[COLOR=‘Red’]Update: Released![/SIZE]
Latest Version: 1.0 Final Release Candidate (Hotfixed). Download here.[/SIZE]
Please report any game-breaking/very serious issues to me ASAP.
This version is the final release candidate. What this means is that I will release one more version, in about a week’s time. That version will be the final, final version - after which I will make no more changes to the maps anymore, aside from fixing them when the devs update Black Mesa.
What this means is, pile on the feedback. If you don’t speak now, your opinion may not be taken into consideration and the final product may suffer, or be less to your liking.
However, be realistic. As you should now be aware, the next version will be the final version. This means that any large feedback which is time consuming and contains many radical changes or whatever, WILL NOT be implemented. There is not time and it’s too late in the development cycle. Please, keep that to yourself. That feedback will be useless to me. I appreciate all the feedback I get but I ask you to be realistic.
Changelog
21/12/12
==1.0 FINAL RELEASE CANDIDATE== <–Surface Tension Uncut - “Maxwell stops saying Black Mesa is shitty” Edition
Assorted/General
-Clipping issues, clipping issues, and more clipping issues.
-A few large(ish) changes to some areas.
C2A5G
-Changed the opening setup so that the keypad to open the door to the parking lot is initially disabled. It must be turned on using a generator in the side room.
-Added 2 large occluders to the parking lot covering each floor. Not a massive difference, but my frames got boosted by an average of 5FPS.
-Extended the playerclip by one of the windows to try and prevent the player from setting off the street sequence by jumping into it. Was finally able to reproduce this bug myself.
-Added a humvee to the second floor, just for visual interest.
-Increased the lightmap scale on high contrast faces on the top floor. Shadows should be clearer in definition now.
-Moved the “hole” on the top floor to a segment further away, and joined up the spiral ramp with the road. The layout of the top floor now makes logical sense.
-Added a destroyed jeep on the road on the top floor. Adds a bit of visual interest, and provides some cover against the wave of aliens.
-Made all the vent lights consistent and added one to the vent where you get shot down. Also moved the cubemap to reduce the highlighting of the reflection in the vent. Should be a bit less trippy now.
-Moved a few of the consoles in the garage around.
-Added (undeployed) ramps to the other 2 car lifts which you can drop. This is actually consistent with C2A5D.
-Removed the shockwave/explosion effect from the ambush, as it had unavoidable clipping issues.
-Tweaked the Harrier takeoff some more. Should be better now, but still far from perfect.
-Moved around one or two of the TOW Courtyard Marines.
-Changed the fence door in the TOW courtyard for a non-rusted one, to be less visually jarring.
-Changed the look of the hangar roof slightly to make structural sense.
-Added a minefield by the hole in the big red wall to make the gap at least make a tiny bit more sense. This large gap was an intentional design decision to allow a view of the expansive skybox, at the cost of some realism.
-Switched the keypad at the end for a switch like the ones you see throughout C2A5H, for consistency. Added a very faint green light to the one you can use, added one on the other side (in the security room) which is lit red.
C2A5H
-Dirtied up the starting corridor a bit so it looks a bit older.
-Moved Barney’s corpse so you can see more of him.
-Adjusted an HECU corpse so it wasn’t leaning against thin air. It now leans against the table.
-Modified the area where the hole gets blown in the wall. It should look fairly dirty and grimy now, and there are more crates and barrels in the area. Turned out nicely.
-Added small beams running across the floor to hide some cubemap seams.
-Modified the hole being blown in the wall sequence. It used to be a sound effect of an RPG travelling through the air, followed by an explosion. It is now a Marine actually spawning on the street, and firing an RPG at the wall. Unfortunately the player has no way of seeing this (it’s a shame, I wanted them to), but it’s a nice detail for those of you looking using noclip.
-Undid some overzealous lightmap optimization on the street. The shadows running along the road should now be clearly defined again, and not jagged.
-Changed the stairs by one of the huts so it doesn’t clip onto sand.
-Changed the stairs by the security hut to eliminate Z-Fighting with the sand.
-Fixed a shadowing bug by a side door near the jump pad.
-Fixed a very serious (unreported) bug with the jump pad. If you used it by approaching from the far right, it would launch you halfway up into the air and the game would crash. This seems to be a flaw in the jumppad’s programming. If you find a position where you can’t launch up to the pad’s target without it being able to calculate a clean arc, it crashes the game with the console error “Emit pitch sound out of bounds.” I’ve recitified this by adding some rocks to the right hand side of the pad, along with a playerclip to prevent them from going to where the game will crash. It looks a bit uglier, unfortunately, but it’s absolutely necessary.
-HOPEFULLY fixed a bug where the shards of the mirror in the bathroom were displaying black.
-Reversed all the shelves on the map so they’re no longer facing the wrong way.
-Increased the size of the fire in the furnace.
-Changed the lighting in the furnace room. The red light from the furnace should be much more prominent, and the other lights a fair bit darker.
-Again grappled with the awful quantization/rounding errors that Hammer gives with the furnace, hopefully eliminating any serious seams.
-Added a playerclip ramp in the janitor’s closet so the players don’t get stuck on the shelf while trying to fight the aliens in the gasworks (unreported problem).
-Overhauled the empty half of the gasworks slightly. Should be far less sparse and far more visually interesting now. The gasworks as a whole should feel a LOT more complete and fleshed out now.
-All the clipping visible in the “inner workings” of the gasworks has been hidden with connector blocks now, similar to the ones I’ve used elsewhere. The visible clipping is still there, but it’s covered up slightly now and looks far less bad.
-Used a little bit of a naughty trick to make the turns on the large pipe connecting from the furnace into nice round ones, instead of the blocky abrupt ones I used before. The texture is a bit low res but the whole thing looks MUCH nicer now.
-Moved the aliens which spawn in when you are doing the jumping puzzle around a bit, but it hasn’t done much to make them less stupid.
-Removed the down arrow from the sign on the security office. There was a GOOD REASON why I wasn’t doing this before, but I found a decent enough workaround for it.
-Fixed a gap in the railings.
-Fixed a pretty bad bug in the security office where the laser beams were being cut off prematurely by a poorly made hitbox for the desks. Made my own custom hitbox to account for this.
-Moved the very last button on the map into the center so it looks less ugly.
-Fixed a support bracket for the upper walkway clipping into the wall.
C2A5I
-Made the effect on the vent lights consistent with the one used in C2A5G. Also added another vent light to make the lighting less bare.
-Resolved some clipping issues with the sandbags on the drop down, and moved a crate.
-Patched up the Garg’s pathing a little bit more. His patrol around the main circular pool should be less messed up now.
-Preliminary fix to prevent plants from growing through certain objects. Note these plants are procedurally placed by VBSP based on the texture, not hand placed by me. The best way to prevent them from growing in unwanted places is to blend a texture which doesn’t have plants growing on it - in this case rock. It it looks bad, I can use a bit of a hackish workaround to fix it and keep the plants away.
