Update on Steam Workshop Version news - Hazard Course mod for Black Mesa

Yo! Today we've got some information on our own special little place in Purgatory.

As you guys know, a little under a month ago we released Black Mesa: Hazard Course for the mod version of Black Mesa, and have since been working towards an improved version for the Steam Workshop. Our reason for delaying was because converting to Steam would take some additional time and testing to make sure everything was functioning and to allow us to fix the stuff that wasn't. We didn't want to delay the main first release on account of it.

Since then we've been working on our upgrades! Some assets have been upgraded, we've written more dialogue and have been tweaking our environments to get a few extra pretty-points as well as iron out some bugs. Buuuuuuut we've encountered some issues. We've been working to fix every issue that we can on our end, that's no biggie. But here's the kicker: There are some critical issues with the Steam version of Black Mesa that make some parts and features in our Course completely broken beyond our control. Some of them we can workaround, but the solution wouldn't be ideal. Some are things we could in theory cut completely in favor of not having the issue, but the rest are things that just don't work at all. For the sake of total transparency, we've gathered a list of things that we cannot fix which you can see below.

• Some logic_playerproxy entity functions aren't called. Basically, this keeps us from making note of player's status and adjusting the game accordingly, which is done in small ways (reactions to
player death) and larger ways (ensuring players cannot get stuck in specific points of a map)
• Choreography
• Custom bms\resource files (captions, hud hints, menu modification) aren't read without manual file overwrite
• Custom bms\script files (soundscripts, soundscapes, credits, character presets) aren't read
• Custom particles aren't read

In addition to this, the Workshop system itself is having some trouble at the moment.

So, what does this mean?
In short, it means we can't release a proper Steam Workshop version until Crowbar Collective fixes the issues with BM. Again, if and when these issues get fixed is totally out of our control. This is frustrating to us because we dislike having the course locked off to an entire portion of the fanbase. We could in theory release a version that's very broken and hackish in a lot of ways with various feature cuts, but we'd really rather not do that for hopefully obvious reasons.

So there you have it. If Crowbar Collective does fix the troubled parts of their game, then yes, we will immediately begin working on getting a Steam Workshop version of Hazard Course up. If they don't, we'll decide on a plan of action. We may just backport upgraded assets and major bugfixes back to the version for mod Black Mesa, and waiting patiently, hoping for a fix. Until then, it's sort of in limbo. Remember the ending of the episode Jurassic Bark of Futurama? That comes to mind.

We'll keep you guys updated.