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[Half-Life] End of an Era

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Posts

  • IcemopperIcemopper Registered User regular
    Yeah, they did an excellent job of making it feel fresh again, and igniting that feeling I had so many years ago.

  • GrimthwackerGrimthwacker Registered User regular
    "All ah know is. . . he's been killin' mah buddies." Gah, soldiers usually aren't a problem, but the sheer amount of auto-turrets in this version is a killer. ESPECIALLY if they're placed in ambush positions you could never anticipate. No matter how careful I am or how much I try to sabotage them they always mess me up.

  • SaraLunaSaraLuna Registered User regular
  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    Sweet, I'll add that to the OP.

  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    So textFAMGUY1's expanded Surface Tension maps have been finished and are available to download at http://forums.blackmesasource.com/showthread.php?t=15065

    FAMGUY has also announced plans to add in missing chunks of On a Rail, though he admits it'll be at a slower release schedule due to schoolwork. I'll be looking forward to it.

    Coupled with groups working on Hazard Course and Xen levels, we may get community versions of the rest of Black Mesa before the BM team gets to it. I really wish they would just give out the source code so that the community can really get to work on some of the core engine stuff. Ah well.

    Wonder what happened to the Steam version, now that I think about it.

  • carmofincarmofin Registered User regular
    I'll say this, I don't give a crap what any group feels they have to add to the game.
    The Black Mesa Team has delivered a mindblowing result and I feel the creative liberties they took are completely justified and fine, which gives me full confidence to wait until they are done with the final version.

    The BM team has my respect, unlike some stupid kid who adds a bell and is like "hey look what i DID". Those people have already sacrificed years of their lives towards the project, so what makes you think that some kid, who's "too busy with school" deserves to harvest their effort?

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  • MongerMonger I got the ham stink. Dallas, TXRegistered User regular
  • TaminTamin Registered User regular
    edited January 2013
    carmofin wrote: »
    I'll say this, I don't give a crap what any group feels they have to add to the game.
    The Black Mesa Team has delivered a mindblowing result and I feel the creative liberties they took are completely justified and fine, which gives me full confidence to wait until they are done with the final version.

    The BM team has my respect, unlike some stupid kid who adds a bell and is like "hey look what i DID". Those people have already sacrificed years of their lives towards the project, so what makes you think that some kid, who's "too busy with school" deserves to harvest their effort?

    And I don't feel all the creative liberties they took are justified or necessarily fine. Some, yes; others, no.

    "Adding a bell" is changing a texture or two. The guy went in with the same goals as the BM project and delivered a superior (read: longer and more faithful) version of a map that the project seriously short-changed in the original release.

    Calling him a stupid kid diminishes what he's accomplished in a way that's completely unfair.

    Are you forgetting the BM project has been in development for almost a decade? Do you think a specific group of people have been working full-tilt on this the whole time? The contributors were busy with schoolwork and jobs. The "team" has lost and gained dozens of people over the years.

    This guy is just as much a contributor to the black mesa source project as anyone else who worked on it.

    Tamin on
    Dark Raven XSaraLunaTychoCelchuuuDeaderinred
  • TychoCelchuuuTychoCelchuuu PIGEON Registered User regular
    edited January 2013
    I like how when the Black Mesa team takes forever to do something, they get your respect, but when someone does it mostly on his own, faster, and by most accounts better, he's a stupid kid because he hasn't sacrificed as much of his life. Maybe he hasn't sacrificed as much of his life because he's better at it than them and can get it done faster!

    TychoCelchuuu on
    DeaderinredTaminBlackbird SR-71CAntimatter
  • DeaderinredDeaderinred Registered User regular
    edited January 2013
    see carmofin, it's that kind of attitude that is the sole reason why I really really can't stand the internet hate machine. it offers nothing to anyone.

