Half-Life: Enriched - Alpha version 0.86 news

Want to see that skybox up close right away? Click the link!

In my previous update I had given all earthbound chapters full 3D skyboxes. I took great care to stay within the style of Half-Life by using the artwork from the game itself. For Xen, however, this proved to be difficult. The original artwork was much too low resolution to be upscaled or reworked into anything good. Next to that, I'm not good at drawing freehand, especially complex things like nebulas. So after a lot of trial and error, I went with computer generated nebulas instead. And I'm glad I did.

I'm really happy with the way these skyboxes add a lot of flair to the scene. In the original Half-Life, the sky was often blurry and pale. No more.The vibrant colours and the higher resolution (1024x1024 per side) of the new skybox really make it pop. You will also notice some more objects floating such as other islands and rocks.

I also made sure that each chapter has a unique colour scheme now. You will start with the easy looking green environments, through the more tense yellows and finally the firey reds when you reach the final portal. This way I'd like to show the player they progression through the alien world of Xen.

Next to these skyboxes, I've reworked all autosave points in nearly all of the maps. In many cases critical points were missing or sometimes too abundant. You'll have a better time in your next playthrough!

On the model front, I've reworked the last few monsters: The Alien Controller, Gonarch and the Tentacle. Next to that I've also updated a lot of ammo types with better models and textures.

As you might have noticed, I've also updated the way I present my artwork with a new logo and background. The MODDB page has seen some updates and so did the FAQ page. I'm currently working on some more promo art, such as this BMRF staff poster:

So, what's next?

Looking at my todo list, it seems that I'm slowly running out of content to enrich. Nearly all models have been updated and the maps are at a detail level that I'm quite pleased with. There are still a few bugs to iron out and I'd like to revisit some of the earlier models, but most of the work is done.

My next focus is playtesting the WON version. There shouldn't be too many issues in contrast to the Steam version but there might be some oddities here and there. This will also give me a chance to test the MOD on older legacy systems such as Windows 9x.

The last hurdle is the co-operative conversion! It seems that currently the code is in a state that makes it possible to have a pretty decent co-op experience. I would have to start a seperate map branch (because I have to adjust the maps to co-op play), so I want to make sure the single player version is 100% done, or elase I'll be making fixes twice. More on this later!

Thanks for reading!