Comments - Junk

Congrats to Cvoxalury and everyone else involved for actually releasing something from what has to be the most cursed material in Source modding history! Nice work, guys.

You are chasing a phantom. The Half Life 2 leak is heavily fragmented and self-contradictory. That's what makes this the best way of presenting it to the world rather than shoehorning it all together and making big compromises.

What do you mean? We got on Greenlight and the ball is rolling again. Nice reading comprehension.

All we did was tell them to stop stealing our maps and models.

This is due to the Steampipe updates that Valve did shortly after our mod was released. We are working on a fix.

JohnSmirnov, this must be your first time dealing with us.

Hi, this is Junk from Missing Information. For the record, we did not report build 2046. All we did was ask the authors to remove the maps they stole from us. Instead of this, they decided on their own to throw a tantrum and delete their own mod. That being said, if this mod is using our content, which it very much looks like it is, that option is not off the table. Consider this your "grace period."

My criticism wasn't about the dark atmosphere, or how "faithful" it is to whatever, it's about the poor choices in textures and prop placements. There are too many mappers out there who just take the "everything and the kitchen sink" approach to map making and fill their maps with too many props or props that don't make sense where they are. This along with poor texture choices are my chief criticisms. Filling the Borealis engine room with stacks of wooden ammo crates, for instance. It makes no sense, looks bad, and ruins the immersion. Importing STALKER models is something I've seen more than one mod do now and it always looks tacky.

And there is plenty wrong with the cinematic mod. The effects it adds are cranked so far to the extreme it's absurd and kind of painful to look at. Good level design should lead your eyes towards details, but the cinematic mod just crams so many props and sharp textures into the maps the level design loses all subtlety. The fact that it's different isn't the problem, the problem is that the end result looks like ****. But like you said yourself, that's my subjective opinion and you'll have to put up with it just like I have to put up with your opinion.

But that's not even my problem with build 2046. Their maps can look as ****** as they want, and they can go with whatever atmosphere they want, I don't care. My problem is that they keep using decompiled maps from Missing Information and putting their own sloppy prop and texture placements on top of it, don't credit us, and then boldly lie about doing it. We put in the work to make our own leak fixes stand out from all the rest and we didn't do it so that some other team can change a few textures, fill it with nonsensical props and put their name on it. If they stopped doing that, we'd stop yelling at them about it. Their leader claims innocence because someone else contributed the stolen maps, but ultimately the mod authors are responsible for the final content because they sign off the release build. So by asking them to stop doing that, that makes apparently makes us the bad guys.

We're not the only ones either. Word on the street is that at least one of their other maps is similarly ripped off from Project 9.

You're dead propably.

That "prefab" balcony on the left in your screenshot was made by me. You will not find it anywhere in the wc-mappack. The displacement snow in the map was made by me. Also the antennae on top of the bridge are in the arrangement that I made for MI.

You cannot lie your way out of this one.

Even your mod's description rips off our description for MI "Build 2046. Beta Edition aims to recreate Valve's original Half-Life 2 storyline found in Raising the Bar." You just replaced Missing Information with your own mod's name. This is getting pathetic.

THIS MAP STOLEN FROM MISSING INFORMATION 1.6

This is using Missing Information's maps. The giveaway is the side balcony on the bridge just left of the spotlights. That is a balcony I made and is only found in Missing Information. Also you left all the displacement snow that I made. You have clearly stolen our fixed maps... again!

Yeah, that's the thing. Seems like every other leak mod out there is just in a contest with each other to see how many props from STALKER and sharp textures they can cram into one map. I don't get it myself, so we stick with trying to imitate Valve's aesthetics.

Glad you had fun with this mod!

I remember when I discovered this partway through 1.6's development, thought about redoing the entire path through the ship so that it is fixed, and then decided "**** it" and crossed my fingers nobody would point it out.

