Hi TextFAMGUY1 – in regards to the discussion about Barney saying “You’d better stand down, buddy!”, you mentioned you were upset no one commented on it before. I just wanted to say that I thought the dialogue you put here was great and served as a perfect parallel to the original moment in HL1 when we find Barney behind the desk and he says “Stand back!..hello.” (lol, that’s it). I agree that the implication is that Barney is pumped on adrenaline and actually doesn’t recognize Freeman as friendly at first.
Anyhoo, I suppose for every one thing that is posted here in this thread as constructive criticism, there a thousand other things which are already assumed by everyone to be fantastic which go unmentioned.
Thanks again for your amazing contribution and hope you can get rest following the recent stress of last week. I sure hope the Black Mesa devs make you a member of the team and/or officially integrate your work, and if not for some reason, I nonetheless believe your maps will earn the reputation as being must-haves.
Im not sure if you noticed this yet from a previous post but the 3d skybox in C2A5G is different then the one in C2A5H. C2A5G is missing the gas refinery in the background, if you already knew this or addressed it…then never mind.
Why not just have an entity spawn the ammo if the player runs out? Unlimited rockets or some shit? It’d be easier to implement and likely wouldn’t take up so much room (I think).
Here’s a list of my outstanding issues based on feedback I’ve provided to you. Some of these might be included in the next version you’re preparing for release.
Illuminate red light on large door button panel at Garg intro area. I haven’t been able to play this part of C2A5I so I don’t know if this has been done (see picture).
Please remove the concrete curb in front of TOW (look… I’m Peter Pan… with no strings attached!). Would you seriously miss it?
In courtyard outside garage there are 2 large doors. Make the height of the button control panels the same, using the height of the one on the left near the stacked crates.
Beginning of C2A5G, add moisture decal on ground below water leaking from pipe at T-junction.
Reduce open-close speed of large door leading into carpark by a third or one half. You decide which works best.
In service garage, all lifts should be in lowered position as default to lessen probability of objects coming to rest below the lifts to avoid potential clipping issues. I discovered that if this clipping occurs and player comes in contact with clipped items they get stuck. Only escape is using no-clip. How many noobs know how to do this or use it as a fix?
In carpark, sparks from light fixture on level 1 pass through floor into level G below.
In carpark, stairwell window frames composed of different colored materials.
Side-by-side doors, mostly seen in tunnel in Garg encounter, have different colors (see picture). You were looking for a fix to this.
Ashes pass through floor of heli-pad to ground below.
For zombie in locked security office, when you open the blast door, he is banging on the window. After the next level loads, he is wandering around. Exchange these 2 scripts as a signal, after the level loads, that he is banging on the window because he’s aware of your presence. Also add a blood decal on window at zombie impact point.
In courtyard with access to vent using stacked crates, illuminate lights over doors 2 and 3 and turn light adjacent to vent off, as a slight misdirection.
Suggested some red lights in vents flicker.
Suggested inserting headcrab encounters into vents and/or pipes.
Door control keypads missing “#” “*” “0” buttons. Is this the same in BM?
Illumination in ceiling with no light source (see picture). Any luck finding a fix?
As usual Text, many thanks for your attention to these issues.
Below, you’ll find the start of further discoveries from v0.95b-hotfixed.
Additional issues found in v0.95b-hotfixed following a further playthrough.
PART 2 of 4
Map C2A5H
In bay outside security office containing zombie, place moisture decal on ground under pipe leaking water.
In office across from damaged red door, can’t see dead Barney behind the desk (see picture). This leisure room looks bare. Can something be placed on blank wall to right (posters, blood decal, vending machine(s))? Maybe move desk that’s in front of window over against the bare wall and move dead Barney to the right so he’s more visible.
Can material leaking from these pipes be made more visible? See picture.
Neither of these 2 bodies will gib (see picture).
Speaking of gibs, I gibbed a single vort which caused a quantity of 21 body pieces to spawn (see picture)! Taking out the waves of vorts that spawn at the beginning of C2A5G resulted in a wall-to-wall vort carpet. Now I love gibs just as much as the next guy/gal, but could this account for some of the game lag that occurs at certain parts of the game or maximum entity count issues?
