PARALLELS - A Half-Life 2 Single Player MOD

First, the good stuff:

Second, the 'boring' stuff:

Tracking has now reached 20% as map 3 comes to a finish and maps 1 and 2 get tweaked and completed enough to call them finalised and finished.

MOD size has been the biggest sticking point for most people so far. While the beta demo was able to be slimmed down, by a large margin at that, the size is still a feedback point. Thankfully, it looks like the size won’t be getting much larger from here on out and there is work going on with regards to textures that can be slimmed down. Unfortunately, there won’t be much slimming going on, as there is a large amount of custom assets in use. You can include 100 maps and 50 chapters with base assets, but adding custom assets is where the battle of the bulk begins. While there is no real compression in the Source toolset, I will be implementing VPK files for faster loading and improved performance. Hopefully, the end result will be worth the download, but in the end, you can’t make all of the people happy, all of the time.

A slower week this week, mainly focusing on working on tweaking the first three maps in regards to bug squashing, light tweaking, and minor graphical fixes, most of which are small changes, but were enough to bug me enough to change them. All three had some minor fixes for both compiling times and background tweaks, meaning they should see a slight improvement in performance on lower-end systems.

Work on map 3 continued with a lot of small tweaks to lighting sprites, a few minor texture changes, and a whole lot of frustrating tweaking with enemy placements. Combine Soldiers tend to have an issue when encountering Barnacles, in that they freeze up, aim at them, and then…do nothing most of the time. This means working around the issue with placements between these two, so there will be a lot of testing and prototyping going on to ensure fights work correctly in the upcoming maps.

There are a bunch of new ideas swirling around that I would love to implement, but I’m still in need of a Source 3D modeller to help create a few models and a programmer to help with some effects, to make them happen. While the MOD won’t suffer without them, it could bring some huge new setpieces and even extra sets of maps if they can be pulled off! Feel free to shoot a message if you’d like to join on!

For inspiration, lately, I’ve been scouring over various movies, games, and even music that have jolted my creativity in the past. Returning to the STALKER series of games, alongside the film, Сталкер [an absolute cinematic masterpiece and in my top 5 of all time] has helped stir the imagination, alongside helping inspire building and setpiece designs that fit into the Half-Life 2 theme. The music of both the game and the film has also helped give life to the new soundtrack, alongside replaying Kelly Bailey’s awesome original Half-Life 2 score. Expect some new snippets soon!

All likely places for inspiration, sure, but unlikely places have included being lost in shower thoughts until a loud dirt bike passed down the street, giving a sudden light bulb moment while another was nothing more than driving along and suddenly noticing a building I had passed by thousands of times before, only to suddenly be struck with how fitting it would look in-game.

Enough rambling for now. There are exciting times ahead, as I push on into map 4 and beyond and I can’t wait to share them with you! Until next time!

-AA-