OHGODNO
Thanks. I do recognize that at times I took it a bit too far. Towards the end, there were still several dozen more clipping issues that I decided not to report on as I could tell Text was reaching the end of his rope and patience. They really weren’t worth dealing with anyway. Besides, my eyes were starting to bleed on a regular basis, so I had to back off on the level of scrutiny, I’m sure to everyones relief. But doesn’t ST Uncut look beautiful? I think even more than Text had envisioned when he first started the project. For the small part that I played in it all, it’s been very gratifying and well worth the effort. Excuse me while I grab a tissue for my eyes… damn, blood everywhere.
yes, it does
Not necessarily. I’ve already made good progress and I’ve established a fairly clear vision for C2A2B.
The nature of OaR and the way I’m redesigning it, actually calls for a little bit more openness in my designing principles/layout. I figure if I get stuff like that out there nice and early, it might help speed things along.
In honour of Conti, I threw together a quick photoshop mockup showcasing my current design layout for C2A2B. It’s pretty simple, but does the job I think. It creates pseudo-complexity while still being largely linear and non-confusing.
The 0 shape you can see is a loop. Once the player enters the loop, the only way off it is by moving the crane off the track. HL1’s version was kind of like this except the loop was FAR larger and FAR more complex, going across some cross-junctions and taking forever to loop around. This loop is far smaller and it should become apparent immediately that you’re looping.
The rocket puzzle is still going to match up with where the rocket is in the final, rocket-launching map, right?
Not sure what you mean by this. If you mean: “if you line up all the maps together at the same time in the editor, will they line up like they do in Black Mesa?”, then definitely not. It’s nigh on impossible to convey a sense of travel over the course of 3 extra maps whilst slotting it neatly into the layout of 3 already existing ones. It’s basically impossible to do without me having the player moving around huge loops loads of times, which would again, damage the sense of journey. Any astute player would probably notice that the layout of the maps loop. In all honesty having the maps line up isn’t a big deal to me at all as long as their layouts aren’t absurdly contradictory/impossible.
This does raise an important issue though, which I hadn’t considered previously, now that you mention it. If we take a look at how Black Mesa will look with OaR Uncut installed:
BM_C2A2A - (BM Original)
BM_C2A2B
BM_C2A2C - (BM Original) Rocket Priming
BM_C2A2D
BM_C2A2E
BM_C2A2F - (BM Original) Rocket Launch
Now look at it without OaR Uncut:
BM_C2A2A
BM_C2A2B - Rocket Priming
BM_C2A2C - Rocket Launch
Under my current redesign plan, the rocket is launched 3 whole maps after it is primed by the player. This seems illogical from a storytelling/gameplay standpoint as a player priming the Rocket orients them to that as their main/immediate objective and they would expect to launch it shortly afterwards.
Is this an issue? Would this be a potential problem? Thoughts/comments?
The simplest solution I could find to this would be to swap D with C so that there’s only a 2 map gap between priming and launch, but this would require a more thorough redesign and more changes to the layouts.
I don’t think that’s much of an issue, actually
it’s just that you still need to travel a bit to get to the rocket
This design actually has a lot of potential…my impression here is that it’s a xenofauna-themed area (the last one before open battle between HECU/aliens). However, the major concern is can you still fit B1-C onto a SINGLE map that’s connected to this? The loop element looks pretty big.
Other things to think about:
-for the B2 room, what exactly are you planning to do w/the courtyard/water elements? Just a place to flip the switch?
-as for the wire side, there’s some walkway areas in HL C2A2A where you can see squids eating HECU. They could fit here pretty well to liven the area up. Also some barnacles near the water areas…that’s how there usually placed in HL OaR
-are you going to introduce the satchel here? This would be a perfect place for a houndeye ambush.
-will you replicate the loop elements in C2A2F and if so, does this create too many loops in OaR (maybe a little too early to tell currently)?
I would say switch them because you definitely want to give the player a sense of journey; that they’ve been traveling along the rails before getting a glimps of their objective. Because if you want the player the think that their going to launch the rocket soon after they prep it, then you need to have the rocket priming as close to the launch map as possiable. But thats just me.
This is a total nonissue as it was like this in HL. Realistically, the person priming the rocket isn’t going to be the one launching the rocket so the distance issue between these 2 tasks is irrelevant. The only reason why you’re launching the rocket is because all of the scientists in the control room have been killed. Swapping D w/C is really, really bad (read unacceptably anachronistic). It’s kind of hard to phrase this argument so I’m going to paraphrase what you said, HL2 style:
“This seems illogical from a storytelling/gameplay standpoint as a player SEEING THE CITADEL orients them to that as their main/immediate objective and they would expect to VISIT IT shortly afterwards.”
Not exactly true and not too illogical right?
Edit: I like what you said below.
It’s alright, the loop isn’t that big. I’m actually probably going to make it larger. The straight parts of the loop are 1024 units long. For a quick and dirty reference, the main road on the street on C2A5H was just under 3000 units long. So it’s not that big.
