Progress Report 09 news - Half-Life 2: ALTERNIS mod for Half-Life 2: Episode Two

Welcome to the ninth Progress Report.

Hey there,

As promised, the next report is here, and for once it's actually within the time frame I've set for myself!

This is no doubt thanks to me finally figuring out my ideal development schedule.
Who knew you could just work on your projects a little bit each day instead of relying on week-long, focused, nonstop efforts and not have a complete burnout afterwards?
Revolutionary stuff I know, I'm glad it only took about 3 years to figure this out.

I've had a decent increase in the time I could spend on this project since the start of May, and I've been putting said time to good use.

So without any further ado, lets get into this Progress Report.

d1_river_01

So first off, I've went back and finished up d1_river_01.
It being the first map of the "Head For The Coast" chapter it's main purpose is to break up the pace a little after you escape Black Mesa East, and provide a connection point for the alternate route leading to and from the Ravenholm docks, in case any players are coming from there.

However this means that this is essentially just the starting point for this new chapter and not a whole lot of interesting stuff happens on it. The real meat of the chapter will come after this map.

The connection point and the initial pipe puzzle area were already showcased in the last report, however the rest of the map was basically nonexistent at the time.

This is no longer the case, as I've went ahead and finished up the remaining parts of the map, which come after the Ravenholm junction.

This short section of the river eventually leads to a small water lock, through which the player can get to the next map.

Now, this entire time the Combine forces are actively searching for Gordon as they know he escaped Black Mesa East, but they couldn't get an exact fix on his location after he got back on his airboat and sped away.

If only there were some extremely inconveniently placed warning lights and loud alarms in a certain water lock that could alert them to Gordon's presence.

Having Gordon get spotted here is necessary for the plans I've got for the following maps of this chapter.

Engine changes

After wrapping up d1_river_01, I decided to set mapping aside for a while and focus on other aspects of the mod which really needed some attention, and also to have some time to think about what direction I'll be taking the following maps of this chapter.

I've finally went ahead and actually dared to mess around with the source code a bit. It started out just as a way to implement a few fixes that were outlined on the Valve Developer Community wiki but I've eventually decided to implement some minor changes as well to distinguish the mod from just being a stock Source SDK 2013 based, glorified map pack essentially. Of course I made sure that all of these changes are as vanilla friendly as possible.

Huge thanks to Gareth "TheMaster974" and their tutorials, they helped a ton when implementing both of these changes.

Muzzleflashes emit light

Not a whole lot to say about this one, I felt it made firefights visually more interesting.

Custom loading screens on chapter start

Huge thanks to Maestra Fénix for creating the original VDC tutorial, and Cvoxalury for making the improved version.
Thought of implementing this while I was working on the chapter backgrounds.
I think it's quite a bit better than the standard blurry background you see while loading.

Minor Fixes:

That's it for the actually interesting changes, now here's a list of the fixes that were implemented, with the help of this VDC article.

• Fixed dropship container gun rotation
• Fixed color correction intensity issue
• Fixed acid damage white flash bug
• Fixed NPC blinking
• Fixed smooth friction sounds
• Fixed combine soldier pain sounds
• Fixed env_sun sprite disappearing
• Fixed citizens not using rpgs correctly

Polishing further

Aside from the few engine changes, there have also been a number of other improvements made to further refine the mod.

The UI has been updated across the board to bring it up to date with the current standards.
The main menu has received a facelift, the new logo has been implemented along with a few font changes such as the implementation of GorDIN from Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary update, in relevant UI elements such as the main menu's sub-menus and subtitles.

The chapter images have also been either transferred over from the current Half-Life 2 retail build's gamepad UI, or have been completely remade to better match the original ones from the earlier builds.

Background maps have also been updated and implemented for all chapters so far, (even for the first 2 chapters which aren't in the mod yet).

I've decided to take a new approach to background maps in general, which is to keep the original background maps wherever present, but have a separate background map for each chapter instead of reusing one for multiple chapters like it's done in retail.

So for example Water Hazard has a background map by default but Route Kanal does not.
That means Route Kanal will get a new background map implemented specifically only for that chapter and Water Hazard will have the original one intact but will not be tied to any other chapter than itself.
I believe this will improve the variety of background maps and make the main menu a bit more interesting to look at.

And finally the mod's branding is currently going through a bit of a rework as I've had some issues with the previous designs.
These aren't complete yet however, only a few of the new images, logos and such have been rolled out as of writing, but this will be done by the time the next report comes around.

Thanks for reading!

That does it for this report, as I've alluded to in the opening section I've come up with a significantly better development schedule as of recently and things have been going a lot smoother since.
This does mean however that progress is going to be a bit slower overall, but I feel that it's a small price to pay to avoid burnout so it'll be worth it in the end.

Going forward I'll continue to focus on creating maps for the new chapter since once that's done we can start looking toward releasing the next demo, which I'm optimistic might not be that far in the future if I manage to keep up the pace.

Also at this point the RK & WH Demo probably won't receive any further updates unless it's absolutely necessary, because I'd like to focus on developing the current build further rather than having to go back each time and add the new additions to the old build constantly.
The next demo will serve as a clean slate that'll replace the RK & WH one completely, more on this in the future.

That's it for now, thanks for taking the time to read this article and have nice rest of your day!