Suggestions for the final Steam BM version

Black Mesa Archive The Cafeteria
#901

Prop suggestion for Black Mesa cafeterias to get a bit more cosmopolitan.

Yes I am serious the world we live in is fueled by this stuff. perhaps if i hit it then hot steam will come out of it.

I meant to post this about 6 months ago but forgot, not that important but It would bring up the aesthetic of the cafeteria environment and I think it would make for a nice model perhaps with attributes like the steam coming out of it.

Interactive environments are the future of gaming in my mind… Think interaction as much as you can that is the best advice I can give you, Put a more interactive slant on the game where and when you can. Also make more of the extremely familiar to make the unreal more believable.

#902

Have Eli sound angrier with the line “it wasn’t meant to do this in the first place”

#903

Is there a chance the tentacle can make an appearence in the second map of ST like it did in the original? It felt like it would’ve been good to place it in that cave instead of all those barnacles. Also would the hellicopter make an appearence as well? I felt like a good way of implementing it there could be to maybe have another skirmish with one after the drain hatch door is open. It could stay flying still and only attack with its main gun and run away again after being injured, making it an easier figh than its first and second one, there could be some tau ammo lying next the control room to open the door and maybe even a .50 cal in the sandbags next to it aswell so the player can take it out without much difficulty.

#904

That’s a bit painful to read.

I do like the idea of another chopper to shoot at, but Surface Tension is difficult as it is. We’re gonna need way more health laying around.

#905

I don’t think they’ll add anymore helciopter fights to the game considering how hard the helicopter in surface tension is to fight. They wanted it to be like the helicopter fight in Half-Life 2 and adding another helicopter fight might conflict with that. Maybe they could have a scene were the helicopter and tentacle are fighting and it could end with the helicopter being knocked out of the sky by the tentacle.

#906

One of the things I wish they’d “fix” is the giant fan area where you have to go underneath the fan to turn it on, then book it up the ladder before it takes your head off.

It doesn’t make sense in real life and is one of the few remaining problems from the original Half-Life. My suggestion is to leave the puzzle as is but explain the reason WHY you have to do that. My suggestion is that there’s a service door underneath the fan that has been damaged in such a fashion that you can’t get through it.

That way, normally, the switch could be accessed and then the tech could return through the door without having to go up the ladder, but that way is now sealed for the player, forcing you to return up the ladder as the blades are starting to spin.

Just a suggestion.

#907

I’d assumed the “fix” for that was the recession that the ladder’s in, as if a maintenance worker or whatever would have to be right up against the ladder in order to not be hit, which Freeman doesn’t do. Bulky HEV suit, or some other contrived reason. A service door or something would be more apparent.

#908

Any chance of maybe offering an option for the main menu to be toggled between 2d and 3d, like cry of fear did? The 3d menu would be the current ones while the 2d could be done similarily to the Half life WON style, I’m pretty sure those who played the original would love it and you could probably put Black mesa’s main theme in it, since it sadly doesn’t appear anywhere else in the game.

#909

Just thought of this while playing through Lambda Core again. I don’t know what’s possible and what isn’t with the way you’ve got things set up, but anyways.

A few times throughout the game, there are sprinklers going off overhead (i.e. that hallway in LC). If possible, why not have them clean off the blood effects on the player’s arms/weapons?

EDIT: Another, much bigger thought. Playing through again on default settings, it occurred to me that part of the reason for BM feeling so much harder than HL could be because of it using Half-Life 2’s armour mechanics (I don’t remember the details now, but I recall reading a while ago that with 100/100 hp/suit charge, in HL1, you “had” 300 health, while in HL2 it was 200 - There’s a convar, “player_old_armor”, that swaps between the two, 0/HL2’s being the default). I went to check, using the whole topside sequence of bm_c1a3c as reference (WGH surface area). Starting from 100 health, 70 suit charge, the results I ended up with were… Quite different.

This is going from the top of the elevator to getting to the bottom of the ladder. No healthkits or batteries used, other than the health charger on the inside wall of the warehouse. Not much effort was made to avoid damage, just to kill all the grunts at the top before leaving.

With player_old_armor off, I ended up with 89 health and 0 suit charge.
With player_old_armor on, I ended up with 91 health and 31 suit charge.

I know the game’s already being assessed in terms of balance and difficulty, and that this would just make things even more complex, but as a thought: What about either having the armour settings change based on difficulty (i.e. HL1 settings for Easy/Normal, HL2 settings for Hard, something like that), or putting it in the options menu under “Gameplay”?

I’m fully aware that having it as an option would have a lot more impact than… pretty much everything else that’s there already. It was just something that came to mind that I felt was worth bringing up (It’s probably been brought up before, but AFAICT not in this thread).

#910

At first map of Power Up there is a wounded security guard who helps player to figure out what to do. I knew this would not work but for fun i tried to complete this chapter as smooth as i can and save a medkit to bring it to him. There is a port for non-HEV users on medkits but i still was not able to help a fellow human. Is this possible to make aid to that guard possible? I also think that this would be a great acheivement base.

#911

I am pretty sure that you can enable that in the gameplay options. It’s called enable always run unless you mean the thing in the original when you hold shift.

#912

Screen effects during Nihilanth speeches but more frequent when near the final battle. Also it must be different from G-man’s effects to make G-man still unique.

