October 2023 Progress Update news

Hey all. If you’re not a member of our Discord Server, you might be confused at the lack of updates. Well, we have retired the monthly articles. We’re choosing to prioritize quality over quantity. As a result, we have not uploaded an article in a few months. But, here we are now! Lots and lots has been worked on over the past few months, and I'm excited to jump into the details.

For those unaware, Outcast takes place in a fictional area located in the North Eastern United States, Pennsylvania/West Virginia Area. Unfortunately for me, Half-Life 2 takes place in an Eastern European setting, meaning many props simply do not match the setting of Outcast. As a result, I have been working on many new assets to better represent our American setting. Of course, in creating these new assets it has been very important for me to keep everything inline with the quality and style of Half-Life 2, so things don’t look out of place. Baked AO and use of real photographs are just a few of the steps I take to keep in line with the standards of HL2. Here’s a look at some of our new models, not all of them have been exported to the Source Engine with proper textures and all, so I will show some screenshots from Blender.

Beware this is NOT the full set. There are several models not shown here. Most of these will end up being physics objects, with several of them having broken/ gibbed variants that I'm currently working on.

Just these models weren't enough however. As I have become more skilled in modeling, texturing, and animating I have noticed a lack of quality in a good bit of our Xen assets. Some of them are great and work just fine, but there simply were not enough good looking models in my opinion. So, I took a few days to model, texture and animate some new Xen Assets. Using Half-Life Alyx as inspiration, here is some of what I was able to come up with. You'll be able to see some of the animations later in the article.

I have a few more ideas for Xen Flora, but for now I think these work great.

In Outcast, one of our big focuses is on creating a new story for people to experience. Naturally, new characters are inevitable when taking our approach. As a result, I have been working on the character model for Langston, one of the first friendly faces you encounter in Outcast. Langston is very important to the plot of Part One and ultimately will be the one to set up the story going forward for the player. Here is a look at his WIP character model. Keep in mind this is not yet exported to the Source Engine.

I have finally began work on the fourth map of chapter one. This is another decently sized map, and further introduces the player to our new characters and setting. Since this map contains several spoilers for the story, I will be showing only a few images of this work in progress map.

Since my skills as a mapper have continued to improve over the last few months, I’ve decided to once again go back and revise our areas with heavy Xen Infestation. We really want these environments to show the havoc wreaked on the planet from the Black Mesa Incident and Seven Hour War, so I broke out the Displacement Paint tool and got to work.

I’ll go ahead and sneak in a few images of various areas around the Wasteland that have been touched up on.

Starting about last month I began getting back into programming for Outcast. After being busy with other projects and parts of Outcast, I was simply unmotivated to work on the codebase. I finally bit the bullet and cracked open games.sln once again. If you’re a long time reader, you’ll remember my previous attempts at the flocking floater, protozoa, and gas flyer. Flying NPCs are notoriously difficult to pull off in Source, and my knowledge at the time was simply not enough to competently work on them. After several months of study, I am completely rewriting all of our flying Xen creatures. With the help of Cvoxalury I was able to create a much better Flocking Floater NPC, which I then used to build off of for our other flying NPCs. Here is a video demonstrating the idle behavior of the Flocking Floater, recorded in a recently revised Xen Infested area of the wasteland.

And a simple video showing further progress on the Protozoa texture. After learning about emissiveblend and using it for one of the new Xen Light Fauna, i experimented with it for the protozoa and am quite happy with the results. See for yourself.

More tweaks to our AI include added behaviors to the Bullsquid and Houndeye. I added the Houndeyes pack functionality from HL1 a few months ago. Now, if a Houndeye decides not to sleep, there’s a chance it will walk around the area in a small radius. If alerted, the pack will all run around in search for whatever has spooked them. The Bullsquid has received the same treatment, giving it an idle behavior where it walks around the area and a frantic search routine when alerted.

Speaking of the Bullsquid, here is one of the WIP alternative skins I’m working on. I like this one particularly because it matches the colors of the environment better in my opinion.

In our quest to create some new gameplay experiences, we have decided to do something different. Over the past month I have been fixing and reworking the Molotov code. The molotov will be a useful weapon, and hopefully a fun one too. We didn’t want to just throw it in without giving it some special uses though. I am currently programming a function for the Molotov to be able to scare away antlions within a set radius for a set amount of time. In chapter one there will be several areas where use of the Molotov will be needed to progress further. Simple things like blowing up gas tanks, burning up obstacles and such. In the Antlion Caves, they will become an even more useful weapon. If a pack of Antlions is coming at you, a well placed molotov throw could be the very thing to buy you enough time to collect yourself and get the advantage. Bugs hate fire, after all.

Well, that’s about all for now. If you missed it, we released the first part of the Beyond the Bar competition, with six new maps for Coterminus. It can be downloaded here. Thanks for reading, and as always if you have any questions or would like to leave some feedback you can join us here in the Discord Server or message me at Zapagoogas on Discord. We plan one more article before the year is over, so be on the lookout for that. See y’all next time.