This sounds like a fantastic idea, I’d definitely watch that.
I seem to get hl2.exe needs to close when the lav25 gets punched to bits in c2a5g, any fix?
Nevermind, restarting fixed it
Hey, I just wanted to ask:
I remember Text saying that he did plan to re-release Surface Tension and On a Rail Uncut on Steam Workshop, or whatever the Devs have planned, if such a platform does indeed come to exist.
My question is: In light of all of the model and texture improvements going on, is it possible/likely that a new up-to-date version of the Uncut chapters will be released, utilizing these new assets and features?
I understand that life is busy, and if it’s not something you want to put on your agenda, or something you want to comment on, I understand and respect that. I’m just asking as these additions, although officially unofficial, truly do contain some of my favorite moments in Black Mesa.
Thanks!
I have to say - Surface Tension: Uncut was amazing. What Black Mesa launched with, while not necessarily “bad,” was sorely lacking in the kind of insane over-the-top military action and firefights which made Surface Tension so cool in the original game. Half-Life was - and in may ways still is - a game of sweeping themes. It starts out with survival horror, it goes through environment puzzles, then becomes a disaster movie, then an alien shooter before diving into a full-on war, before diving back into environment puzzles and aliens and eventually a really out-there finale.
Surface Tension: Uncut tanked my framerate in a few places, but it was SO worth it. The chapter felt more alive, it felt like the soldiers really were caught in an out-and-out war with the aliens. It felt like there was something at stake, a real reason for why I’m in a mad dash to the Lambda Reactor Complex. Thinking back to Half-Life 2, this is what the Seven Hour War must have felt like, because even the tough HECU Marines are getting killed and pushed back.
Great level design, nice scripted sequences, locations actually look like real things. MASSIVE improvement over the original “cut” chapter.
Oh wow I never noticed this question before. So apologies for the “slightly” delayed response.
No, they will not. All I will do is a straight port, no work beyond that. There’s no point me working to update and polish up those two mods, because they are fundamentally flawed and poorly designed in places. The bare minimum I would accept beyond that is a straight, ground-up remake. They’ll have to be taken for what they are. I started redoing Surface Tension: Uncut from scratch but shelved it because I simply don’t have the time or motivation to do it. Far too much actual Black Mesa stuff to do!
Thank you for the kind words. Interesting thoughts on the sweeping themes, that wasn’t something I had considered in my reasoning. Cool stuff.
Wait, what? Outside of a few technical issues (I had one crash-to-desktop and two issues of severe framerate loss, but that’s about it), they don’t seem fundamentally flawed to me. OK, On a Rail: Uncut ran me in cricles for close to two hours, but that was mostly my fault. I’m a bit too used to linear lead-you-by-the-nose games that I’m rusty on environmental puzzles. Took me 45 minutes to realise the very obvious power substation was the place where you turn on the power. Purely my own inattention.
To be honest, though, your Uncut chapters are what I always thought Black Mesa should be to begin with - bigger, prettier, more exciting while still retaining the rough layout of the original game. I was able to recognise iconic locations (Oh! I know! A tank will burst through that door! Oh, I need to find the guard in that building to let me through to the Garganuta!) but it never felt like I was just playing Half-Life HD. I recently heard that the “finished” version of Black Mesa will be sold on Steam. I can tell you for a fact that playing your Uncut chapters is the primary reason I’m OK with this.
Maybe they’re just fresh in my mind, that’s possible, but I wasn’t half as impressed with Black Mesa when I played it the first time. For all the talk of adding extra challenge with the faster, deadlier aliens and soldiers… The base prodcut just felt like had stripped away all the actually challenging locations. Yeah, the firefights were harder, but the levels were stripped down, made linear and simpler. Keep going forward until something happens. Now, you can say that that’s just Half-Life, but that’s why we had Blast Pit, On a Rail, Residue Processing and Surface Tension - to balance the linear levels with sprawling exploration ones.
I guess the only issue I might point to with On a Rail is it’s sometimes hard to tell interactive buttons apart from non-interactive but similar-looking consoles. Beyond that, though, I can’t put my finger on any one thing and go “This sucks! Fix it!” Sure, there are issues here and there but nothing I can’t gloss over and really nothing that’s not just inherent in Black Mesa (like the fact most weapons are terrible at long range). So really, if you can make sure the two Uncut map packs work with whatever the final Black Mesa release ends up being, then that should be good enough in my book.
