Actually there is raytracing through alpha take a look at the image below. When I compile lighting with an episode 2 prop in there, VRAD displays the messege:
Loaded alpha texture materials\models\props_foliage\arbre01.vtfand as you can see you get lovely alpha shadows.
The problem Im having now is figuring out what the hell I have to do to get it working with my props/textures...
Hey guys,
I've beeen playing witht he ep2 engine recently and am trying to get alpha textures working. So far I added the following to the $light compile parameter
Code:
-final -staticproppolys -staticproplighting -textureshadows
Seems to activate per vertex lighting and shadows etc but for some reason it does not like my alpha texture and just casts a shadow for the whole polygon instead!
Anyone had this problem before or know where im going wrong?
Nice one! Fancy making one for Max too? 
all i'd like is to be able to just run the thing, not much to expect i think 
Quote from zaphodMy post was not meant to belittle anybody or treat anyone here like they are not developers. I assume everyone here is a developer, since there wouldn't be much point in being here if you were not. I would never shrug off the opinions of the people you mention, mostly becuase I AM one of those people you describe. I am just voicing my own opinion, on a subject I am very passionate about. My "bubble" comments were just meant to make the point that the mod world IS a very passionate and close-knit community, ( which I know first hand ) and it's easy to get caught up in details that might seem trivial when you step back and look at the entire state of things.
I know I am repeating things that have already been said, I just mostly wanted to profess my take on things becuase I thought the idea that Valve does nothing but buy up mod teams to make things for them absolutely laughable.
Fair enough Zaph 
Quote from zaphoddoes it matter at all that Valve is still the only company out there that seems to care at all about supporting the mod and user content community? What other company out there is supporting much of anything besides the ability to make a few deathmatch maps if that? ( maybe microsoft counts now w/ XNA & creators club? )The assertion that Valve "buys up" mod teams and community talent becuase they are lazy just makes my jaw drop. How many opportunities have been provided for becuase of Valve's embracing modding? How many people on these forums right now are only working in the industry becuase of resources and opportunities that were provided by Valve? I know that I am one, and I could name you quite a few others right off the top of my head. Buying up talent? Valve is one of the only companies out there that makes it a policy to embrace and lift up the self-motivated modders and developers and give them a chance to do it for a living if they choose. How is that bad for ANYBODY? Fucking bastards found some talented students and gave them the chance to make a great game called portal, boy we can see how THAT turned out. It would have been much better if they had all gotten hired by random studios and put on work detail churning out the same rehashed shit that has been flowing like oil from the ground instead of being given the chance to construct their own personal vision of a game.
I think that sometimes modders have a hard time seeing outside the mod developer bubble. Inside the bubble, things like the state of the tools, drama between developers, and the policies Valve choose are big issues. But if you stand outside the bubble and roam around on the larger game development plain, you start to see that it is still the largest and highest bubble if it's type floating around out there, and you start to notice that it's pretty unique.
Valve is still putting that chance out there to amateur developers. You can argue about how they are managing and offering that chance, but the fact remains that they are the only major player out there offering that chance, or that even thinks that it's a valuable thing to do.
If you think Valve's tools are bad, you should probably go try some others or try out some "from scratch" game engines. I think there would be a lot of stuff you run into that you had taken for granted with the source engine, buggy and annoying as it may be.
You've completely missed the point Zaphod, go back and read the other posts made by people here before drawing such bold conclusions based on one comment. Valve's amazing support and tools are what prompted this thread in the first place.
Myself and many others here are not just from the modding community but are also working within the industry itself. In fact I believe people who can look from both sides of the 'bubble' as you describe it, should have a much more educated and less biased point of view. Simply because you are a developer does not mean you can turn around and tell people "you're not a dev, you dont know what you're talking about!" (maybe a wrong assumption of your post, but that's how I percieved it).
You should never shrug off the opinions of the community, especially ones that helped to build a business upon like Valve and Epic. After all, the consumers are the ones that put money into gamedev's paycheques.
Oh and...
How many opportunities have been provided for becuase of Valve's embracing modding? How many people on these forums right now are only working in the industry becuase of resources and opportunities that were provided by Valve?
Giving someone tools doesnt make them an artist or give them a free pass into the gaming industry. I dont even know where to begin with this statement and to be honest I feel some might be a little insulted by the insinuation that Valve got themt o where they are today...
Again, I dont hate Valve, Epic, Id etc, I am just dissapointed by there declining interest in the modding community.
