Within the past 2 weeks, Half Life has had a gamebreaking update, several subsequent hotfixes, changes to the codebase, changes to the SDK.
Whether it was planned due to the 25th anniversary or whether it was by accident, there have also been updates updates to the commonly praised and highly esteemed mapping tool: Trenchbroom.
The hotfixes to the half life codebase and source code have allowed the use of old format TrackerScheme.res, the use of client.dll changes that are old-fashioned have also been rendered less explosive and gamebreaking through these hotfixes. I'm grateful Valve got on top of this quickly, I knew it would be fixed eventually, I was simply unsure as to when it would happen, which made me disillusioned and caused me to focus on things besides map development.
However, since the fixes the development has resumed and even more interesting progress has been made.
Half Life Anniversary Update page
Those who have been keeping up with the github page of Trenchbroom will know that not only is this project open-source (Which is not the case for J.A.C.K.)
But it is currently under a CI/CD application on github, which allows us to get nightly builds.
I was first brought attention to this by some of the community members on the Whole Half Life discord group.
Those of you who know me closely probably know I could have gone months or years without inquiring to this because of my proclivity to avoid larger use of social media, especially in locations where there are large numbers of members all contributing to great amounts of background noise.
I'm grateful there are some members there that helped me start on this journey to building a platform to use TrenchBroom more, as it's clear-- TrenchBroom is no doubt the superior modern BSP mapping tool.
Through a trial-and-error process, I have been able to edit the gameconfig.cfg for half-life in the trenchbroom directory, I've been able to edit the aomre.fgd I wrote to conform to trenchbroom's more favored format, and I've been able to get trenchbroom to display the title, description and available options for spawnflags when interacting with entities.
With these new tools ready to use and more possibilities opening up with each nightly build of TB, I'm very excited for the future of the mod and even more excited to work with my favorite level editing tool.
Yes I did take several screencaps and one even of my web browser simply to get moddb to allow me to publish this news where all can actually see it, thanks for this arbitrary and unhelpful limitation by the way.
I hope you all have a warm winter solstice and stay healthy, see you in 2024.
New to me. Didn't know about Trenchbroom.
Could be interesting to see those files for Trenchbroom configuration and FGD.
They are messy, but I don't mind publishing what I have in the next upcoming demo, I could also post them to my discord server.