I worry about talk of starting from scratch, though. Would be a shame to pave over what you already have.
Alright, I can expand on this a bit. This is a bit tough for me as I’m basically tearing apart my own work, lol. But hopefully this will bring the point home for people.
My gameplay design was solid enough. In terms of gameplay, I think that’s about as good as it gets in terms of what I was going for. Some people didn’t like what I was going for, and that’s fine. But I think I made the most of that style of gameplay, where you watch battles. I did my best to make it as challenging, interesting, and fun, as it could be, and I don’t think that there was much room for improvement in that department.
But, aesthetic and architectural design in Uncut was mediocre to average. I did not come close to touching the functional and architectural design style which Black Mesa nailed so thoroughly. It is an area in which I have grown and improved vastly since joining the team, particularly given the rather brutish style of Gasworks. The only way I can make much of the Uncut stuff work, from a logical and design standpoint, is a total ground up remake. This shouldn’t worry you at all, as I’m not doing it. I have accepted that this content is “of its time”. I worked my ass off on it, and got amazing feedback from the community. I did all I could, based on my abilities at the time. And it’s still pretty good. But not Black Mesa standard. I could do tonnes better now.
Take the parking garage, for example. The very first moment of Surface Tension Uncut. Really go through its architecture and layout and ask yourself: “Does this make sense? If this were a structure in the real world, would it work? Would it be designed like this?” The answer is a resounding no, to most locales, at least in ST:U. The support structures are lazily designed, unevenly spaced, and go straight into the ceiling. The ceilings are not properly supported anywhere else, except by random metal crossbeams. The parking spaces are not evenly spaced or sized, and are space inefficient. Space wise, the whole thing is really tight. The lights are just randomly sprinkled around everywhere, and are quite unevenly spaced, even after I did a pass to improve this. There’s little detail beyond the destruction and cars, the ceiling in particular having much unused potential for cool stuff. The wall textures, on the interior, are from Blast Pit, never seen ANYWHERE ELSE in the game. The exterior wall textures are actually an interior wall texture from We’ve Got Hostiles, also never seen ANYWHERE ELSE in the game. Why would a parking garage be colour coded from the outside? The style is not consistent with anything else in Surface Tension. I detailed it in “stripes”, randomly changing materials every now and then to make it look better. The walls are 136 units high, instead of sitting on a power of 2 grid (128). The textures don’t quite fit. The road layout does not make sense and is also space inefficient. I could go on, and on, and on. That’s only a small part of my list (I came up with all of these myself, haha).
These things are not necessarily readily apparent to anyone not looking for them, which is probably most players. But they are certainly obvious if you are aiming to design a cohesive, consistent product, which is why my work DOES NOT fit 100% into Black Mesa. There is simply no way to “adapt” what is there into a proper framework either, as the mistakes are basically fundamental. Hence why it would require a complete rework.
Framerate issues are to be expected, honestly. There’s so much AI going on in the big battles, it’s very hard to keep it running nicely. Personally, I wouldn’t want to reduce AI to save frames. However, a lot of the maps’ poor optimisation comes from lack of foresight and planning. The layouts I finished with were not conducive to good optimisation, due to huge sightlines, open areas and lack of proper vis optimisation. It is a fundamental design flaw, which, again, can only be rectified by designing the base layout with optimisation in mind in the first place. The problem was, I arrived at my base layout over a VERY LONG and iterative period, many releases in. Again, too challenging to rework without a from-scratch redo.
That’s not to downplay the quality of what I did. I think, personally, they’re still good fun, nice to look at, and well designed enough. They’re just not up to the standard that I aim for now, not by a long way. That’s just too bad - that’s what happens to anyone in any artistic field that improves over time! I simply don’t have the time, desire, or motivation to go back over it again, particularly given I have commitments to the actual game now. Think what would happen if every artist did that with their work! Gotta move forwards.
Just for fun, and as it will probably (99%) never see the light of day, here are some Hammer shots of my complete redo of C2A5G’s parking garage. Though it’s a super basic blockout, you can immediately see what flaws I rectified over the previous version. Again though, I’m not working on this anymore, and probably never will!
