Updates? Yes, please! Click that link!
version alpha 0.885
Before we kick off today's update: the MODDB Mod the the Year event is back on! Last year, Half-Life: Enriched came in 8th place for Upcoming MOD. I would love to see the MOD in the Top 10 again this year, so consider voting for my project! Thanks a lot of your consideration.
Most of my updates so far have pushed the MOD further will actual playable content, but today I'm releasing a sort of 'inbetweener'. Mostly because of all of the exciting updates that Half-Life has received over the last two weeks. Most of the issues that made MODs crash seem to have been resolved by now and hopefully Valve is going to push the engine limits a bit more in future updates!
Starting with this new version (0.885), I'm going to switch over to the 25th anniversary build and develop Half-Life: Enriched from there. I've taken some time to fix up the changes in the user interface and added the new menu items that Valve included in the last update. Here's what the main menu looks like now:
The new version also include a crash fix for the Hazard Course and some new player models for the co-op test map. Make sure to give those a spin in your next playthrough!
As you might have noticed, I've also updated some of the artwork on the page. Most noticably is the new MOD logo. Here's a full-scale version that you can use as a wallpaper if you like. I would love to turn this into an physical big box copy to sit on my shelve with the other Half-Life games.
What's coming up next?
Upcoming versions will mostly be more smaller releases that fix bugs or improve the artwork. I'm planning to port the entire MOD over to the Half-Life Unified SDK as soon as that is out of alpha. The full co-op conversion will then function as intended. This might still take a bit more time.
In the meantime, I've been practising my texturing skills and created this new set of Half-Life textures. Other than the Enriched textures, these are made from scratch by myself and not AI upscaled. They're all four times as higher definition than the original textures, which puts them in the same league as Source's quality (512x512).
I'm not certain if I'm ever going to use these for Enriched. I would have to scale them down to 256x256 first to make sure the maps will still compile, so some of the quality will be lost. But the biggest issue is that remaking all Half-Life textures from scratch would take me FOREVER on my own. I'm not sure I want to keep broadening the scope this project and still be working on it when Half-Life turns 50.
Thanks for reading!
Great update
Aww, the build number could be 888, like 3 snowmen :)
You may want to consider a different font for the navigation stripes... it looks too "print"-style (like a newspaper) and I think Arial, which is traditionally used in Half-Life for various things, can fit it better, being more straightforward and plain.
I'm not sure the cleanness and smoothness of the new textures wins me over. Even with the low resolution of the original, the painted detail on them made them feel more real, and having to work out some of it with imagination was not a detriment. Here, the high resolution gives away all of its plainness and flatness.
The old low-res textures looked like they had all those realistic stains, seams, shadows and highlights to imply a surface more detailed than it was. Now it's obvious there's nothing extra. And feels more office-y and built on a budget than a high-tech facility housed inside a refurbished Cold War era bunker. Of course, I can only speak for what I see right now.
P. S. Aren't high-res textures going to reduce the size of the flashlight due to how Goldsrc works? Echoes had this problem.
If your planning on remaking textures, will you do it for some models that have text on them that was smushed by the upscale? Like restoring the original words
Played a little bit.
Xen skies are *such* a mistake.
Do you really not see which one worked better?..
Cdn.discordapp.com
Cdn.discordapp.com
They're fine textures. They can look good. They do *not* look good here. The Gonarch's Lair made me sad as well.
The Nihilanth fight redesign was very satisfying. I'm not sure if it's specifically different in Alpha 0.885, as I've skipped a few previous updates.
Either way, I thought the map changes there were mostly pretty good, and the mechanical changes made him a more real boss, more demanding and enforcing certain pacing. This is as close as getting to fight him for the first time again.
The changes made sense and there were some nice extra touches (not going to spoil them).
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Also, voted for MOTY now.
You can make base ingame textures 256x256 and use black and white versions of 512x512 for detail textures
It's literally looks like Black Mesa Source
More precisely, it's similar to Black Mesa: Classic
Looks awesome, haven't played your mod yet, for sure gonna try it out
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