Just looking at what other people have said, and the turntable is still acting fairly buggy. I think what I’ll do is I’ll take a look at it myself later and see if I can’t come up with a solution. That way you can focus on more important matters (such as B2, for example).
@ Mr. Someguy, your “bonus” wooden crates adventure pictures were hilarious.
Just watched the wonderful video. Not much to say rather than brava, I might not be able to hold out on waiting after all, it’s so exciting!
The music was beautiful. It fit perfectly with the rest of the music (if I didn’t know any better I’d say Joel had made it) that’s quite slow and sad. I’m having a mental blank so I’m not exactly sure where the sad music comes in (maybe in Residue Processing?) that’s similar, but regardless it’s beautifully composed.
Does it fit with the whole battle sequence? In my personal opinion, no, but if you like it in there then that’s perfectly acceptable. It does differentiate from the more bad ass music in Surface Tension or QE ambush, so that’s always an upside.
Ambush wise. The lighting was beautiful. As suggested, is it at all possible to maybe have the flares eventually die out? Just as a nice little extra effect, but don’t stress out on it if you don’t like the idea or it’s not possible. The fight looks a mix between boring and hard, since you do almost always use the Cal, but that’s all up to personal choice since if you want more action you technically can run around and fight.
As also suggested by 1-2 people, is it possible to get it a teensy bit darker? Maybe the ramp up through the thread made me over expect, but I think there is a possibility of it being a bit darker without being that much harder.
2 things quickly.
- The man screaming during the fight. I lol’d so hard.
- The little pattern you ‘played’ at the end with the crowbar. You have no idea how often I do that (not necessarily in game, just in general).
The commentary was cool. I’m among those guys who’s waiting for the final release of the Full version, so I can experience it all the way. Actually, once the final release of On a Rail Uncut Full comes out, would you be able to do a commentary for said final release?
My first playthrough of BM was on hard and it was doable. Yeah, I died a few times and some moments were a bit annoying due to the fact that stupid combine ai was making up for it with aimbot - AI behaviour that is inferior to HL1 marines was what pissed me off, not the aimbot itself (there are ways around it) - but it wasn’t particularly hard.
And probably, what I was thinking by considerably darker was considerably darker than what you get with flares burning. Sorry for the confusion. It can be a bit darker after the flares die though.
BAN THE MOTHERFUCKER!!!1!!!1!!!
Thank you everyone for the feedback so far. I’m really glad this has been fairly well received, I have to say this was the map I was the most nervous about releasing. With so much deliberation and changes being made to it over the past 3 weeks, I wasn’t sure if it was just because my ideas were bad that I needed to change them so often, or what. But I’m glad it’s turned out alright. Thank you to everyone who’s played it and helped test it for me. There hasn’t been anything like as many raw “bug reports,” as there were for the A maps so I’m assuming that means in terms of design and glitches that B1 is a level above the A maps (at least for now).
There still has been a lot of feedback and bug reports and I simply don’t have time to comment on it all - but I can at the very least address some of the most important issues.
Or alternatively, you could have read the big, underlined, red warning I put right underneath the download link. I have no sympathy. I don’t write those for fun, and if you don’t read it, that’s your problem. It’s in the readme too, which you obviously didn’t read. Besides, you can install the previous version of the B map from the old version of OaR Uncut, or extract it from the BMS installer. Really not that difficult. Take that tone elsewhere. Pisses me off when people don’t read stuff that’s as clear as day.
Darkness
The Flares already go out after 2 minutes. The fight is insanely difficult without the Flares. I’ve done tests where the fight ran well past 2 minutes, and once the flares go out, it becomes extremely difficult. You cannot make out any details in the environment except for the Marine’s green eyes. This means you can’t identify cover, you can’t identify reliably where their bodies are. This means headshots only, which against aimbots such as the BM HECU, it’s just even more tedious and frustrating than it would ordinarily be.
The reason for them throwing flares is that a few of the Marines in that fight are not wearing NVGs. In the alpha I accidentally made their Commander wear NVGs, which I picked up on when playing the map with friends yesterday. That wasn’t supposed to happen. It looks funny though. If you run up to him with notarget on, he’s wearing his beret and smoking a cigar INSIDE his gasmask, which looks hilarious. About 1/3 of the Marines are not wearing NVGs, so obviously they’d need to be able to see as well. The flares down where you are allows them to see you well, but not the other way round. From a realism standpoint, it doesn’t strain believability too far, I don’t think.
