ello Guys, Since a lot of people were asking how to implement new lights I have uploaded some of our internal tutorial/test maps on Dropbox.
I would recommend checking out tut_nextgen_lights_optimised.vmf since it contains a lot of examples in a single map. Then you can check one of those specialized example/test maps too.
Please note that these maps are not the most optimized version of maps and they were just created to test/demo specific bugs/features.

To help us configure new lights in a faster way we have implemented Ingame Light Editor. Here's a quick tutorial/documentation from our internal forums -


In game Light Editor - a Convar based system for easily selecting new Light entities and edit their properties via convar. (Whenever alex get free from UI he will look into UI for editor and even saving to vmf if its easy)

Here's the overall workflow -

1) le_editor_selection_mode_enabled - Enable Light Editor selection mode. It will show you xyz axis and a box around light…

Going to do things a bit different than what I usually do, I'll give some background on how we are doing the levels and then show some of the small props I have been making. So we posted new images today to go along with the summer sale showing new images from the map Xen. C4a1a which is where all the images have come from so far (except for my wire frame shots) is a desert like area that is quite rocky and has many different islands. Adam, Shawn and I have been detailing the map using 3dsmax and a plug-in called WallWorm (WW) developed by Shawn Olsen (a team member and creator of the program, buy it it is great you will need Max though). Our process is to import a vmf that a LD has already made and has been divided up into a instance for ease of bringing back into hammer later. Once in Max we can turn all the displacements into a sculpt mesh and sculpt it very easily. We also can vertex paint 4way blended textures onto the mesh. We also can sculpt the mesh to form around pretty…

I have been slowly replacing old models, and slipped in the crown vic in the last CU, but the real big one is this one. Couple of years ago before I really started to model a lot I got Robert to make a new jeep. This was before the steam release and with all the replacement I ended up doing, I didn't have the time or experience compiling to really do it justice. Well while working on the STU stuff I made the trucks and a lot of the skybox props and ended up fixing up a lot of the old source game models so they all matched the style of the CSGO ones (i.e. very dark interiors,little detail and very dirty windows). These include the big gray van and the little utility truck. Those were released with the last CU. I had been using the parking lot in QE for my testing and noticed some things that really didn't fit in with the rest of the updates I was doing.
For instance. Hummer didn't have a dedicated interior. This was something I left out when I redid those models a couple of years…

Coming Soon!

Here’s a quick glimpse of what we are polishing for our next update. You’ve hopefully already seen our preview of Surface Tension: Uncut over at Lambda Generation. We are very excited to see how the community likes the uncut levels. We’ve done a ton of work since we’ve shown those screen shots, and even improved our AI for the Alien Grunts and Vortigaunts to help make this chapter be as fun and engaging as possible.



Our BIG announcement though, is that we have implemented Cascaded Shadow Mapping, or CSM into the Black Mesa Engine. CSM brings the visual quality of the game to a whole new level. It’s hard to describe in words what CSM does to the game, so we’ve added a few screenshots below to give you a better idea. Notice the crisp shadows on the world and weapons, that originally weren’t there.

Cascade Shadow Maps!






New Shadows work on viewmodels too!


Dynamic, Crisp shadows


They work in real-time, they are not prebaked!

Why work on this?

First, there were…

More stuff from the last few days. The slime in the last pic is much larger now.