Posts by JeanPaul

Well now is your chance

Quote from fewseb

20 hours ago, fewseb said: Hey I just played it and was wondering a couple things

-Are the different voice lines indicative of different classes, I noted most of the shotgun soldiers have the deeper pitch and play more aggressive soundbytes. But at the same time some regular soldier used the pitched down voice lines?

-Are the new voice lines just pitch down versions of the old ones or are they new in some way and were they also voiced by Mike Tsarouhas?

Only the gasmask marines use new lines which are just pitched down Tsarouhas recordings.

Update time!

https://steamcommunity.com/games/362890/a…867920418803575

@Pampers I urge you to replay the earthbound maps with our new marine AI and combat space refinements. The AI is an incredible improvement imo. They have classes, bark all their voice lines loud and clear, and will flank the ever living crap out of you :P.

We also implemented our improved vorts from the alien maps into all the earthbound chapters. The new vorts run around the combat spaces a ton more, actively dodge your attacks mid fight, and had a lot of their timings changed so they feel like an actual thinking creature out to get you. They also have a new AOE slam attack that damages you and pushes you back if you get to close so watch out!

I really cannot state enough how much the combat has improved its legitimately like a whole new game in certain areas and that much closer to the old half life feel.

Im glad you liked xen!

The lack of marine chatter is a bug and will be fixed. Also youre in luck because our release coming out of early access will include a human grunt ai overhaul and a ton of small earthbound map refinements

We just released an open technical beta if you would like to play the first three maps (out of 19 total)

https://steamcommunity.com/games/362890/a…893608676653038

Quote from FMPONE

On 12/27/2018 at 1:31 PM, FMPONE said: More of a technical question, I suppose. If the BMS team would be supportive of Total Conversion type mods that use the Black Mesa tech to package a new experience, that would be ideal IMO.

I guess my question was more geared to how you can release a mod of Black Mesa (as long as you have purchased the game and have it installed on Steam). Would be nice if there was a way to create a Steam page for the mod, I've seen a bunch of HL1 and 2 mods doing that.

Like this: https://store.steampowered.com/about/communitymods/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/587650/HalfLife_2_DownFall/

Im pretty sure this is a thing you can do with any source engine game so I am sure we will have the support for it as well. (on both points you brought up)

Our workshop might be a bit in shambles (last I checked) atm but it takes a load of programming power to get working properly so its on our immediately to do list once we release xen.

We want to support mods and mod makers as much as possible so any additional input people have in this realm will definitely be listened to.

Quote from FMPONE

On 12/23/2018 at 8:33 PM, FMPONE said: Looks awesome!

I asked on Twitter and didn’t get a response, but what about mods for Black Mesa? Your tech is really exciting, it would be fun to do a map pack. What do you think?

Obviously everyone on the team is in support for making the game as moddable and open as possible with sdk tools and documentation on all the new stuff. Youll be able to make anything you normally can on valve source engine games. I would love to do map pack related things (like csgo updates you mean right?) but stuff like that is still up in the air. We'll have to gauge the community interest somehow first.

I personally want to continue to produce more SP content for the game post xen release so I am in support of any community that aims to do the same.

Quote from RaVaGe

7 hours ago, RaVaGe said: Hey JP ?

Yo!

Yes there are definitely plans to do a full pass on the earthbound maps with all this new stuff post xen release. ?

Some Black Mesa news if you missed it:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/362890/a…207569423590279

New Features

Screenspace Fog ("Xog") Using the GBuffer that we've developed for our new Dynamic Lights, we've added a dynamic, very flexible new fog system that replaces Source's legacy fog. The new "Xog" can be configured on the fly with instant results ingame, it can change over time with I/O, and it can vary in density and color based on height. Best of all, it's very inexpensive to render, costing about as much performance as a single dynamic light.

Our level designers were slack-jawed when they saw how much it improves the look of the whole game, bringing a true sense of scale to the levels.

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New Alien Grunt NPC (Agrunts) Our original Alien Grunts were tank enemies that shot ridiculously powerful homing bees. They fit relatively well into the tough, cover-laden final levels of Earth. In the vast, wide open spaces of Xen however, they became extremely frustrating to fight.

