The only thing that killed my love of Half-Life when I first got it (on my old 450MHz -- top of the line at the time
) was the annoying habit of my 32max speed CD-ROM drive to spin down when it wasn't being used for redbook audio music (notice how nobody uses that anymore
). When Half-Life needed to load a track (which it only did during particularly suspensful scenes or when entering a new area), the game froze while waiting for the CD to spin back up, and during this time any sound that happened to be playing repeated like a broken record.
The most infamous part of it was when you come across a scared guard who tries to warn you about something and then gets shot in the back. The moment he gets shot and falls, action music is supposed to start playing. I can't remember exactly what he said, but this is basically what it sounded like:
"Hey, man... WHATEVER you do, don't open the... GAHHHHHH ... GAHHHHHH ... GAHHHHHH ... GAHHHHH ... GAHHHHH ... GAHHHHH ... GAHHHHH" (Sorry, I'm not sure how else to spell a grunt of sudden surprise and death
)
That really REALLY killed that scene for me.
cccp_leha wrote:HotWax, is 3D (specifically JK2) editing really not that difficult? If so, you know of any good guides? Thanks.
I'm not sure about guides, although Q3Radiant (the Q3 editor) comes with a fairly well-documented manual and tutorials. Here's a crash course though:
You open a new map. You're presented with a top-down view of a blank grid. On the left is a height-map (you can cycle through the X/Y/Z views of the main grid, or go to the preferences and choose to view them all at once, but I prefer only seeing one at a time). To create your first room, you left-click and drag a square in the main area. When you release, an untextured (red and black checked) cube (our first brush) appears, that is 128 units high (the defualt height). You can see this cube in the mini-3D preview window at the top-right, and texture it by loading in some texture from the appropriately-named Textures menu, and selecting them from the right side of the screen. The console area at the bottom of the window tells you exactly what you're doing as you do it. (side-dragging, textures applied, resulting sizes, etc) The box will still be selected, so to turn it from a solid cube into a hollowed-out room with 4 walls, a ceiling and a floor, we click the handy Hollow button on the toolbar. Instantly, the editor breaks the single Brush into 6 brushes -- one for each side. Before we can hop in and see what this looks like in-game, we need two things -- a player start (just like Doom), and a light-source (unlike Doom
). Both of those are Entities. To add them, we'll simply deselect the 6 brushes by clicking empty space in the grid, then right-click an empty space and select Entity->Info->Deathmatch_Start from the pop-up menu. A new violet-colored box will appear that is the approximate size of a Quake 3 player. We can then drag this box into the room we created, and make sure he's in the right place height-wise using the height map. (His feet should be a little OFF the floor to start -- Quake 3 will automatically shift him down to the floor on spawn, but if he's touching the floor, he may be stuck in it) To create the light, we use the same method, only this time we select Entity->Light. We can then highlight it and press N (eNtity properties) to adjust things such as the light color and intensity. After placing it near the center of the ceiling, we compile the map from the menu and take it for a test spin. Congrats, you just created a square room.
Okay, so it's been awhile and the menus and other specifics might be a little different, but hopefully you get the gist of how simple it is. The main difference between this and Doom editting is that instead of creating playable space in "The void", you're creating SOLID areas that will then encompass what becomes the playable area. If you want to punch a hole in a wall, or slope it, or "cut" a brush in any other way, you design a brush to cut it with, apply it over the top of the brush to be cut, hit the Cut icon, and then delete. For example, if you wanted your ceiling to have a circular opening, you'd make a cylinder the size you wanted the hole to be, "punch" it through the ceiling brush, cut, and delete the cylinder. Viola, a circular hole. (The brush that makes up the ceiling will be cut into multiple brushes automatically -- this is because a brush cannot ever be concave, so that the BSP tree can do its magic)
Like I said, once you get the hang of it it's really not that hard.
. Anything beyond that (read: Half-Life) is beyond me (probably isn't, I just can't get around to learning it).
. HotWax, is 3D (specifically JK2) editing really not that difficult? If so, you know of any good guides? Thanks.