Pinned Black Mesa Mod Work in Progress Showoff Thread

Close followers of the pre-disaster threads will recall my travails with the bulletin boards- how they seem to glow phosphorescently when even the tiniest bit of light hits them, way brighter than anything else nearby. I've since added the canteen tables, the filing cabinets, and the printers to this list of weirdly-lighting props, and until now I've just tried to fix them by giving them different lighting origins- which is extremely time-consuming to fine-tune, doesn't look quite right, and isn't always feasible if the entire map is bright and/or different colors.

Purely by accident, I found a solution: these props will light normally if you make them prop_dynamic override! (prop_physics_override with motion disabled does the same thing, but dynamic allows me to keep lighting origins if I really do need them):

Default prop_static:


Static with lighting origin:


Dynamic_override (note how the portions of the left board in and out of the overhang shadow are no longer the same brightness, but the text is still readable):

Alright you guys, I took the time to script the intro.



Still a couple of things to do:
Changing Barney's animation during power down, he's still typing away.
Figuring out the default framerate for model animations so that the desk fan can start back up
Reduce shake a bit, make it really subtle
Keep computer monitor turned off since it makes no sense that it boots up immediately to Barney's email.
Still no dialogue ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thoughts?

Looking good, but I think you should have the lights be dimmer when they come back on, like they were in all the post-disaster maps.

Also, maybe have radio chatter or the PA announcement system say something about the explosion in Sector C?

Anything that requires dialogue is not something that I'll pursue atm, but I wanted to say that your dynamic_prop_override discovery also solved my problem of incorrectly lit props during the power outage, really helpful!

Yeah, I actually kind of forgot to mention that- there's a Black Mesa / Source Engine bug that causes some props to light incorrectly when there are named lights shining on them, and setting them to prop_dynamic_override (or, failing that, prop_physics_override with motion disabled) will fix it.

Now I feel like I'm the culprit of this issue because I knew the EXACT solution to this for long time but I never shared because I thought the problem you were having was NOT the same as mine.

When I developed the lightswitch AM addon back in February I ran into the exact same issue which I was able to fix it on the day one by closely observing that only the static props lit incorrectly and dynamic ones stay okay. So I changed all the props in the office to dynamics/physics.

In my case it was noticable because the room has on/off lighting so incorrect lits are very noticable when the light is off, but looking sorely at your pre-disaster screenshots I never knew because the light looked static and stay on all the time, so the "incorrect lit" props seem... simply incorrect. so thought it was something else.

Making a personal map of my own I discovered more and more and more Black Mesa bugs that I hope to help other mappers. For example, did you know Black Mesa will crash to desktop if you have a certain entity placed in the map AND have Alien Controllers in it? Crowbar Collective, #plsfix. Dealing with so many bugs that I'm sure no one has come across yet it makes me feel like I'm climbing K2, with hammer editor and Valve developer wiki. Though that is the joy of mapping!



now pls dont kill me for not helping you properly TT

Just do it. Plees.

Something useful I figured out relatively recently in Office Complex- not very important in and of itself, but it's somewhat necessary to understanding something that is quite new:

Now, in Black Mesa fluorescent lights are typically blue-green (the ones I am familiar with are yellowish with a faint purple cast to them, but whatever). In Questionable Ethics that wasn't really a problem because pretty much everything in the maps is some shade of blue and so the player's eyes adjust, but Office Complex has that tan-yellow color for the walls and if the lights are saturated enough to not just show up as white they make the walls look horrible. Here's some unfinished areas from B map- the brightness of the lights is OK (could be a little brighter, and will be for reasons I'm going to get to soon), but note how the blue-green light on the tan walls just sucks all the life and happiness out of the room?




Now, at first I tried adding constant* lights "underneath" these, with their color set to pure white, but it turns out that green plus white is still green. What you actually want are constant* lights with a color complementary to the one you're trying to neutralize- for instance, since the flourescents have a light color of 198 234 255, I made the fill lights 57 21 0, decreased the saturation, and increased the brightness (the resulting color was 247 217 213).

This produces an effect like so:
You can still see the blue-greenness of the fluorescent lights, but the walls and doors still "pop" as their yellowish-tan selves.

Typically, a good place to start is with the constant* lights about equal in brightness to the colored ones- tune both until the "auras" of the colored lights around the sources show up clearly, but the corners of the room are not too dim.

Increasing the saturation of the constant lights makes them more dominant, bringing out the walls and suppressing some of the effect of the main lights:

Similarly, decreasing the saturation of the constants* makes the room take on more the color of the main lights, at the expense of the walls:


Tune to taste.

*Technically, these are not constant lights at all- they're something different that I'll get into later. But for a roughly cubical room, constant lights would work.

Have some jpegs. I call them Spoophall and Boomroom.

[Very Early WIP]

Hello guys,

I'm working on a singleplayer adventure composed of 2 maps.
The first one is a road that links two sector within Black Mesa Facility and serves as an introduction.
The other one is hosting various things that I'll show later

First map:


Will it be possible to disable/enable a xen jumper in the future?


Second Map:

One area contains a radioactive liquid where a Valve is required to be retrieved by draining the radioactive water through a pipe system.
I have strange issues with this area in specific:
- The particle system displaying the radioactive leak is sometimes not working despite using the 'Start Active: Yes' in Hammer.
- The scientist hanging on the metallic platform is sometimes not working correctly. The scientist is doing his sequence outside the scripted_sequence. Btw the sequence is starting on spawn.

Any idea what can cause this problem?

To disable a jumper, just kill it and have a prop_dynamic with the same model and enable it.
To enable, have a prop_dynamic that you kill and a point_template with the jumper spawning.

Thank you LordDz, I hadn't thought about this!

Hi! I´m working on and update to my nostalgic sound mod. I feel it´s getting quite good but constructive criticism and suggestions are always helpful. Especially on the vort-sounds, I´ve only changed their sampling rate and did some noise removal so they sound really low-quality right now.

This is the outside of a building and the inside of a different building

so i figured i would post what progress i have for a dm port dm_wgh

more images at this link imgur.com/a/2ZCPZ



i have opened up some paths around the map via extra vents and teleporters

there is a vent drop down near the cafeteria stairs


the gluon gun is inside the blastpit transition but so is radioactive waste the silo door can be open and shut so unlucky player can be trapped in a radioactive deathtrap the silo door will sound a map wide alarm when it is opened or closed

i would recommend trying out elevator diving like cliff diving except pioneered by the folks in sector C how ever unlike them your elevator diving efforts will be non lethal

Oh yeah, some data got furthered a while back.

Fun fact: if you put multiple Xen Crystal props overtop of one another, they begin to glow an angry red:
Definitely going to use this when I go back to upgrade the pre-disaster QE laser labs.

Pretty Cool Admiral

Other than that does anyone know how to get the particle mode to work? i am trying to figure out what they all are but cant get it to work starting BMS with -tools -nop4 that i saw in a steam thread fro ma BMS developer

As far as I've been able to tell, the particle editor has been broken in every published build of Steam BM so far. Haven't been able to get it to run at all.

I guess it runs for the devs though, because I think they made some custom ones as recently as ST:U. Not sure what they do differently from the rest of us.