Progress Report April/May 2014 news - Combine Insurrection mod for Half-Life 2

Hey everyone and welcome to the latest progress update for Combine Insurrection. This past development cycle saw things slow down a little bit. I decided that instead of gradually working on maps I would focus on specific areas and fill them with stuff to deal with any creative issues. By doing this, though, there was not much visible change to the maps overall.

One thing I wanted to do but ran out of time for was to update the code for SDK 2013. I did however fix several issues I have had since installing it. I fixed the texture quality in hammer and in-game. For Hammer it was the dxsupport.cfg fix that fixed that problem but for in-game the setting for LOD apparently was reset to low and I did not realize it.

So on to the screen shots:

You might recognize this area from the last update. It was very empty then however. I plan to put some more stuff in here but this is how it will look in the general. The second screen shot shows the interior of the security check point. The light source to the top left in the second image has the light fixture textures set to the ones that will be used in the completed map.

Not much else was done to this map except for placement of some shield walls.

Deck 6 was the nightmare map for me for this cycle. I could not get any kind of inspiration for how to fill the space of the main room. In fact I made it bigger by adding in a shooting range which you can see to the left in the screen shot. The central pillars were added to increase the amount of light that the lighting fixtures would cast. As with deck 5 I also added in some of the shield walls.

Deck 7 had more done to it than is shown here, read the vlog section below for what happened. About three hours of work was lost but I will be redoing it in the next dev cycle. I also added in, in addition to the start of the security area shown here, a new area to deal with not having enough security places for the number of shield walls in the map as well as started working on the main security hub for decks 7-5 which will be present in this map. The lighting may be a bit off or wrong because I was not able to build cubemaps for this map; I was getting an assert error in the console, probably from some experimental brush work I was doing for the security hub.

Also here is this update's developer's vlog.

There is some stuff in the video that you won't see in the update because of a jackass mistake I made yesterday when I accidentally hard reset my computer while reattaching the facade pieces after de-dusting the radiator. I lost all of the work I did on deck 7 building the storage room, that is still present in the vlog though.

That is all I have for this update. I am hoping to get some more work done for the next update including some new work in the code to re-add the cooling bar as well as get our more powerful grenade item back into the game as well. Maybe a few other additions and fixes too.

Thanks for following the mod!