If there are any beginning modders or those like me who started pre-Steampipe in the crowd I have a small list of high yield info, as they say in my industry. Maybe it'll save you hours of googling, valuable hours you can use for going outside.
1. Compiling Source SDK: It's not bad. I managed to make it work with zero compiling errors only by installing both Visual Studio 2010 and 2013 then compiling 2010 versions of the projects (not converted!) using 2013. If you have an edu email account you can get both VS 2010 and 2013 free from Microsoft Dreamspark.
2. Task management: I used to keep long lists in Evernote, add to a bullet list when something new or broken came up, then strike it out when finished. After a couple days the list would always become, well, a hot mess. This time I used task coach (Taskcoach.org) and it was awesome. There is also a cathartic thrill of sorts as you see the count of incomplete tasks go down and the list go from all red of despair to all green. Plus you feel all serious and stuff about a hobby when it needs a dedicated task application.
3. Gameinfo.txt confusion: There was conflicting info on the interwebs about what number to use. For reference, in order to get mine to work correctly as a SSDKB2013SP mod it uses SteamAppId 243730. I also had to revert to the old way (using /custom/ folders) so that it will load my stuff first. Feel free to take a look when I put up the download.
4. Rebuilding scenes.image: I had to wrestle to make faceposer run properly (don't remember what I did) but was instantly depressed when I found out I couldn't rebuild at the end. Turns out if you run faceposer with your mod as base it rebuilds! Faith restored. If you need the original HL2 animations just copy over the scenes and expressions folders as needed, rebuild, then remove it all at the end. Thanks interlopers.net!
5. Save and backup like a madman, if you don't do this already: For a long while Hammer would crash if I tried to change entity flags. It would crash if I clicked something twice in a row. It would crash if I looked at it funny, and then it would corrupt my entire save file. I got into the habit of Ctrl-S'ing multiple times a minute and saving a new copy every few days or with major changes.
6. Misc notes:
- As SDK notes says, multiples of some entities don't work well (ai relationship, fog controller, logic playerproxy) meaning change things with I/O instead.
- The damage filter works well but cannot prevent people from drowning. Invincibility has never been so hard (without resorting to just command lining godmode, lame). To disable drowning you have to do so in the code and recompile. It also means for us largely noncoders you're stuck with either human or Aquaman for the entire mod.
- Facial expressions built with flex in faceposer seem subdued in-game - why so serious? (No idea.)
- Some properly encoded wav files refuse to play even with completely proper triggers. Solution? Create a new func_trigger pointing to the same thing. (Defies explanation.)
- All soundscapes suddenly refused to automatically play for me unless they were triggered with one of those func soundscape boxes.
- Too many triggers and/or multiple complex trigger with activator filters can cause the engine to get a mysterious "AllocTouchLink: failed to allocate to" or something error that means something like the engine doesn't like things touching triggers they should be touching. It also means all other trigger volumes stop functioning. The only solution I've found is to find another way to do what you want.
Hope this helps. All the files are in the zip file and the mod is pretty straight forward, so take a look. I'll try to stick around moddb for a bit if you have questions.
