Jurassic Life mod for Half-Life 2

30 comments by jurassiclifeteam on Dec 12th, 2012

Greetings everyone!

So almost a year has passed since our last news post and certainly we owe you an explanation. But as that would be to boring and long to read we move on over to the news :)

What you will see it the fruit of collaboration between several member this year. We finished the explorer, drivable, and new weapons, usable, like the machete and SPAS12 which has been redone. We also advanced a lot with NPC, our character models, Nedry and Hammond are still in progress but have advanced much more and are included in the game.

New fauna has been added, birds, insects, crocodiles, and, of course, many new dinosaurs, animated, and hostiles.

We are also working on a whole new AI for dinosaurs, so the most clever of them will patiently hide so he can ambush you when you feel safe. All levels have been greatly improved, with better lights, better design to enhance your experience. Optimizations have naturally also been done to, in fact they take up a lot of the mappers time as each individual object has to be addressed and given the properties to give the smallest amount of mark on the performance while still looking good.

One of our dearest member is releasing the MESA (Maya Exporter for Source Absolute), which is a script that improves the valve's one used to export models and animation from Autodesk Maya to Valve's source² for the newer versions of Maya. This contribution should help a lot of people in the modding community with an incredible workflow of one effective click import to source. It's still being enhanced, but it's already a great tool for all modders working on Maya. Some of our members in JL make use of it already of course.

We mainly need a coder/programer to help on AI, and unique features of Jurassic Life that need improvements (inventory, climate change...). We could use an helping hand from yet another modeler so if you are interested contact us via the forum. Make sure you do have the skills we request. Good modeling knowledge and knowledge of Zbrush or Mudbox for example. Rigging and animation skills for Source is a large plus. Knowledge of exporting to Source is preferred. We could also use the help of someone who knows well the choreography tool.

Open request about Source engine error: Maybe someone in the community can help us out with a problem we encountered recently. When using the flashlight that casts dynamic shadows we get a crash in one of the levels in a certain area. When setting shadow settings to medium the bug is gone. Seems related to flashlight in other words. “To many vertex for a dynamic vertex buffer (number value)>(number value) Tell a programmer to up VERTEX_BUFFER_SIZE“ is the error. It could actually be hardware related as only 1 of us gets it it seems (still needs verification).

Credits : Nicolas “Redeyes” Kirsch, Robert “taurus” Olender, Julien "izZz" Desnos, Nicolas “infernal_cheese” Castagnede, Alexey aka “SIR_Halyavshik", Régis "weSh" Boissenin.