From a gameplay perspective, I can actually darken the flares a bit, yeah. My early tests with the dark flares didn’t go too well because you couldn’t see the rappelling Marines, so I turned the flares up to compensate. Later on down the line, I added lights around the corridors on the top floor which serve to silhouette the marines who are up there, so the brighter flares aren’t really needed. I can try turning it down a bit. Though I am personally perfectly fine with the level of brightness, I’ll turn it down for the beta and see what everyone thinks. It won’t be massively dramatic, but it will be different.
As for the Vorts, we may have to agree to disagree. There had to be something to draw the Marine’s focus away from you, because by the stage in the fight where the rappelling Marines arrive, your health is going to be chipped away to quite low. With the final wave of Marines focusing all of their attention on you, I’d imagine death would be swift and painful. The only way to alleviate that would either be to make it way easier, or have more healthkits, neither of which I consider acceptable alternatives. And plus, the Vorts arrive about 30 seconds before the flares go out. If I have to fight an opponent in near pitch black, I want it to be the Vorts!
Music
I’m very pleased to see the new song has generally been very well received. I haven’t had the chance to speak to my friend yet but we’re meeting up a bit later, I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to hear that people like what he’s done. I know he put a long into it during his own busy time at university, and I really appreciate that. The ratio I’ve seen so far of people saying the song FITS the battle, compared to those who say it doesn’t, is about 2:1, which is something I’m happy with. That’s not to say I’m discounting the opinion of those who say it doesn’t fit. What it means to me is that the song has its own identity while also sounding like it fits in Black Mesa. Some people pick up on “its own identity,” while others pick up on the “fitting” part. I like that, and I’m actually fairly sure my friend will really appreciate that.
Turntable Fight Difficulty
A few comments have been raised on the difficulty of the turntable room fight. Having seen the community response, and having played through the fight myself many, many times, I’m going to throw in my opinion that it is probably too difficult. Not by a crazy amount, and I still personally find it WAY less frustrating than the QE Ambush, but it probably is too hard. I’ll see if I can do something about that. .RK comments that the AI should be changed to be less about hiding behind boxes and taking potshots at you to make it easier for them to kill. I understand where he’s coming from - but that would make things much worse. During my playtests before when I changed the AI to do that, the Marines would annihilate me the moment I peeked out. I mean brutally. They already have the high ground and darkness advantage, giving them the advantage of being able to be aggressive makes it WAY less fun! I understand if you don’t find the Marines playing the cover game fun, but I have to say, I personally do. They don’t really exhibit any behavior like that during Black Mesa, so to me it makes that battle more unique and believable. It’s actually a serious problem I have with the B map’s 50 Cal sequence. It seems to be a rule of modern FPS that when you encounter an important turret sequence, the enemies lose ALL sense of self preservation, and decide the best way to live long and fulfilling lives would be to toss themselves headfirst at the 50 Cal. Nobody would do that. Why would the Marines in the turntable room ambush do that?
I can find other ways to reduce difficulty without changing the AI.
Turntable
Be my guest. I used a hackish approach to get the turntable working, by the time I actually managed to get it so that both trams worked on it, I was so fed up with working on it that I didn’t think about coding it for other eventualities, such as reversing the tram after turning and whatnot. The only thing I did do was make it so that you can’t operate the turntable when the tram is on it, but not in the center. That makes it easier to control consistency. I ended up not using func_trackautochange (which is what Black Mesa uses for all of its turntables) simply because I couldn’t get it to work. I copied exactly the setup they used on Power Up, but I just couldn’t get it to work. Pain in the arse. In the end I used parenting and branch path trickery to get it to work.
Yes. Yes they were. Gave me a good hearty chuckle. I dunno where the heck you got the idea to do that from, but kudos. It’s good to see that Gordon Freeman’s PhD is being put to good use!
On the subject of the music - the point is kind of that no other battle in Black Mesa used chilled out sounding music, it’s something a little different. As I said on the video, all the battle music on BM is really in your face and heavy, which is GREAT, I love BM’s music. But I think having something like that for the turntable room would detract from the mood the scene itself is creating. It makes the fight seem a bit more unique, I think.
As for the pattern I “played” with the Crowbar (we call it the “Football Anthem,” no idea what it actually is), you don’t know the half of it! My mates who I regularly play CS and other games with, we do that shit all the time. It’s just drilled into my brain for some reason.
Yes, I will, much like I did for ST Uncut.
