'Nother One for the Pile news - Terminus mod for Half-Life 2: Episode Two

Yeah, I think we all knew this was the case.

TL;DR

To summarize, Terminus ceased development in early 2015. Due to a multitude of issues, and our lack of knowledge and experience at the time, we simply moved on to other projects. This developer build is the last version of Terminus as it stood on our git repository for almost four years.

So... What's in the build?

A bit of everything. Our codebase was getting really unstable, so there are plenty of bugs and technical issues. HOWEVER, we had a bunch of cool stuff as well! We had the original Antlion Grub AI restored to its former glory, along with the Combine Guard, hydra, and some others. Map-wise, it's a mixed bag. There aren't many precompiled maps, and the ones included are a mix of legitimate effort, concepts/experiments, and complete shitposts. The original map sources (along with some model and texture sources) are included with this download as well.

What killed the mod?

Terminus died a slow painful death. It's a mix between the classical fate of all ambitious source mods (People grow up, go to college, get a job, etc.) and lack of technical knowledge (we barely knew how to use Git properly back then). This combined with our programming lead leaving the project to start his own thing, and us managing to hit the size limit for bitbucket lead to the slow decay of development interest.

Beta mods are difficult to work with, as you essentially battle the same demons that Valve faced for all of HL2's development. Can it be done? Absolutely. Were we going to pull it off? Evidently no.

So... what HAVE you been doing instead?

Some of the team has moved on in life onto other things. The rest of us keep up with other projects. In an interesting turn of events, development on Insolence has kicked off again, with some of our team focusing on bringing the classic beta experience we all know and love. Others (myself included) have changed our focus to a much more prestigious project: Mystery Combat Man 4: The End of Time.

Anything I should gleam from this as a source developer or aspiring modder?

These are just some personal anecdotes from me (CrazyBubba) and do not reflect the opinions of every team member but...

1. Don't bite off more than you can chew. Define a scope for your project early on and DO NOT CHANGE IT.
2. Have contingency plans for every team member and software tool. If you have only one programmer and nobody else knows what the hell an if-statement is, then you need to either learn it yourself, or get more people who do know.
3. Experiment with dumb ideas when you hit burnout. Parent a couple of entities together. You just might find something fun.
4. Unless you are planning to simply fix WC maps, you should be mapping from scratch. The WC maps are interesting, but a beast to work with. You will waste a lot of time trying to modernize maps that are old enough to vote.
5. Keep in communication with everyone on the team, make sure that there is a focus and progress is being made.
6. Have a solid understanding of the tools you plan to use. If you use something like Git, actually learn how to use it properly. It is a powerful tool that makes collaboration a breeze in the right hands.

Hey, some of these maps are freakin' weeeeird... What gives?

We had a couple of oddball inside-jokes.

Other than that...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah I don't know what to tell you.