Haven’t really found any of the alternate routs, though the sniper fight makes me happy, it seems way more coordinated then any other sniper battle in the game.
Also I have to ask why was the TOW removed from the court yard, the .50 cal seems to make less sense with all the TOW ammo around. I get it could be for balance, but if that is so could you put a packed TOW somewhere near by?
I actually would like the TOW back because of a balance issue I encountered: playing that part on Hard makes it damn near impossible to kill all the Agrunts that rush you after blowing the gate. Since their bees never miss, it’s impossible to take cover from them when using the .50, which means even with full health and a decent amount of suit power, you are almost certainly going to die if you try to use the .50 cal against them. The only ways I managed to get past that part were by pure dumb luck (on my first run-through), and by concocting a half-brained plan where I planted a crapton of tripmines/satchels in a radius around the door, lit the barrels on fire, and ran like hell to hide in a corner with my RPG out (on my second run-through).
With the TOW, I could imagine getting at least one shot off and killing at least a few of them before having to deal with the rest using whatever other armaments I have. I don’t think I managed to kill even a single one with the .50 cal before dying.
You know what would awesome? In the outdoor levels of On A Rail- chapter, there would be explosions and red flares in the night sky, casting super dramatic changing shadows on the ground 8)
TOW balanced? You are smoking crack…it was removed because of the 50 times we had to play that area and couldn’t hit any of the Agrunts. It isn’t an area affect weapon but a point affect weapon. Hitting one was difficult and it usually didn’t kill it, you still got killed fast trying to reload the TOW. Even if you play by dropping down and blowing up the door first you still can’t hit anything with 1 or 2 max followup shots. Getting hit by 3-4 Agrunts firing homing bees makes you last about 3 sec.
The TOW was absolutely atowtious. It was universally hated. That bit is best solved through use of Satchels, which have also been thoroughly buffed up in this update too!
Aww oh well. Too bad about the splash damage or lack thereof.
I attempted to use satchels too but it usually didn’t turn out well. I had much better success with the mines, but usually that only killed the first few which still fired off enough bees to severely weaken me when dealing with the final grunt or two (or however many were left).
Are the bees supposed to do insane amounts of damage? Something feels wrong about them, since whenever I face any significant group of Agrunts I invariably will die if I have low to no suit (even with full health). Unless I exclusively use the RPG.
EDIT: I play on Hard difficulty, so that may be part of it. I just tested it out, and it appears that the bees do 4 damage with suit on, but a whopping 21 damage (!!!) with no suit power. That explains why I had extreme difficulty getting past that part even with full health and less than 50% suit power! If you do the math, it takes fewer than 10 bees to kill you under the circumstances that I was in (100 health, about 50 suit). Now normally I’d be okay with that, for like, gunfire or something, but these are homing bees that are unavoidable-- you can’t take cover from them, which means the only way to avoid them outright is to kill the Agrunts before they fire at all.
I mean, I get that Hard difficulty is supposed to be hard. But there’s a difference between “Hard” and “Unsurvivable”. Anyway, I do really like the rest of the level on Hard, I think other than that part I had no real frustrations with difficulty and it always seemed pretty fair.
I managed to get past with full health/suit by going nuts with tripmines and satchel charges, but yeah, 21 damage (which I can confirm is how much damage the hornets do on hard) is way too high (IMO, 4 health/9 suit is pretty ridiculous for a homing projectile as well).
In order to make this post more useful than just a “yeah same”, are the snipers on c2a5h supposed to ignore the zombies/barnacles inside the building?
Yes it would be helping you (Gordon) if they shot the zombies and barnacles.
guessed that good to hear confermation that they are ignoring targets in hopes that the enemies kill each other.
As it is the hecu snipers showed in that scene that they are 10x smarter then combine snipers.
Mm, figured as much, that’s a really nice detail. Just making sure!
What entity give shadows and make CSM work ?
Holy crap, man, its’s like two posts into the thread.
