If you’re looking for a way to get the player a bit higher to see the harrier flyby, consider using displacements on the road- make an upturned section of road with an explosion crater to pop the player up just enough to see more of the overhead action. Or consider adding a fortification or roadblock of some kind that both slows the player in a safe spot to observe the sequence and also leads the player’s viewpoint upwards to maximize their chances of seeing it.
Perhaps block the access road with a destroyed missile carrier vehicle, which would force the player to find a way up to an elevated walkway leading around the corner. This puts the player higher up and lets them both easily see the sequence and the subsequent battle below. Arranging some boxes beneath would also give players the option of jumping down into the fray without suffering unnecessary fall damage.
Having done maps myself, this would easily take another few hours to get working, particularly if you have to re-time triggers, but it’s an idea.
Hate you ? Hate you for all you’ve done for all Half Life and Black mesa fans ? Nobody can hate you for anything. Without you this project would never become reality and surface tension would still be shitty and cut.
Nah it’s fair enough that you feel that way mate, I do too. I feel exactly the same. The only shitty thing about BM’s Surface Tension, at least I feel, was the Garg Chase. And I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason why it’s the way it is. There were some BASIC BASIC mistakes there which I can’t fathom, but with time and manpower restraints its understandable. It certainly didn’t make all of ST shitty whatsoever.
BM’s Surface Tension was great actually, but I feel that it didn’t quite live up to the original in standard. They did a fantastic job with the resources they had - having the mapper leave half way through was no doubt disastrous.
The way I felt BM’s ST was lacking THE MOST compared to the original, partly by virtue of it missing C2A5F, and partly because of the way the game’s balanced overall, was the fighting between HECU and Aliens, as a transition into the HECU pulling out. So BM’s ST certainly didn’t have the story impact the original had. Hence my remakes with a focus on said fighting. But I by no means think BM’s ST was “shitty” without my stuff.
Still HECU Marine, thank you for your kind words. But I would like to point out that I don’t want people to feel indebted to me, or that the community “owes” me anything, or even that I’ve done something selfless for them. I’ve enjoyed developing this map and I will certainly enjoy other people enjoying my finished product.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean that he thought it was " shitty ". He’s just taking what they made already and is making it even better by filling in a gap that was left.
Heh don’t get mad at me ;p In fact I really love surface tension in black mesa. I said it to show my respect to TEXTFAMGUY1 for making this awesome, fantastic piece of work. But yeah I feel kinda dissapointed by surface tension because they cut my favourite part, the real war between alien and human race. I think that’s why it’s called surface tension, but in Black mesa in fact you don’t see that tension. But still it’s really well designed chapter and developers must have really work to finish it.
OH MY GOD!! i’ve just watched the surface tension video! you are a genious!! its almost perfect… holy god!! you managed within a few weeks to do what the devs of bm didnt in 8 years. Did the developers of black mesa already contact you??
Ah ah ah, keep in mind, for the most part what he did built upon the pre-existent level detail designs, and all of their textures. He did two maps in about a month and a half, without having to do any of the prerequisite work (textures, modeling, coding, that stuff).
Lets assume a map per month, then an extra two months for playtesting, fixing up the menu maps, and all that general stuff that needs to be done before releasing it. That’s just shy of 5 years. Then take into account the fact that they were juggling a team that varied up to a few dozen people (towards the beginning). Then take into account that, they had to make all their textures, create all their models and animations. Then take into account that they practically scrapped the whole thing and started from near-scratch in 2009. That last one alone pretty much justifies everything, heh.
Not to say Famguy1’s stuff isn’t amazing (It totally is). I’ve just seen him take some awkward offense when people compare him to the developers.
I don’t really like people saying things along the lines of “you did in a few weeks what it took the devs did in a few years”. Not that I don’t appreciate the compliment - but I think it’s a little unfair to the developers.
I know the work I’ve done is good in quality, and pretty damn amazing in the development time it’s taken. I know that. This doesn’t make me better than the devs in any way, however. Make no mistake, my map design skills are extraordinarily inferior. I’ve also had far less work to do than they have. I’ve also had the basis for design laid down for me already, as well as all the texturing, modelling, etc already done.
That’s not to say it hasn’t been difficult to make these maps. It definitely has, and I really do feel I’ve done an excellent job of it considering that I’ve never developed a map for anything other than CS before. But I do think it’s unfair to draw comparisons between me and the devs, though I appreciate the sentiment.
More on topic, however, I’m finishing up C2A5I as we speak. It’s been a trick one for sure, I haven’t enjoyed doing C2A5I anything like as much as C2A5G/C2A5H, but that’s primarily because the Garg is really frustrating to work with. Once C2A5I is finished up in a few hours, I will link it to C2A5H and…it’s complete. The alpha will be posted to the testers.
Don’t worry, no serious dev-bashing was intended… i just wanted to express how impressed i am by textfamguys work. i m really glad, he’s doing this, and it really corresponds the rest of the games standard as far as i’ve seen, or more than this… really perfect work so far.
btw.: i loved the scene with the osprey and the mantas. Plus you have to take into account that he’s just a single person… so its extremely impressive to me.
Another question: If the devs say to u: ok, we gonna use ur maps for the official release, but we gonna clean them up a little bit… U gonna say no or yes to the question asked?
Don’t jump the gun.
Now it’s testing time:
Hopefully, we’ll be able to underline to TextFamguy all the major issues of his maps.
Will be quite interesting to see if all those scripted sequences will lower the framerate on older computers.
There’s no if about it - they will. Some of my battles feature 8 - 15 NPCs at once, weaker computers will suffer. Probably quite hard. I’m okay with that. Black Mesa’s a pretty demanding game anyway, and there were areas where I had plenty of frame drop in the game anyway (i5 3.3 GHZ, 8GB RAM, HD 6900). So my areas having frame drop isn’t the end of the world considering how poorly some other areas of the game run.
I will try my best to optimize these areas but in the end there isn’t a great deal I can do. If your computer is very weak - then I’m afraid my maps just probably aren’t for you.
The Garg section is nearly done. His entrance is decent enough, but not mindblowing, his behavior in the courtyard is acceptable enough (though the pipes still confuse the crap out of him which I’m trying to fix - everything else works pretty well).
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.
