I remember VTMB being rushed to market, so I wouldn't say Valve forcing them to wait for HL2 to release doomed the project, if anything, it bought the team sometime to work on the game some more. Though I'm not that familiar with Bloodline's history.
though Activison releasing the game the same day as HL2 was dumb and no way helped the sales of the game, but that's not Valve's fault.
Replaying HL2 I notice the indoor and city environments have aged very well. HL2 was one of the first games that I ever thought looked "real" and even today the shaders and texturework still look decent.
Except for the outdoor sections. It's almost bizarre - nova prospekt and ravenholm in particular looks great even today in a lot of ways but the cliffs are so repetitive and ugly in the outdoor segments. It's hidden decently in the airboat sections since there's a lot of canals but the coast levels are in particular hard to look at, especially those weird cliff textures they use.
Episode 2's outdoor areas look miles ahead of HL2, even if they overused that 2d forest texture a bit much on the cliffs
The ravenholm transition to the cost (the underground tunnel) and the coast have some of the worst looking geometry/displacement work in the series.
It was either lack of time, or understanding their tools, but yeah, they really stepped it up with EP2 and the displacement sub-d method.
Playing through MMOD and got the Tau Cannon. Is there any ammo drops for it? Or is it just a once and done 250 shots you get when you dismount it from the scout car.
I was hoping it would either replenish from the Combine Balls or slowly recharge like the Airboat Gun.
You can plop it back on the car to refill it
Oof. For all it's faults, VTM:B did an impressive job of using the Source engine to make something pretty unique and fun. Didn't they also use like some sort of weird beta version fo Source that had remnants of GoldSource in it or something? I recall hearing (perhaps during a speedrun) that VTM:B was some sort of weird legacy version of Source.
Ugh... it's so sad to hear these studio names, knowing that many of them collapsed in the early 2000s. Late 90s/early 2000s were the golden years of these studios and their games. Experimentation was one of the main virtues and many great games came out of them.
Yeah, I remember a lot of forum posts about those bugs back in the day.
Weirdly enough, SiN Episodes was actually distributed officially in Russia (CD jewel + steam code inside), I had the disc
I had a little look around and found the post I read years ago: Rom's Rants
VTM:B basically runs on a modified version of the leak engine. After the HL-2 leak Activision forbid Troika from upgrading the source engine with any code Valve made. Thanks to this Troika's version of the Source Engine has a ton of stuff missing/broken in it like overlays, AI (Troika made their own) and a big part of the logic entities.
VTM:B did also "benefit" from the leak. Since HL2 was delayed so was VTM:B. This gave Troika some time to fix bugs that were even worse than the ones the retail version had. Unfortunately Activision was only willing to pay for the work that was suppose to be done i.e till the un-delayed release date. All work after that was done out of Troika's own pocket.
Because this came at the tail end of several years of Valve giving them insufficient documentation and their build of the engine being overall incomplete compared to the Source variant that was released for HL2 on the same day. As I mentioned in a prior post, the devs were NOT given enough documentation or help with the engine, and couple that with Activision's poor QA, it's a miracle the game worked. Valve didn't give the game a beneficial delay, they effectively slaughtered it by ensuring Activision, in all their wisdom, would release the game on a doomed, dumping ground day. You can pretend like Valve wasn't aware of what would happen and that Troika should've known better but at the end of the day the devs were marched to a pit with a gun to their head and told to jump or be kicked in.
Would you also sit there and defend Bethesda's almost identically scummy practices toward New Vegas?
Is it even a surprise that there was a lack of documentation for an engine that wasn't even finished yet?
Why though?
Well it's not like there's documentation for it now. Most of Source is poorly documented, if it's documented at all.
Since I couldn't find map of ep2 outlands, I decided to do my own:
https://puu.sh/CsOBp.jpg
Sadly there some overlaps:
Intro map is set in same location as riverbed/radiostation from later chapters and superportal position jumps all over the place
https://puu.sh/CsOr4.png
As is tradition, HL1 and HL2 have a ton of overlap as well.
Man I had forgotten how beautiful the outlands are. Definately a step up (visual design-wise) from episode 1.
Yeah, and it's always interesting to see these in perspective. Sometimes I still wonder what made them use CSS trains for one map though.
I never noticed the lighting changes when you reach the area where you have to crawl and use the cars as cover to take out the auto gun and the maps before, and how it keeps changing to the final version.
RP_IneuPass is a few of the outland maps.
And Dog vs Strider map suddently has completely opposite sun direction, compared to all others
Someone just bumped the HL2 Enhancement Mod thread. That hurt to read through.
Never select your entire map and move it around a bit in Hammer. That broke so much shit and caused graphical glitches and VRAD won't compile anymore
Been thinking a lot about this lately. Man, these were the days.
https://youtu.be/PkClwUE9R34
Hopefully you've got some sort of version control to track/revert changes.
Otherwise, RIP.
When you get that issue, you need to copy the brush, delete it, and paste it in the same place (which will technically count as a new brush).
The railroad-related assets in general are used so inconsistently, like in EP2 they have introduced a freight train engine and an ore car model, both only appear once in the very beginning. Then there's a new bluish boxcar model in two variations, again briefly used only for the trainwreck where the game starts. It's odd how they were seemingly enthusiastic to introduce better assets, but went with reusing the CSS carriages anyway.
As @Merp said SiN didn't kill Ritual Entertainment. In fact they were working on a sequel. Once they were bought out by MumboJumbo they were tasked with making mobile games and the company didn't want to continue the SiN Episodes franchise.
As a result most of the developers behind SiN Episodes left the company to find work elsewhere and the trademark went un-renewed. Successive updates to the source engine then broke the SDK which was then no longer updated and according to Valve it's maintenance is down to the company not them.
I have Levelord on my friends list and we chat occasionally and it deeply saddened me when the SiN Episodes series failed. So much so that until Valve broke the SDK I had been working on my own stand-alone expansion.
I can say that this isn't the case. MumboJumbo still has legal rights to all SiN IP although I have no idea what they're doing with it, if anything. For what it's worth SiN Eps didn't kill Ritual but it was pretty much the start of a slippery slope. It sold enough to pay for itself but not enough to fund the second instalment, which lead to Ritual's financial troubles and later acquisition. The game's protracted dev cycle, and engine changes, fuelled the company's degeneration.
Bizarrely enough, the Cafepress site for SiN is still active and Cafepress will still produce the stuff there (I got ahold of my Jessica poster and 'I beat SiN unpatched!' shirt from there) but they said to me they do not know who is in administrative control of it anymore.
The money from SiN sales, as far as I know, goes to MJ. Who was behind SiN Gold coming to GOG I have no idea, I've heard off Reddit it's the result of devs negotiating a deal with MJ but I can't verify that. I know that MJ are in charge of the rights, though.
I have a backup from 3 days ago, which isn't too far because of how ridiculously slow I am anyway. Now that I figured out what I want done, it would take a fraction of the time to get back to where I am now. I'm trying to fix it first, align everything back to the grid, put back models that were displaced, and in doing that most of the graphical glitches went away. Haven't checked if VRAD works again yet. The main thing that still worries me is that some lines are double width as if the vertex is 1 pixel out of place on one end, and I don't know if that would cause problems and I don't know how many brushes are affected.
New media from Dark Interval:
Dark Interval
Gotta love that hybrid of scopeless OICW with "Combine tech".
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Half-Life Chat V11 - 20th anniversary edition
