The System Shock 1 to Half Life 1 Project

Bjossi on 25/4/2007 at 15:49

Secrets would be fun. The only runthrough of the original I have done so far has revealed very few secrets for me. So searching for them in a remake of the game would be lots of fun.

kodan50 on 25/4/2007 at 16:55

I was working on the HL2 portion of the project. I have a few things that need to mention:

1: The original System Shock textures look like crap on the Source engine. I don't know why, but the colors of the textures are off, and doesnt look very good, even when properly alligned, they don't look like they fit together. Because of this, Ive decided to map using whatever high-res textures I can find, and up until now, JukkaKevät's textures were working best. Ive become spoiled, so until someone makes more textures, I do not want to continue on HL2, simply because I cannot stand how bad the SS1 original textures look on the engine. This means that I am going to pospone the HL2 project for now, until I decide how I am going to proceed with it.

2: If I do manage to get all the high-res textures to work on this, it is still going to take a few hours to resize each texture, so its not practical for each release, I am going to cap the HL2 until I am finished with the barebone of HL1, then _if_ I can get the high-res textures I am looking for, finish the HL2 portion, otherwise I will have to use the original textures, that don't work on this engine. Stupid Source ...

With that said, I have a few screen shots of how magnificent JukkaKevät's textures look on the engine. These are not that optimised, they are just the default texture type, so no reflectiveness, shinyness, or anything like that until I finish the project, that will be the last thing I will worry about...

(http://anyon.no-ip.org/Half-shock/HL2/medical0000.jpg )
(http://anyon.no-ip.org/Half-shock/HL2/medical0001.jpg )
(http://anyon.no-ip.org/Half-shock/HL2/medical0002.jpg )

*SIGH, I wish he was still texturing, I hate to say these kinds of things, they depress me ..

Regardless of the HL2 project, the HL1 is still going strong, and I have another release prepaired, I am going to finish the last parts of the next map release tonight, and make the mod data tomorrow, it will work on the non-steam enabled version for sure, I don't know if it will work on the steam version thou...

Stay tuned :)

Bjossi on 25/4/2007 at 17:09

Did you expect 10+ year old textures to look good on a today's rendering engine? I wish Jukka would have made the whole set of textures. :erm:

kodan50 on 27/4/2007 at 05:28

Here is the next, poorly thrown together release...

(http://anyon.no-ip.org/Half-shock/HL1/Half-Shock%2004-26-2007.zip)

This release theoretically could work with the version of HL1 that is bound to steam, but only tested on the non-steam bound version, therefore previous rules apply, however, as an added bonus, select Half-Shock from the customer game menu, it should work, I tried it ^_^

First off, I "fixed" the door sound for now, told you I would, its only off by about .6 seconds, so that shouldnt take but a minut or so of cropping audio to fix, later that is :p

I dont remember how much of my last release actually showed, but the light elevator is "working", feel free to give it a ride :) I have more of the level mapped, as planned....

In the area by the other area next to the mini grove .. (okay im bad with directions!!) I had to make the light ultra bright for the see-thru coloring to work right, its a limitation in the engine that is evident from the first time I had this problem .. I hate full bright, but it was essential for proper visual...

screenshot: (http://anyon.no-ip.org/Half-shock/medical0004.png)

I hope you enjoy :)

kodan50 on 5/5/2007 at 04:51

Quick update - I found that I need to desperately optimize my level, so in a drastic panic of desperation, I had to kill the potential high-res for the recreation on Half-Life 1, simply cause I do not want to wait, nor do I want to split the level up into the 4 even parts that would have been required to map with high-res implementability, while sticking to the original low-res parts. What that means is no High-res for Half-Life 1, but it WILL still be a mandatory for the HL2, or Source recreation, since the map structure will work with any Source based modification, I might use Dystopia's recreation, but that wouldn't be fair, nor is it good recreation practice, but nonetheless, if you are worried about the cost of Half-Life 2, not to worry, their are many free mods that this will work with! I will post instructions on my site later on how to make it work.

With that out of the way, optimizations should only take about another mindless weekend, but I also don't want to work on it non-stop, so I give it, 2 weeks top before I can finish the optimizations and continue mapping. At about now, its 40% complete, so it's moving at a decent pace...

Also, I am looking for a Half-Shock avatar type image. It should be high-res, preferably big enough as a screen shot inject into the engine (say, 800x600 or 1024x768) but with the action in the center so I can crop the top and bottom out for a banner to place on the web page. Something that has a lot of System Shock feel to it, but not directly involving the plot, if that makes sense. Any entry would be greatly appreciated, artists choice on size and whatnot... Winner will have the bragging rights of having their picture on my project, I don't know if that will be considered a compliment or not, again, artists choice :) *kidding (I would do it myself, I just have no creativity on this kind of thing.)

One last thing, IM POSTING LATE NIGHT AND TIRED! Please disregard spelling typo's. Thank you.

Navyhacker006 on 7/5/2007 at 21:33

Not sure if this will be much use to anybody, but the (ages ago) conversation about paper-thin doors seems to have a solution that jumped out at me - Portals.

We know (from the trailer) that they expand. If (and it's a large if) the portals don't necessarily have to look like they do in the trailer, if they can be square, or circular instead, it might be very easy to use them for this purpose. It would also encourage modular design - if the rooms don't have to be physically side-by-side, it would cut down on clutter.

Thoughts?

JossiRossi on 8/5/2007 at 04:07

Portals would be absurdly complicated for a rather simple problem.

Like using a suborbital solar powered laser beam to remove a wart =]

Bjossi on 8/5/2007 at 11:12

Well, warts can be pretty big...:p

Navyhacker006 on 9/5/2007 at 11:46

Quote Posted by JossiRossi

Portals would be absurdly complicated for a rather simple problem.

Like using a suborbital solar powered laser beam to remove a wart =]

Complicated? How so?

This is all speculation, but I'd assume placing and linking them in Hammer would be a relatively painless procedure - entity portal[0] goes on wall-face b[0], entity portal[1] goes on wall-face b[1]; portal[0] -> Properties: Exit == entity portal[1]. For example.

Far easier than trying to get a door just thin enough to work while still looking right. And the perfectionist in me knows just how hard that can be. In a similiar vein, trying to figure out why Hammer insists on mirroring my textures is proving annoying.

JediKorenchkin on 9/5/2007 at 13:36

Quote Posted by Navyhacker006

It would be so much a) easier b) better loading c) not at all buggy with enemies to just adjust the level architecture accordingly.

I was actually looking at the new Perfect Dark Source Beta, and what they did with keeping the basic layout the same while giving the level designers artistic freedom worked really well. I'd love to see one of the SS conversions do that, most of them try for point by point perfect upgrades (which I do like) but get discouraged fairly easily.