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That is on the drawing board. I am going to try and figure out how to call specific animations from the code so that when the weapons overheat there is a visual element to the actual weapon to indicate that it can no longer fire.

I may also, as I venture into modifying the firing animations, try and add the finer details (smoke for example) then.

Thanks for the feedback/suggestions.

The lighting here must be even worse. These maps are made with Source 2007.

There are other things I did not mention because they have to do with individual map events. Trust me when I say that there are some epic moments floating around in my pool of ideas. Not going to release any details about them though as I want then to remain a surprise.

That was going to be my first task starting in March regardless. Many of the recoil animations need to be adjusted slightly. The one that needs it the most is the smg1. The shotgun only needs slight tweaking. Not sure that any of the others need much work, if any, though; the 357 is pretty much fine as it is, the pistol does need some editing though.

The end of the game sees Gordon slowly coming back into consciousness on the middle of a city on the Combine home world surrounded by Combine. Instead of killing him one extends a hand and helps Gordon up and the mod fades out to credits.

For a better understanding, these Combine that found Gordon are part of a insurrection on the home world that has been going on since the Combine invaded Earth. It was not a popular idea and the devastation that Gordon caused to their interests turned many Combine against their Overseers. However, even with their numbers a handful of individuals are still more powerful than tens of thousands of Combine soldiers and commanders in this insurrection. If there ever is a sequel to this mod it will see Gordon helping this insurrection to overthrow their hostile government and restore the power back to the Combine proper, where it was prior to the creation of the Advisors.

Gordon and Alyx fight through the citadel and arrive at the teleportation chamber where Alyx is able to set up a teleport to the mothership, to ensure they are not surrounded when they get there she sets the location to an abandoned sector of the mothership from which they can continue forward.

As they travel through the mothership they become aware of some kind of higher intelligence that is tracking their progress. Right away Alyx thinks it is an Advisor from their run in with one during Episode 1 however this one is much stronger. What they find is something much greater than an Advisor but much more fragile as well. It commands power on the order of Nihilanth and even attacks in the same way (with balls of pure energy) but has an anatomy more similar to an Advisor. Gordon manages to kill it by destroying its life support systems but in doing so raises an alarm within the ship and now they have to race towards the portal.

On the ground more Resistance members are showing up at the citadel and have managed to secure a path directly to the teleportation room and are teleporting up to the mothership to follow in Gordon and Alyx's footsteps and to provide back up as well as to bring up a device they hope to end this conflict with.

When Gordon and Alyx arrive at the transportational singularity (the mothership teleporter is essentially powered by a miniature black hole) they secure the area and then wait for the Resistance team sent up to deliver the device, a neutron bomb, so they can deliver it to the Combine home world. However before they can start the detonation sequence the Combine breach their defenses with striders and gunships thus forcing someone to have to carry the bomb and detonate it from the other side. Gordon decides to go after helping the Resistance members re-secure the area. Alyx plans to teleport everyone back to the surface after Gordon goes through.

First Source is still a perfectly good engine, in the right hands it can make maps that compare to most of the newer ones and can be given new features as well.

To answer your main question the mod is still in pre-alpha stage, not many of the details are hammered out yet.

Since you seem so keen on ripping it down though I will go into some more detail on the plot; everyone else, if you do not want some fairly big spoilers DO NOT READ THIS. Your only warning D:

The attitudes of the Resistance leaders have changed much since Gordon was sealed off by GMan. They used to think that just driving the Combine off-world would be enough to secure their freedom; they have a more realistic perspective on the situation now.

They realize that the only way to stop the Combine is to deal with them at their source, the Combine home world. However the only know teleportation device that can connect to their home world is located in their Mothership up in orbit and no one has even come close to being able to find a way up to it.

They tried, with rockets, but they have all been shot down and experienced soldiers lost. Their new idea, which they have been trying for several months, was to break into one of the newly constructed citadels and use a teleporter there to reach the Mothership.

When Gordon arrives back on Earth they are right in the middle of organizing their largest offensive on their target Citadel, Citadel #4 (again this is the Combine naming scheme not mine, I would love to call it something else but it would break the lore and I would rather not do so much more than I am already going to). Even though Gordon is only one person he serves as a symbol of defiance and emboldens the other Resistance members and with Gordon's help they are able to make it into the citadel, albeit with heavy casualties. Continued in another post.

Thanks, I have a feeling I am going to need it; the vision I have in my head for this mod is one of my more ambitious ideas I have ever had.

Essentially yeah.

That is a very probable feature for the RTS/RPG build. I do not think it could work well in the text build though. But you are correct, motherships will be able to transport ship types smaller then it depending on certain variables.

