I’ll reply with regards to the debate here between Wangman and Chickenprotector first, then Wangman I’ll move on to some of the points you raised.
The ammo/health balance at the beginning of C2A5G is pretty balanced the way I play the game, but that’s because I don’t use heavy weapons on Alien Grunts. I often find myself entering C2A5G with half ammo for most main weapons, and 50ish health. I would have thought most players would. You have the entire destroyed building on C2A5F to trawl through in addition to the infinite Osprey battle, and a tank. I’m not sure it’s too realistic to expect the player to enter C2A5G on full health with nearly full weapons. This is why I’ve placed a large deal of healthpacks - contrary to what you’ve been saying, I think too many healthpacks is fine as long as my intention is to keep the player at high health, which it is. This is particularly true of the rooftop sniper bit, where you say I should remove 1 of the 2 healthkits. If a player is on low health when they do the Satchel Pipe scene, they will get repeatedly pummeled by the guy after he comes back to check you are dead. He could 1 - 2 hit them while they’re trying to climb out of the pipe awkwardly. It’s kinder to let them at least have 30 or so health for that bit, I think.
I will move the turret to a more obvious location. It will probably help the player if the balance gets borked and the player ends up facing a horde of bad guys.
On the subject of despawning, though it would be nice to give an impression of a co-ordinated attack throughout Black Mesa, it would be highly inconsistent with anything that happens during Black Mesa, so it’s a bit of a no-no I’m afraid.
On the Zombie/Camera, those are both carried across from C2A5G to C2A5H, contained within the trigger_transition. This is why they don’t appear if you load into C2A5H directly. I don’t view this as much of a problem. The Zombie stops banging on the glass and starts wandering around, which looks fine to me, and the camera looks just fine. If they DISAPPEAR during the transition for you, then something’s wrong.
As for the Regret Vort’s animation being interrupted, I actually spent quite a while designing that scene to allow it to happen, so how you can think that’s a bad thing I find a tad confusing. In the very first iteration of that scene, you could jump on his head and teabag, shoot him, run in front of him and he wouldn’t care. I had to use the I/O system to make him: 1) react to the player getting too close 2) react to the player shooting near him 3) react to the player entering his LOS.
As for the RPG round breaking the wall, I used the exact sound from Black Mesa’s RPG round, and I haven’t changed anything to do with it since 0.8. Near the 50cal is a dead Marine with an RPG, and there’s an RPG marine also dead on the rooftop. Either one of them could have been the source of the RPG.
I’ve noticed Wangman, that you have a tendency to notice things in my maps which I haven’t changed for many versions, and then blame it on a change from a previous version, which I find strange. For example, you say I should revert the sidewalk to its 0.81b appearance which looked better, because it didn’t have all the rubbish on it. The rubbish is part of the texture itself, and has been present on that road literally since I first blocked out that section. Look here. You’ve done this with a lot of things which I’ll point out later, but I’ll assume that it’s just because you didn’t notice those things before and you just associated it with a change, rather than the fact you didn’t notice it before. I will probably change it though - you’re right, it doesn’t look that good. You also did the same with the Apache in the gasworks, which I literally haven’t touched since 0.80b.
I’ve never seen the Abrams debris disappearing but I’m guessing it is either a loading/saving bug or a problem with your computer? Is it lower spec? Lower spec rigs might delete debris from save games or something to make the game load and run better, or something like that.
I’ll put some batteries in the janitor’s closet. You’re right, the first fight in the gasworks can be a little brutal.
Okay, onto some of the points that Wangman raised which Chickenprotector didn’t object to:
Most of your objections to design elements in my car parks are fair ones. I will work to address them. The parking bays are consistently spaced relative to one another from level to level. They are a little disjointed with one another on opposite sides which I can rectify, but your objection to the pillars and the spacing of the parking spaces is nitpicking at its finest, and something with 99% of players will not pick up, or care about. As for me using the stripes to denote parking spaces, this is consistent with Black Mesa. They do that too. Look at the last map of QE, or THEIR version of C2A5G, they both use those stripes. The texture for that stripe is actually made by the BM devs, and is named csrev_parkingx. As for colours of the roads being different, they all use the EXACT same texture. The differences in colour are a result of lighting. Aligning the lightmaps a bit better might help, and increasing the luxel count probably will to, but aside from that…eh. Lightmap optimization is still something I need to do, actually.
As for the player using up the TOW missiles, is that REALLY a problem? There’s NOTHING to fight with the TOW before you break the door, it’s very damn obvious you have to break the door. Even my 57 year old Dad, who I showed this map to the other day, figured it out, and he doesn’t even play video games. A player who runs out of TOW missiles would either be so unbelievably stupid that you’d wonder how they’ve got this far in life, or they’re deliberately trying to fail, neither of which are eventualities I feel I need to safeguard against!
On the LAV in the helipad, having a contingent of Agrunts show up specifically with the purpose of attacking the tank side-on is a very nice idea which I hadn’t previously considered. I will implement that and see how it turns out. It should work fine given I will now provide the player with the turret in an easier location, and also given the fact I will bias a bit of the initial fight more towards the HECU now.
As for the Abrams battle, I probably won’t rebalance it anymore, though your suggestions wouldn’t help. Having the Aliens in melee range BENEFITS the HECU due to the flinch effect of their MP5s. The Grunts try to melee repeatedly and have each attempt interrupted by the flinch from the MP5 shot, resulting in the HECU winning easily without the Aliens landing a blow. The distance is better for the Aliens as it forces them to use their weapons. Having the rooftop Agrunt spawn earlier seriously biased the fight in favour of the aliens, and having them on the opposite roof gives them a seriously limited view.
The explosive barrels on the roof, I don’t understand your serious objection to this. I think you’re assuming everyone is stupid. A player isn’t going to go “oh no, he shot an explosive barrel, I’d better not use any barrels for cover ever again”. They’re going to think “oh, I should shoot these before he does when I’m near them,” or “oh, I’ll only use the regular ones for cover”. It works fine. It adds variety to the Sniper encounter. However, I agree the barrels appearance isn’t great, and I’ll switch them for crates. That should help things a bit. As for a demonstration - do you REALLY need a demonstration to show you that the explosive crate will kill you if he shoots it? I don’t think anyone’s that dumb, and like I said, my 56 year old Dad could figure it out, and he doesn’t play video games.
On C2A5I I was sure I’d fixed the script from triggering before the player drops down. I’ll look into it…again.
That’s it. Now look, if you’ve been repeating some minor complaints since 0.8’s release (such as the background on C2A5G being too orange which is a completely bizzaro objection, seeing as I’ve used the same textures that have been used throughout ST), I’m probably not going to address them. Repeat them, by all means, but bear that in mind. It’s a lot of effort to reply to all of them, so just remember that. Still, thanks, as ever, for your copious amounts of detailed feedback. It all helps. Hopefully new version by Thursday.
