Multimedia Update #7 news - Combine Insurrection mod for Half-Life 2

Hello everyone, sorry for having to delay the update a week. This was because of many factors both in the cyber world, like Jan. 18th's blackout, and in real life that I will not get into except suffice to say I lost a week in any and all development and I felt that it was necessary in order to complete certain goals.

I lost a week of dev time and the progress made justified taking an extra week to compensate.

Anywho I made some huge progress, although not much at the same time, this past development cycle. While this will not be a true multimedia update I will cover various update areas like I normally would. I will get into why that is later though.

First let's get the mapping progress report out of the way:

This was the area of the least amount of progress this cycle, while that seems bad it is not because as I mentioned before, I made a huge leap in progress over the previous update. I have added in the final lighting placement and models to the second underground bunker map but I am still trying to deal with some of the light_spots not working and I have not added the point_spotlight entities yet to them as well. I did a little bit of structural work on that map as well as deciding to add in a new room (that isn't done yet). I also opened up the first underground map and did a small amount of work on that, nothing drastic enough to show off.

I also did a lot of work on the Black mesa tunnels map, I redid all 20 of the bends in the map so that I could subdivide it properly. There is still a lot of work to be done on that map as you will soon see because certain areas did not subdivide well or have weird geometry issues. I still only have the basic lighting there and not everything is textured correctly yet.

I also did some work on the Outside are for Black mesa and started working on finishing the rest of the mountain displacements. I also cut this map into pieces with the part further down where you enter Black mesa being moved into it's own map. This was to cut down on the size of the map and also to accommodate the new progression that the level takes.

I then decided to open up the City 23 map from Chapter 4 and I did a bit of updating here, replacing some really old and map mapping with some newer and better version but I did not change much, just a few things here and there while I tried to figure out how best to remake the map to bring it up to date. I may have some screen shottable progress for that map next update.

These tunnels look so much better then last weeks (not shown) displacements. I also changed the geography a bit. This is the same area as in last week's image of this map.

Textures are not completely correct here and some even stretch too far, referencing what I meant by a lot of work still needs to be done.

Still working on the lighting here, the lights that are working will be much dimmer and the effect I am shooting for will become apparent once I get the point spotlights in. There are also lights shining on the teleporter pad I am standing on but they are among the many lights that still are not working (I think they are all too far into the lighting models).

Almost all of the lights in the larger section you see through the glass are not working, which is why it is so dark in there. I gave up on trying to get them working for this update after six failed attempts.

Materials/Models Update #2

So I mentioned last news posting that I was going to be working on getting a large scale building collapse and try to make it look as realistic in size comparison as possible. I started working on that second and I did get the build made but ran into trouble trying to animate it. Due to the number of objects used (1013) my CPU was unable to efficiently process all of the physics involved and was doing the animation one brick at a time.

If my calculations are correct it would have taken 956 hours for it to complete the processing for each object, something that is not possible for me to wait through at the moment. So that is why there is no video of that. Although test animations with smaller number of bricks were fairly decent in the way they fell down. I am trying to find a way to use less objects to get the same outcome, possibly by using the scale setting in the QC file like I did for the wall and house cphysics. This was actually going to be to scale, no up scaling in the qc file, and I think that is what killed me in the end.

Here is where I made the most progress. I spent the first two weeks of January working on the source code and I was finally able to get several things to work. I have restored the Iron Sights as well as the high explosives frag grenade. The later still has some problems I am trying to work out though.

I found that the cause of the issues, while being partially grounded in certain code changes, was that there was something wrong with the client commands conditional statements in my server player object. I fixed those and Iron Sights started working again. I have yet to add the armor system back in nor start to try and get Overheating to work again. I ran out of time just getting the other stuff working but it was a great feeling to get those frigging things working again after a year and a half of frustration.

Hopefully I can get the rest in without any issues and then figure out the overheating in time for the next update so I have something new to show off.

Well that is it for Combine Insurrection's update. I am hoping to make more mapping progress between now and the next update because that front has been sluggish for quite a while.

Thanks for following the project!

~Geowil