I agree with you Hourences. It seems to be a growing trend to release half-arsed sdk kits these days, I remember the days when the sdk was what made a game i.e. Unreal, Half Life and Quake 3. Now look at this generation of games being produced by the same studios, Valve, Epic and ID. You all know about Source's sdk and from what i've heard about the UnrealEd 3.0 that Epic released to the public it sounds like a crashy nightmare (I can speak from experience that they have much more stable builds than this) As for ID - I guess we have the doom 3 editor, which to me at least, is as unappealing as the outdated engine it was built for.
The worst thing is these devs were once the strongest for supporting their modding community and now I dont see any interest from them after they've released their buggy tools.
Remember the "Make something unreal" competition? valve's deathmatch mapping comp etc etc?
I agree with Hourences that if this trend continues it will certainly be the death of pc modding, and a considerable loss for the gaming community.
Quote from Neil SquibbThen we remembered we get the tools for free...
Just because its 'free' doesnt make it ok.
I have to say, I was in two minds about responding to this thread, but I think I need to speak out also about Valve's increasingly poor support for it's mod and mapping community.
Now I have always had firm respect for Valve and there games, and more so on how they first founded their company on the mod-maker community and how they embraced the mod community with the release of half-life. However, over time, it seems that their interest in the modding community has continued to decline since the release of Half-Life 2. The initial release of the SDK was pretty ok I guess, at least as far as hammer and the compiler tools went (I never experienced other stuff until later on -eg. faceposer) it was relatively stable and it had a huge community following passed on from HL/TF/CS. They actively encouraged mappers and modders by holding competitions and events, further strengthening the community, but then shortly after there was nothing. Then along came the dreaded SDK updates….
I always dread any new Source/SDK update these days as it’s an almost dead cert that they will break something or everything. Worse than this is the complete lack of acknowledgment of it and to top it off we don’t get a fix for weeks, sometimes months. I've noticed this decline in the functionality of the SDK tools as well as QA and support when anything is done to them.
Last Monday, for the first time in months I tried to compile a simple model, it took me an entire day and even then it still had problems! Not because I’m inexperienced in source, nor because their tools are unintuitive (that’s another issue!) but because every damn tool was broken in either the beta or the current SDK release. If model viewer wasn’t crashing the studio compiler was.
Now it may be just me but I’ve noticed that all of this is having a big impact on the Source mapping/modding community as a whole. Im seeing less cool map releases for TF2, Portal etc, and of the ones that there are, I can bet the authors who made them will tell you they had to hack and slash it to get it working properly and probably already had a good knowledge of the engine in the first place. The result of this is that more and more novice and veteran mappers/modders are getting turned off by the Source engine, and as a conciquence the community feels like its dying along with it.
The general feeling I have about Valve now is that they have their core team now and don’t have any more interest in the modding community 'outside'. Sure they have the Portal team, but I feel kind of disappointed that they never look to their own community to give opportunities such as they gave the Portal students.
To quote a recent interview in which they were asked “We see you are looking for new staff, what do you look for in an employee?” it was something along the lines of “someone who can run there own business”. I find that a very disappointing attitude, especially when in a creative industry such as this. Another disappointment was when they announced Steamworks for ‘developers’ At first I thought this would finally the be the solution to supporting mods via Steam, but it seems its for commercial purposes only. After all these years they still have no interest ... sad!
I’m about ready to hang my hat with the Source engine if things don’t improve very soon. We all know that Valve are using superior tools in-house but it seems like they are uninterested in sharing with the community that their company is built upon! Its so frustrating because it goes against everything I thought Valve’s ethics were based upon, and ethics that I have come to believe very strongly in!
I dont hate Valve, far from it, im just very dissapointed in their attitiude towards people like us. :arrow:
Hey guys,
I'm using the latest sdk beta (-beta srcsdk0122) so that I can create a new mod using the orange box engine as a base. The problem im having is that I cannot get models to compile. At the moment I have a batch file which i drag my .qc files onto, the bat file consists of the following:
@echo off
"%sourcesdk%\bin\orangebox\bin\studiomdl.exe" "%1"
pause
when the compile window comes up I get "WARNING: AppFramework : Unable to load module p4lib.dll!" and at the end: "Error opening f:\valve\steam\steamapps\SourceMods\Willows\models/perftest\PineTreeInd_01.mdl! (Check for write enable)"
Now i've seen on various forums that you need to add a -nop4 command when you launch the sdk, so I added a shortcut with the line "F:\Valve\Steam\Steam.exe -applaunch 211 -nop4 -beta srcsdk0122" however it doesnt seem to fix the problem for me.