The new Agrunt is the most mobile, unpredictable enemy in the whole game besides our assassins. They'll leap onto different platforms, find a way to outflank you, get in your face, and unleash a devastating secondary "hornet hurricane" attack. As a much-needed balance, the bees from them no longer home in on you, and individual bee damage has been lowered.

New Controller NPC (Xontrollers) The player only encounters Controllers once in the released game. They were a good, if a bit simple, final enemy type for the Earth bound levels. For Xen, we drastically expanded their abilities, turning them into a kind of overlord or mini-boss. We don't want to spoil everything about their new abilities -- but mind-control, telekinesis, and crystal-powered shields are just a taste of what players can expect.

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Improved Vortigaunt NPC (Xorts) These were another straightforward enemy from Earth-levels. We mostly teleported them straight onto the player and expected them to be gunned down in a few seconds. For Xen, we have worked them into a much more intelligent, emotional creature. In keeping with the original Xen, they won't be hostile to the player by default.

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Flashlight Shadows Flashlight shadows are back! Last patch we switched to one of our new dynamic lights, but couldn’t quite solve all the issues with shadows. For Xen, the flashlight will be positioned on the player to look like it is casting from lower on your chest. This creates interesting shadows and adds to the atmosphere in dark environments while still having a usable flashlight.

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Soft Particles Better late than never. This is a feature that's been in other Valve games, but for some reason has been broken in Black Mesa, even from our very first mod release. No more hard-edged particle clipping!

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Chapter Updates In addition to the improvements above, we have been grinding away at locking the final bits of design and arting for all our Xen levels.

While building momentum toward release, our goal is to lock down the chapters in order so that we don’t have to dedicate resources to them, and so all the subsequent chapters go faster and smoother. Here is where we are at:

Xen (~2-3 Hour Estimate) This chapter is completely design locked, most of the art is done, and we are polishing the levels to be release ready. Left on the to-do list is merging art, polishing art, unifying skyboxes and effects across all 6 maps, optimizing maps, and finally a clipping pass.

Gonarch (~1-2 Hour Estimate) These maps are design locked and are going through the art process. The goal is to be mostly art completed, and start in on its many animated scripted sequences in January. We learned a lot arting Xen and refined our pipeline to be more efficient going forward. There are also half the maps (3) in Gonarch as in Xen, so we got that going for us.

Interloper (~2-3 Hour Estimate) This chapter is design complete, but needs refinement to lock the chapter. The goal is to have this chapter design locked in the next few days so that level designers and artists can start in on detailing it. Interloper is currently 6 maps.

Nihilanth (Super Secret Time Estimate) We have started in on the core gameplay coding of the final boss. We wanted to avoid having the big boss be just a bullet sponge, so we have kept the design fluid and kept the environment interactive and dynamic. Most of the static art for this level is completed, but it still needs scripted animation set pieces.

Endgame (About 5 mins) Endgame is locked, but needs some final animation and graphics updates. Endgame will be the last chapter we do a pass on, as it is dependant on a lot of final art from the other levels. Even in its current state we are very happy with how it plays out.

We posted our xen trailer this morning if you havent seen it yet

https://steamcommunity.com/games/362890/a…111426405732058

Woot!

@laminutederire

Quote form our resident shader guy Chetan in response to your question:

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This version of godrays improves perf by avoid the need to re-render the entire scene for masrking etc. This is one benefit of our new gbuffer passes that we have all the buffers (depth/normal/misc) needed for all the lighting and post processing needs. This change is the big improvement over previous godrays. Gbuffer pass itself is upto 2x-4x faster than normal shading pass depending on quality modes and other factors.

There's also a huge quality improvement compared to previous version and we have enabled them for new local point lights.

Second improvement comes as a part of new godrays implementation itself. There's a minor improvement in something called fillrate due to different ways of doing things. One big change is we are now performing radial blur pass on a B&W texture instead of RGB. But again fillrate improvements might not be noticable depending on GPU/Resolution etc because at the moment godrays is being done of full size render and number of blur passes are high. Consider this as INSANE quality mode for godrays. We didn't got time to implement quality modes for godrays for beta update.

