I am not good at find obscure console commands in the ocean of the internet.
Could you expand the options’ Black Mesa tab with things like
- enable headcrab laching?
- enable shotgun gibbing?
Actually, I don’t want a new main menu UI for the retail BM:
keep it close to HL2’s UI (menu layout & sounds), please!
you can change the text font & color
you can change the window color
you can also change the title’s font & color
I really like the HL2’s UI. It’s both simple & cool (also, the sound when touching the options & selecting them). Please, think about it :-\
Who said anything about changing the main menu?
So I have been focusing on interactivity in Black Mesa and throwing around some ideas that have perhaps not been seen before in the source engine.
This is my last example that springs to mind.
I am not sure it is possible but it is for retinal scanners.
upon use on a retinal scanner the players cam would go to the scanner and an overlay would be activated for the scan of the players iris.
I thought it could be an interesting effect and kind of got the inspiration from the city scanner in HL2. it’s a cam animation with overlay.
Like this image above with without eyes .a green wipe and a short flicker perhaps
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Well, I’m almost sure the BM devs have planned making a new main menu UI (for the retail BM).
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I’ve suggested a new main menu UI in my previous post on this topic. But I’ve changed my mind. The HL2’s UI is too cool and yet simple.
You’re almost sure or you’re making wild speculation?
Possible, but HL games don’t like taking away your control. That’s actually kinda the opposite of interactivity.
You are totally right, but in this situation you have to conform to the mechanism to have your iris scanned so It’s not a game mechanics breaker in fact it would be more realistic and it’s perhaps the only exception I can think of.
It could also work as a hud animation sprite and env_fade perhaps cheaper this way.
A better way to phrase it would be a point of view interaction rather than a freely moving interaction with the world.
Absolutely no political messages in that what so ever
It’s just my guess, dude. My opinion/my thoughts… I THINK they are planning changing the main menu UI. (Although I don’t want a new UI)
So, wild speculation then. Right on. Carry on.
For the retinal scanners, I don’t think you have to take control away from the player, but if the player is looking into the scanner as it activates, there could be a momentarily flash of green (or other color) light that fills the screen, or perhaps a small triangle representing the laser come out and when it wipes over where the player is located, there could be that flash. It would represent the laser shooting into the pupils.
You can’t take a shower unless you are inside the shower where the water is. That’s kind of my point. I only thought it would be a quick 2.5 - 3 seconds anyway of cam zooming on the object. But I know it is something that is considered bad to take away control even for a couple of seconds and I agree with that but I really can’t think of any other way to inject realism that you are using a retinal scanner otherwise.
Small request about the tau canon fully charged blast. Is there any way to make a fully charged blast that little bit more spectacular and different for extra satisfaction. I thought about the particles from combine energy balls from HL2 being added.
So it would feel a bit more like you were disintergrating matter. perhaps gibs with electric too. It was just something that I thought the fully charged tau canon never gets old but giving a bit more oompf to the fully charged blast. And I am not talking about dark energy effects only those particles that are pictured.
Something else and this is a texture that I really loved from portal.
That glass was a real cool effect I would like to see something of this sort in some of the more cleaner hi tech areas of Black Mesa facility.
A non-existing feature that no one will even think about is better than an existing one that only hurts, things IMO.
If I can be an even bigger smartass for a moment, the covers on some office lights have a similar effect.
I am not going to fight over it but when you are in unforseen consequences with Kleiner and Eli. Eli animates and put’s his face in the retinal scanner to be scanned. Perhaps he should be running around the room instead.
That is where the idea came from because I felt the player should have to do the same as Eli. So Black Mesa and City scanners from HL2 meshed together to form the idea. That is all.
Lights and a refractive glass pane are totally different and you would only know that because you are mapping probably. So you noticed something nobody else noticed. But that is what it is about I guess detail at the end of the day.
These glass blocks would even do say in toilets or cafeteria areas.
This glass effect could work in some of the more dilapidated areas of the game from portal.
The hole in the safety glass in surface tension is a good example where this would work as a good visual update to that broken glass where you climb in and push the switch to open the Blast Doors.
And while I am focusing on effects this is no biggie but I thought about adding in a shaft of light for the player flashlight with animated dust particles close to the point of the beams source. That would be going one step further with the flashlight than we have seen before but I am pretty sure that would be pretty expensive flashlight.
My 1 big quip with any suggestion intended to enhance “realism” is that it just almost always goes too far with one detail. The retinal scanner for example, I can understand the point, but I don’t see how that at all improves the game, even moreso when it takes control in a game notable for pretty much never taking the player’s control. And then why stop at retinal scanners? Why not have animations for pushing buttons, for climbing up ladders, or give Freeman feet so he can realistically walk, or remove the HUD, or who knows what and when it should logically end. The HL games and BM haven’t really put a focus on that type of “realism,” and I don’t get why they’re good suggestions, especially when they would largely alter play.