We’ll write a guide on how to properly customise and tweak the CSM shortly for modders. I’m writing it right now, actually. We’re updating a fair bit of our modding documentation with the new stuff.
Ok, so I played Surface Tension now.
Imo you guys did a fucking amazing jobs, it´s such an awesome chapter ^^
I also appreciate the changes to the shotgun gibbing!
Here are 2 minor things that I noticed during my session:
-The gibbing often doesn´t carry any momentum.
When I shoot an alien grunt with a MP5 grenade, I expect his body parts to be blown away by the explosion.
Instead the gibs are just falling straight to the ground.
-Tank shells, aswell as the hornets of an agrunt get stuck inside mounted weaponry like the TOW or mounted MG.
It should be an easy fix, just make the mounted weapon non-solid to those projectiles.
There is one route in Surface Tension which is blocked off it seems.
After the hydro electrical central, u move forwars till u reach Houndeyes, then u move to the fight with the soldiers, there was an alternate path to the minefield (if I remember correctly), those is removed it seems.
Also some visual bugs at those courtyard, wheels of truck in the air, blue lines and such…
It still exists it’s just redesigned,they just expanded it and added the toxic waste instead of water and several HECU bodies.
Just played a tiny bit of the new surface tension, along with the new details in the mod since content update 2 (haven#t touched BM for a year or so), it was pretty refreshing but also unusual. Is it normal that compared to the mod version of ST Uncut I get massive drops in the battle areas (i mean i experienced them as well in the mod version, but not that hard) when xenians and hecu are fighting ? the jiggly cable on the Tau goes crazy, other stuff like plants etc. in the maps is fine. AI, Damage of weapons, everything is tweaked, took qute some time to get used to this. Its pretty hard no on hard now, opposed to rushing through BM on hard first time I played. No bugs found so far except for one time when the security guard gets ambushed. It didn’t load the choreogrpahy, but one reload and everything worked fine. The new ST UNCUT maps definitely add and are really on an even higher level than the ST UNCUT which was already great ( I didn’t play all of them yet though, mind you), but I don’t like some of the design choices. More realism yes, but I miss the dog fights with the mantas, the jet that takes off, the battles were more enjoyable and design wise I even liked the helipad and hangar more (even if they didn’t make any sense). I also think that while looking really nice and having a better layout, with the new helipad you are too much in the open on the little tower. Sure, the xenians and hecu are fighting each other, but if you choose to ignore them and they turn to you, it_s open season on you. Different approach, you go down into the hot zone, you have no line of sight to the alien slaves and ghe grunt on the left side and get zapped from there. So, not really the best design choice gameplay wise. Not as frustrating as that respawning VTOL area which you thankfully alleviated bc now it takes just 3 rockets to bring it down, but still more disillusioning than fun.
Noticed the same thing for the hornets getting stuck in some objects sometimes . Will write again and edit if I played through it in whole. Just a first quick impression. Shadows work like a charm and look fantastic. the lightning and skyboxes as well I might add.
I’ve never seen any casualties amongst the Manta Rays and AV Harriers which is strange because we saw a dogfights roughly about a half of the chapter,but it also applies to Half-Life 1,there were so many mantas and fighter jets in the sky and noone of them was ever shooted down in such a massive fights?I doubt about it.It would be really nice to see some updates in future regarding that plot hole and see some wrecked jets\mantas in the airport or crashed in the buildings.
Seldom are goodies impossible to reach. I thought this might have been one of those times. I had to go back an play it, thanks. Time spent playing STU, 4+ hours and 
counting.
Great work guys. Had a laugh-out-loud moment.
I killed a couple of HECU guys with an RPG whilst waiting for the alien craft to come and nuke the tank. After the tank had been blown to bits, a disembodied HECU leg floated past, looking like a rather bloody chicken drumstick 
Quick question - do the new graphics upgrades work with my card - ATI 7700? Didn’t notice any shadows / god rays and couldn’t see a place to turn them on.
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.