Text, I posted a little more feedback on your maps.
To Text and your-name-here, and others throughout the BMS community,
I understand, and please accept my deepest apologies!
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@ Ulrik
Just so you know, the first image in this post is not related to the impaled soldier.
“The impale soldier is buggy when you shoot at it : https://i.imgur.com/0jkhmAe.jpg, https://i.imgur.com/hs5ZpHD.jpg, https://i.imgur.com/JUSQICE.jpg”
Also, as a suggestion, for Text/others to better understand the issue that you’re reporting, turn on your flashlight. This would “shed light” on the issue that you’re reporting about.
How was the soldier impaled anyway? Any logical reasons for that?
Hi all. Breaking lurker status to walk on eggshells here (especially since it seems to be all but sorted now), but I haven’t seen anyone bring this up:
Out of all the feedback submitted, a lot of it (from a few users) seems to highlight visual glitches from the Source engine: Rogue shadow issues, or lighting on models popping in suddenly. But I’ve only seen Dadster be called out for bringing up these details. Other users haven’t been directly told what Is or Isn’t useful feedback. Could this be causing confusion?
I can’t remember if it’s engine bug or a Black Mesa bug specifically, but it’s one or the other, nothing to do with the maps as far as I’m aware. I’ve had it happen to me twice ever I think, and as Chickenprotector says, just restarting the game fixes it. It COULD be more likely to happen on more packed map files, but I don’t know.
Looking at the chair’s collision model in the Hammer editor, it extends out past the model by a fair bit, and the origin isn’t in the center of the chair either. I’m no expert on the physics engine or modelling but I believe that would cause some weirdness with the physics interactions, and isn’t something I can fix. I know one of the screenshots from feedback on here featured the chair standing on its arm after being hit by a Houndeye, which is an example of what I’m talking about (and also can’t fix!)
Trust me, it would require a tonne of rebalancing. The outcome of the battle isn’t solely determined by numbers. Both positioning and timing dramatically influence the outcome of the battle, and making them behave defensive changes both a lot. If it were solely numbers I would have got that stuff well balanced with good behavior on the very first version, which we all know I certainly did not! It’s supposed to be a dramatic fight scene where the two sides clash hard right before your eyes. I just don’t think having the HECU turtle behind their tank would make for very exciting action. Nah. Let them be manly. Dead, but manly. It works on B1 because the scene was set up and initially balanced around them being defensive. That is not the case here. I’d like for them to be smarter, but it’s a lot of work and I’m happy with how it is now.
Well I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree! I much prefer the “huge wall on both sides” look myself, even though I know it doesn’t make sense. I just like that wall’s design.
This. Please. Everyone.
I SERIOUSLY wish to put this behind me now. I don’t know if you’ve read the rest of this thread and OaR Uncut, but suffice to say that I’ve never really take issue with the content or delivery of feedback from anyone else in the community - and bear in mind this feedback process has been going on since last September. Most people get it. It isn’t terribly difficult to work out what is and isn’t useful to me, nor is it too tricky to know what I can and can’t fix, especially if they’ve been working with me for so long. Dadster has been asked to change his style of feedback maybe 5 - 6 times by me now, in addition to the BM Devs asking him on multiple occasions, both privately and publicly. He finally seems to get it now, and that’s great, now we can all move on and be happy! Let’s leave this topic behind us now, it’s dealt with. This thread is Surface Tension Uncut. Any further discussion of this topic can be moved to the Feedback Uncut thread!
ST Uncut v2.0 feedback:
1 )I think it is better to remake this collapsed ceiling with displacements. It is looking too blocky and reminds times of hl1 for me 
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2 )Those towers have different glass color on bm_c2a5g and bm_c2a5h
3 )Place this metal beam here to make feeling of symmetry.
4 )Bad texture choice on the parking building. It is fits inside, but outside looks terrible. This texture would looks much better.
5 )Sometimes sun disappears ,but i think it is engine bug.
6 )HL2 low definition model near the models with much better textures.
7 )Black Mesa original maps have not abrupt texture transitions like here. Can you make please transitions like here?
8 )I think this texture must be darker.
9 )Can this be redone with displacements?
10)Add ram here
11)Can you add displacement with rubble texture here?
12)Strange Hummer position
13)Too many windows on the new office building
14)On the bm_c2a5h I had messed up physics. All the physics objects had not collision: one, two, rockets were spinning round and sticking.
By the way everyone, except a release for the RC fairly soon, within the next few hours. I’m nearly done. Working on 1 major change (Manta pathing in H) and I’m pretty much finished.
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll address these directly, as they’re all fairly easy to communicate about.
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I actually tried to do this back when I started v2, but it doesn’t look good either. The damaged ceiling is so vast that if I were to make it really detailed, the car park, which already runs quite poorly for many testers, would just run worse. It doesn’t look appalling as it is now, just acceptable.
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Nice catch. Fixed. The horrible green glass which everyone hated from the earliest versions of ST Uncut has to live on somehow! It can do so now, in the form of the air control towers.