To be honest it was least on the priority list since we didn't notice major perf impact during our internal testing (we mostly tested stuff on 1080p or 2140p sometimes). Also, we are planning to do another overhual of godrays (no promises). I wanted to try one of the screenspace ray-trace (or ray march) based implementation which is the standard now on dx11. But its tricky to implement on dx9 and may or mayn't turnout to be faster that current radial blur based implementation. Apart from better perf it will improve the quality even further and might enable us to use them for new local spotlights the way we wanted. (But again no promises, it's something on the list for xen release but not big priority at the moment.)

Another areas of improvements include - making godrays go through tonemapping pipeline, improve AA when MSAA is enabled , etc

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Quote from laminutederire

4 hours ago, laminutederire said: Would programmers be okay with revealing how exactly they made volumetric lightning more efficient?

I am sure they would totally be down to help. I wouldnt be able to explain it in the slightest and I am sure it would require more than a forum post to get the ideas across. Im not sure how public or readily available their contact information is but if you need it just pm me.

Black mesa update!

http://steamcommunity.com/games/362890/a…703306631918308

Its an engine release so our future xen and interloper maps are as bug free and playable as possible.

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Dynamic Lights - Full featured dynamic lights that are able to cast real time shadows, project textures, and emit volumetric light (godrays). These have been implemented across earthbound to help amp up the visual fidelity and “nextgen-ness”.

Overhauled CSM and Godrays - Cascade Shadow Maps (CSM) have been totally rewritten and now run better than before. Godrays are completely overhauled to run smoother and operate off of a new entity that automatically gets the sun angle from the environment light.

Image Based Ambient Lighting - Lighting can now be generated based off of the skybox image. This allows mappers to have significantly more accurate environmental lighting, which automatically takes into account the nuances and difference colours of the sky. This is unlike any other version of Source, where environment lighting is simply one flat colour picked by the mapper.

4 Way Texture Support - 4 way texture blends are now supported in engine, each with their own bump map, specular map, and procedural blending options. This allows for much more variety in texturing natural landscapes, as most older versions of Source only support 2 way texture blends.

Improved Prop Lighting - While developing Xen, we realized the existing Source lighting just wasn't accurate enough. In the original Source, up to 4 lights are allowed per object and there is no self-shadowing. This works fine for small or medium sized objects, but for something like a massive, detailed rock archway, the limitations appear. In the screenshot, the vines hanging under the arch do not appear properly in shadow, and the arch looks strangely flat because only 4 light samples are being taken. Our new static lighting supports all the nearby lights in the scene, self-shadows correctly, and also works seamlessly with both our new skydome lighting and our new dynamic lights. This makes a big difference "merging" the objects with their environment.

Left is the old style of prop lighting, Right is the new:

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Doubled Source Displacement Limit - Max number of displacements allowed per map from 2048 to 4096. This allows the creation of more detailed and expansive natural outdoor environments.

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While this quote here doesnt include everything - its the main things I figured mapcore guys would be excited about. The new dynamic lighting stuff is really intense and honestly opens up source to a whole new realms and genres of level design. (our dlights work through alpha textures as well) If you havent seen an ingame example of image based ambient lighting I suggest you give it a shot - the difference from stock ambient is immense.

One last thing I would like to note for anyone potentially doing a single player project: the doubled displcement limit is a WAY bigger deal than you think. In fact the entire concept behind one of the xen maps I designed wouldnt even be remotely possible with the previous limit. The doubled limit was one of the most important things to happen to our maps - and here is the crazy part - it took one programmer less than a minute to change and has not a single bad effect in our game so far. Makes you think why the original limit exists in the first place

Woot!

Dont forget about our pretty massive dynamic lighting update

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Quote from blackdog

3 hours ago, blackdog said: Not to spit on the good work, but when I saw it on twitter i thought it was a leak of some new HL stuff from Valve

Hey you thought our work was Valve's, I take that as a compliment

Quote from FMPONE

58 minutes ago, FMPONE said: realtalk, I can't fucking believe this discussion is still happening. Like, life is a cruel sort of torture in a way.

ETA ON BLACK MESA..... IT'S ALMOST 2017

Its a lot of work dawg!

I mean even getting the game from mod to steam release was an incredible amount of code. Almost disturbing how much actually.

