Half-Life: Enriched - Hazard Course news

The Black Mesa Hazard Course Decathalon will commence this evening, so you should download the new build fast!

In my previous post I've put out a call for Beta Testers and many of you responded. The small team I wanted filled up quickly and they are currently in full swing playtesting the current build! Once again, my apologies to the people I had to turn down because we already reached capacity. I'll probably add a new wave of testers after a while, so be sure to keep an eye on this page. Of course, you can always download the alpha version and private message me your feedback.

Black Mesa Hazard Course

The last chapter I've converted is the Hazard Course, which is basically a tutorial on how to play Half-Life. I can imagine people have skipped this chapter but I've always had a fond feeling for it. Even though it wouldn't really make sense that Black Mesa would build such a large facility just to show you how your suit works, it's still a very cool bit of Half-Life.

I managed to squeeze all 5 BSPs back into just 2 BSPs, so you'll only encounter one loading point this time around. From what I could see in the original files, the Hazard Course was created a bit later in the development of Half-Life. There are a lot of objects and geometry that were taken from the rest of the game and the way they've approached brushwork and entities doesn't suggest that this is an early design.

It was rather pleasant to work on this chapter, although you could see that they've cut a few corners and slapped things together quickly in certain areas. Another hint about the time contraints lies in the lack of animations for the hologram model, as there aren't many in the game. However, there are several animations that weren't used in the original model, so I've tried to use those where possible.

Speaking of the hologram model: It has been updated with more polies and higher definition textures! I've kept to the textures of the retail version of Half-Life, where this character has an older face. There are also variants of a younger character that more resembles Gina Cross from Half-Life: Decay. I went with the older face, because I felt that the voice fits an older woman better than 25 year old Gina. I've also changed her figure to resemble actual female shapes, instead of the typical 90's wasp waist and massive triangle breat area.

The road ahead

So what's next for Half-Life: Enriched? There are still some models to be enriched and I'd like to give certain maps a few more art passes. And, as mentioned above, the test team is currently working hard on finding bugs and issues. My new step is to adress those and release a first beta version (beta 0.84). Normally I'm quite steady in releasing builds but I can't really predict how long it'll take to get this version public. Hopefullly somewhere in the next month.

After the bugs have been dealt with, I'd like to revisit the balance of the game. I'm probably not going to make huge differences to the weapon system or monster damage but the ammo, item and monster placements really need a good look.

After the Steam build is stable, I'll put the test team on the WON build to find specific quirks for this version of Half-life that should be addressed. Hopefully by then, the Single Player portion of the mod will be stable and done. After that I'd really like to create a co-operative version of Enriched, since this is what Half-Life has always lacked out-of-the-box. I've done some preliminary tests and it seems it's possible but I'll talk some more about this when the time comes.

Thanks for reading!