Getting Started
Creating a mod on your own is quite an undertaking. Thus, picking the right engine is a key decision that can lead to the success or failure of a mod. I choose to build The Nightmare Chronicles on the Half-life 2 engine because it is the one I am most familiar with and has a large base of knowledge provided by the developers and the community here at moddb. A very usefull site for developing for the hl2 engine is the ValveDeveloperWiki. It is a quick refence to most features of the engine and comes in handy when doing anything from level design to coding.
Why isn't my mod working?
I began with Valves handy create a mod tool that comes with the SDK. Gave my mod a name and chose the verison of the engine I wanted. Then Clicked create mod and in a few minutes Valave informed me I was ready to go with a friendly picture of the TF2 Heavy giving me a thumbs up. So the first thing I did was make a quick test map to run around on. And make sure the mod was setup right. After I compiled and placed the map In the right folder and tried to run the game, nothing happened. Apparently Valves Create a mod only gives you the source code. Which means that even if you are only planning on making maps for your mod you will need to have visual studios installed to compile the vanilla code base. After this "crisis" was averted I moved onto the next step in my development process.
You have to go backward before you can go forward
Wanting to use the most up to date version I started with a build of the orange box engine. However, this soon proved to be a bad choice. Because while the general knowledge surrounding the engine seems to exist it is mostly for the older version. So when it came time to code a third person camera I found myself double checking tutorials and questioning why the code i was looking for didn't seem to exist as it should in visual studios. So I was forced to recreate my mod with the episode 1 version of the source engine.
While at first this felt like a defeat, but it turned out to be a good move. The older code base is a bit more simple and easier to parse through. Also it will increase the audience that can play my game.
Once I was on the older code base the third person camera tutorial worked like a charm and I was able to see the ugly untextured "gordon" model running awkwardly around the test map I had built. And after a bit of tweaking i was able to adjust the camera controls and distances to suit my needs for the game.