Also noticed that when bodies gib, the pieces usually fly towards the player, even if the explosion occurs in front of the enemy. Seems odd.
The body and shadow of the zombie in the carpark stairwell clip through the door (see picture).
Additional issues found in v0.95b-hotfixed following a further playthrough.
PART 3 of 4
Gasworks
Pipe clips into floor metal grate (see picture).
I-beam clips into big blue pipe (see picture).
Pipes do not reach wall (see picture).
Pipes clipping at fire spouts (see picture).
Large pipe goes into a concrete beam (see picture). Can it be shortened and curved into the boiler below?
To be continued…
Additional issues found in v0.95b-hotfixed following a further playthrough.
PART 4 of 4
Pipes clipping in furnace room (see picture).
Sparks from arcing light in security hut storage room pass through wall into security hut.
In the event that Barney does not survive, the security hut control panel does not have a clearly labeled button to indicate an interaction is needed in order to open the large secured doors (see picture).
These same large doors open too quickly. They are large and heavy and should open more slowly. Try half the current speed?
This door control panel is broken and arcing, so the green indicator light should be off (see picture).
And just for fun, more examples of gibmania to enjoy (see pictures).
It worked for me too when I played it. He’s already tense and scared, and he just heard a room full of tripmines explode above his head. You wouldn’t really expect him to immediately respond with a neutral/friendly “what’s up doc” when you stroll in.
I myself in that situation would be more than willing to shoot the first thing that shows it’s head, at the least give an unwelcome greeting. It’s totally understandable.
I was trying to think what could be done to make sequence for barney being left behind a little better then just standing there with him saying “I’ll stay here and help anyone else who comes by” then “Goodluck Feeman” which works good. However what may work better would be this, when barney follows you up the stairs to the upper catwalk leading to the vent, have notice it being a dead end and have him say “whew, looks like ill take a load off” and go sit on some miscellaneous boxes in the corner. Then he can say “I’ll stay here and help anyone else who comes by”, followed by the "Good luck to ya freeman"when your in the vent. It would fit better with the area because he just said early how we have to “run like hell” which he did and now hes tired and wants to rest. It would be good way to again show off barneys humor and lazyness. Its a small touch i think works better.
And you can also input your responses to each person on the same post, instead of one post per person. Just look on your own post I merged right above.
This is the gold rule here: Double post only if your reply is too massive to fit one simple post. Even TEXTFAM with his massive posts didn’t reach that limit yet. :fffuuu:
Okay, I phrased that badly. What I meant to say rather than you saying the previous version was better “just for the sake of it,” I meant to say something along the lines of - you tend to say the previous version was better in the place of simply “this could be better,” when the previous version wasn’t better at all, or alternatively - not changed at all. That’s all. Wasn’t being nasty or anything.
I’m afraid I still disagree on the TOW thing. I do think it’s “ridiculously” unlikely. You’re the first and only person to ever report having this problem. I playtested it with my 57 year old Dad who never plays video games and the first thing he did was shoot the door. The ONLY circumstance I can think of where this may happen is if the player was deliberately trying to use them all up (like you were) or if the player was so dumb they’d have to be spoonfed absolutely everything. I doubt such a player would have got THAT far in Black Mesa anyway. But, I’ll probably end up putting safeguards against it - it’s just a right royal pain in the ass and a waste of time given my limited time.
@JessieStorm
Cheers for the feedback. I won’t go point for point on my reply but I agree with most of the problems and will endeavor to fix ALL of them. Mapping went pretty decently today, more and more bugs are getting squashed and it’s rapidly approaching release. If this really is your last post - thank you very much. There have been a few regular contributors in this thread - Wangman, Dadster, Jessie, Ronster, Conti, who have been consistently posting copious amounts detailed and intelligent feedback (sorry if I missed anyone out, that was just off the top of my head - don’t take it personally!). Thanks guys, I appreciate it, for all the disagreements we’ve had too! Thanks a lot.
