Campaignjunkie

It's amazing how the author(s) wrote so much, yet said so little. Seemed like a pretty generic article to me. But then again, I don't think I'm the IGN target audience anyway.

I agree with ginsengavenger - the bumpmaps don't help the bricks. Sure, it's fancy shader technology, but I don't think it necessarily looks better because of it. While I'm sure there are brick textures that need normal maps, this doesn't seem to be one of them.

I really wouldn't know, I left months ago. They're doing some sort of restructuring, apparently. I'm sure they'll figure something out though, PV and the team are very resourceful people.

I played the real thing - my friend got it for his birthday as a cruel joke. It wasn't that bad, but it clearly wasn't good either. Some nonsensical design decisions (stupid sidekicks, save gems, shooting mutant frogs with guns for a whole level) were particularly glaring. From what I heard though, the 3rd portion of the game n Europe was supposed to be quite good, assuming you can play it long enough to get there.

It was a little more complicated than polishing off a few maps. While there was a good amount playable (Adam's stuff especially), there was also a lot that wasn't (err, mine, among others). I'm not really exactly condoning the act of throwing the work away, but you have to understand that staff turnover was absurdly high and not much was getting done with HL2 sitting in front of everyone. It's like telling someone to keep watching black & white television when a High-Def widescreen is sitting next to him.

Sid Meier's Civilization 2, mostly the "early game" where you have to expand like crazy in order to have a fighting chance. Then it's a race to switch to a Fundamentalist government to crush the other players!... But I didn't care too much for Alpha Centauri or Civ 3 though, a little too complicate for my tastes.

Thrik: What makes you think the player is (kind of) a Combine soldier? I know the messages refer to you as a human and a traitor, but a traitor to what exactly? I think Adam said he wanted to add voice-over, but he didn't have the resources to do so. I bet lots of people are going to offer themselves over, now that the first map is released.

That Riddick game wasn't half bad either.

... You -might- insult someone? :roll: Anyway, I think it has potential, but right now this stuff probably isn't enough to attract experienced people. Some suggestions: Don't post unskinned model renders, and make sure the media you release is a bit more interest. Go for quality, not quantity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.