Duper wrote:Makes me wish I had HL. ..
Tricord wrote:K, knowing you from the past, this makes me want to go out there, buy HL² (and a PC that can actually run it Razz) and enjoy the sheer quality work that I know I can expect from you.
Get it. You will not regret the Orange Box. Even nearly four years down the road, Half-Life 2 and its Episodes are still among the finest FPS games you will ever play. The amount of content out there is breathtaking and unlike many other PC games, Steam makes installation of mods a breeze. No hacking around to trick the game into loading a user map. No wacky console commands. You can launch the best mods right through Steam.
Just look at the staggering amount of single player content on
PlanetPhillip alone. Half-Life 2 is a game you will play well beyond the official maps.
Duper wrote:just wondering, do you make TF2 maps on the same editor?
For the most part. All of the Orange Box games (Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2) run on their own version of the Hammer editor. It has a few improvements compared to the version used to edit pre-Orange Box games, but is largely the same editor. As far as I understand, the editor interface hasn't changed a whole lot since Half-Life 1.
Personally, I'm fine with that. Hammer is a great editor, maybe even the best I've ever used. It may not have all of the bells and whistles UnrealEd has, but it makes up for it in speed and efficiency.
Duper wrote:Also, how many of the meshes did you have to fab yourself?
All of the meshes are stock from Half-Life 2. From a technical standpoint, it is worth pointing out that some "meshes" can actually be fabricated inside the editor. One of Hammer's neatest features is that you can group pieces of BSP geometry together into "detail geometry," which it handles like a formal mesh. You can fashion a lot of detail right in the editor, rather than having to resort to an outside modeling tool. More often than not, when I would look at Valve's work, I discovered that some of the nicer looking props were actually creative BSP details. So, as far as those "meshes" are concerned, there are a fair number. Stairs, archways, the fancy reactor thing...
Flatlander wrote:Short, but fun! I hope you make more (throw in some drivable vehicles, eh?).
I plan to address both of these in the next project.
