Update. blog - malortie

2022 summary

2022 has been a busy year.

From late December 2021 up to now, I have been mainly contributing to Half-Life: Unified SDK. The project is still in pre-alpha but you can check the releases if you wish to try.

Aside from a couple of contributions in code, I have mostly been updating models to allow them to work across all 3 campaigns. Several meshes, textures, UVs were reworked so that they could be reused across models whenever possible. Various mesh and animation quirks were also fixed. See 'Additional information' at the end for more details.

So far, all major work related to models that's required to play through all campaigns is expected to be complete but there are a couple of minor improvements/adjustments that still remain for which I'll try to address in my spare time. Note that due to my return to studies, this is likely to occur only between sessions.

Source SDK 2013 patches

I have been asked if I would continue work on Source SDK 2013 patches.

Prior to a few months ago, I had considered eventually reviewing all existing patches and improve/fix issues. This was originally to occur after finishing modeling work for Unified SDK but due to my return to studies these plans are currently on hold.

Additional information

While adjusting models, various challenges arise. For example, HL1 and Blue Shift scientists models have different bone hierarchy, names, length, etc. incompatible skeletons. This required developing utilities to retarget animations onto a different target skeleton, uniformly, adjusting bone lengths and doing other operations in the process.

Although the tool was made for a one time use, it has been sufficiently flexible so that I was able to add specific animations (originally exclusive to certain models) to other models that have similar bone structure e.g.

• HL1 grunts <-> Op4 grunt allies <-> Male Black Ops
• HL1 scientist <-> Cleansuit scientist
• Barney <-> Otis

This should give mappers the chance to use shared animations in different ways.