In this chapter of the Black Mesa Incident you are a highly trained Black Op Soldier. You were sent in with a small squad to assassinate Gordon Freeman as well as other personnel that gave the H.E.C.U trouble. But as the grunts begin to fail and pull out your orders change. Now you must silence HECU soldiers that were left behind and conceal any evidence of the Black Mesa incident. In this journey you will visit new and old areas of black mesa, battling the forces of xen, race x, black mesa security guards, and HECU stragglers. I also plan on adding some new enemies, ones that Gordon & Adrian didn't get to see. With all these adversaries ahead, its good to know that these ferocious agile assassins will be on your side.
design history: I'm sure some of you have seen iterations of this area before. Those who saw this back 2008 they were just floating pyramids and I updated the islands in 2011 giving them a more natural design. I would then update this again in 2015, The layout is actually quite similar to the 2011 version but with more atmospheric lighting.
Info about the are: This area is actually a secret level. There are multiple secret xen areas planned to be hidden within each chapter.
Once again I strongly recommend changing the ground texture of these islands. Also seeing more closely the sky texture intersecting with the picture it's obvious that the sky texture with it's 8 pictures is not properly aligned to it's corners. You should get rid of that as well or fix it with cloning techniques. I'm referring to that ugly line in the middle left of the screen where you can see how 2 different picture segments actually meet.
Other than that nice work.
are these cloning techniques something I can do in hammer? The skybox came from trusty crowbar's packs as well as the detail textures.
No you do these in tools such as gimp, paint shop pro or photoshop.
I just got rid of skyboxes with bad alignments. I have plenty to work with anyways.
Kinda looks like how Xen would look at night :)
Send the sky pack over and i see what I can do for clearing it up. Did the exact same thing for another game once.
23-Down has delivered a lot of critique, but I have to say you have come a long way since your very first demo release way back in 2008. I think I still have it on an external drive somewhere.
I have even worse maps I made in 2006/2007 before I even announced this mods existence on moddb. It wasn't until 2010 that my maps actually looked somewhat decent, I'll still have to revise them though because there's many parts that lack detail or don't make sense.
Beautifully made poisy! Awesome work with these floating islands, nice lighting and awesome skybox, the colors of it are just amazing and fit pretty well with Xen's environment.
I agree with the floating island's terrain texture suggestion. As for the skybox, I've also seen some of the original skyboxes having alignment issues. Doesn't bother me much, but, if you can fix it, that would be nice. But fix the current one and don't just replace it, it looks awesome ;) .
I've reverted back to an official sky until this one can be fixed. I've actually recolored the lights to fit the new sky but if 23-down can fix the alignment issue I'll use one of the custom skies again. There's one that looks just like the skybox shown in the picture but green & blue (this color pallet also looks quite nice here). I'll use that so I won't have to shift the light colors again.