Aw shirt, it raw bean!
(Will anyone actually remember what that’s from? No idea!)[/size]
How’ve you (and Jambo) been?
Jambo’s been around for like half a month in the Ladies Club FYI
Awesome news! Hard to believe this 13-year journey will soon be coming to a close. Great to hear it will greatly expand upon the original concept. I’m counting it not as the final “completed” version of the base game, but more as the expansion.
i can’t emphasize enough how much i love this, and how excited i am to have some actual news to look at and a time frame for release.
though i do have one question about the maps. are these the same parts of Xen as the half life 1 map being used as a size comparison? like, is that first map your version of the map with the island with the 3 big spikes? or is it something entirely new and different in that chapter? or maybe this is your version of the tiny rocks you jump on before reaching the big spiky island??? hmmmm…
speculation aside, i do legitimately want to know how much your basing your Xen off of half-life 1 Xen vs making completely new expanded stuff. im sure no matter what it will be amazing and tons of fun to play though.
can’t wait for next summer!
As TextFAMGUY1 stated, Crowbar Collective have chosen to completely redo all the maps within the Xen Chapters.
The two Images they have posted today show the wire-frames for the completely redone ‘A’ Maps for the Levels ‘Xen’ and ‘Interloper’, with an insert window showing the wire-frames for the original ‘A’ Maps, all to scale.
Its a comparison shot of just how expansive and detailed they are making the New Xen. The content within the Inserts will most likely not be present in the release of the Xen Maps.
ahhh ok thanks.
i knew they had mentioned how expansive and different it was going to be before but i didn’t know they were changing all the content. thanks for clearing that up.
Might it just be brushes made to seal that part of the map? If it’s a cave or interior but with displacement walls.
It’s also the most model-dense part of the entire map. Something’s fucky about it. Godammit, now I can’t stop paying attention to it.
Speaking of which, you know that you get better performance out of Hammer and less visual clutter if you turn off those corner vertices, right? Works wonders on large/complex maps.
Between BM coming out in 2012 and now I have gotten married, built a house and had a baby.
So you know… not bad =P
Yourself?
I can’t believe Zen is possibly only 6 months away! I actually have a game to be hyped for again! This is way crazier then what I was expecting to come of this! So dang HUGE and I’m loving it. Might make a freaking wallpaper for my desktop out of one of those delicious images.
actually it’s almost 11 months away. The announcement said Summer 2017. That means we COULD get it on August 31st, even if we don’t get a delay.
Nonetheless, that’s some great news! Wish you guys good luck and i hail the initiative to differentiate so much from the original maps!
Hope we can get it in the early summer in June, even the better May, April…… 
I might even get the 1070 in time for Xen release.
1080 will probably have dropped in price by then. Though if you can run vanilla BM you will probably be able to run Xen unless there’s an intense graphical overhaul along with it.
Congrats! This is wonderful news.
Here’s my reaction:https://youtu.be/0PHk0rDUtG4?t=26m23s
(Go to 26:23)
And no, I’m not him.
The fact that you guys ACTUALLY released something regarding Xen is making me rejoice. This along with the Cubs winning the World Series is making me a very happy person. But I will not say this is a criticism. I mean, you guys ACTUALLY talk to us while we’re waiting for Valve to say SOMETHING about HL3. So with that I say Black Mesa Team, I hope you guys get it up going and I’m willing to be a beta tester! 
But I must also say the sheer size it what makes me even more excited about. An idea I did have was if you guys referenced at least what happens to Black Mesa at the end of Opposing Force when the G-Man talks to Gordon, something like that.
We’re all already Beta testers, yo, that’s what EA is for. Alpha testers, arguably.
pretty neat. I wonder how it will play. Xen was always kind of controversial, some loved it some hated it. Tbh the game play was kinda dull, so I wonder how that is fixed even more so since you seem to have a much much bigger Xen planned.
Can’t wait to see the end result!
Oh and hi raw_bean and Jambo, haven’t seen you two in ages. On the other hand I wasn’t very active in the recent years on this board either.
Ho-lee shit. A developer said “Xen” and it wasn’t in the context of “Don’t ask”
This is better than Christmas!
Oh man, that takes me back. That was from the Black Mesa comics. “BAN BAN BAN”
Unfortunately they don’t seem to exist on the internet anymore 
Question: in Interloper A, what are these “giant strands” going about everywhere. Are they just REALLY tall towers or some kind of tunnels?
It’s difficult to say what these might be without knowing more about how far along the map is in development and/or what is currently being hidden from view.
At the moment, we can see no skybox or other obvious enclosing elements, so either the map is a series of tunnels defined by relatively thin walls, or the actual main enclosing elements are hidden and it is a series of floating islands or ledges. If the former is true, the ‘strands’ are probably portions of the wall geometry; if the latter then they are probably rock faces or cliffs.