Hey there, it's been a while. The mod is still alive and making progress, even if it's slow.
There's been a few changes during the past six months, with first, the base mod used.
Arrange Mode is a great improvement over the default HL base, but it proved to be unpractical for this mod. This is why I have reverted to a Spirit of Half-Life base, and my friend JPiolho has accepted to provide me his coding assistance for this mod. When I started to work on the Chapter 5 map that takes place outside, I wanted to give a feeling of really being in the desert, and thought about using the 3D skybox feature of SoHL. I quickly noticed that this feature was broken, such as entities not being rendered and the skybox not loading when you entered the map from a changelevel. The good thing is, JPiolho fixed it surprisingly fast and made me an extremely happy mapper.
We've also thought that despite how old the HL engine is, there are still many like us that love it and continue to work with it. That's why we'll release the source code and FGD of all the improvements, fixes and additional features added to the code to the community.
You'll likely have seen the pictures already if you're tracking the mod, if you're not tracking it yet, I invite you to do so to keep track of the progress and let me know of your potential suggestions.
I've also been thinking about splitting the releases of the mod. Making a full scale mod takes an awful lot of time if you want to do it properly. Would you be interested in episodic releases containing one or two chapters each time ? (we would aim for 2 hours minimum of gameplay for each episodic release) Or would you rather wait for the full mod ?
In the meantime, have some screenshots of what has been added recently. You won't see everything, because spoiling the entierity of the mod would be pointless, wouldn't it ? We all love surprises.
Tram Station
Some corridors of Chapter 1 (not finished)
An image of Chapter 5
Remember than nothing is really final and could likely change right now.
Have fun and let me know what you think.
New maps are looking really nice! I would recommend you use Paranoia's renderer to power your mod, since it has all the features of SOHL like complex entities and a 3D skybox and also allows for more detail in levels and a proper projected flashlight :)
Releasing in episodes is absolutely fine by me if it takes some pressure off development, keep up the good work!
I don't feel like using another renderer. the paranoia renderer, or hlfx even, just change the feeling of the game too much for me.