/rant
As far as the scanner goes, I think Danielsangeo had a nice idea that doesn’t impact anything.
I like that suggestion because it doesn’t strip control in a non-Half-Life-like fashion.
ok lets go down this trail of thought for a moment. I think I can see potential in this actually and I am glad you have beat down on me about it.
Player must walk to the retinal scanner, face the scanner, use the suit zoom function to activate rather than the use key.
Is that possible?
The entity may need a clause “on zoom” > activate > unlock / locked > open? I guess that is a coding thing.
I guess it would be a push and hold until scan is complete but the player is in full control and can abort the scan at any time.
scan would be a hud animation / overlay coupled with an env_fade upon the flick in the eye.
I also prefer something like this rather than loss of control. This is the best I can think of. and it also would give the suit zoom a really cool extra added feature in the process.
You would have to be in control of conforming to the object in this instance. and we could also get an instruction from the tutorial captions of what to do. I can’t recall the zoom function having a caption in the tutorial so there is another excuse.
A pair of decal feet under the scanner in a box might also be an extra detail that is needed with or without the mechanic.
Theres also one last effect I would like to see and that would be animated sun sprites. So they would have subtle moving rays upon looking at them and shimmer in the sky.
And that wraps up all my suggestions.
I realize that you guys likely won’t bring back the leeches at this point, but I still got an idea from reading this, so I will just throw it out there. It’s not like it’s the most outlandish suggestion in this thread 
The approach I’m imagining is similar to that in Half-Life 2, with the leeches being a sort of environmental hazard instead of individual NPCs. But instead of having them be unkillable, they are part of a physics puzzle similar to the ‘electrified water’ puzzle in Office Complex.
So you have a pool of water filled with leeches that the player has to get across, but the player dies too fast if they try and do it. To solve the puzzle, the player will have to drag an electrical wire into the water and turn it on, electrifying the leeches and clearing the water.
It would probably be too much work to implement now, but I still think it would be a feasible compromise, and that it fits with how leeches were handled in HL2.
I would really like to see broken electrical plugs that you can use as a weapon or something similar to what you have just suggested. Actually this sounds like an extension to the puzzle already present in on a rail. Cool idea anyway.
I just thought about this some more and I think it’s a great way to deal with the leech problem. Make them an obstacle unless you fry them with electric. They then become a puzzle obstacle rather than a direct annoyance.
The other option other than frying them is to flush the water away that they inhabit so you would then have a climbing or jumping obstacle to cross the area that you thought you could swim across. i.e. empty pool or tank that was previously infected with leeches before you flushed them away. but making traversing the space more difficult.
Or perhaps even the makeshift jumping platforms strewn with barnacles up above. This is where you cannot get rid of the leeches. and like someone else had already been through this area previously…
As for Broken plugs to differentiate them I was going to post this the other day but forgot.
Make broken ones red plugs not only does it mean that they are 3 phase cables which means that they contain 3 times the power of blue ones it would also serve to differentiate them. Standard ceeform color coding. That is if they like that idea of the broken plug weapon on a cable.
Ronster, your suggestions keep getting more and more obscure by the minute. Can you please slow it down a bit?
either fix the vorts’ eyes so they don’t look to the corner of the screen, or skin them in such a manner that they have no pupils. Use less bland animations for them, too. (I’m sure this has been suggested before)
Implement the zombie animations from all those years ago that ended up being replaced with the tired, over-recycled, too-easily-recognized, 12-years-old-as-of-today HL2 ones.
Female guards would be cool. I already know you guys are too busy(sexist) for this one.
Hit up IIopn and work something out that makes his reanimation pack official, either as an option or permanent.
If you can’t do THAT, the least you could do is re-origin the animations you have. The only game that can pull of that all-the-way-to-the-right look is counter strike. Center that shit a little bit and you’ll be good to go! The guns in hl1 are much cozier on the screen than in black mesa.
Implement real giblet models and a gibbing system that doesn’t require the target to be ragdolled first. It would also be nice if the limbless bodies weren’t static.
think the reason they don’t have female guards or soldiers is the amount of work it will take, unlike the scientists which only have a few body groups the guards and soldiers have a lot of them, each one of them would have to be remade for the female versions, not only that but they would have to get a more voice actors (sorry but if all the females in the game sounded the same it would be strange).
Though there are ways to work around that, like making 1 or 2 female guard models and replacing one or two of the guards in the game with them, still would require the team to do a lot of work, which would delay things further for a minor detail.
though it would make sense seeing that equal opportunity employer thing in the intro(that’s still there right?)