#913

Is this still the main thread for suggestions?

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#914

Sorry for double post (I just posted this in questions thread in this Cafeteria) :slight_smile:

I haven’t seen a SINGLE dead female scientist anywhere. So far, I only see one or two dead female scientists in Questionable Ethics (without the Uncut mods) because most dead scientists I’ve seen were ALL male.

I hope we’ll see what needs to be done in this remake. BEST REMAKE EVER! :smiley:

#915

Yes you can do that but it doesn’t work. If you hold down walk nothing happens.

Edit:
I have one question to you guys. What’s your aim about Black Mesa Multiplayer? Which persons are your primary target group to like this game?
Personally I am a very great fan of the original Half-Life Multiplayer but I more and more worry that I will never like what you seem to want to achieve with your remake.
There are so many things in the game that make it feel like a different game (ammolimits, map balance, weapons, playermovement etc. etc.).
Sure there are some things that have similar gameplay mechanics compared to the original game but in the end your game feels slower and more rigid than the original Half-Life and the players agility when playing Black Mesa Deathmatch is very very limited (weapon switching is super slow, dodging is so very different to HL1DM and HL2DM, ammolimits and ammopickups seem somewhat unbalanced). I’m not sure but slowly I think that you just want to target the casual gamers who are noobs and don’t want to take time to learn real Half-Life MP properly. Even if there won’t be bunnyhop in future. There are a lots of other aspects in the game that you could change to make the game more faithful to the original, more balanced, more skillful and more enjoyable for passionate fans.
So I ask now. Do you want this game to be slow and rigid as it is now just to eventually make it more fun for casual players or do you want to improve this game to give this game a greater learning curve and make this game more fun for those who actually care about the game and spend much time in the game because they want to learn it and have the claim to achieve something in the game?
If you as the devs want feedback I’m sure I can give constructive feedback. I am just a bit disappointed atm because I waited since the development of this Mod/Game started and now it seems like it’s going into the wrong direction. I worry a lot about it. So please answer me which kind of players are your target group and what your game should be like. Should it be more realistic? Should individual skill be more limited?
In current Black Mesa I feel like individual skill possible only in very limited ways (you need to aim great like an aimbot). Most other relevant aspects like switching weapons, outmoving your enemy, controlling areas (prefiring spawns, wallbanging and controling important weapons) are very hard or close to impossible because there seems to be spawn-protection. It’s way too hard to rush multiple slight armed guys. Yesterday I played Black Mesa MP and I was crazily stacked with weapons, LJ and armor… So I started a fight vs 2 very low armed guys (1 freshly spawed guy with pistol and one other with some other weak weapon). For me this fight was really hard, even with all the weapons I had and all my HLDM experience I gained the last ~12 years. I felt like the longjump is greatly nerfed because it has cooldown and you jump lower than in HL1 (sometimes it happens that you jump against low ascending slopes in the terrain that take away all your speed). Also you can’t switch your weapons quickly, which means that you can’t make use of all the weapons you’ve picked up before you entered the fight (in Black Mesa MP weapon management is less as much of a deal than it used to be in other Half-Life MP games). In the end of that fight I managed to kill one guy and escaped with few hp left, because I managed to gaussjump away. Still… I think you should consider changing the games balance (remove delays between charged gauss shots and make it possible to change weapons quicker). In Half-Life 1 the gauss was the most powerful and important weapon. In Black Mesa the gauss takes a long time to charge and after each charged shot there is a huge delay which stops you from charging up your next shot (This is not good for gaussjump-movement and also bad for fighting). In short… The gauss is crazily nerfed. The Egon on the other hand is still very very strong. I can’t understand this because the Egon (besides the RPG) is the most noobish weapon in the game (everybody was complaining about it in HL1 already).
I really hope you will take feedback serious and make something great of this game. Because atm I think the gameplay is designed in a very wrong way. It’s just not like Half-Life. I can give more detailed and better feedback later… But first please let me know if this game is supposed to favour casual players (and kick veterans in the face).

#916

Long jump module must boost you on where your crosshair is looking.

#917

I would like to add a text in the chapters of the single player mode. Like Multiplayer mode.

#918

Chargers destroyable so everytime you hit it with a crowbar while charging it explodes causing damage.

#919

I don’t know if this has been suggested before, and 47 pages is a lot to look through, so my apologies if this is a duplicate, but I have one simple suggestion.
Put the soundtrack up as DLC for Black Mesa on Steam (payed or free, whichever you think is best). That way it can be downloaded to the Steam BM folder, and immediately be set up for use with Steam’s music player, like all Valve games have since the introduction of the system.

#920

can the flashlight be buffed a bit? I found it a bit useless in some situations

I found that with changing the fov of the flashlight slightly (from 40 to 50) helped greatly by use of r_flashlightfov. I can turn up the intensity of it with r_flashlightfar and r_flashlightconstant, but if I turn on r_flashlightconstant, the cutoff range looks way too sharp, and messing with the farZ of the flashlight doesn’t really help, it just changes the distance of the cutoff, it does look great without constant on however

edit: I found another way to bring up the intensity. Turning up r_flashlightlinear to 150 (from 100), it looks much better paired with r_flashlightfov at 45 and r_flashlightfar at 1000, and I don’t have to use r_flashlightconstant. Everything looks way better now

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.