Thanks for the praise. Those are some kind words. I feel with the dialogue…I’ve done the best with what I’ve been given. I have to use existing lines, remember. This leads me on to…
That would be nice, I agree. But…I have to use what lines are already in the game. I can’t come up with new ones. What we have at the moment is pretty much all there is. I can’t do much more. I can do audio editing (and I did, to get the lines in the security office), but I can’t create entirely new lines.
Haha I totally, 100% agree. Even though a humble security guard no doubt has had training in weapons and combat scenarios, I’d imagine even a well trained guard would probably be crapping himself at this point, particularly if he had been in a fight beforehand where his friends had been killed. Personally I’d probably have emptied my magazine into Gordon before even recognizing who he was!
This has been fixed. Cheers for pointing it out though, it reminded me it was a problem so I fixed it today.
Cheers for the copious amounts of feedback, mostly on clipping. I will fix all I can, even the smallest instances. But, bear in mind - sometimes clipping is unavoidable. For example, the pipes clipping through the beams on C2A5H. Fixing this would require way too much structural adjustments (or cutting tiny holes in every single beam), and is just too much work for something that doesn’t bother most people. Black Mesa’s stock maps have PLENTY of clipping too. I was looking through the first map of We’ve Got Hostiles to see how they designed the vending machines, and I found about 4 different very obvious instances of clipping, which they’d obviously intended and couldn’t really avoid. You’ve pointed out a fair few which are like that (PARTICULARLY with the very long pipe models). So while I’ve noted all of them, please don’t be upset if I don’t fix all of them, I can’t! Thanks though, there are some bad ones there which I will fix. Also, I’ve fixed the contorted corpses. Rest in Peace, oh hilarious bug.
Concrete slabs for the columns in the garage-think this will mess up your newly corrected alignments of the columns and parking lines; not sure if these slabs count as entities but this area is already the worst performing area (even worse than the lambda reactor) so further additions are kind of a no-no.
Headcrabs in vents-it’s either headcrabs or snarks…can’t do both so I say snarks. I mean come on…there’s headcrabs in almost EVERY vent in all of BMS. A little variety here is nice!
-On a side note, I played BMS OAR yesterday…it looks like you could easily add sections between the first and second maps and the second and third maps and have it flow seamlessly. I think to get the HL flavor here would require two loading screens of content. This isn’t really for pacing. It’s just that one loading screen might be a little too dense w/content compared to the rest of the BMS maps. This would also be helpful for storytelling as there’s only one marine vs vort battle currently, which also happens to be choreographed poorly by the .50 cal.
Edit:
-Alternatively, you could do the Hazard Course lol. I realize there’s already people working on this and my comment might offend them but realistically, you’d actually get it done and probably better and faster too. This project has already failed three times before.
I took a look in the editor and concrete slabs for the columns are not a feasible idea, even if they may sound decent enough on paper.
HOWEVER, I am absolutely outraged that you would say that the garage performs worse than the Lambda Reactor! I am livid! I shall write a letter of complaint to my local MP. That is slanderous, I am going to sue your ass. The Lambda Reactor is the only part of all of BM which managed to bring my fairly fearsome rig down to a grinding 10FPS. The rest of BM, including my garage, runs fairly smoothly - with the garage giving me a consistent 60FPS. Maybe it’s your rig or something. I agree, the garage is not particularly well performing (it CANT be, given the amount of stuff that’s there within the PVS), but it’s no Lambda Reactor!
I won’t do headcrabs in vents. There’s nowhere it can work. The two vents which exist already have Snarks in them, and they’re an element I thought were underused in BM, so I like having them. I could put one or two in the furnace pipe which you climb into after extinguishing the furnace, but…seems kinda overkill.
As for OaR, I actually played it through myself just today. I’m still not sure it actually NEEDS an expansion. It’s clear that the BM Dev team intentionally “streamlined” this section with their own clear vision rather than it just being cut like ST was. I’m still not sure if adding to it would make it much better. Making it seamless wouldn’t be a problem anyway, the transitions all take place during those train lifts.
I don’t particularly care about the Hazard Course. It’s not something I’m interested in doing, I’m afraid.
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.
