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Yeah that was my main concern when I was making and testing it, there is quite a bit of screen covered. I toyed around with the idea of making the task list area more transparent, maybe around 60 to 85% so that view space was not lost.

But the idea of this is to promote that you are inside a helmet, as to why there would be a helmet at all, I will cover that closer to release

I may figure out something further on down the road, maybe an animated thing where this section pops out when the task list is opened.

Hmm, its probably just the resolution, although there is currently a bug with the iron sights for the smg, if you switch to a new weapon while in IS mode the camera position doesn't reset. So that could be what happened there.

Is this game made in RPG Maker? The tile sets seem pretty similar.

that's not entirely true, or maybe I am the only dev that does? Lol still though, in regards to this particular dev you are right, need an update of some kind, I mean the last one was 8 months ago. They are waay over due.

I suppose I could replace it with some of that combine-ish glass from teh first area. Would fit in better with the braces I think.

Don't really have an answer for that xD, least not one that would be meaningful. It's just the way I designed them; the whole floor is more of a central power generation area, things have to be on a larger scale in those kind of situations.

If you want I could put you on the Alpha/Beta testers list.

Its still a little ways off, but I may start alpha testing some of the maps in the next few months.

yes, though I may change the texture. The displacement in the back of the last screen shot is the real issue with that, its stretched so much that textures do not want to get applied correctly, even with face/world and treat as one.

I might have to figure out a different way to make it and start out with hollow blocks instead of solid ones, as this would likely fix a few other the other problems.

its not really an issue, there is already a temp fix on the steam forums (someone posted the old binaries).

Pretty cool, artwork is nice, the models are awesome. I would say this easily "companions" BM:S, although they haven't released any info in a while so who knows, might be better.

To comment on the music, the OPM Theme, while awesome in its own right, seems kind of off. Can't explain why though. Op Bravo Mike, though, is amazing.

I'll be watching this as well now, looking forward to what you guys can produce.

I was going to write a lengthy bit, but I exceed the character count by a lot @.@.

So, the short version.

I am not a pro mapper, I don't get paid to do this. Some people look at mapping for mods like is a life and death situation, that maps have to look like Valve made them. I don't aspire to emulate Valve's work, I aspire to tell my story through my mod.

That said, making this mod is nothing more then a hobby to me, albeit one that I am very vested in, but a hobby nonetheless.

I do not have that certain spark when it comes to mapping like say the mapper for Raindrop has. All of my work comes from experience and critique; which is why I was/am relying on it so heavily.

I think I have said this countless times before but the screen shots you are seeing, they are of maps in progress. You see source-less lights because I am not at that stage in my mapping process yet. Lights come last for me. I won't explain my process, that's what killed my char count before, but I will say that I takes me months, maybe even years to finish a map entirely, 100%.

I don't like to rush things and I have the patience to follow this mapping process.

To those of you "holding back" because you don't want to discourage me. You don't have to. If people saying my maps were crap was going to stop me, I would have stopped the second I listened to PodCast17 or Read the review for the demo on PhilipsPlanet.

I am not one to fold under peer pressure or negativity, so lay it on. I might just end up with better maps because of it, although I might end up losing some sleep from it lol.

Yeah, this is just the base work, I have a lot of work to do in the area in the last screen shot and with the map in general; I was just getting the ideas out of my head; let em stew for too long and they can go sour =\

If I were to give it a percentage of completion, I would say it is at around 30% right now.

Thanks for the feedback earlier tho. I don't mind paragraph responses or comments, hell I'd be fine with pages; I'd still read em.

lol epic indeed, nice to see though!

My short answer: Thanks I'll keep that in mind.

My long answer: Most of the stuff in these weekly reports (even of "finished" maps) won't represent the truly 100% finished maps. As I keep working, getting more experience with hammer and through comment feedback I will likely g through everything and scrutinize it.

Does it look good or like crap? Could there be more interesting things here? What if I changed the lighting here? Etc.

For now I have not said anything big about the plot line yet other then you play as Gordon and are eventually going to defeat the Combine once and for all. Even I do not know how this story will end, it's a work in progress. I have ideas about how it should and what progression it should take, but you never know when you may get an idea that will change a story completely.

That in mind, I understand about being too transparent or too CIA-ish is a bad thing. I'm trying to walk a fine line between releasing enough of the work being done to get people interested and not releasing too much of what will be in the finished product.

Right now I can say that every area in each screen shot will either have more stuff added to that area or not look the same (lighting or otherwise). I do not plan on releasing images of fully 100% completed maps, just much of the work, throwing out a figure I would say 60% to 80%, up to that point.

But yes, I will entertain the idea of monthly updates rather then weekly. It may or may not speed up progress though, that is from external forces outside of moddb/moding; collage and other projects.

But here we are, at the end of February, maybe this is not such a bad place to start doing monthly updates. I will need a bit of thought on it though, so I will likely let you know in the next report.

Anyway, enough typing lol, walls of text are generally not read on the internet <_<

I have not released the entire plot line of the game yet, so it is a bit early to call it out on being too similar to HL2+.

Even while that may be true, there will be some twists.

lol, I guess it is not a total impossibility, but might be a while. Right now the only map that have any game play on them are the chapter 4 maps and chapter 1 maps.

But I will see what i can do.

1. it isn't stealing if you have permission from the creator and/or intend to include credits (which I do over at FPS Banana).

2. go read some of the responses to Shirk on the next image. You may find them enlightening.

personally I don't really care what your kind of people call my mod, a single person can not make totally new content all by themselves without either a hell of a lot of free time (which I don't have now) or some tricked out programs (which I never had to begin with).

its a possibility. If/when I find a weapon modeler and animator or when I learn to do that stuff myself I probably will be including some new weapons that fit in with the back story I created. But this is a ways off, after the mapping is finished for the mod (possibly still a few years, unless I can find some mappers to share the load).

its actually all one map, but point taken. Although using different textures for each room would make it seem less organized imo.

hey, what do you know, it worked! Thanks.

I agree as well, c++, or something similar, should be one of a coders base languages (along with maybe c# and possibly java) in the first place, in my opinion. C++ is probably one of the easier languages to learn, least it was for me.

But yes, watering down an engine to hand-hold the "mappers"-esque people, as it was put (mappers should map, not get into coding. If you want to code, go learn the language you want to code for), is not the best way to go about things.

interesting, ill try scaling it back then.

huh, very interesting.

This kind of reminds me of RPG Maker XP, except full 3d. sounds cool, might be able to use this for a certain project I have going.

Guess I'll throw you a vote as well.

just dled it and installed it and so far all I have to say is that some of your icons are wrong ;P

"Waterfall" village icon is really for Cloud, and "Wind" village is Waterfall.

Oh, and the installer music got annoying after a while.

So, my first impressions (just played for a bit before the server I was on dropped and then the game crashed) are that its fairly good for a beta release.

There are some odd issues when walking up walls with the screen taking a few seconds to update the new view and some random crashes as well.

Will look forward to future releases though.

Vista Ult. 32-bit, game plays fine for me.

for which weapon?

Lol

yeah this was only a proof of concept/beta, as it says in the news update that moddb has yet to approve <_<, will still be improving it as time goes one.

lol.

map looks crazy though, wonder how powerful of a computer it took to compile that bastard.

rusted metal,almost looks like one of the HL2 metal door textures.

the railing texture is from source as well.

but yeah, when I saw the larest screens for a second I thought they were real pics taken out side, jesus.

whoever their mapper is, he/she is godly.