July Progress Update news - Outcast mod for Half-Life 2

Another month, another article. As always, we were busy working hard this month. A good bit of things worked on are spoilers, which we will not show for obvious reasons. Regardless, we still have enough new content that we can show. Lets go ahead and get into it, starting small with some changes to maps.

Perhaps finally for the last time I have touched the lighting on this map. This map was originally made in January, before I even had a proper lightstalk NPC. I also didn't tweak any light settings beyond the RGB color values. Shameful. Beyond just lighting, this map also received a lot of work in the abandoned rebel camp that was shown in a previous article. Here's an image of a different part of that camp.

Some more changes were made to the third wasteland map, however i'll only show a small portion of whats mostly been seen. This map is important to the story, and I want everyone to experience it themselves.

Moving on to more interesting stuff, I have began working on our viewmodel arms. When the player wakes up in the train after the crash, they will eventually find a (conveniently placed) citizen hazard suit. This provides the player with enough protection to step out against the unknown. Hopefully.

Please note this is still early, the textures especially will be made to look much better.

Here's the suit itself, positioned in game.

Here's even a sneak peak at the suit admire animation. It's a bit rough still, but I think it's good enough to show for now.

Now Finally, lets talk about chapter 2. This month, Marco and I really have began working on these maps. We are both working on prototypes, however his will not be shown until next months article. what we'll look at now is one of my prototypes of the mines.

These are prototypes for the beginning of the chapter, after you have entered the mines. Before entering the mines, you must make your way through an old industrial site. That is what will be shown next month. Another part of the mines i've been working on is the beginning of the actual Antlion Hives. Here's another rough screenshot of the beginnings of this area(new model!). This is very early.

And of course, with our new caves come new antlions. One of the new ones made this month, and the final creature to be created for chapter 2 is the Antlion Roller. I've been afraid to work with this model due to the amount of legs it has, but I used some tricks to get it all working well enough for me to use.

Something to note is the iridescent texture. This is actually the hunters iridescent texture from Episode

2. hue shifted a bit. It works surprisingly well, and gives it an even more bug-like appearance.

The Antlion Roller is an enemy cut from Half-Life 2. It was meant for the Antlion Caves, but not much is known about it besides the leaked model and textures. For Outcast, we have repurposed the Roller to have a peculiar relationship with another one of our restored cut creatures, the Antlion Birther. The Rollers are guardians of the deep hives, where the Birthers who are laying eggs are located. They are typically found patrolling the deep hives, but can at times come up closer to the surface. The AI for this NPC is being figured out and written, as of now it is only able to walk around, chase the player, and play the spray animation.

Here is a look at the current idle animations. This is the actual npc_antlionroller I have began writing, but notarget is on.

And finally, here's a look at some new window models i've been making for the previously mentioned industrial area. Brush windows haven't exactly stood the test of time, First here's a picture of one of the props on an early blockout of a building.

And finally, here's a picture of a good bit of the new window models made in Blender. Some were based off of HL2 textures, while others are from reference images.

That wraps it up for now. I hope everyone enjoyed, and if you would like to leave any feedback I can be reached on discord at Zapagoogas, or you can join us in the Outcast server here. See ya next month!