Bloodstone - The Journey Home mod for Half-Life 2

Hello Dr.Thrax,

unfortunately it seems like there has been a big misunderstanding. Bloodstone was always meant to be an Episode One mod. And we've always addressed it as an Episode One mod. I'm not entirely sure, how that got lost in the introduction paragraph. Unfortunately you cannot choose Episode One as a mod type, or we would have done it back then.

To all those without Episode One who have been expecting Bloodstone, we must appologise for the misunderstanding. (It's only $9.99 and a really good game to play as well, if you're tempted to get it.) And I must iterate again, that this was a University Project. The Mod has been created with 5 people in less then a year. Now where we all finished Uni and are starting jobs, there won't be a lot of patches or even addons in the future.

Apart from this obvious problem, I hope everybody else is enjoying the game so far. What's your progress everybody?

What about to release your FGD files? It would be cool, if other players should create their own mods and stories based on this mod.

Wonderful mod, I couldn't imagine all these being possible in Source. Congratulations. HOWEVER, there are quite a few minor bugs, which I ignore and forget about them. But there are problems which I find... disturbing.
#1. Only one save slot (perhaps allow custom saves?), this is pretty hard. Especially when you keep losing your saves on transition crashes. I replayed this game over 5 times, due to save losses. I'm not sure what causes this but in the Wilderness, possibly caused by completing the stable master quest (I tried many ways to determine the cause), upon attempt to return back to Riverside, the game crashes... with your save too.
#2. I tried to work around this by copying/backup my savedata.dat file. Turned on my game, pressed F7. Press press press. Nothing. I made so much progress *sniff*. I'll understand if you aren't able to develop a patch, but this is absurd.

Again, this is a feature that just got lost in the big pile. But if you copy paste around with the savedata.dat in the main Bloodstone-Folder, you should be able to save different stages. Might your crash have something to do with another issue described, where it crashes on level-change when you have too many items in your inventory?

Ah yes, this is probably the cause. When I have more than half of my inventory filled, it crashes on transitions. I've tried copying my savedata.dat file away, I couldn't load after that. I'm not trying again to risk my progress :P. It appears that after I crash, I shouldn't try loading (it takes to me the menu map with my items). If I go straight to new-game, I start in the AB Inn room with all my stuff intact.

Out of curiosity, why does the mod only work with Episode 1?

I was trying earlier to figure a workaround, and with a bit of help, it may be possible to simply run an executable file to the mod without Ep. 1.

Try doing this, though I'm not sure if it works:

Create a shortcut to Steam. Right click and then go to "Properties." In the "Target" field, copy this:
"C:\Program Files\Steam\steam.exe" -applaunch 215 -game "c:\program files\steam\SteamApps\SourceMods\<Bloodstone Folder>"

(Im not sure what the Bloodstone folder is called, so you'll have to manually edit that in)

Then, in the "Start In" box, fill in this:
"c:\program files\steam\SteamApps\SourceMods\<Bloodstone Folder>"

I suggest renaming the file appropriately. I'd imagine this is a valid way of getting IN the game, but, I'm not sure of how safe such a method is.

Yes this is correct. You can launch mods that require Episode One instead through Source SDK Base (appid 215). It works fine this way, there shouldn't be any problems resulting from running this way.

Hope you enjoy the mod. :)

"...is that sufficient to play?" Why don't you try, maybe you might be a lucky person! :)

"...2GB big man thats alotta space" Maybe we should get a new hard drive soon? :P