Welcome back to Half-Life: Enriched! You can grab the tech demo containing the first two chapters (Black Mesa Inbound & Anomalous Materials) from the Files page!
Alpha Tech demo version 0.1
Recently someone asked me: OMG, VALVE GAVE YOU ALL HL MAP SOURCE FILES?! 0_o
That would have been great and very kind of GabeN, but sadly... no. So how is this MOD possible, then? For that I have to explain a little about the way maps are made.
There's a lot more to it but to keep it simple: maps are made in a map editor. These are then saved as MAP files. A compiler then takes the info from the MAP file, does a lot of complex calculations and spits out a BSP file. This BSP file can then be loaded into Half-Life as a playable map.
There are decompiler programs like WinBSP that can turn BSPs back into MAP files. The end result is a little messy, because some critical information is lost when MAP files are compiled into BSPs. Most of the world geometry becomes unusable. Luckely, all entity information (like monsters, weapons, triggers, lights, etc) remains intact.
When Half-Life 2 was released in 2004, Valve brought Half-Life to the Source Engine by compiling the original Half-Life map sources with the Source Engine compiler. This also resulted in BSPs but a more modern version that can be fully decompiled back to MAP files. Valve had to change quite a lot to the maps to make them work with Half-Life 2, though. Many entities were altered and certain stuff was swapped out for their Source Engine counterparts.
Thus, I was able to grab nearly intact map sources from Half-Life:Source and then fill in the gaps with the entity information from decompiled Half-Life maps creating a working map once more. Saying it like this makes it seem like this is a piece of cake but let me tell you: this is a LOT OF WORK. I have to constantly crosscheck both decompiled sources for discrepancies and all texturing has to be redone. Secondly I'm adding a lot of improvements to the game, as: fully redone lighting, fixing original inconsistencies and errors, loads of optimisations, merge maps, new textures, new models, etc.
I've developed a pretty good workflow to make the process a bit faster but it's still going to take a while to enrich all of Half-Life. And the old engine gives me plenty of limits to what is possible but I'll write more about that in an upcoming article! Thanks for reading!
Very interesting insights. Thanks for sharing!
Gladly! I actually enjoy writing these explainer articles a lot, so I'm happy to hear you found it informative :)
From what I read, I realized that this is more difficult than I thought.
You're missing a pipe in the 2nd image as Half-Life: Source itself forgets to add said pipe.
Good catch! I've been staring at these maps for so long that you'll start missing obvious things.
There are quite a lot of interesting inconsistencies in HL if you pay close attention :)
You may want to look into adding some of the PS2 additions to the maps.
Is there new areas like put in the main description page or not ?