Update #8 - Progress, Story and Development Kits news - Reversion mod for Half-Life 2: Episode Two

First things first, Happy New Year! I know it's a month late but this is the first update of 2014 so it's completely acceptable.

This Christmas thanks to my lovely family and my new job, I split the cost and got a new computer. It's a 6-core, 16gb work-horse. It's not got the best graphics card but I chose this one as it has the power and speed to really crunch some numbers, which is of invaluable benefit to a developer. The reason I bring this up is because seeming as this PC is now around 4-5 times the power of my last computer I have been able to play FakeFactory's Cinematic Mod 2013 maxed-out.

The breadth, scale and detail of the environments is astonishing, although sometimes some additions are a little out of place. Never-the-less the level design is beautiful and being the competitive person I am it looks likes there's a new benchmark to aim for. Anyway there is a lot to get through today, plenty of screenshots and information so let's kick things off and dive straight into some content.

It might have flown under some peoples radars but you may notice that the mod has a new description on the ModDB page and a new profile header. This is because after months of chopping and changing, indecisive story ideas and getting frustrated that I couldn't get a plot I was happy with, I finally cracked it.

It took about 3 hours of discussion with a good friend in the early hours of the morning that finally lead to the development of a story that makes sense and fits the world of Reversion. Obviously I'm not going to divulge too much but I think the following small description should set the scene.

"Every night the same hunter-chopper scans the town. Every-night it does the same thing and then leaves. The Combine finally found our shelter and yet they do nothing. I want to know why."

I think it's fairly clear that you [The player] will be the one hunting down the answers to why Reversion is being watched.

I spent a lot of time looking at photos, videos and reading about the elements that would go into the creation of a unique and interesting setting. I think [so-far] I am achieving that goal with "Reversion". The shanty town setting that the player will frequent has been built up over the years from a small fishing pier and the rusting husk of a run-aground freighter.

The image above is the current work-in-progress map for the town of Reversion. Below are a collection of images that I have been using as references for the creation of the town. Click each image to see the original image from the source.

As I move forward with the development of arguably the most important environment in the mod, I hope to include more elements from the previous images. I especially would like to implement more of Kowloon [Image 2] into the final design with more foliage and natural growth.

I'll be posting more images as the map progresses.

This is something I would like to talk a little about. Since Source Single-player 2013 is now the way forward (For better or worse) then I'm going to need a better way of managing the mods assets and tools. Say hello to the Reversion Development Kit.

Being a programmer at heart I took up the challenge of creating a useful tool for managing the mods development. It's essentially a wrapper for the many command line tools that are available for mod production but manages them all from the same environment and with a simplistic GUI. For instance, it launches hammer straight into the "Reversion" setting and bypasses the options and selection windows. It also compiles and decompiles models into the mod folder and makes many parts of design much simpler. It's a massive time saver basically.

I plan on developing it in conjunction with the mod and already have a small list of features that I want it to have. Also, due to the way I developed the scripts and launcher, it's compatible with any Source mod that uses Source 2013 with just a simple ".ini" tweak. A bit more tweaking and it works with any source modification.

I'll talk a little more about what this means in the future.

So in the last few months I've been uploading some images from WIP parts of the mod, below is an aggregated look at what I've uploaded since the last update.

Thanks for reading and as always please feel free to post any questions, ideas or critique in the comments section below.

-Chris