Our official statment for release atm is summer 2017. We are definitely pushing all out to keep it that timeframe.

Quote from dux

2 hours ago, dux said: Very cool pic but it doesn't look particularly Xen like

This pic is actually of a completely original location - we are saving the really organic and juicy strange shit for later

Also dont worry we arent throwing the original completely out, there will be loads of visually recognizable parts.

Quote from D3ads

38 minutes ago, D3ads said: Is that Combine structures I see?

idk is it?!

Hey guys

How about a lil xen

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Quote from 2d-chris

Still think it's weird shooting a photo then asking for permission,

98% of the people that notice just ignore me and go about their day. People are a lot more apethetic to photographs than you think.

Reading the situation is a huge help as well. There have been plenty of times where I didnt take a photograph because it didnt feel right.

Quote from FMPONE

limitations are what makes great art

I agree wholeheartedly, limits are very important. I limit myself in other ways (35mm prime lens, no cropping, landscape orientation only) I have found these limitations, especially, the 35mm prime lens, to vastly improve my photography. However, candid shots vs asking permission isnt about limitations, its just a different style of photography.

Quote from FMPONE

I really like the photos! You have a real eye for colors especially and I think that helps all of the pictures a lot.

Thanks breh. I spent a lot of time looking for these colors and making sure each image has a strong sense of color so its nice to see someone notice

Quote from 2d-chris

Well I'm not really into street photography, but you can't just go around taking photos and sell them, you have to ask permission soon as money is involved and there is a good chance you'll have to take images down if people find out

Actually this is wrong. Money is irrelevant when it comes to permission. Images taken in a public space are free use in pretty much anything thats not a commercial advertisement.

Quote from 2d-chris

Most professionals I've seen avoid the idea of true candid, and they usually say to not do it because it does give a pretty creepy/bad name to photographers, you know the creepy dude hiding behind a lamp post with a zoom lens shooting people that are unaware

You are only the creepy photographer if you act like a creepy photographer. If the subject notices you, just smile and 99.99% of the time its not an issue at all. Simply shooting candidly doesnt make you creepy by default.

Quote from 2d-chris

Your photos are of people directly and very personally, not a wide shot of them walking by or in a wheelchair from a distance, as art it's fine, but it does raise concerns as a project IMO, if your goal is to be a bit out of there and risky then it's all good.

I think you might be a little confused here. All of these images were taken with a 35mm lens which means I have to be pretty damn close to get these images. That first shot of the guy near the orange wall was taken three and a half feet from him. In fact the second after that image was taken he noticed the camera. If he had a problem with me taking his image, he would have told me

Quote from 2d-chris

I guess, what I'm getting at is, this is not street photography in the traditional sense, you know people going about their lives in an environment shot, it's more of, taking portraits of people on the street without them being aware?

Thats exactly what street photography is though. Its a capture of people going about their lives. I think you might be taking this "candid" term a little too literally. When I say candid, I dont mean im creepily hiding places to capture private moments of people from a distance. It means im taking a picture without them noticing. (sometimes right as they notice) This doesnt mean im hiding, it just means their attention is elsewhere. I mean that image of the guy in the red jumpsuit was taken in times square in the middle of the day. I just managed to time it right so the image wasnt filled with 10-15 tourists.

Quote from 2d-chris

I know you said candid, but when it comes to people it's always best to ask permission

I disagree entirely here. Once you ask permission to take an image it is an entirely different image. The image is also, in my opinion, usually not as interesting.

Quote from 2d-chris

the key is to make them feel natural.

Thats the problem though. Even the most charming of photographers will still be taking an image of someone posing for a camera once permission is requested. The dynamic has switched from a person going about their day acting as if they normally would to "im posing for a camera now".

Quote from 2d-chris

IMO the best street shots look candid

Most definitely

Quote from 2d-chris

but are actually a bit scripted in one way or another

What makes you say this?

Quote from 2d-chris

I think these days I feel more awkward hiding and shooting people than just asking them, not that I've done much of it.

Its not really about how I feel about photographing more as it is about the final result. Asking vs finding has a massive difference in the style of the final image.

Quote from 2d-chris

your pics are cool btw

Thanks!