Here's a fun fact about the Borealis for you guys:

On the first map of the Borealis you meet with Odell, listen to the transmission and go into a flooded hallway that takes you to the cargo hold. This map does not physically exist in the actual Borealis, as these rooms and hallways conflict and overlap with the Borealis in the rest of the chapter. They only exist in that one map. The communications room falls roughly in the hollowed out cavity with the Breeder pods. Also the staircase that leads down to the cargo hold is physically outside of the ship.

Also, in MI canon, Odell is gay.

what the **** is this

The future, you say?

There is no "old story" just a collection of unfinished ideas. We will be doing whichever fragments we find most interesting.

Even the leak itself doesn't work 100% with the map pack. All the maps and scripts will require work to get them running acceptably.

That description was written before I joined the team, and since then I have drawn similar conclusions that there is no singular unified "old story." This is the reason (or one of the reasons) why every mod that sets out to remake "the old story" winds up failing. The themes, locations, and events that are hinted at within the leak and RTB are quite fluid and don't always agree with each other. We ran into this issue with the Borealis, as there seemed to be two congruent storylines at work - one where Odell was always on the ship, and one where he evidently was tagging along with Gordon to investigate what happened. We opted for the latter plot as there was more material to work with.

So the answer is, it depends which snapshot of time we are looking at, and your definition of "faithful." For the most part I would like to default to visual themes that are different from what you see in retail to give the maps a "leaky" feel to them. However, a lot of the old maps are quite frankly pretty crappy in both visual style and gameplay, and so the challenge lies in updating these old maps with new/updated material while not being overly obvious that there are parts of the map that Valve didn't make. For example, right I'm working on an update for one of the old Depot maps and crafted a new interior space to make it a bit more interesting, but I have to be careful that it doesn't stand out too severely and that it has that intangible, balanced "valve" feel to it. I won't hesitate to alter the path of a map if I feel it suits gameplay better (I did plenty of this in the Borealis) but so long as it doesn't feel like some rubber-stamped "MaDE bY JuNK" sort of deal, I can sleep at night.

It's going!

sounds like a good plan.

Yeah sorry man, we aren't making this mod to be famous or well liked or anything, we're doing it to play the leak content we want to see. This is not a democracy.

How was calling us lazy and unimaginative supposed to come across as anything but insulting? Honestly, we were willing to have a rational discussion about our reasons for not including the hydra before you started going off on this emotional rant about it. Rest assured that the hydra probably wasn't going to be included anyway before you started this. I don't know how you expected anything constructive to come from acting like a demanding ******* when you don't even sign our checks, but then again, from what I can tell, you are pretty far in denial about how much of a douchebag you are.

Do you know what we did when we were dissatisfied with all the other leak mods out there? We started our own. You don't need a special license to do any of this stuff, so how about you go give it a try and stay the hell away from us.

Would you like a tissue for your issue?

Seriously, go be annoying somewhere else.

"While it is well known that you don't care that much for players, so why pretend?"

Take a step back and look at how whiny and entitled you sound, and then ask yourself who WOULD care about any of this naive **** you're saying?

Ok, I'll bite, what have you tried doing to make the hydra anything other than an unfun lagfest? You seem to know way more about it than us!

The thing about the leeches is that the way they are presented as a barrier in the ocean, you as the player know that you have no hope of fighting them. This is most likely the reason why they replaced the Ichthyosaur who originally played this role. A hydra, as Scart says, whether we make it hide in a hole or not, people will think it's guarding something that they can get to.

I'm sorry guys, but we're just not doing it. There really isn't room for debate on this.

"why would I need to rig the seer? Its function is, true to its name, to provide Hydra with information, it's a sensory organ. It doesn't attack the player, so I don't need to put all the math in it."

Because those models have a singular animation that only looks good when played in the E3 demos. In their current state they are incapable of free movement like the non-E3 hydra model. You know how the hydra entity (not the canned-animation model in the E3 demo) knows how to wrap itself around world geometry? Swaths of mathematical calculations which are the biggest roadblock to getting this thing to work. Oh, the seer provides the Hydra with information? Yeah, on paper. AI is not as cut and dry as you are making it sound. Get a goddamn clue before running your mouth like some kind of authority on the subject.