Extended News (#1)

Our mappers haven't been wasting time and the first third of the game is near completion! You may have heard that our mapping forces used to be scattered throughout the entire campaign, but since then we decided to focus on the first four chapters and the Hazard Course… you'll see why ;).

We've Got Hostiles is the first chapter to get the honourable status of fully finished and playable. Originally begun by the16mapper, this chapter had to be remade from scratch because of numerous scripting issues. This decision was seen as questionable at first, but soon proved to be a very curious way to make the familiar places feel new. Halfway through the development, the chapter was handed to Tear, our leader.

Tear's and the16mapper's work combined made for an amazing, action packed chapter, a blessing!

Let’s take a look at something cozy, that being Office Complex. This one has been made by the16mapper. There has been added a new section to the c1a2, featuring new offices using the unused green door textures and a somewhat cozy environment, par some dead bodies. There’s even the introduction of an uncut NPC, the panthereye!
Not to mention the completely recreated from scratch c1a2d, now looking like an actual storage area belonging to Sector D.

But why should we talk about chapters set in the resonance cascade if we can talk about chapters set way before? That’s right, Anomalous Materials is back and has been revamped! More concretely, the Anti-Mass Spectrometer chamber got a full revamp, resembling it's distant cousin from Half - Life 2 a little bit more.

• All of the campaign monsters and entities included, be it human grunts with a large variety of weapons, black ops, chumtoads, additional Black Mesa personnel, new and restored enemies, scripting entities from Opposing Force and so on.
• Monsters and decorations randomisation. Every monster, func_breakable, _wall, _pushable and _illusionary have a nice little keyvalue called "Spawn chance, %". Unlike the alternatives in other mods, you can enter any number from 1 to 100 in this field. What makes it better is that they’re not a separate entity, reducing clutter in the .FGD!
• Smart monster sub-models randomisation. HL:E monsters ( especially humans) sure have a lot of variations, if you don't feel like manually setting a head, a skin and what not for every single monster, don't worry: every sub-model keyvalue is set to "Random" by default and we made sure that the randomiser doesn't create a buggy or ugly look for your monsters, Smart™!
• Smart light models loading system. Already demonstrated in the modelling section, a feature that might be truly unique to HL:E. Just put a model with a _light postfix into your models folder and the according additive model will be displayed on top of the base one, works in software mode too!
• Extremely easy to set up. All you need to do to make a mod based on HL:E is just get a copy of HL:E’s SDK, change the menu background, icon, liblist.gam and add/change models; however, you may want to change some code: fret not, as it’s open source! Have we mentioned that we’re releasing hand addons for you to use? We will include Gina and Colette HEV reskins, white and black Barney hands, white and black Shephard hands and even white and black scientist hands; all for your mods!

One last thing before we finish, and that is, join our discord server!

We post a lot of early previews of things we're working on and you can also chat with other fans of this mod.

And if you're an animator, you might be interested in this small announcement:



That's all for today, thank you for reading, have a very safe day!