The issue with Source maps isn’t normally their size. The grid is nearly always large enough to accommodate any map in terms of raw size. The issue is their entity/brush limits. Obviously, as you increase a map’s size these two things also logically increase. Though my C2A5B will take up a lot of grid space, they shouldn’t take up a great deal of entity/brush size. The reason I was having so much trouble with that on ST Uncut was because the entity setups for some of the scripted encounters were VERY complex. OaR Uncut will use far more simple, less dense, and also less of these encounters anyway. Map size isn’t a concern - not yet at any rate. I’ll have to play that one by ear.
Thematically I was planning on having some kind of electrical room/walkway running alongside the dangling wire section, as an optional exploration area. In the center of the loop will be one of the rooms from B2. This makes the loop much friendlier - if you end up stranded on the other side without your train for whatever reason there may be, you can cross the center room.
I don’t think there’ll be too many loops throughout OaR. There’ll be this one, and the one on E. This loop was present in HL1’s A map, but it was really weirdly designed. It looped around MASSIVELY. Definitely the dumbest thing by far about its design was that the only way to move the crane blocking the path was to loop all the way round and you could only access the walkway leading up to the crane from basically the opposite end of the loop to where the crane was. That was really dumb. I’m thinking of having 2 walkways leading up to the crane controls - one stairwell or something actually by the crane controls, so a player who stops there can get to it easily, and one connected to the B2 room in the center.
I think this design would work pretty well and is a good compromise between complexity and simplicity. We’ve already discussed how B1 and C are going to go, they’re going to be pretty much 1:1 remakes. The elevated parts of B1 which run above the rail (the office section) I might make a really nice skylight for. That might look awesome.
If I feel up to it, I may add the other room from B2 to the very right hand side of the loop.
I might make the Satchels, with their associated introductory sequence, available in the B2 room in the center.
As for the loop on F, I don’t know what I’ll do with that just yet. For now I’ll work on this and continue to develop this map.
EDIT:
Inaccurate analogy. A more suitable analogy would be the player opening the door to the citadel at the beginning of the campaign, and then not going through it until the end. I also fail to see how swapping D with C would be “unacceptably anachronistic,” it’s not like I have a sworn duty to replicate perfectly the way OaR goes. I can change things up, I can work my magic how I see fit. It’s not something I’m currently considering, anyway, but I’m hardly going to rule it out on the grounds of it being “unacceptably anachronistic”.
Swap “unacceptably” for “unnecessarily.” It’s one thing to introduce a slight anachronism, like wedging B2 elements between A and B1, because of logistical design issues but it’s another thing to introduce a major anachronism unnecessarily. HL’s E is a BIG map w/lots of important features. There’s really nothing to justify its swap w/the previous map, particularly over an issue as trivial as a little extra distance between mid to end rocket. That should hopefully clarify what I’m saying a bit.
As for ruling things out on the grounds of being “unacceptably anachronistic,” of course you should! Look at ST uncut…despite it’s sometimes dramatic visual departure from HL, you followed the appearance of every key HL feature CHRONOGICALLY, W/O DEVIATION. Despite the cuts, the BMS OaR dev did the exact same thing so it’s reasonable to follow suit.
Sorry to go back to the music discussion, but would it be possible to maybe add one of the unused tracks when you launch the rocket? In BM there was nothing that played after you had launched it, and it was quite disappointing since that’s a pretty important part of the story.
Fair enough. That’s probably a reasonable argument. Perhaps my objection was to the way you’d phrased it and I hadn’t quite realized it myself. As I said, it’s not something I’m definitely planning on doing (or even seriously considering), it’s just another option. I’m not a purist, I’m quite alright with changing things up here and there if needs be. But, for now, needs don’t be.
I’m not sure. I’m not even quite sure what I’m going to DO with BM’s maps yet. If I play my cards right, there’s every possibility that I could use entspy to edit the BSPs directly to change their level transition data, without decompilation. This avoids a VERY large number of problems - such as entity systems getting broken by decompilation, areaportals/occluders needing to be entirely redesigned (which always end up worse as a result as I can’t know the entity logic which the BM devs used to go with them), and the very complex brushwork which OaR uses getting distorted and having vertices jumping off the grid. Remember the gaps in the furnace? Yeah, all of OaR’s walls do that when decompiled.
As you can see, I’d REALLY like to avoid decompliation if possible. I might be able to use entspy to change the level transitions without decompiling. I’ll see. I’ve never done anything like that before, so I’m not quite sure what entspy’s capable of yet. If it is as powerful as I suspect it is, I may even be able to use it to inject an ambient_generic to C2A2C, and add a music sequence.
Then there’s just the question of what song to use. The HL1 song fit absolutely beautifully but I’d quite like to stay with the Black Mesa trend of using original music.
