burn out? Can you set them to stay burning forever? It may get a bit dark if they burn out before you turn the lights back on.
If you are strongly against that, you can always set it so the lights turn back on the moment everyone died, as if the marines set the power to be cut for a “timed” period. Just expressing my opinion here. Also, you can always use the red lights… Just a thought.
I’d say if you want the lights to come back on, and have it make sense, then just have the first waves equipped with NVG’s. Then the reinforcement wave has no NVG’s, so the first thing they do is turn the lights back on so they can see clearly.
Also @Han, he’s not talking about the player flares you get, he’s talking about the kind used in Nova Prospect which emit a strong red light and burn forever.
Lights off until the player themselves turn them on. If you’ve got the hole in the roof still, have that give off some ambient light for the entire room with some flares. It’d be a nice effect with some soft dynamic lights in the center of the room.
Edit: As for the vorts, I’m kinda iffy for that, while I know they’re supposed to turn on eachother, I think it’d be better to have it just a squad of grunts vs the player. Vorts vs marines can pop in during the vista imo, it’d be a better setting. This is really supposed to illustrate the grunts REALLY wanting to kill freeman at this point. The ambush would enough, just my 2 cents on the topic. Although on top of it, the vorts can temporarily generate light of their own with the lightning they shoot. It’s up to you, I think the fight could do without.