    Deaderinred on
  • carmofincarmofin Registered User regular
    I like how when the Black Mesa team takes forever to do something, they get your respect, but when someone does it mostly on his own, faster, and by most accounts better, he's a stupid kid because he hasn't sacrificed as much of his life. Maybe he hasn't sacrificed as much of his life because he's better at it than them and can get it done faster!
    You know, your post simply oozes of respect and appreciation for their efforts. It makes me sick to see an internet community persisting in talking down on team black mesa, even after they delivered on all their promises. Essentially "Step aside and let someone fast do the job" is all you have to say.

    PSN | Steam
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    NNID: carmofin
    3DS: 2852 6971 9745
    Throw me a PM if you add me
  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    Uh, Black Mesa hasn't delivered on all their promises yet, unless Xen came out when I wasn't looking.

    Or even that first bug-fix patch.

  • TaminTamin Registered User regular
    Uh, Black Mesa hasn't delivered on all their promises yet, unless Xen came out when I wasn't looking.

    Or even that first bug-fix patch.

    Even then, their original promise was a very faithful reproduction. Which they threw out after a year or so of development.

    And the promise the first release would be when it was all done. Which has now been broken irrevocably.

    And there's the implied promise of using the HL2 engine; the release uses the source sdk base 2007. But that's a technicality - it's still Source.

  • SaraLunaSaraLuna Registered User regular
    BM is nice enough, but it has plenty of problems.
    -a couple levels were gutted, which people are fixing
    -the difficulty was way, way overtuned
    -most of the vo is terrible, even if that was "intentional"
    -the whole thing feels like like a patchwork assembled over a long period, not a polished, cohesive whole. one small example: in HL, when you broke open a crate, a small assortment of trash items fell out. In BMS, this happens only in a couple of the areas. Someone took the time to do the crates "right" but then it was only used in ~15% of the maps.

    people fixing problems should be lauded, especially since they're doing it in a matter of weeks/months and not a solid decade of "soon"

    TaminTychoCelchuuu
  • Flippy_DFlippy_D Digital Conquistador LondonRegistered User regular
    carmofin wrote: »
    I like how when the Black Mesa team takes forever to do something, they get your respect, but when someone does it mostly on his own, faster, and by most accounts better, he's a stupid kid because he hasn't sacrificed as much of his life. Maybe he hasn't sacrificed as much of his life because he's better at it than them and can get it done faster!
    You know, your post simply oozes of respect and appreciation for their efforts. It makes me sick to see an internet community persisting in talking down on team black mesa, even after they delivered on all their promises. Essentially "Step aside and let someone fast do the job" is all you have to say.

    This is a stupid post, and it's making you look stupid.

    p8fnsZD.png
    TychoCelchuuu
  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    I was on the bus earlier so I didn't get to address his full post, so I'll do that now, and then move onto much cooler discussion. Black Mesa was a project who's very inception was founded in the idea that a particular project (in this case, Half-Life: Source) did not meet the standards of the mod makers, so they took it upon themselves to produce a version they felt was met those standards. To imply that the Black Mesa mod is above the same approach is ironically misguided at best and outright hypocritical at worst.

    textFAMGUY1 not only has been very clear about why he felt the cut levels should be added back into the game (namely they are the levels where the most soldier vs alien combat appears, as well as where the tide begins to turn against the soldiers, prompting them to pull out.) he also spent several months working on the extra maps he added, in cooperation with the Black Mesa fan and modding community (Did you know there's an entire forum dedicated to fan made maps on the BM forums?). Additionally, even going beyond the fact that Black Mesa is a mod to begin with; they were big on accepting community submissions during BM's development, so Black Mesa already has community made content in it. (And honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to eventually see FAMGUY's work make it into a future version of Black Mesa. His maps are just as good as the ones included with the game already.)