Ah, I see what you mean now. I thought you were more referring to the quality of the work from a “cool game” perspective whereas you’re more looking at it from a “does this make sense as an actual structure” perspective. Admittedly, that sailed completely over my head and it IS an important aspect of any game. I like to bring up Oni, the last game Bungie made before they sold their souls to Halo. Though sometimes confusing, that game’s architecture is immaculate, depicting both the insides and outsides of buildings simultaneously… And in a way that makes the inside fit the outside! Awesome!
I can concede that some of the maps may be a bit awkward if you “go lick some walls” as TotalBiscuit would put it, and having objective critique of your own work says A LOT of good about an artist. I can respect that, from a technical standpoint.
Thing is, though - I still love both of the Uncut chapters, even knowing what you’ve just explained. Surface Tension may be a bit rough around the edges and a bit make-shift, but what it delivers is bigger than that, I think. It delivers the kind of over-the-top, high-octane action that Black Mesa Surface Tension simply doesn’t have. I played this back in the day and I recall seeing a few firefights from the outside looking in, shrugged to myself and went on with Forget About Freeman, never feeling the kind of… Well “tension” that the chapter was supposed to convey.
Certain things need the length, breadth and scale of your Surface Tension: Uncut. Certain things simply need run us ragged through fight after harrowing fight, set-piece after giant set-piece, again and again to drive it home just how serious the situation is.
More than that, the open spaces you used - though probably graphically inefficient - really add to the scale of the encounter. The old Half-Life Surface Tension was cool, but it always felt small. A room, a building, maybe a courtyard if we’re feeling generous. We’re led to assume that there’s a big battle going on out there, past the walls that we can’t see over, but that’s the thing - we CAN’T see it. Jets flying, guns shooting, grenades exploding - all that’s fine, but it’s warfare by proxy. You put me in an open yard with line of sight for miles around, with wrecked machines around and aliens dropping everywhere and that’s a visceral experience.
Back when I first played Black Mesa way back when, I came out of that pipe where the awful painted backdrop would be in the original game to see a large valley with a road leading to a building off in the distance. I wondered just how large Black Mesa really is, but I never got a sense of this. All I ever saw was corridors, walled-off areas, pits and more corridors. Surface Tension ran me through so many large open areas, showed me so much stuff that I couldn’t reach but still knew full well it was there. I’d look off to the side and there’s a hangar full of jets. I’d look off the other side and there’s a road leading to more buildings off to in the distance. It felt like I was making my way through a very large, chaotic war zone, following the only safe route available to me. Everything felt “big” like it should be.
Half-Life was a good game, but its modified Quake engine couldn’t really do anything “big.” Consequently, whenever the game had to put me outside, it was always in walled-off areas. If it’s not walls, it’s cliffs blocking my view, and if it’s not that then I’m being bombed so I don’t have time to look around. What Surface Tension: Uncut brings - and yes, even with your valid criticisms - is the size that Half-Life would have had if Valve had the technology to do that.
You need look no farther than Half-Life 2 to see that for a fact. Yes, the game is sometimes claustrophobic. Then it gives you a car and sets you on the open road, with sight lines for miles around. It runs you through the narrow confines of a prison, then lets you loose in the plazas and open spaces of a city. For all the technical faults I seem to have missed with Surface Tension: Uncut, the large open spaces REALLY fit well in-between Questionable Ethics’ tight narrow corridors and Forget About Freeman’s sewers right thereafter.
Sorry to prattle on like this, but I am genuinely impressed with your work. Fingers crossed that you end up with the time and inclination to mess with those two chapters in the future.
I really like both Uncut versions, they gave so much extra gameplay and fun.
When I buy Black Mesa, I surely gonna add this two Uncut parts again to the game, a must have for me!
At the risk of sounding biassed, that’s true for me as well. I have the dubious habit of factoring in the presence of mods I like in how much I’m willing to pay for a game. Take Payday 2 for a random example. I would be physically unable to play that game in the first place, let alone paying a dime for it, if it weren’t for some kind person’s “patch” to remove Chromatic Abomination… Sorry, “Aberration.” That effect makes hurts both my stomach and my brain, and I’m SO thankful Black Mesa allows me to disable it. The point, though, is that with that mod, I can enjoy the game enough to buy every bit of DLC it offered. Without it, I wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole.
