[page=The Handy Vandal's Half-Life Almanac Review]
The Handy Vandal’s Almanac is one of the sites I’m sure most Half-Life modders have seen while learning, and probably still use. The owner/admin Karl Jones (aka. The Handy Vandal) has made sure it contains help on just about every aspect of the art, and if it doesn’t then it can certainly tell you where to find what you’re after. From AI to Zoner’s, the Almanac covers it all.
The Almanac was started way back in 1999, surprisingly, as a single page to organise Half-Life mapping links.
“The Almanac started out as a links page for my own use -- a list of mapping tutorials on the web.” Says Karl. “Soon after I posted the first version of the Almanac, email started arriving -- comments about the site, new links, bad links. And lots of questions. I answered a lot of questions by posting the answers to the site. Sometimes I knew the answer from experience, sometimes I researched the question. This process quickly filled in missing knowledge.”
This process also began the collection of content, and made sure it was what people wanted to know.
Since its humble beginnings the Almanac has progressed from a mere collection of bookmarks to being mentioned on VERC and even having a direct link in WorldCraft/Valve Hammer Editor itself. This is undoubtedly due to the sheer volume and quality of content that’s available, ranging from a simple description of what WorldCraft/VHE does to entire tutorials on adding new code to the game which are simple and easy to understand, walking you through step by step and referring you to details of anything else you need to know about.
When asked what kept the Almanac going, Karl replied “I love game design -- it gives me a great deal of pleasure, creating 3-D worlds. I also like helping people learn new skills. I make my living, in part, as a teacher, so it's natural for me to share the wealth of knowledge.” This makes for far better content than somebody who didn’t really have interest in the subject, and gives Karl a reason to carry on.
But the Almanac doesn’t just cater for newcomers to the Half-Life modding arena. Its comprehensive entity list lets anyone look up exactly what a func_trackautochange or a trigger_endsection does (occasionally even the best of us forget), even across all the expansion packs (OpFor, TFC etc.). This makes it an invaluable addition to any Half-Life modder’s bookmark list.
On the negative side of the Almanac, several links are broken, although this is mainly due to the sites at the other end moving around. The menu is simple to use, but occasionally things aren’t where you expect them to be and the absence of a search engine makes finding them harder than would be thought from such a site. Despite this a few minutes will almost certainly find you a link to what you’re after, or if not give Karl an email and he’ll look it up.
The Almanac’s future looks bright, with updates being made for the development team of Xen Rebels, which benefit the general community as well as the mod’s dev team. In this way other mod teams or even lone tweakers can see how things are being done and learn from there.
When asked about the future of the Almanac, Karl revealed he would like to have a shot at making money out of bits of knowledge – “I want to go commercial -- Handy Vandal Studios. Create something cool, and sell it. Maybe work with an established studio.”
“I'll continue to develop and promote to Xen Rebels mod. In some ways, the mod itself is the next step in the Almanac -- as I learn about the SDK and coding and mod-making, some of that knowledge goes into the Almanac.”
The Almanac is one of the few modding help sites that cover pretty much every aspect of one game for both newcomers and professionals alike. Highly recommended for everyone, if only as a reference tool. I’d like to finish with a quote from Karl himself: “In closing I'd like to send out a big Thank You to everyone who has sent help and encouragement along the way. Without your assistance and good wishes, the Almanac might never have been.”
Links:
The Handy Vandal’s Half-Life Almanac
Comments on the Almanac
Questions and answers
The Handy Vandal’s Unreal Almanac
Xen Rebels
sadly its down, this seemed like a cool idea, can anyone point me in the right direction to something else like this?