Campaignjunkie

Pity CJ didn't take his own advice on board when making dm_ominous

Ooohhh, ouch! Are you going to take that from him, Crackerjack?

Err, I hear testing the timing with bots is a good idea too, making sure that the 2 teams clash at interesting areas.

The horror parts were scripted? no way!?

/end sarcasm

Hey, there's a couple great games that have some completely unscripted horror that works a lot better than the cheap tricks in this demo - most notably, System Shock 2 and Thief 3. It's certainly possible.

I have a pretty highend system (3ghz, 1gb ram, ati radeon x800) and it was jerky as hell - entering each room would cause it to stutter and freeze momentarily. But anyway:

Like Mazy said, the whole pitch-black swinging lights thing is a bit more annoying than interesting. But I thought the whole demo was kind of generic anyway; basically running and gunning through a brick-wall maintenance building. Some of the horror parts were pretty cool, if not a little cheap (shadows darting across the room, all scripted stuff). The characters, though well done, are still plastic-looking - it makes you appreciate all the work that went into the HL2 NPCs.

Pretty sure there's a "$scale" property in the .qc you can use to scale it up.

fuck you curman, i though blueshift was great, i enjoyed every moment of it

Yeah, Blue Shift is actually my favorite one - great level design and puzzles, plus scientists that would live longer than a few minutes. If only it would find its way on Steam, but I guess that's an impossibility.

What's so bad about the graphics? Granted, they're not crazy normal-mapped parallax shader-whatever, but it's still pretty good.

I liked the demo. Well, except the beginning. Couldn't understand what that guy was saying at all, unfortunately.

Agree with scaling down the lightmap. Also, those holes are way too polygonal. Look in props_debris for some broken concrete wall pieces or something, rotate them, and put them in the ceiling. You could probably put some debris below them as well. The broken wood beam could use similar treatment, but rather clip the hell out of it - HL2 can handle the extra faces.

I'm pretty sure lighter = shinier. Here's an example of a texture I did (although it's not anywhere near as great as Peri's):

I saved the specular as an alpha channel in the normal map. It works great in-game.

lah blah blah

campaign junkie lets see your stuff I know you have something to show

Well, only because you're calling me out like this...

Attrition, small singleplayer map-pack/mini-mod. My goal was to plagiarise Nova Prospekt to a high degree, but then put my little spin on it.

Babble, a side-project that is being abandoned (for now); don't have time to learn XSI and all those things. Cartoony-stuff is hard!

Seraph, another side-project which will hopefully turn out better. It's supposed to be a gothic cathedral, but I still need to flesh out more "Gothic" details and, you know, build the rest of the map!

Okay Ferret, your turn! You know, show me your's since I showed you mine.

You found enough time to fiddle and make a map?

BA-DUM-cchhh!

Looking good. Just needs more crates.

There's a bit of wasted UV space. You don't need to duplicate the arrow panel or the top panel. Then you're left with 4 panels, which you can scale up to use the whole canvas. Nice work though... Well, for a box.

I think Ferret suggested something about putting boats in the water, which I agree with. It looks too empty / artificial right now. And I would check some of the window placement too (i.e. that 5th screen, on the left). The fog also seems a little weird, and augments the kind of "dead" feeling in the map. I would also put some chimneys/antennas to break up the skyline on the top and make the silhouette more interesting. (look at those photos!)

I finished Eclipse. General impression I got is that it was kind of underwhelming as an HL2 mod: you pick rocks up and throw them. But still, it showed off the team's abilities to get something done, which is probably the main purpose. All in all, it was pretty polished and not half-bad, just not mindblowing or anything. It's certainly a lot better than anything else that's singleplayer HL2 at the moment.

Some "desert palace" type textures. (mostly photosourced from Mayang / stock.xchng) Yes, I know I am shameless.

You might want to move the ceiling/glows up a bit (if there's room). The white light glows are kind of obstructing the player's view across the walkway. Oh, and I love the fan too.

Yeah, it's brushes. It's also entity-intensive. It's also painstaking to build the outline of every object manually. But hey, I have all of my summer to waste dragging vertices, and hopefully the effect (in a complete map) will be worth the effort.

Nothing much yet, just trying to break out of the "realistic prison-warehouse canal" kind of theme that everyone (including me) seems to be stuck in. I've since discovered that I find cartoony stuff much more difficult than realism since you just can't copy a photograph and call it done - a lot more "thinking" involved. Ideally I want a cross between Jet Grind Radio and World of Warcraft, but my art skills aren't really up to snuff.

HL2 materials actually do have detail texture features. But there's already normal + spec maps for a lot of the textures, not to mention cubemaps. It's just a waste of texture memory to have them, since most players won't be staring a few inches down at the ground or at a wall.

The best part is, I have all of those RMF's! Bwahahahaha!

(Oh, and I would take out the first DarkTruths shot, its too weak compared to the others)

It's a white texture, a few env_lightglows, and a few (very strong) lights and light_spot's. Geeze, I didn't think so many people would like it.

People, people! There's more than enough Campaignjunkie to go around! One at a time please, and no pushing!

Bastard child of Prince of Persia and HL2 (using stolen CS:S assets as well as my own manglings). Didn't end up looking as good as I thought it would. Fortunately, I've lost the VMF into oblivion, so I guess I'm starting from scratch now. *shrug*

EDIT: Already mentioned the lamps in the third screen are obscenely low, btw

I agree about the dead trees. Especially those dead bramble bushes - I think it just looks awkward. But if you do decide to keep the bushes, you might want to turn off shadows for them at least (it's blackening the ground under them).

Plus, what's wrong with the street in the 3rd shot? Rather than displacements, it just looks like a lighting error or something. You might want to fix that somehow. Overall, the map doesn't look too bad, but it kind of looks messy/cramped in general - like you're just cramming as much stuff into it as possible.

Considering I didn't even post in this thread, I would guess Crackerjack.

But, err, good luck to this mod anyway!

Just finished the demo, it's great! Definately going to be picking this one up.