Why would marines leave a heavy machine gun pointing in their general direction, after meticulously preparing all that fancy ambush scheme? Dipshits.
Not saying anything, but I thought it’s really hilarious.
My bugs thus far 
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Where the vorts fight the marine, those big meeting room with the long oval table, on the other side of the hall there is a room where there is some kind of dynamic shadow cast by a light ( those one behind the corner), well the big shelf draws a shadow on a little shelf, but not on the little shelf and even the little shelf makes no shadow at all
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I had the problem my train didn’t stop automatically
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When killing a barnacle, he dropped his body on the floor above it
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the door with the wall behind is, is not fixed, so u stil can open it
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When on the turnable track, I parked my train on it, then had a little fight and went to the office to turn it, the table turned, but my train still stood in the same direction, so the train didn’t turn with the table
I thought Gordon’s suit is being advertised to come with a flashlight installed ._.
TextFAMGUY1 don’t get mad at me. I didn’t mean to insult you and I didn’t forced you to make a backup. I just suggested. If you interpreted it that way then sorry.
The amount of stupidity is immeasurable. The one who is being insulted here is intelligence itself.
You didn’t even have to read text’s posts, for you should have used your brain to realize that his files replace those of BM when it asks you to confirm if you wish to proceed when extracting them. You obviously didn’t bother to open the library and check it’s contents, only pasted it and bothered to do so only once you found out there’s no level transition and the tunnel leads to nowhere.
The only excuse you could have would be blindness or analphabetism, if you had them, that’s it.
I thought we established that the M2 was there incase of Gargs 
Damn. You’re absolutely right. It would make things easier but it would make absolutely no sense.
I would have suggested that when they peek out the peek out just a bit further, but I’ll obstain from full on pining for it if you’re sure you don’t have to resort to changing AI.
I can find other ways to reduce difficulty without changing the AI.
From what I see from the Power Up level, once you reached the turntable you couldn’t turn back. In fact, you never even controlled the turntable; the guard did the turning for you, and even then he wasn’t actually doing it, it was the entity setup.
That might be one of the reasons why it didn’t work; the trackchange was attempting to go both ways. It’s further compounded by the fact that you could potentially put the enemy tram on the same track as the one you entered with. That would be bad.
So in my opinion, it would be best to scrap going in reverse once on the turntable. Have some rubble fall on the tracks to explain it or something, that would be doable. So, if you would be okay with that, I could start playing around with the track entities.
While I appreciate the offer of help, I’m pretty sure I can do it myself. I’d prefer to keep my work as my work alone, in all honesty. I can just set it up so that the path_tracks disable the previous ones on the turntable as you pass over them, should fix the problem entirely, because you wouldn’t be able to reverse anyway. Simple, and doesn’t require any dramatic changes to the turntable. Then I just need to make sure that the func_door_rotating which controls the turntable can only be used at the right time, when the tram is on the center, and it will be fine.
It’s not an issue that has me massively stumped, I’d just had enough of it when I got near the end of mapping B1. I will return to it once B2 is complete.
On the subject of the trackautochange, Power Up’s trackautochange was simply triggered by reaching the central path_track. The only difference in my setup was how it was triggered, it has nothing to do with going both ways. I already explored that possibility numerous times. It works fine as it is currently and I can most likely get it to play nicely with a bit of tweaking.
I think it’s fair to say if they REALLY wanted to fortify that room for some reason (which is quite believable), they’d want to cover all angles well, as the Aliens teleport in randomly - they’d want to be able to cover all angles. It does stretch believability, but in the name of good gameplay and fun I don’t think it’s too far.
I wasn’t mad. But you did make it seem like your failure to back up your own files was my fault. It isn’t. It’s yours. And it’s not like it’s difficult to rectify anyway.
I don’t know why you’re giving me feedback for the A maps, I haven’t touched them at all. The A maps will be edited for the full beta which will be happening later on down the line.
Fair enough, if you think it’s an easy fix~
Especially considering that a Garg would ever so easily fit in those tunnels
:retard: :retard: :retard:
Well, those with the turable table with the train on it is NEW.
I played a few times through the A map before this new release, and I thought some stuff was changed, weird…
The Year of Death song was made for BMS?!
i thought that was a song from 28 days later, damn that song is amazing
I had that same problem. If you try to drive the train, though, it will somehow turn the right direction; thereby making the Resonance Cascade not the only seemingly impossible thing to happen that day. 