Posts by Defrag

  • Battlefield Next

    Yeah, I don't think a SP BF game can every be half as entertaining as the online versions. I remember when BF2 just came out and I was playing with the FF guys... it was seriously amazing. Easily the most fun I'd had in about 5 years of gaming since TFC came out. Even dying always seemed to be comical and amusing a lot of the time, then there were the numerous "holy shit" moments (like firing the GL into a packed transport chopper and seeing about three corpses tumbling out ).

  • dod_wall_b1 released

    Quote

    Which one specifically? I live in Canada, we don't have castles here. Can you provide some images of generic around a castle type terrain?

    Castles were generally built on naturally occuring features that made attacking the position rather difficult. Looking at yours, it seems to be a little too low lying. I don't know whether gameplay would be affected by changing this up, just pointing it out.

  • Your first Level Editor

    bsp (or whatever it was called) for Quake2. I remember playing a custom map called dead by dawn and thinking HEY MAN, this.. me.. me.. making.. custom levels. This has to be a great idea, I mean, how hard can it be? Yeah, that worked out...

    I gave up and then picked up editing seriously when HL was released (I bought the game to use the editor, strangely enough).

  • Model viewer and Hammer problems

    Quote from hessi

    bicball: you should say: without CS. this is one mod. maybe you can add DOD but dod wasnt a that big success of modding as CS was.

    Firstly, I agree that CS was one of the main reasons for HL's longevity. I also think it was a huge boon for valve and they honestly made quite a bit of dosh out of it. Want to play CS? You've gotta either buy CS retail or HL. They were still selling the game five years later and it was almost entirely down to the modding side of things. If that's not a reason for a company like valve to pay someone to concentrate on the SDK, I don't know what is.

    As for HL2: gmod is HL2's big success, and I don't doubt it will sell by the truckload once it's on steam and re-written from the ground up. Valve will be taking something like a 50% share of the profits I think, so that's good business. What I also think is that valve really underestimated the support the community requires when it comes to modding these days. It's getting rather complicated and community created documentation just isn't cutting it. Their SDK has been a trainwreck in many areas.. I mean we're currently entering our third week of not having a working linux server. Our programmers had to fix countless bugs in the SDK because fixes were not forthcoming and it took a year to get an SDK code update. I think that says it all.

    Hopefully with the new guy working on it and the new SDK base setup things will be a lot better, though. Huge updates will always run the risk of breaking a lot of stuff due to the mass changes. Valve has definitely done more than most, but it's not all altruistic -- they've got a great business acumen and obviously realised how big a role modding could play. Unfortunately I don't think they've given us enough support for HL2. There's some really, really esoteric stuff in the SDK and little or incomplete documentation in many areas.

  • hammer to max?!?

    Be careful with some of the settings & welding, or you can sometimes affect the dimensions of the imported geometry. When you're trying to make your prop seamless with the map bsp geometry, it's just something to be aware of.

  • Half-Life 2: Custom Water Shaders

    A custom shader is actually coding the vertex/fragment shaders yourself so it's a little misleading to call it a custom shader, as the code is the same but the materials are different. I'd personally call it a custom water material or similar

    Looks nice btw, but it repeats a bit much and has too much noise for my liking. I know how tough it is to make a nice normal / dudv map for water, so anything that looks pretty nice is a job well done

  • Model viewer and Hammer problems

    The main reason people complain is because of the sheer amount of problems the SDK updates generally cause and the lack of testing and big oversights. I mean, the SDK wouldn't even compile under linux out of the box... there's nothing that can excuse that.

    Hopefully Valve will start to dish out frequent, smaller updates as opposed to gigantic and infrequent ones. Less stuff to break = less stuff to test = better SDK updates and less frustration.

    This round of SDK problems has effectively ground my mod to a halt in various areas, so no wonder people get mad. Steam's ability to instantly update things has made Valve's QA worse than usual as they seem to now have the attitude of "oh well if we break it we can fix it again in a few days or weeks...". The weird thing is that with steam they can roll out beta stuff to whoever wants it, then fix the bugs before they roll it out properly. However, they didn't do that with the SDK this time. The beta hammer period a few updates back was done this way and it helped immensely.