Anyone know what im doing wrong?
hmmm, all i can say is "oh dear" but then im not into these type of games....
Nice work Pogo!
Dont hold your breath for completely destructable environments in any game, ever... Although its technically possible with today's engines and tech there is no game/level designer in the world who could design a game or game play around it that wouldnt break after destroying something you shouldnt have.
Looks Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!
my c64 can do better graphics!!
Good work guys
any server admin can easily change the c4 timer, in fact by default I created an entity which set the timer to 60. As has been mentioned you can also make a custom cfg for the map too.
The "SOLID_VPHYSICS static prop with no vphysics model! (models/pinetrees/branch_002a_small.mdl) " is simply a warning, not an error and should not cause any problems. I cannot solve this my end it just seems to be the way Source works atm.
****UPDATE****
I noticed that alot of people were commenting on a lack of ambient sound, I just checked and I forgot to include my custom soudscape and soundfiles!!
I am currently updating the ZIP file to include these files, simply redownload and re-extract to your CS folder (not your maps folder!). Give it around 10 mins from this post to let it upload fully, thanks!
Thanks guys!
It would great to have a game later if we can get one going! I will be there!
Thanks guys!!
The feedback on navigation was really good and i've tried to implement more landmarks and unique areas to the map in response. There are also many subtle markers t help guide you along the way such as flowers signposts and colour variations in the trees.
Thanks for the mirror too, I appreciate it!
Hello everyone, Im pleased to announce the release of De_Forest!
There's been alot of blood sweat and tears to get this into the state it is today, also figuring out how the hell to make a forest map work in the Source engine, but Im pretty proud of how it looks and plays now.
It should run well on most systems with a ati 9800 / nvidia 6xxx or above, not sure about below that as I havent been able to test on lower end systems.
Screens:
[Blocked Image: http://robert.nuclear-dawn.net/Misc/de_forest…_forest0024.jpg]
[Blocked Image: http://robert.nuclear-dawn.net/Misc/de_forest…_forest0027.jpg]
[Blocked Image: http://robert.nuclear-dawn.net/Misc/de_forest…_forest0005.jpg]
[Blocked Image: http://robert.nuclear-dawn.net/Misc/de_forest…_forest0010.jpg]
[Blocked Image: http://robert.nuclear-dawn.net/Misc/de_forest…_forest0012.jpg]
[Blocked Image: http://robert.nuclear-dawn.net/Misc/de_forest…_forest0013.jpg]
[Blocked Image: http://robert.nuclear-dawn.net/Misc/de_forest…_forest0014.jpg]
[Blocked Image: http://robert.nuclear-dawn.net/Misc/de_forest…_forest0015.jpg]
[Blocked Image: http://robert.nuclear-dawn.net/Misc/de_forest…_forest0016.jpg]
[Blocked Image: http://robert.nuclear-dawn.net/Misc/de_forest…_forest0017.jpg]
[Blocked Image: http://robert.nuclear-dawn.net/Misc/de_forest…_forest0021.jpg]
[Blocked Image: http://robert.nuclear-dawn.net/Misc/de_forest…_forest0023.jpg]
now for some info:
Intro:
=======
Terrorists have been hiding out in the woods for months and are being hunted down for
information on spies within a number of high ranking organisations assisting
in plotting terror attacks.
As the terrorist team you must destroy all evidence of
such activities by planting bombs at either of the two sites which were being used
as the hideout.
As the CTs you must secure the hideouts and prevent the terrorists from
destorying the information.
Tips:
======
If you get lost, find your way back to the river and look for landmarks which will point you in the right direction. There are also many signposts dotted around the forest to help you find your way to the bombsites.
Footnote:
=========
Thanks to everyone who offered feedback and advice on this map, its been a big challenge and a hard journey and I hope you have fun!
****UPDATE****
I noticed that alot of people were commenting on a lack of ambient sound, I just checked and I forgot to include my custom soudscape and soundfiles!!
I am currently updating the ZIP file to include these files, if you are experiencing this problem simply redownload and re-extract to your CS folder (not your maps folder!). Give it around 10 mins from this post to let it upload fully, thanks!
Download: http://robert.nuclear-dawn.net/Misc/de_ ... forest.zip
Have fun!
lol ok ok guys, I think I got enough name suggestion now thanks!
