You can view On a Rail Uncut's workshop page here!
Greetings all! Long time no see! I think it's time for a long, long overdue update!
As most of you will already know, in September 2013 I joined the Black Mesa team. Since then, I have been working to help polish up the singleplayer (particularly some of the encounter design), recreate Surface Tension Uncut from scratch, and I have done a lot of multiplayer design work (I made Gasworks and half of Lambdabunker, as well as a lot of the gameplay design and misc work on other MP maps). I've also been serving as Black Mesa's community manager! It's been an incredible experience being a part of such a wonderful, passionate group of people working on an amazing game, and it would never have been possible without the love and support of the community. So thank you all who played and left feedback!
Since the release of the early access retail version, I have been waiting for the workshop to be upgraded by our programmers to fully support everything which On a Rail Uncut needs to be put up there. They've worked extremely hard and it has taken a long time, but with the current new patch for the latest Crossfire update, that support is now available, and you can now play On a Rail Uncut on the Steam Retail version of Black Mesa.
The actual mod itself remains completely unchanged from the beta version you can currently download here on ModDB, the assets have simply been ported to work correctly with the retail engine version. I will likely never return to develop On a Rail Uncut. Given how much I have grown and developed as a mapper over the last 2 years, in order to further improve On a Rail Uncut to the standard I work at now, I would need to redo it all from scratch, which I likely will never have the time or motivation for. On a Rail Uncut will not be integrated officially into Black Mesa in the future, if it were, I would not have put it up on the workshop for download. Like it or not, the shortened version of On a Rail which was shipped with Black Mesa is the team's definitive vision for the chapter. I have to respect that. For those of you who prefer the chapter longer (myself included), my mod is available for you to play!
So for now, this is probably the last word on On a Rail Uncut. I hope you guys enjoy the Steam version, and like playing it as much as I've enjoyed making it! Thanks for everything!
Yes and we thank you for
A.) building it in the first place and presenting us such a nice and polished chapter and
B.) Now releasing it for the retail version as well. This is wonderful.
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I still believe you're evil in down rating your own product. By any means even if you yourself consider it inferior it was and still is possibly one of the best things ever shown and created in source engine to date. Even Episode2 can't compete with the vastness of all the epic scripted sequences you used not to mention the wonderful looking maps. That you will never return to it is simply put pity but I do understand the implications involved in such much work. So I suppose it makes sense and is just natural.
That the the Black Mesa dev team decided to shorten entire chapters by themselves is still considered blasphemy among the community. Then again without them we wouldn't have such a wonderful game at all in the first place so I guess that evens it out. As a fan of course it's still very sad as you know yourself which led to your recreation of the chapter.
You did demonstrate quite well that even hated chapters in the original can be changed in such a way that they do make a lot of fun. So I'm almost certain the devs could've easily done the same thing back then but they rather chose the easy way out. But be it as it is. For that we got your wonderful expansion and for that once again my biggest gratitude and I'm sure the community theirs as well. :)
Black Mesa rules.. :)
Maybe I'm blind, but what about Surface Tension Uncut? Is that being integrated?
Correct. CU3, next major update.
Oh when I wrote my comment above I was actually partially thinking about Surface Tension Uncut. But ya on a rail uncut is also pretty good so the comment stays. :)
I didn't know you were on the Black Mesa team. Congrats.
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