Black Mesa, then. At no point would I ever say the mod-turned-retail is bad. It isn’t. A LOT of blood, sweat and tears went into making Black Mesa and the result is so remarkable I thought it should be sold for money from the very start. Question is, though, how much I’d be willing to pay for it. Even with Xen, I wouldn’t want to spend much past $10-$15. It’s a good game, but it’s not $20 good, not on my budget. With On a Rail: Uncut and Surface Tension: Uncut, though? Even though the map packs are and will remain free, knowing I can play with them makes me not bat an eye at going up to $20-$25 for Black Mesa without really thinking about it too hard. With that Hazard Course remake, if it ever comes to life? We could be talking AAA game prices easy.
People like to say that mods “add value” to a game. In my case, this is literally the case. If a game has mods I really enjoy and feel add to the game, I’ll be willing to pay far more for it than I would be for just the base product. The game has more value, ergo I’m willing to pay a larger cost and still feel like my purchase was worth it. Call it penny pinching if you will, but I have the misfortune of living in a country with an awful, corrupt economy, yet still end up paying premium “Western World” prices for my games, so I need to budget my purchases. Black Mesa is definitely something I’d be willing to buy if it came at the right price. What “the right price” is, though, does come down to how much extra quality content I can get out of mods to the base game.
I guess my point is this: Mod-makers, you are making a direct contribution towards the eventual financial success of Black Mesa. Thank you for your work and effort 
Fair enough. That brings another question to my mind: I don’t know if the maps were touched in any way other than (optical) improvements or streamlining in terms of the whole “BM-Overhaul” for the steam release. If so, does that mean that reaplcing the new “old” maps with ST or OAR uncut works, meaning you can play Steam BM modded with uncut seamlessly ?
That’s another question, cause if u use the uncut versions and they update the original version due a patch, then I guess you are in some kind of sh*t
I understand. It’s sort of a shame the Uncut maps won’t be given a proper update as so many people (including myself) consider them part of the core experience, but we all have to live in the present, and you’re right that you can’t go back and re-do everything all the time.
[/UNCUT MAPS ARE THE REASON I GET UP IN THE MORNING RANT]
And who knows, maybe someone else might pick up to torch sometime and rebuild them to be up to spec. I know I would if I had the time/skill/permission. You finished Surface Tension… maybe someone else will finish Surface Tension Uncut 2.0. 
All of that being said, here’s to the future, Text! I excitedly await your new work on Gasworks and whatever else you’ve been working on.
uh…im sad now after reading all this… 
Since many of the models/props/textures of the mod are being replaced or updated for the Steam release, wouldn’t your Uncut mods just naturally incorporate the new ones as a result of simply porting to the new version?
Some of them maybe, but there aren’t a HUGE amount. A lot of what Brian is replacing is the high tech stuff, which you don’t see in ST:U.
Aw! Poor Uncut mods. Well, here’s to hoping you ever get the time and inclination to go back to the Uncut stuff. Frankly, even with the criticisms you laid out earlier, I still couldn’t notice map issues on my second run-through. Granted, I completely forgot to look, but I’d have thought being aware would have let me spot them. Did not see any issues with pillar spacing in the parking garage, either, though I’m not well-versed in architecture.
Oh, and the “performance issues” I mentioned Surface Tension: Uncut giving me seemed to be mostly issues with multi-threading. I followed a few guides on the forums and managed to kill nearly all the wonky performance, by which I mean the “stuttering walk.” Without that, I believe I only ever saw one place in Surface Tension: Uncut that tanked my framerate, which is the broken building with the jump pad and gasworks, just before the Gargantua.
Like I said before - so long as both ST:U and OR:U work with the Steam version, I’ll be happy.
Pleeease do it! : 3
Agreed, these mods are a must use thing for me as well. I know the reasons for cutting On a Rail and Surface Tension were more likely than not valid, but I still find it as a negative that a remake of a game that’s supposed to improve it in every area actually shortens it, not only that, but the removed areas contain some “iconic” scenes from the original, unforgivable!
For the criticism, who cares that the layout doesn’t completely make sense? Gameplay is more important in my opinion and the gameplay of both uncut chapters is both fun and immersive, not to mention together they add over an hour of gameplay to the overall game, so using them is a no-brainer.