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Yep. Looks better.
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This is more of a matter of personal taste, and I disagree myself. I like the way it looks outside, it makes the building a bit more distinct from the other buildings in ST. I think yet another cinderblock square building would look really, really boring.
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Never seen that myself, probably is an engine bug. Not sure there’s much I can do about it.
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Eh. I still think it looks better with it than without. Nice bit of variety to the models. Can’t do much about it being low res.
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Yes, I’ve already fixed that. It was easier than I thought it would be.
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It’s a problem with the lightmap. If I make the lightmap for that bit more detailed, that lighting difference goes away. But the lightmap being more detailed for that bit uses up a lot of space and performance, for nearly no gain. So I’ve left it like that.
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No, you can’t have displacements with no collision. Besides, the texture I used for that is horrendously inappropriate, because BM has no proper Xen moss texture like the stuff you see in the vent in C2A5G. That’s why I had to keep their really seriously clipping model.
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I’m not sure what you mean by that, could you explain?
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No, although I would like to. That’d be great. The problem is you can see that building from the top floor of the car park, before it is destroyed. Displacements are static and cannot be tied to entities, so you’d be able to see the pile of rubble sitting there before the building is destroyed, which could look weird.
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Seems fine to me. Cars have handbrakes for a reason!
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Seems fine to me. Helps keep the place lit up. Besides, the windows are there mostly so the player knows that the balcony area outside on H is just outside this office block - the windows line up perfectly. That’s why they are there, as a frame of reference.
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Engine bug. Restarting the game fixes is. Happens during normal Black Mesa too!
Please see our bugtracker. All 324 bugs were reported by Dadster. Virtually all of these are clipping problems or silly ass issues we can’t fix. There’s not understanding ‘Don’t post clipping issues’ and there’s being a jackass. I have to sort through these now as I fix bugs for our next release. They’re not ‘resolved’ by any means. They were marked as such to help remove them from the massive list of legitimate bugs we have. This is why Dadster was called out. The bug reports others have posted are 1-2 clipping issues, not 50-60. And they’re not per post either. The noise-to-useful-feedback ratio of everyone else’s posts are very high.
Heh. I see about 5 - 10 bugs from C2A5I on there, which have nothing to do with the work that you guys did, and concern my own additions. I apologize for that bollocks cluttering up your own tracker, I didn’t think that anyone would be silly enough to post issues specific to MY MAPS on YOUR OFFICIAL BUG TRACKER. That’s gonna be a pain in the ass to sort through. There also seems to be some stuff specific to OaR Uncut on there. Dadster what were you doing, and what were you thinking? Why would you report ST Uncut issues on their bug tracker? I apologize profusely to the dev who ends up having to sort through that stuff. I certainly wouldn’t be happy if it were me.
EDIT: I’ll comment on all the ones I know are my own maps and not yours, so that it’s easier to go through if and when you ever get around to looking through those issues.
I am talking about something like the metal beams or door frame
He’s been banned by a moderator so there’s no point to continuing discussion. You also don’t need to apologize. This isn’t your fault. Most of my time is spent categorizing the bugs because a large number of those had ‘programming’ listed as the category. That was until I told Dadster one of his issues was due to VRAD. Then magically every issue he reported was a VRAD issue.
Note: The above buglist doesn’t contain any of the 80-90+ bugs he reported while the tracker allowed anonymous reports. He’s the reason why we forced usernames on the tracker. We thought we could ban specific users but unfortunately, BitBucket doesn’t allow it…
I think we are blessed with a person like Text, who makes unofficial maps for this mod, without him, I guess nobody would expand THIS part of the game.
Absolutely right.
I always thought the brushwork girders on the top floor car park should have been prop model girders… Perhaps something to think about?
I like the new redesign for the TOW courtyard… I will have to re-install BM over the summer as I don’t have it installed at the mo but I will defo put this straight in for my next play through.
but I still wonder why he placed the little building on the TOW Yard!
If it’s meant for those parking lot, then it has to be closer to the fence…
Hello again all, breaking the lurker status yet again.
I’d like to say that Text is doing amazing work on this uncut project which I thought was final for good and all of a sudden I see a V2 of the project…
I will be testing and reporting feedback on the new ST Uncut V2 when I have the time, even though the amount of feedback on the new maps was well… crashy to say the least.
Man, Text’s uncut projects plus a bunch of other mods (particle improvement pack, weapons animation revamp, enabled vort dispel attack etc.) makes BM a wholly awesome and epic experience the still feels fresh until now.
On a side (possibly unrelated) note:
Text, how does it feel that you are working again on your ST uncut project after the experience you might have gained for doing OAR uncut?
The Release Candidate is coming in 1 - 1:30 hours. I’ve just started up the final compile for G. This Release Candidate is mostly just a tester for crashes and major bugs at this point. I just want to make sure before the final release of ST Uncut v2 that the crashing has been resolved, and that no major bugs persist.