The system will not be used on normal weapons, unless I change my mind about that. It was meant for the White Matter Weapons I will be getting to making eventually. However I decided to take a safe approach and make the system work for any weapon so if I wanted to add it to the regular weapons all I would need to do is change the settings in the weapon script file instead of mucking around in the source code. As they say work smart not hard.

Yeah, this is just the prototype. I made it non-weapon specific in case, if I am REALLY lucky, someone makes a mod for my mod and wants to use it for other reasons or on other weapons (or if i change my mind). I only have plans to put this on White Matter Weapons once the time comes for me to add those. Having it on the pistol is just for diagnostic purposes.

You bring up a great point. Normally I would agree with you but the way the story is written the Earth Alliance is in drastic need of crews and captains and have conscripted anyone old and healthy enough to join the military. Because of this there are a lot of untested captains, who are only captains in name but not experience, in the military.

This ranking system is less about an individual level of experience and more about the overall level of ship experience. I know that does not make much sense at the moment and I will attempt to figure out a better way to implement the ranking system or find a way within the story to make it work with a bit more clarity.

Thanks for the feedback.

Delaying the progress update until Tuesday of next week. This is to get some things in order, finish the planned mapping, and for some other stuff. Reasons will be given in the update.

I was too lazy to break it up into tiny pieces, :P, but no it was just a test so I did not want to do anything too fancy.

Nope, this is purely a text-based game at the moment =\

Was it that long ago? O.o seems like ti was just a few years ago that Stargate came out.

I know lol. Sometimes I forget just how buggy the SourceSDK is, or has become actually, ever since that major update last year (august?) seems to be very unreliable.

Man, this, I think but I could be wrong, blows BM:S out of the water in the art design. Really nice stuff showcased here.

I am very surprised this is going to be a free mod, awesome.

not only that, but AutoDesk ripped a lot of features out :\

I meant to say working on CI as a whole and not just mapping (referring to the 1st paragraph where I listed the dev time for CI each cycle). Quite a lot of the time goes to writing the story as well as testing things my ideas for maps and working on the code.

In case you did not know this is a one-man project essentially; I have other development members but they are pretty much either non-involved with CI, on other projects, or bug/alpha&beta testers.

Possibly, but I do not like to work within stereotypes. This is the way I show my map progress, since I do not have a tonne of time to spend every cycle mapping, usually around 90 to 140 hours per two months, it is usually in short bursts so we end up with screens like these.

Plus we are still in early development and I could change my mind at any moment for a map, that being the case I do not like to fill them with things until I am sure that we are going with that approach (see comment on last screen for an example) so I do not waste the time I do have to put into mapping.

I would rather take a year working on a map and get it near perfect then to pound out a mod in six months and have it be half baked. That is just my work style. Trying to subject my release style to the status quo of "once it is near finished" would mean I would be making updates about every 8 to 10 months, far too long imo to hold the attention of any would be followers.

Thought you do have a point for people who are just starting to follow us and are not used to how we do things.

Thanks for all of the replies. I will see if I can incorporate them into the retooling of our mod image later on this year. I will likely take out the characters and try to reincorporate the "felling" I was trying to push for with the Combine/Resistance symbols in a different manner.

Hey everyone, sorry for the late update. It will be coming later tonight, I will give the reasons for the delay then.

That is one thing you can count on. CI will never die. I may go into hibernation once in a while, but I will never let the project die entirely until it gets finished, and I will not let my followers be hung over a cliff waiting for updates without previous warning, like some other Dev team we know of here on MDB...

It may take 3 more years, it may take 20 (j/k), but CI will be done eventually sometime in the future when I have more time to put into it, or if I manage to find some mappers and programers that want to help out.

I would not say 5 seconds, took about an hour for the whole thing because I manually did the curved sections instead of using the arch tool, but yeah these are just subdivided displacements; nothing that fancy.

There is a bug with the pistol sights at the moment where the y-axis (i think) rotates based on the angle of the gun. Still not sure how to fix it though.

it requires, at the moment, HL2 as well as episode 1 and 2 due to using materials from all of those games. It may also require Ep3 once it comes out and GCF linking is fixed to work properly. However the demo just needs Half Life 2.

We are still very much alive, just doing bi-monthly updates. The next one is scheduled for May 31st.

This is only temporary until I can get the new HUD hammered out. I thought it would look better this way then having some crappy dual-toned image covering the video xD.

pretty much correct. Think of suit energy as 'shielding' (i know it is a bad cliche but just roll with it xD). Once that outer shell is gone then the armor/HP takes the damage.

There will be certain damage types that the shield will and will not protect against once all is said and done. For instance shields might protect against high velocity damage, like from the SMG, but will not protect fully against stuff like rockets or WMWs. Radiation damage will not be block-able to armor (contemplating an upgrade that will allow it to though) or shields while blunt force damage might only be blocked by armor (falling from high places).