I thought that was the case but on my playthrough, it actually took me 2 shots to kill it. The first shot was partially off target (on about 1/2 the garg) which didn’t kill him. Even if it’s trigger based though, couldn’t you make the death trigger after 2 direct shots?
I have some strong ideas about the furnace puzzle and I cannot see the idea clearly because of it so i’ll wayt for the video but I am coming at it from the opposite direction that you need to overload the system to get the hatch to blow open causing more destruction…
I like the gasworks jumping but the furnace puzzle won’t sit right for me because I cannot see past my own ideas which is annoying as in I am almost a bit fed up with myself that I cannot see it another way.
the original had nothing but opening a hatch so it’s still an improvement in that it makes more sense whatever happens in this area.
I will just wait to see it and try to have an open mind
I did a plan view of my ideas as nobody could understand me so here
https://www.mediafire.com/view/?esoid3sx566djb3
raised level no ladder in the pipe
I can’t change it.
It works as follows:
The Garg from this scene has a damage_class filter set on his properties so he can only be damaged by the class “mortar”. He is dying from damage dealt by the mortar. It seems inconsistent however, so my guess is he only received damage from a direct hit.
In order to change how much it takes to kill the Garg, I need to either modify the Garg’s health or the mortar’s damage, and as they’re both hardcoded entities, that’s a serious no-go, I’m afraid.
Edit: And Ronster, seriously dude, what the hell are you on about? How difficult is it to visualize turning off 3 valves? Do you really need an open mind to understand how that would work? If you have your own strong ideas about how the furnace puzzle should be, great. If you can’t bear with my own ideas, that’s fine. That’s your prerogative. Build your own. Whatever. But I really don’t understand what you’re on about.
@ronster do not edit posts after some one has replied most will not look at edit.
any way on topic. the way you exit the pipe to enter the gas works doesn’t makes sense to me, its probably been changed by now, but here is my idea have that section off pipe instead of being missing blown up, and put a dead hecu grunt in the room with a mp5 and some secondary ammo near.
I have to get some sleep… no problem I just can’t get anyone to understand what I am on about did a drawing don’t care if you don’t like it just want people to understand the idea atleast
sorry the drawing is also labelled wrong should be ground / level 1 and level 2 where the jump would be from ok good luck
The lack of anything in the pipe exit was just placeholder. I wasn’t ever planning on leaving it like that. I was always planning on having that section destroyed. Leaving an MP5 and secondary ammo in that room is pointless as you immediately emerge to see 5 dead HECU grunts - with plenty of ammo for you.
@Ronster: While it’s great and all that you’re full of good ideas and whatever, and you’d like people to see them, I’m not sure it’s worth your trouble in all honesty. I’ve already said several times I have locked in the furnace room, I will not change it majorly now. Without trying to be rude, it seems you’ve wasted your time drawing a fairly difficult to understand picture which wouldn’t make me change my mind even if I did understand it. If you have your own ideas for the furnace room, map them out. Having worked on it for the past 3 hours or so I am very happy with how it’s turned out. Change will now be down to what all the testers think on Tuesday, which by the way I’m still on track for (I think!).
Not much major work left on C2A5H, actually. The furnace room which I was dreading I’ve pretty much finished now - leaving just the security office you find Barney in.
After this it’s finishing off C2A5I which shouldn’t even take half a day. Then it’s minor details on every map until release. I’ll probably do optimization first (areaportals/visleafing/object fading) as I haven’t touched it yet.
the mp5 and secondary would be to explain the hole not just for ammo, it would show that said grunt panicked while they where under attack and blew a hole in the pipe killing him and opening the players path.
alt idea for same thing, have the pipe blow as the player enters that strait away, this would be a good way to show that the battle has just ended other than having players guess that by the fact that the aliens are still there.
…or the pipe was damaged and accessible to the player because of collateral damage which happened previously, which makes much more sense considering the area is a war zone. I’m not a fan of human grunt stupidity and killing themselves with their own weapons. It also makes no sense based on the level layout because outside the pipe room is a bunch of dead grunts killed by aliens. It would look really stupid if that lone grunt cowered in fear, locked himself up in the room and then blew himself up just to open a path for the player.
Just wanted to say that your work looks great! Here’s hoping that it can be added to the main Black Mesa code base.
On an aside, do you think there were any other areas that were distinctly lacking in the mod? I was going to do a side-by-side playthrough for inspiration, but was just wondering if you had any thoughts on anything that struck you as significant?
