News - Half-Life: Final Run mod for Half-Life

So as always we open with the tired old trope of progress is chugging along slowly.

Coding and texture creation are adding to the slow pace. Coding is almost completely done just working out a bug where two of the NPC groups who should go into rag the minute they see each other don't.

Texture wise it's always something - make some brushes and go "oh, I need a texture like this"......... and it doesn't exist in any of the vanilla WAD files. Also have to trim down the existing WADs as when I merged BS into HL several doubles appeared. Near as I can tell BS took what they needed from vanilla HL added their own and released the WAD.

In other project news there's a faint possibility of doing some work for a Fallout 4 mod. The FO4 Creation Kit isn't very friendly at times.

I'm also working on a map for TWHL Tower Source. Mapping for Source is quite different and I'm learning as I go. Basewise yea blocks plus textures equals rooms, but beyond that triggers and models (aka "props") have changed in how they operate or are something new like "Instances" which is a map inside a map.

That's all for now,

-K

So just a small update on the coding side of the house. Got some help from the guys over at TWHL and have successfully pulled Otis, as well as both the guard and soldier zombie (the regular one, not the gib chucking Gonome) variants from Opposing Force into a new dll file. Now that I know how to do it I may pull a couple more NPCs from Opposing Force in the mod. Nothing too crazy, don't want to overwhelm the NPC pool.

As such this also means a new FGD was created for Hammer. I pulled what I want into that - we'll see what survives and makes into the hard code and available in game.

So for a quick recap the mod has one weapon with a slightly increased magazine, Otis, zombie guards, and zombie soldiers. For Otis I'll have to go through his sounds and pull all the ones where he addresses the player as "Adrian", "Shepard", "Soldier", and anything else of the like.

That's all for today.

-K

Small victory today.

This is how it goes - I wanted to change the magazine size on one of the weapons ever so slightly as I replaced said weapon with a different one. Well after a ton of reading it came down to "Yea, start coding". So via some older YouTube tutorials and an 8 year old SDK file pulled off of Valve's GitHub I got VisualStudio 2019 running and reading the HL.dll. I made the small tweaks to the weapons.h file and attempted to build the dll. VS came back with 9 errors. All of them about some 'abs' overload problem. I have no idea what I'm doing - how do I fix this? C++ was offered in school but I instead took CAD/drafting and woodshop. Google to the rescue, changed the 'abs' to 'fabs' and look at that it actually built the file. Copied it over to HLFR's directory and ran it. Impulsed my way to weapons and YES!!!! it's showing the new magazine and max ammo as I wanted! Armed with this there will now be more changes made in small increments to make sure the dll is stable.

That's all for now.

-K

OK so here's an update over the Feb. 25th article.

What was lost in the HDD crash:

• HLFR custom WAD file. I've rebuilt most of it as the textures were found in various folders (I have horrible organization skills at times) and at the moment it seems I'm only missing 2 or 3 textures. The names of the missing ones are known at least from the purple checkerboards all over the place.
• Recolored menu GUI. It's a total pain to do and driven by a file called "TrackerScheme.res". Just need to embrace the suck and redo the file. Also take better notes this time.
• Map progress. I recall the last thing I was working on before the crash was building out the dormitory building. Lots of copy/paste going on. The map files recovered from my secondary drive show at least a month's worth of work is gone. The rebuilt hazard course is more or less intact but the first map is completely wiped.

Progress since the 25th:

• HLFR custom WAD file 95% restored (as mentioned above).
• Main menu complete - layout, background, titles, etc.
• Mod directory rebuilt - Shoutout to badsniper365 for their "HL Mod Kit" which comes with a blank directory making this a pretty easy rebuild.

I'm sure there was something else but I can't recall it at the moment. Progress is being made that's the gist of it.

-K

Alright so the old STEAM drive is totally toast. Hooking it up to my old Win 7 PC in the basement showed the same results as my new Win 10 rig. PC will take quite LITTERALLY forever to boot with the corrupted drive, and once Windows finally boots the only option I'm presented with is to reformat the drive.

However it seems I was working off of the secondary drive on my PC, so the only thing I lost was the "custom" GUI for the mod. I can recreate it, it's just a pain. I won't know the full extent of the damage until I rebuild the STEAM directory. Have to pull up the blank template and start pulling everything back in.