The advantages/disadvantages of props vs models are debatable. Brushes can be much more variable on a mapping level. Brushes tend to be better for when you want a certain detail that’s repeated loads, but with variation, such as these destroyed girders on the top floor. It would be a lot of work to create 20 - 30 unique girder models, and loading that many models into memory isn’t worth it. The alternative, model wise would be to use 5 - 6 girder models, which would then be repetitive. Though the current solution isn’t detailed or particularly fantastic looking, I agree, it’s performance friendly in an already poorly performing area, and every girder is “unique”.
It’s a little security hut, I’m not sure what’s so perplexing about it. The TOW Courtyard has 3 large secure blast doors, 1 of which leads to a Helipad, as well as the access for a few underground tunnels in a few areas. It makes sense there’d be some kind of security provision in the area. It does the job.
The crashing is still something I can’t explain, but something I hope I’ve fixed. From my experience it’s pretty tricky to do something at a mapping level which can cause crashes. As I’ve said several times (and is the honest truth) I also get hardly any crashes myself whatsoever, which makes it even more confusing. Most of the testers who are reporting crashes have better specs than me too, which adds to the confusion.
As for the experience of revisiting ST Uncut, it’s been…interesting to say the least. I may have said this before, but it’s astonished me just how much I’ve been able to improve something which I gave my all in the past. When I finished v1.11 I was certain that ST Uncut contained the best maps I could possibly ever create, in terms of my own ability. The amount I’ve improved the maps with v2 just goes to show that there’s always so much more you can learn, so many greater heights to reach. It’s beautiful really.
It has been a frustrating and annoying experience as well, though. As any mapper will tell you, revisiting old work is a right pain in the arse, particularly as ST Uncut was in many ways, my “first true” piece of work. Many of the areas had already gone through several revisions previously (Car Park, TOW Courtyard, Helipad, etc etc), so within the editor those areas were a little bit of a mess, a hodgepodge of failed ideas mixed in with parts of more successful ideas. For instance, when redesigning the Helipad, the system I’d used to make the HECU run up to the Osprey before it gets blown up was so complicated and highly dependent on the level geometry (path_corners) that I ended up just scrapping it and rewriting it entirely, so I could remake the Helipad layout without screwing myself over royally. Very often I found myself being constrained and screwed over by poor design/map craft I’d made in the past. For instance, fixing the aircraft being to low by raising the Skybox took me nearly half a day because I ended up introducing several other bugs elsewhere routed in the aircrafts’ path_tracks, the most serious of which being that the Manta’s laser simply disappeared from existence in game, despite being unaltered in the editor. Things like that made this experience significantly more time consuming than I’d have liked.
However, my actual mapping practice, in terms of design decisions, attention to realistic detail and design, gameplay, and scripting, as well as under-the-hood things in the editor which you don’t see in-game (such as more efficient I/O, etc) are also a lot better, and I’ve been able to transfer those new skills into old work. And that’s pretty cool. Overall, I’m really happy I’ve done this, even though it’s taken nearly 2 weeks more than I’d initially planned. It’s slowed progress right down on OaR Uncut, but when I start proper work on it tomorrow, I’m going to carry on some of the lessons I’ve learned from ST Uncut v2 over to that too.
Working on B2 has been horrendous, which is pretty much why I gave up on it and went to work on ST Uncut v2 in the first place, as it was something I knew I wanted to get round to doing eventually anyway. Tomorrow, once I start work, I may very well scrap the outdoor area and concept for B2’s layout. I’ve never been terribly happy with it and still am not. I may instead be much more faithful to HL1’s layout, in that regard; my vision for B2 may have been overambitious. I’ll get an opinion from the community first by showcasing the layout, but I’ll do that tomorrow. HOWEVER, the beautiful vista will exist either way - but the nature of the outdoor area may end up changing dramatically. I’ve come to this conclusion from working on ST Uncut, and now knowing a bit better about when to cut my losses and move onto a new idea.
Sorry if this answer was way longer and rambling than what you’d hoped for when you asked me! I can’t really do anything right now except talk on these forums, as it’s really late here and the maps are compiling. Hopefully it’s been interesting enough.
Awesome work, Text
I’m looking forward to testing tonight. Can we still expect the video posted today as well? I only ask because I know how long it can take to upload and finish rendering on YouTube. The commentary insight from the creator is always interesting to listen to.
It is a shame about OAR uncut being left at a literal dead end for the time being, but I’m sure something will come of it once you get some fresh eyes on it. I know I’m not the only one that’s really looking forward to seeing it’s completion and can help toss ideas around.
I’m happy for the possible disappearance of the large outdoors area in that chapter, while at the same time I’m actually very happy that you’ll be able to cram that vista you’ve frequently talked about. It was the main thing I was looking forward to in that area.
And, as jessie asked, will the video be out with the release? I love your commentaries almost as much as the Uncut project itself —also, I don’t currently have BM installed, unfortunately.