Not off the top of my head no. As I’ve already mentioned the cuts from On A Rail didn’t hit me anything like as hard as from Surface Tension. And I can’t really remember anything else that I really remember missing - though I do miss my framerate during the final scene of Lambda Core! Overall in BM there was so much that was done better than the original (particularly Questionable Ethics!) that it really overshadows the lacking parts anyway. But for me the Garg chase was the most lacking thing. It was definitely rushed.
Not a fan of stupid grunts either. Just gonna make it a destroyed pipe.
Since playing about with alien grunts i noticed a really good animation that was a jump from dropship or something… I wondered if it was worth having an alien grunt burst through a window where go with the barney on the road… like a small “oh shit” momment.
Think it could be quite cool like waiting to ambush you?
As far as i am aware the animation is not used
There’s a room in forget about freeman that has a tank. Its the second tank in that level, its really awkward, because the aliens end up killing all the marines and ignore the player, they keep attacking the indesructible tank, which cant fire on the because their too close.
I’d say the most significant thing is On a Rail, which could do with some slight expansion and especially more Xen enemies and a few HECU vs Xen battles where the HECU just barely win.
Also Xen flora seemed to be missing for the most part throughout the game.
Actually the tank can (and does) fire, it’s just that it would rather shoot the player instead of the npcs surrounding the area.
Actually, the tank shoots them with the mounted .50 cal. and it’s not undestructible…
From a storytelling perspective, the cuts to OAR don’t really do much. However, I think the chapter could benefit from the addition of another loading screen or two of content to make it closer to the original in terms of pacing. I though it was kind of lame on my second playthrough that you could just slam the accelerator to get to the water puzzle and bypass 20% of the content. They should have kept the ability to switch from one rail to another and toned it down, rather than eliminate it.
QE from a concept and level design layout was a brilliant revision from BMS, but what really killed it for me the was the rediculous amounts of spelling, capitalization and other grammatical errors on almost EVERY bulletin board and poster in addition to the rediculous layouts of almost EVERY sign. It looks really unprofessional compared to the rest of BMS because it’s the ONLY chapter with these types of errors. If you are feeling ambitious, after you polish up the rest of ST, you should address these. Who knows if the devs are going to deal with it.
P.S. Ya I remember that FaF scene too, which was really stupid. The aliens have no way of killing heavy mech other than the manta and it raises a decent argument for bring back the alien cannon in that scripted sequence or at least its reintroduction in LC.
The tank does fire, but not if the target is so close as to be touching the tank. I dont remember the machine gun. But what ends up happening is that the aliens run up to the tank and start punching it, largely ignoring you. The tank either is indestructible or it takes so long to destroy as to be practically indestructible. That section in general hurts the suspension of disbelief, plus there isn’t anything destructible in this scene either, The tank is firing indoors.
I find it funny how anyone can say anything was rushed in Black Mesa considering the dev time, but I do agree.
It was either rushed or just very badly done. Because I respect the Black Mesa devs and think they’re fantastic, I’m going to go with rushed unless I hear otherwise.
For example, during the Garg chase the Garg is supposed to knock cars aside as he follows you. The devs clearly didn’t have time to code this to work properly, so their solution was to make the cars REALLY light so they get moved from him just running into them. This of course has the hilarious (and immersion breaking!) side effect of allowing you to push the cars aside. Seriously, load it up and run into the cars, or hit them with your crowbar. Very quick solution to the problem. I’ve solved that, so a solution certainly wasn’t impossible. I used the OnUser4 output combined with a trigger_multiple parented to the Garg, which enables motion on the cars on contact and disables it 1 second after (motion disabled on the cars by default). Simple (if quite clever, even though I do say so myself) solution. This is why I assume they just didn’t have the time.
Yeah this part wasn’t too fantastic either. They clearly don’t deal enough damage to the tank to kill it, so they hit it indefinitely. And they’re in its dead zone so it can’t shoot them. Having talked about it, I’ll see if I can do something about it. In all probability, if I were to muck around with it, it’ll probably be a solution as stupid as a trigger_multiple hugged close to the tank tied to a math_counter, and only gets triggered by Xenians. If the trigger exceeds 2 or 3, then the tank dies. That’s my idea anyway. I’m not sure there’s any other decent, easy solution.
Someone said in that chapter the maps and sign are messing with the letters of the sectors, and a dev said they’ll fix it.
I think we can trust the polishing, balancing and bug fixing on the devs. Sticking to the thread, I think only ST is where they cut too much out. OAR turned out quite nicely in my opinion.