    And again, Black Mesa was a mod. Plenty of the people working on it went to school or had real jobs while working on it. It was a labor of love, just like FAMGUY's maps are. To denigrate his work by suggesting what he did is any less worthy than what the Black Mesa team did is really disingenuous. He's a fan of Half-Life just like the BM team is, and he has as much right to generate content like this as the BM team does. Especially when the BM team itself condones map development by virtue of hosting a map development forum for their mod.

    Anywho, with that malarky out of the way, very recently an alpha version of the original Half-Life leaked onto the web; this version was from a press demo and the little bit I looked at it, there's a lot of stuff in there. This is a build from before the famous restart of the Half-Life project where they scrapped a lot of the work and started over, so it's almost like a lost Half-Life game. The NPC models are the older, crazier ones; you can see panthereyes wandering around, and there's other crazy old stuff. If you have any interest in how Half-Life looked in development, I VERY much suggest you check it out. http://www.valvetime.net/threads/half-life-1997-alpha-preview-disc-leaked.243023/

  • IcemopperIcemopper Registered User regular
    How does the Alpha play? It sounds awesome, if only as a piece of history. I definitely want to give it a shot.

  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    Kinda clunky. You only get two weapons with infinite ammo (pistol and mp5) and you have to manually set a use key (console command "bind e +use" should work) in addition to resetting all the controls to be anything approaching modern.

    You REALLY feel the quake engine in this version :D Like I said, I didn't put a lot of time into it, but I'm definitely going to check out more.

  • IcemopperIcemopper Registered User regular
    Sounds fun in a historic sort of way. Kind of like a WWII geek finding original notes from an officer or an archaeologist digging up a potsherd. I can't wait to try it out.

  • LaCabraLaCabra MelbourneRegistered User regular
    Oh man, I've wanted to play that thing for years.

    Deaderinred
  • TaminTamin Registered User regular
    so, going through the uncut surface tension, I'm not very happy.

    The TOW launcher is ridiculous. Way too hard to aim, reload, and generally use. Especially under fire. Not the mapper's fault, exactly. The asset already existed and he just re-used it.

    Lots of clipping issues, which confuses the hell out of me. How do you end up with physics objects not interacting with the floor or walls consistently? Barrels that start half-buried. Dead bodies disappearing into the floor; including the player. Shouldn't all that be covered by the engine? I don't recall any of that happening in the rest of BMS.

  • anoffdayanoffday To be changed whenever Anoffday gets around to it. Registered User regular
    What exactly is surface tension? I don't get it.

    And uplink is a HL demo redone in source? Am I getting that right?

    Steam: offday
  • TaminTamin Registered User regular
    anoffday wrote: »
    What exactly is surface tension? I don't get it.

    And uplink is a HL demo redone in source? Am I getting that right?

    Something like that.

    Surface Tension is just one of the chapters of Half-Life. Starts right after Questionable Ethics and includes the hydroelectric (?) dam area.

    In the original game, there's a vent that drops you into a garage with some marines. This then leads through a couple of areas that are interesting. One famous bit is a marine tossing an explosive into the pipe the player is crawling through, then shutting the door. The explosion is then focused into a jet of flame. It was a really cool effect. After a bit, including saving a Barney, you enter a parking garage and a Gargantuan chases you.

    The original BMS release cut the chapter drastically. You enter the vent and it drops you into the parking garage with the Gargantuan chasing you. Very disconcerting.

    Some guy took the released map, modified a few things up to the vent (I think), and extended it with BMS-style updated versions of the original's areas. He then added in another map (the buggy one I mentioned) which contained the aforementioned jet of flame moment.

    So now it plays much more like the original.

  • anoffdayanoffday To be changed whenever Anoffday gets around to it. Registered User regular
    Ah ok. I thought it sounded familiar. The uncut part makes sense now. So does it just fit right into black mesa source and replace it?

