I really like the work that was done to the manta rays in black mesa, however it bothers me a bit that now we see them just flying around and don’t really feel like “alien aircrafts”. We don’t see them attacking or deploying forces, in the original they would drop off grunts, which showed us that they were part of the xen military. In here rather than just ramdomly teleporting grunts where they would be dropped off in the original, you could actually add some sort of green beam being fired from the manta which then would teleprot the grunts into that location and would make them feel like they are in fact a transport vehicle. I also don’t know if we’ll see its main beam attack before xen in the final release, it definately looked really good in ST uncut, and showed what a threat they really were.
Yeah I was a little disappointed they didn’t do more with the manta rays, like showing them shooting down jets or being shot down themselves. It would have made the surface tension scene more realistic.
I could’ve sworn I had never seen that part before, 
As long as there is the option to keep the jumping the same or easier, I think everyone will benefit.
I suggest having a working candy/chip machine instead of those static ones.
That was probably cut due to the engine running out of edicts.
That’s awesome too bad about the entity limit. :’(
While I was going to save this thought for an actual review of the first release of Black Mesa I’ve been putting off writing, I gotta say that the one thing that really blew me away about Black Mesa this time around was the redirection of the story. Something about the atmosphere and the ambiance made it seem more like a science-fiction / horror adventure, with the NPCs in Blast Pit being a prime example. I only mention these guys because they actually have a plan “in motion” when Gordon shows up, their own party of scientists and guards that clearly had their duties in carrying out the plan (including that asshole Smithers.* Why he couldn’t just turn on the generator and hide, I’ll never know). I dunno, this kind of stuff just really made the “legacy” of Gordon Freeman all the more morbid, because really as Ross Scott puts it, most of Gordon’s exploits involve being the only man capable to finish what others died attempting to do.
*Smithers remains the only “friendly” NPC I have gunned down without hesitation. The pit of irradiated goo makes for a wonderful dumping spot for his body / body parts
And I know I was rooting for this when I joined the forum years ago, but I still think it’d be cool to have guards scavenging weapons off corpses, but I’ll concede they’re pretty proficient with the mapper-defined weapons
And on the topic, since I love the friendly NPCs so much this time around, the various “Points of No Return” can bug me a little. I know that there was an effort made to give the friendlies a “reason” to not come with you past certain points, but the guard at the beginning of OAR is sticking behind to “help more stragglers,” after Gordon’s basically cleaned out the entire area behind him. Except for the wounded guard in the power station, the last friendly I remember seeing was the only guard that survived the mission to immolate the Tentacle in Blast Pit, and he told me that he wouldn’t climb down into silo even though that was the whole point of them trying to kill the blasted thing. I’m not trying to complain too much, because I know it’d be impossible to script the guard following you all the way through Power Up, but as for the guard in OAR, he couldn’t maybe just hop on the tram? Or would he rather keep playing computer games while the power’s on?
Anyway, ranting aside, still looking forward to all the polishings and fixes with the final release.
It would also be awesome to try to contact Garry Newman to try to incorporate Black Mesa things in Garry’s Mod like many source games…
Soda machines generate a lot of new entities (cans) so why food machines couldn’t do the same If there is too much sodas and foods, the oldest one would just disappear like gibbed body parts.
But having both would do a load. And do they really want to program the entities to detect when there’s too many, or a lot? Proooobably not.
Once you get past a certain limit, the engine will refuse to spawn any more gibs/minor entities anyway
Gordon won’t die out of snack deprivation… let’s be happy for the vending machines that give us drinkable soda, because that feature alredy puts Half-Life 2 on the knee.
- Here. Let me buy you a drink.
- … (still waiting)
Two things:
First, I know it’s probably been stated, but what exactly is the reason we can’t bunnyhop? There’s a lot of walking around and being able to jump to go faster, even if not by much, is just damn calming for I don’t know why.
Second, and it might just be me on this one, but I don’t think that hitting someone in the face with a pizza should be able to make them fucking explode. Now I’m no physicist, I barely got a C in physics this year, but I don’t think that’s the way it works in reality. Now, if someone were to try this and prove to me that it happens in real life (I’m told I should not have any more pizza, even if I’m not planning on eating it), then I would be happy to retract this complaint. But until that day, I’m standing by it.
[COLOR=‘Black’]Please, God, please may someone send me a video of a pizza making someone’s head explode
I once killed a man with a slice of pizza
took a few months, but I killed him
and why Bunnyhop when you can sprint?
They should make bunny hop a feature like in Xonotic at least in deathmatch so newbies doesn’t considered it “cheating”. You can bunny hop in Black Mesa by the way, but it’s not very fast and fun in it.
Maybe have it as a toggle for single player, and multiplayer servers can enable/disable it for everyone, and it could be like a filter for server browsing?
I suggest keeping the crystal like structure inside the controllers’ and Nihilanth’s heads. i heard somewhere that the structure contributes somehow to the story of the original Half-Life.
IIRC, the crystal was a sort of psycho-mechanical link between either the Nihilinth and the Controllers, or the Controllers and the Vortigaunts (similar to the shock collars on the latter)
I think it’s an interesting sci-fi extension into the “powers” of both the Xen Crystals and augmenting the psychic potentials of sufficiently advanced / augmented aliens.
One detail that isn’t made too clear in the Half-Life storyline, at least I think, is the fact that the many alien races encountered in the series only exist in bondage to other species’, rather than living together as a colony or army with a shared genetic lineage.
Thinking about it, the Vortigaunts and the Antlions share a homeworld, but the Antlions were never encountered on Xen. Similarly, it’s hinted that the Nihilinth wanted to occupy Earth in the same manner it occupied Xen, as a “last-of-his-kind” refugee running from an even greater conquest.
So, with this all gathered, it seems like the Vortigaunts don’t share an original home planet / dimension / whatever with the Controllers and the Nihilinth, and none of them are native to Xen like the headcrabs, houndeyes, snarks and bullsquids seem to be. Don’t quite have a solid head-canon theory on the Grunts, but my best bet is that they’re just test-tube shock troops.
With all this fan theorizing, I really hope that our look into the Borderworld will be juicy and dripping with little details to satisfy our curiosities. Now that they’re making it under Greenlight, and have already talked to Marc Laidlaw about certain plot elements, this could be a great time to implement ideas that never made it into the original game.
It seems pretty clear to me that the Nihilanth, Controllers, Grunts, and Vorts are all related in some way. They all have that third arm in the middle of their torsos.
Your idea of grunts as “test-tube shock troops” is supported in the Xen chapters, where Gordon goes through a factory creating large “barrels” that release Alien Grunts when broken.
I believe accepted canon is that Xen itself was not home to any of the “Xenizens” Gordon encountered there. Rather, the Nihilanth and its slaves (including, I think, the alien “animals” like headcrabs, bullsquids, and houndeyes) fled there in the wake of Combine invasion of their home realm. (See here, under “Race X”)
I have a suggestion for the Black Mesa.
How about that you can take enemies apart?
I know that an explosion will make enemies go to pieces, but this idea is very different
and more realistic.
So, the main idea is:
When an enemy is shot by a laser, or a crowbar many times in a shoulder for example, the arm falls off.From here, the enemy would have an animation to fall on the floor trying to hold his wound for 2-3, then grab his weapon and try to kill you( HECU Soldier grabs a 9mm and fires 5 rounds).After that, he is low with health, lies down, and rests until he is killed or dies after 10 seconds.
All in order(example):
1.One limb falls off
2.Holds wound for 3 seconds
3.Tries to kill you in desperation, fires five 9mm rounds at you
4.He is killed or left to bleed to death after 10 seconds