Jose emailed me last night. He didn't say a lot, but he's OK, which is the main thing.
We should be having a conversation next week and after that happens hopefully we will be able to let you know what is going to be happening with Random Quest going forward.
Happy Holidays everyone!
Shortly after making my last post here, I lost contact with my co-creator Jose (aka Kasperg). It took me a while to realize it - we have had unplanned breaks in communication before. But nothing like this. At this point I haven't heard from him in over two months. And it has unfortunately brought the development of this mod to a halt for the moment.
The last email I recieved from Jose was on 27th August. The content of that email did not suggest he was going anywhere.
I sent Jose several emails soon after that, but the most significant was an email on 6th September about my latest update to the mod. It was quite a big update, and I wanted him to test it as soon as possible. I expected a relatively quick reply.
But, he never replied, and I don't think he ever even downloaded those changes.
Since then I have emailed him a few more times, the most recent ones simply to ask if he is OK. No response so far.
I have an FTP server which we use to share files. Jose has not logged onto it since before 6th September. We also had a bittorrent based syncing service which we used to hold the latest version of the mod. The server for that indicates that Jose's peer is no longer syncing, also since shortly before 6th September.
Jose's steam friends 'last online' display suggests (but in no way really proves) that he is still turning his computer on most days. But I've never actually managed to catch him being online during this period, so unfortunately that is literally the only "evidence" I have to go on.
So, I now feel a bit silly about that last post I made here, because regretfully it seems quite unlikely now that we will release RQ again this year.
I'm sorry.
Hopefully Jose is OK, and we will hear from him soon.
It is my profound hope that Random Quest 2016, as it is currently known, will actually be released in 2016.
We are working full steam ahead at this point, so things are looking reasonably hopeful.
Major improvements and additions have already been made to every aspect of the mod. Amongst the improvements is the fact that I have learned how to code new things in the Source Engine, (it only took me 10 years!!!) and so the updated mod includes new entities and functionality. One example is, we have an inventory system for the player now!
There is still a lot to do, though.
The way things are going, the re-release will be over 3x the size of the original mod.
If you liked the original RQ ... please hang on. Eventually, we will satiate you. Fully and completely :-D
It's a good lesson when amateur-mod-making to never announce anything that you're not 101% sure of.
Some time ago I began talking about how I was working on Random Quest 2, and that was the truth, but unfortunately my life got in the way soon afterwards and I ended up betraying that post and stopping work again. I'm genuinely sorry for that, and I want to apologize to anyone whose hopes I raised unnecessarily.
The main reason for all this was that my wife had our first child, and I bought a house to raise him in. If you've never done those things - let me tell you this: those things make you very busy. I found the time I would previously devote to making mods stripped away from me. I still do - although I am trying now to find more time for it once again.
Recently, Kasperg and I have been talking again about finishing Citizen and making Random Quest 2. As a result, the finale of Citizen is going to be released in the not-too-distant future. (Kasperg has been working SUPER hard and he is one talented mofo, so you can thank him for that mostly) and quite a lot of promising design work has taken place on RQ2 also.
I'm not going to make any promises about a release date this time. Or even a general release time period. I've learned that lesson already.
But one day .... eventually ... there will be a Random Quest 2.
the third map, right? there is a door in the building to the left of the combine barricade which you can open. Once you get in there, it won't take you long to find the terminal
sorry for the late reply. There are several ways that scenario can play out
The door opens when two conditions are met-
#1 the whole squad has arrived at the door
#2 the door mechanism thing in the corner has been destroyed
If you hang about and kill all the soldiers until they stop coming, but don't destroy the door mechanism yourself, one of your NPC buddies should go and destroy it for you. It's in the corner of the building on the right hand side of the door - it has a red light on it. If the NPC doesn't go to destroy the mechanism, then you should be able to continue on by blowing it up yourself.
You can destroy the mechanism yourself at any time, as soon as you can get to it on the map. This causes your squad to go to the door and leave immediately, ignoring the soldiers.
I've no doubt occasionally the sequence might break, as it was a nightmare to get working right. So worst case scenario you might have to do that bit again (I guess you probably have by now already, but anyway...)
Time for some news. I will now announce that serious work is now underway on Random Quest 2. A new moddb page will go up when the time is right. There is no release date yet - it will undoubtedly still take several months to complete. But things are progressing very well at this point.
I had burned out on source modding and I took over a year off. Last week I booted up the SDK and I've been bitten HARD by the mapping bug again. I've put over 50 hours into the new mod so far --- since last Thursday. (And I work full time!) Too much cool stuff is done now to leave it alone, so I plan on continuing in the same fashion .... I'm having a lot of fun with it. Some of you may be pleased to learn that the narrator from RQ1 is fully on-board for the sequel, so you will be continuing the story of our ordinary man torn from his everyday life and plunged into an abstract world.
See you all soon.
I am not sure if this is really the problem. But so far, I have only seen this problem on 64-bit machines. This seems to be the only thing all known cases of the problem have in common.
In these cases, changing the SteamAppID to 220 will often allow the game to load again. (Wierd)
However it also seems to break the mod, preventing you from progressing past the introduction. (Wierder)
You can then change the SteamAppID back to 215 and it should work again (ultra-wierd) but the problem with the introduction will remain. (off the scale)
I have not got a complete solution to this yet, sorry.
Time to pull out those old 32-bit boxes, folks :D
Last year Valve released an update which broke the voice acting in this (and many other) mods.
There is a patch in the downloads section which, when properly installed, fixes the no-talking problem.
Yes, in this one it does. I agree about the immersion.