Why don’t you just put all your maps before the Rocket Priming? Imo it really wouldn’t make sense for you to prime the rocket, then go far away from it and either loop back or go through a wormhole and appear at the rocket site even though you’re a mile away from it. :fffuuu:
Yeah, maybe things won’t be in the exact order as they were in HL then, it’d be hard to full off priming the rocket, then going all the way through 2 maps without the player wondering “Where am I going? I was just at the rocket, why am I leaving now? Wasn’t this launch supposed to be urgent?”. It makes no sense for the player to ready the rocket for launch, then take the scenic route up to the control room.
I thought that how the song goes that plays during that part of OAR was made so that it fades out once you get to the rocket launch to allow for that little moment of silence, kind of like how the first gameplay footage of that area showed before release.
Lol it makes perfect sense…think NASA launches. Where is the space shuttle relative to mission control (hint: very far away). It’s like the whole citadel thing where you see it early and recognize it’s importance but then take the scenic route to it (after like 10 chapters or so no less).
As for the music deal, I think really the best solution is to add a SHORT (e.g. ~10 sec) after the rocket launch rather than an actual piece that’s similar in theme to the HL track (Drums and Riffs). The issue here is that addition of a piece would be too close in proximity to the dubstep battle track and would sound a little awkward, but I think it’s best that Joel makes the decision since this section was actually part of BMS and his music selection (and lack thereof) was a conscious decision. Maybe I’ll PM him or something…
Edit: want to make a correction based on something I said previously: Sirens in the Distance is NOT the garg theme…it’s actually Alien Shock which should be in the beginning of Power Up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4gQOjpzWBE.
I understand what you’re getting at, but that’s not how it works in Black Mesa. Here, we prime the rocket, we are literally right next to the rocket. Then we have the Command Center, which is right infront of the Rocket. The journey to the Command Center is literally just to the tram elevator and back to the launch pad. Altering this would create continuity problems, not to mention it’d be illogical to go so far away from the missile and you’d have to wonder why the military doesn’t just disable it in that half hour or so that you’re gone.
I’d also point out that the Citadel example does not apply in this situation. We don’t start Follow Freeman at the foot of the Citadel and move away, we start far away and move toward it. Completely different.
I was thinking hard about how to make the crane scene make sense from both a design and a realism perspective. I’ve been working on that area mostly today, I reckon I can have the basic layout done by the end of today, and might even be able to start working on the B1/C area.
(As a little side note, I’m going to start a convention of simply referring to the maps by letters, it’s much simpler and less confusing for those less “savvy”. So now, C2A2B1 will be called B1, C2A2A = A, etc etc.)
The crane in HL1’s A map was really contrived. It basically existed for no purpose other than to block the player’s path and this much was blatantly obvious from its setup - there was nothing around it. There’d also be no reason at all for that crane to be dangling over that tracks, at least not obviously. Of course that’s something we’re trying to avoid. Here’s my current (early) solution and design:
On the left is some kind of “loading dock” where you can infer the crane is used to load heavy materials onto vehicles which then go out the door and to wherever (this design is “Kosher,” so to speak, if you look on Black Mesa’s C2A2B there are at least 2 areas like this with these garage doors). The right hand side is the storage area/whatever, that doesn’t matter too much.
The player could then infer that this area is for loading, and the crane is dangling over the track to move stuff across the track when necessary, or perhaps even load things onto trains. I think this is a good design and it works well. I haven’t decided quite on where the control center will be yet, I’ll figure that out in due course.
Just bear in mind most of the stuff in that pic is heavily unfinished/placeholder.
While I’d like to avoid continuity problems if possible, moving the maps around to preserve continuity creates many problems of its own, and will make redesigning this stuff a lot less simple. Perhaps a simpler and more interesting solution, would be for me to place (in the map after Black Mesa’s where you prime the rocket), some kind of “Main Rocket Access” tunnel or something like that, clearly labelled for all to see, but have it blocked off by debris or an HECU dig-in. The player would then realize that they have to take the longer, overground section of the rail to reach the rocket. While it cheapens it a bit I guess by making the player KNOW they’re taking the long way round, it does avoid players having the head-scratcher of “why is the rocket launch so far away from the rocket”?
EDIT: While I’m chucking ideas which I’m planning on using out there, if I want to have some form of rail switching system, I need to improve Black Mesa’s signalling system, which currently can either be
[COLOR=‘PaleGreen’]<-- [COLOR=‘Red’]X
or
[COLOR=‘Red’]X [COLOR=‘PaleGreen’]–>
on the signs. Not very flexible or clear, particularly once I introduce the concept of rail switching. My idea, is instead of a red X one one side and a green arrow on the other side, I’m going to combine these elements.
For example, when it’s possible to go left AND right, but the left path is the active one, there’ll be a green arrow left and a red arrow right.
When it’s possible to go left but not right (because the path is inaccessible to the player for whatever reason), there’ll be a green arrow left and a red X right.
Thus:
A green arrow points in the direction the train will go, and means that path is active.
A red arrow means that this path is activatable, but not currently active.
A red X means that the path is completely inaccessible (to trains) for whatever reason.
Good no?
Nice start!