Recent Posts

41

HL2EM Discussion / Suggestion Sanctum

« Last post by Mr. Someguy on April 01, 2015, 07:11 PM »

Yeah, my main reason for hiatus is Source is becoming unbearable to work with.  Using Blender, Unreal, Source 2 is a ton nicer.

I'm not sure whether I should be disappointed or excited. Come faster Source 2...

42

Announcements / Officially in Hiatus & The Future

« Last post by Mr. Someguy on April 01, 2015, 07:08 PM »

The maps are the easiest part, currently the DoTA 2 toolset allows direct importing of VMFs.  The hard part is going to be batch decompiling the models and textures so they can be re-imported (temporarily, until replacements are made).

Huh, interesting. So HL2's maps with all their optimization and scripted sequences can be imported without breaking into a million pieces? I thought it'd be the other way around. I forgot about them abandoning the .mdl format though, so I can see that being really time consuming to convert every single model.

43

Announcements / Officially in Hiatus & The Future

« Last post by Glitchvid on April 01, 2015, 04:00 PM »

Sad to hear that work has stopped 

On the other hand, Source 2 looks promising. Although unless Valve fully supports it, porting the maps would be hell. Everything that can conceivably break, probably will.

The maps are the easiest part, currently the DoTA 2 toolset allows direct importing of VMFs.  The hard part is going to be batch decompiling the models and textures so they can be re-imported (temporarily, until replacements are made).

44

Announcements / Officially in Hiatus & The Future

« Last post by Mr. Someguy on April 01, 2015, 03:36 PM »

Sad to hear that work has stopped 

On the other hand, Source 2 looks promising. Although unless Valve fully supports it, porting the maps would be hell. Everything that can conceivably break, probably will.

45

Announcements / Officially in Hiatus & The Future

« Last post by Glitchvid on March 25, 2015, 05:49 PM »

Hello everybody, we've got some news:

The HL2EM team is announcing its hiatus, this means active work and production has ceased for the time being.
This does not mean the project is cancelled, it just means we're taking a break to decide our future.

   Primarily we're assessing Source 2 as our next platform, we don't have any special insider information or anything so we're waiting for further information, and it is probably going to be a long wait.

During this time we're going to try and set more concise project goals, likely this project will transform into something more akin to Black Mesa in scope and quality.

Source 2 should allow us to freely increase the technical fidelity of our assets to match a visual upgrade worthy of Half Life 2 after ten+ years, instead of being held back with the same engine it was originally made on.
* This post will be updated with information as it comes in.

46

HL2EM Discussion / Suggestion Sanctum

« Last post by RaTcHeT302 on March 14, 2015, 08:53 AM »

Sorry if I went on rambling again :v

47

HL2EM Discussion / Suggestion Sanctum

« Last post by Glitchvid on March 14, 2015, 07:10 AM »

Does that mean you'll be revamping the current models for Source 2 to be even more detailed? If so, would you think about releasing the models you've currently done for Source 1?

The models would probably not be released, I will however release some of my textures if we do decide to ditch Source, since they would likely need to be remade anyway.

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HL2EM Discussion / Suggestion Sanctum

« Last post by RaTcHeT302 on March 13, 2015, 11:00 PM »

There's not exactly too many finished models anyway and it depends on who made the models in the first place. Most of the models which I did manage to see weren't that great otherwise.

I'm hoping the workflow in Source 2 is going to be improved, being able to just drag and drop a material or model into the engine makes things so much easier to prototype with and it really speeds things up, it also makes the development way more enjoyable to me at least, although the amount of control available over the engine and its tools is pretty much unknown, with the Unreal Engine 4 at least you can pretty much customize whatever you feel like (as long as you know what you are doing).

I'm hoping the new SDK and whatever other tools won't be as shite as the current ones, even setting up a basic source mod feels like such a huge pain in the ass to me.

So far Source has been pretty sub-par from a development perspective compared to the UE4, although one issue with the Unreal Engine is that seeing as the API is constantly changing you always have to update your source, UE4 is still a fairly young engine but the development pace makes up for it in my mind although I'm not entirely sure on how a big project would have to handle this, the documentation is decent I guess, it's still way better than what the Source wiki had anyway but it could be a tiny bit better.

Seeing as Source 2 is an in-house engine I'm just going to presume that it'll be far more fleshed out than the Unreal Engine anyway considering how long it probably has been in development.

I really like all the examples games you get entirely for free with the Unreal Engine 4 though, it's such a ridiculously useful thing, even more than the documentation itself.

49

HL2EM Discussion / Suggestion Sanctum

« Last post by zelpa on March 13, 2015, 10:23 PM »

Not much of the rendering and lighting engine is intact in the Dota 2 version of the engine, so we don't know really anything about how textures need to be authored, maptypes, etc.
If the VR presentation was anything to go by, there's a bit of proprietary methods that are going to require authoring assets specially, something we can't do since no documentation has been release, and because it's not in the engine yet.  Aside from textures and materials, we don't know polycount targets, or best-practices from valve; it would be going in blind.

Does that mean you'll be revamping the current models for Source 2 to be even more detailed? If so, would you think about releasing the models you've currently done for Source 1?

50

HL2EM Discussion / Suggestion Sanctum

« Last post by Glitchvid on March 13, 2015, 10:11 PM »

Surely you could spend this time creating textures and models? Even if you're not currently working on the engine there's a lot that could be done.

Not much of the rendering and lighting engine is intact in the Dota 2 version of the engine, so we don't know really anything about how textures need to be authored, maptypes, etc.
If the VR presentation was anything to go by, there's a bit of proprietary methods that are going to require authoring assets specially, something we can't do since no documentation has been release, and because it's not in the engine yet.  Aside from textures and materials, we don't know polycount targets, or best-practices from valve; it would be going in blind.