When we made this mod we didn't know how to get rid of the suit.
We know now though, and the sequel to this mod does mostly get rid of the suit.
You need to install the patch. Check the downloads section.
The whole mechanism that runs the 'secret' is not perfect and occasionally doesn't work. The only way it is 100% reliable is if you complete the whole mod in one sitting. The problems seem to get more likely to happen the more you save.
Sorry about that.
The 'secret' ending is where you wake up in a different place, there is some of the concept art for the mod on the walls, and some other things to look at. It's a bit like an art gallery. There's also a guy there who talks to you, but to be honest I can't even remember what he says now!
There are ammo dispensers on either side of the arena. They provide infinite ammo, but there is a delay between reloads. And you have to 'use' them, like a door, you won't pick up the ammo just by walking up to them.
The antlion battle is all about timing. There are four antlion guards. They come out one at a time, but the spawn is timed rather than waiting for you to complete the kills, so if you take too long you can end up with multiple guards to deal with.
Don't be fooled by the rocket launcher - your best weapon against the antlions is the secondary fire on your shotgun.
If you do it well, you can kill every antlion before the next one emerges.
Look in your console output after things fail to work in the mod. Are there messages there saying that scene files (.vcd) are missing?
If so, there are two possibilities:
1. You have installed the patch in the wrong place
2. You have discovered a new bug
If you re-check really, really carefully and you absolutely definately have installed the patch correctly, then please take a screenshot of your console output and upload it somewhere so I can see it. I need you to take the screenshot after you have tried and failed to get the first 'bully' NPC to speak (so just walk up to him and wait a couple of seconds, then bring down the console and take a piccie)
With the console output, I'll do my best to help you further.
All non-essential rebels and citizen are indeed kill-able by the player.
This isn't terribly consistent I know, ideally I'd like every single NPC in the game to be vulnerable to friendly fire. But it's not very practical or easy to make this work with a storyline inside the HL2 engine.
You just need to go back to the NPC who told you to find the fuse. When you get close enough to him after getting the fuse, things should move on.
What I meant is - "part 3" is the rest of part 2.
There were only ever two parts planned - but we had to cut part 2 in half for various reasons.
It does get a little confusing, I know.
What has been released is the first half of part 2. "Part 3" will be the rest of it - but we will be releasing it all as one package again.
We will of course provide some way to start in the middle, for those why don't want to play this part again.
Sorry the endings didn't all work for you - it's a bit disappointing when that happens. It usually works though, if you tried again from a save chances are things would go better.
When it happens for me it's because one of the combine soldiers has gone and hidden somewhere, and the rebel scenes won't advance until he's killed. It's wierd as the combine should be running towards you at all times. But sometimes, one will get all cowardly....
1. I like to think of the 'maniacs' as what became of Monk after he was killed (?) by zombies in the HL2 story. In becoming undead, Monk uncovered his long repressed love for gambling, and headed towards the Casino. While there, he had an elaborate encounter with a pane of curved glass, which changed his diet plan to bullets and multiplied his number of souls by three. ;)
2. This was fully intentional. :)
3. The bit with Dog was a dream. In reality, you fell asleep. And fell off the train.
This is part 2, but part 2 was originally twice as long.
When we release part 3, it will have part 2 attached to the front of it, because they are closely tied together in various ways.
So it will all become part 2 again at that point, I guess.
Yes, yes it does.
Although it's not guaranteed it'll happen for you - it depends on the path you choose.
The original Citizen mod also had enemy disguises - more of them in fact.
Thanks!
I did try 7-zip as it is usually my archiver of choice.
Maybe I need to fiddle with my settings more though, as I couldn't get it to compress as well as WinRAR. :(
Some of the maps are very big and contain lots of custom stuff. They can take time to load. I'd love to improve this situation, but I don't really know how it's possible.
The longest load time in the game is of the second map (after the intro map) which seems extra long for two reasons:
1) The intro ends faded to black, and the second map starts faded out for about 20 seconds. It's all about the sound at this point. If you've got your sound turned off, I can understand how you may think it has crashed at this point.
2) We had to change the method of loading that map to fix a different bug. This causes the loading message not to work properly. However the level still loads OK, it's just the message that doesn't work. There are details about this issue in the mods Readme file (included in the mod download).
The issue about the common scene files can be easily fixed.
If you look at the Known Bugs section of the Readme file (included in the mod download) you will find a section which talks about this issue, and there is also a link for a download that fixes it.
We didn't include this patch in the normal release because it is 20 megabytes in size and it doesn't really have any effect other than to remove errors from the console about missing scene files (which the mod does not even use)
To be honest I don't even notice the gun names in the HUD, I'll have to go check that out. I guess that should be easy to fix for the final release.
I have no idea why that fixed it for you - those files are required for this mod to operate normally.
:|
But anyway, I'm glad you got it working!
Sorry, I don't know what else to suggest. I've never seen this issue myself, and you're the only person who has reported it.
If anyone else has had this problem and solved it, please let us know.
Mostly, this kind of error can be caused by the runtime components of Visual C++ Libraries being missing.
You can reinstall the Runtime components of the Visual C++ Libraries to hopefully resolve the problem.
Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package (x86)
If you need the 64-bit version, you can google it pretty easily.
That was us trying to make a new NPC without being able to code :)
He works most of the time :D We tried to see how far we could push a standard HL2 npc without having a coder. That was the result.....
That's a very well made review, Sir!
I want a microphone like yours! That might help some of the character voices be a little better!
Playbus
Chris joined
I like making Singleplayer mods for Half Life 2. My aim is to create things which are different and interesting.