    Steam: offday
  • TaminTamin Registered User regular
    edited January 2013
    anoffday wrote: »
    Ah ok. I thought it sounded familiar. The uncut part makes sense now. So does it just fit right into black mesa source and replace it?

    yes.

    edit: I keep wanting to expand on this. But I can't quite articulate it without getting into technical details. The uncut release contains four maps + necessary files. Two of these maps are modified versions of and overwrite their BMS counterparts; the other two add content and link them together.

    It's quite smoothly done.

    Tamin on
  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    edited January 2013
    Been having fun messing with some Black Mesa mods and trying to get them all to play nice. Currently I have the Uplink and Surface Tension mods installed (mentioned above). I had to learn how to compile the scenes.image to get them to play nice :D I also have a couple of soundpack mods that replace the soldiers voices with the original HL1 ones (desperately needed, IMO) and that replaces the tram lady with the original one (not needed, but it was there so I grabbed it.) I also put some tweaks into skill.cfg to make headshots more powerful, reduce enemy reaction time to something a little more insane, and to make jumps higher so you don't have to crouch-jump for every single jump. :P I also have a small mod that gives the crowbar a "woosh" noise even when it hits something.

    Currently, I'm looking at integrating a mod that fixes the closed captions in with the above mods, without breaking anything.

    EDIT: Also, apparently the quick and dirty port of the HL: Source Xen levels straight into Black Mesa is almost done; though they likely won't be able to do much for the Gonarch and Nihilanth, sadly. At least it'll give the game an ending, even if the geometry is from 1998. :D

    Here's the links to some of the mods, btw.
    Uplink
    Surface Tension Uncut
    Xen Levels (Not finished yet and requires porting files from HL: Source[/url]
    Updated Closed Captions
    Crowbar Impact Sound Fix

    You can find the Radio Chatter Swap and Inbound VO swap somewhere on those forums as well.

    Undead Scottsman on
  • SkabSkab Registered User regular
    So, my Half Life 1 just randomly patched, 417 MB, and I have no idea why.

    steam_sig.png
  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    edited January 2013
    I've had that happen before. I think that sometimes Steam just gets confused and redownloads chunks of games. In that case, I think 417mb is the entirety of Half-Life 1, compressed.

    EDIT: Hmm.. Seems other people are getting this too; an it appear to increase the GCF size by about 8k.. I've heard rumors about big picture support or linux support, but I dunno.

    Undead Scottsman on
  • SkabSkab Registered User regular
    It seems to have enabled the HD texture pack by default as well. Weird.

    steam_sig.png
  • LaCabraLaCabra MelbourneRegistered User regular
    GCF! GCF!

    I am going to go see if there's anything obviously new in the GCF.

  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    Hmm.. I wonder if they added the ability to turn the HD pack on and off into the main menu's.

  • LaCabraLaCabra MelbourneRegistered User regular
    They didn't. It sure is on by default now though

  • Gandalf_the_CrazedGandalf_the_Crazed Vigilo ConfidoRegistered User regular
    I think Valve just does this stuff to fuck with us.

    PEUsig_zps56da03ec.jpg
    Tamin
  • agoajagoaj Top Tier One FearRegistered User regular
    Someone won a bet if they could get 1000 people to boot up HL in 10 minutes.

    ujav5b9gwj1s.png
    Dark Raven XTychoCelchuuu
  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    Looks like it was indeed Linux support. Though I dunno why the HD pack got stuck on.

  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    So, Half-Life is available for Linux and Mac (Heh, that only took like 14 years). However, it appears mods are broken right now and the HD pack is stuck on. :P

  • maximumzeromaximumzero I...wait, what? New Orleans, LARegistered User regular
    Oh sweet, I can finally play Half-Life. Glad I bought it back during that 99-cent sale.

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  • Gandalf_the_CrazedGandalf_the_Crazed Vigilo ConfidoRegistered User regular
    episode 3 to be mac-only CONFIRMED

    PEUsig_zps56da03ec.jpg
  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    Half-life 2 and episodes have been on Mac for ages.

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