Concept and Progress (Page 2 of 3)

If you own just HL2, you can still play a mod even if it uses the EP1 or Orange Box engine. All the code I've done so far is with the Orange Box SDK, but I think I'm going to have to go to the EP1 due to all the bugs in Orange Box SDK, although supposedly Valve is finally going to be releasing an update to the Orange Box SDK soon, so I don't know what I'm going to do for sure yet.

So the point here is that to play the mod, no matter which engine version is used, you can own any source based game (HL2, HL2:EP1, HL2:EP2, TF2, Portal) and you can play the mod, but as far as mapping, I don't know.

HDR seems to be a neat feature, but it seems kind of out of place to me for NS. I'm not an artistic person. Maybe an artistic person could find a good use for it. From what I understand if you compile a map for HL2 or EP1 it will run on the OB engine without modifications, so you should be fine to port a map even if you can't access the OB version of hammer (I don't even think there's a difference tbh).

The only issue with different game versions and so forth that I can see is that if you use textures from say TF2, then the person playing the mod needs to own TF2. Similarly with portal or HL2:EP1 textures and so forth. I don't know if people who own only TF2 have access to HL2 textures for example.

Valve's license agreement forbids the redistribution of any content of any of their games. Basically, you are allowed to access it in your mod via their GCF files, but not copy their content and redistribute with the mod.

Ok, good to know that I can contribute with only HL2 and that I can't use any of those textures.

I agree on HDR. It'd just give a disadvantage to players using it in such a fast paced game, because they'd take longer to get used to light differences.
It also blows up size of the mapfiles, because the lightdata has to be stored twice, and thus you also have to compile the map twice with hlrad (once for -ldr and then for -hdr), which is just a waste of time in that case.

I'm currently at my parents', home tonight, but I've already googled for some tutorials and tools to convert .wads to .vtf textures. At least for a quick port in order to have a testmap, it shouldn't be that big of a deal.
The real work starts, when you replace the placeholder textures with remade once, because in hl2 all textures are scaled down by 0.5.

Awesome, good job!
Downloading right now..

Edit @ Asmodee:
You said, you haven't added some stuff like func_weldable yet, so should I still leave these entities in, when I make a quick port for testing purposes or would this cause a crash?
What's with the point-entities "env_gamma", "info_gameplay" and "info_mapinfo" and the important brush-entity "func_seethrough"?

Last edited by Yog (2009-03-14 10:52:06)

Alakad, what .wads exactly have you converted? Only ns.wad and n2.wad? It seems all the mapname.wads are missing.

Edit: Looks like you've only converted the ns2.wad. It's amazingly easy (like with most things not written by valve ) with VTFEdit to convert the missing ones though

Last edited by Yog (2009-03-14 23:18:09)

I need a step by step on how to do this myself. I've tried following this guide:

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki … g_tutorial

But it must be missing a step.

I've downloaded VTFedit, which loads the .wad and converts it straight into .vtfs with simple .vmts ;
then you open Hammer and do this "convert .wad to .vtf" thing (I'm not sure wether Hammer also converts the .wads like Alakad says, or it just changes the texture reference of all faces from the .wad textures to the .vtfs).
In case it doesn't work, make sure the .vtfs are in the proper path that you are using with the game configuration you started the SDK/Hammer with and if it still doesn't work, try to load all the needed .wads into the Editor before loading the map and converting, so that all faces are textured and not white (with the missing texture error).

We'll replace them with kittens that are so cute that you have to cuddle them until they blow up in your face.

Not dead, but I wanted modelers before I wasted more coding time on it. If I don't have modelers by August 1st, I'll just rip off all the NS models and then start coding.

Here I come with bad ideas again, watch out.

Do you think there are people in the NS community who are half-willing to do it but don't quite want to do it for free? Can we pay someone? I've thrown money at NS before (constie, black armour, 2nd account for a friend) and I'd throw a bit more at it. Pitch in together and maybe we'd get enough to pay a

The reason I say it should be someone in the NS community is that I don't think we'd get enough to straight out hire someone for this. But if they are involved already, and they like NS and whatnot, then a bit of money would be extra motivation.

If you see it going that far, and if you feel like competing against the awesomeness that NS2 will be. (ahh. we'll see )

I only intend to use the NS1 content to get a playable game going and then hopefully I can entice artists to work on the mod once they see it actually functional. I realize a ton of mod projects never complete, so that may be part of why it's hard to find artists to work on a brand new mod.

I do NOT intend to redistribute ANY NS1 content, or any content derived from NS1 content in a public release.