Comments - Slip_Union

No inconvenience at all.

Valve recently had a large amount of uncompressed original textures for several games leaked. We are spending a lot of time utilizing these leaked assets in place of the regular compressed textures for our enhancements.

Our progress is accelerating and directly tied to the amount of quality assets that become available. The more we get, like the valve giga-leak for example, the more work we need to put into sifting, comparing, and integrating anything higher quality than we already have.

We constantly need to catch up with the current top assets. This won't make it a forever project though, since we aren't doing any engine modifications. There are limits to what the source engine can do and we plan on reaching every limit possible.

We are close to creating a top quality amalgamation of all the sound and particle mods available right now, since there is a maximum supported sound quality and there are very few particle mods. The textures and models require a lot more time and attention. Since we can't say what advancements the community will make in these areas for sure, we can't be sure how much there is still left to discover and integrate.

We'll probably release with updates available later once we get more key permissions for anything we find irreplaceable, though our top priority now if finding what exactly is replaceable.

Cinematic mod's maps really aren't that bad it turns out, just ripped out all the lens flares, shaders, and repetitive "HD" textures. No edits to the maps were made, just the models and textures they use. This means you can expect a similar effect on literally any map you load AZ on to. Retail, Update, MapPack Remastered, Cinematic Mod, Metastasis, anything.

We made some models completely custom but we try not to compete with what's popular. You can fundamentally upgrade textures quite easily like we've been doing but its hard to improve upon models in a way that doesn't split the community. Why try to out-perform near perfection when you can improve it?

We noticed the problem with too many mods having a lot of the same thing, that's why we started the project. We are filling in the gaps other mods leave and helping them to tell their stories in a more spectacular and consistent fashion, maintaining what's special under our coat of paint.

We are not telling our own story, we are not doing any "new" voice acting, we don't really have much for maps. This mod snaps on to any existing HL2 based campaign or mod and improves the graphics, performance, effects, sounds, and more to the highest levels the engine can support. The overall story told is up to the mod makers who utilize our project to make their story more immersive.

Thanks for the luck, we'll certainly need it.

Join the Discord and ask, just bring something useful to the project with you. Any knowledge, detailed and useful review, custom assets, or good connections would be appreciated.

The only reason we have for not bringing on a tester would be if they would have a better experience waiting for release. Things are very volatile more than half the time and its kind of a mess if you don't understand what's going on.

Amalgam Zenith is not available to the public currently but anyone can ask to become a tester via the community discord.

Oh absolutely, AZ is compatible with almost every mod made for MMod and most regular HL2 mods.

We've been using this mod.
Gamebanana.com
It fixes a lot of what's wrong with the original HL:A combine but we plan on adding some upscaled components of the original hl2 texture to give it the depth of the original while keeping the model quality. (A good example is the forehead texture's flatness) A lot of the time all we've needed to do to fix HL:A assets for use in HL2 is increase the contrast and lower the normal map intensity but more manual touchups are done where possible.

We're doing something like that. We've been porting a lot of HLA assets directly to start but then if possible/worthwhile we've been hybridizing HLA and HL2 assets to make something we think gets close to the best of both worlds both aesthetically and in the sense of maintaining continuity. AZ is trying to patch up the continuity problems between Black Mesa, Half Life 2, and Half Life Alyx but we are working hard to not mess with the iconic design of HL2 in the process.

To address your concerns more specifically, we are considering adjusting the textures of the scanner to resemble HL2's design. The forcefield is still being worked on but isn't being shown doing its full animation here yet. We used the HLA effect for when the player is up close but used a fading effect similar to HL2 to make it function much more like the original forcefields. Also, we have several moderately sized packs of model enhancements for the stock hl2 props that are being used often, mostly in situations where HLA items do not fit the general shape of the HL2 counterpart. Let us know if you have any specific ideas for how to adjust anything we have to resemble HL2 better.

An expansion to Munancho's response: We will be mixing together several remixes of the original songs followed by mixing the result with the original song and/or a direct improvement or expansion of the original song to create a 50/50 remix hybrid of the original song that doesn't mess too much with the song's overall feel but adds depth, length, and a much longer fade. We also plan on using remixes of BM/HLA ambiance and adding remixes that stray far from the originals to locations that originally lacked music but would be improved through having it. If any of the modded campaigns AZ supports use the original HL2 song files, we will attempt to replace them with their own custom remixes unique to the modded campaign.

When its done? It will probably take quite a bit longer but progress is steady and updates are daily.

We're going to wait and see if anyone ports the animation to the original arms model since all our existing models use it. Once MMod v2 introduces c_hands we will look into modifying hand models.

Mostly just keeping the credits list updated.

We asked but they haven't seen our message yet. Couldn't resist picking this model apart on the day it was released and we ended up with this.

A version of this is currently being used. We are not entirely sure which revision of this we will go with but they will definitely no longer have mitten hands.

Release is likely still very far off but development is steady. We've been making posts to Gamebanana showing off some of our more impressive standalone compatible content which is free to download now. We don't expect it to take many years to release. It will probably take about 2 years at our current size but we add another team member almost every month. We also plan to update constantly after release whenever that might be.

The current development build is 65gb. This is expected to fluctuate as more content is added almost every day and lossless optimization is constant.

We are also working on several alternative helmet overlay textures and presets

I sent you a link to our community discord as a private message.

Newest beta version available for the sdk.
We are working on custom RNG themanclaw citizen textures. We plan on using the rebel mod linked below when it is complete.
Gamebanana.com

We are making this with the assumption that MMod v2 is very far from release but development will shift to full compatibility with MMod v2 once it is released.

We have been lightly modifying CM maps to include new features and remove broken ones. The CM citadel is incredibly broken and near impossible to fix so for testing we replaced it with the HL2:update citadel maps. We are unsure if we should make a separate AZ ultra campaign and keep the original CM maps somewhere else or if we should just include the CM modification. Let us know what you think.

We will use the HLA gman model once it is properly ported to source 1.
We are using HLA antlions. We are not aware of any model mods for the worker but we do have a couple skins. Ep2 compatibility testing has not begun so we can't say for sure until that point.

We will be making this modpack compatible with every MMod compatible mod. HL2 Update is one of our highest priorities for compatibility testing.

We plan on not only having full support for every single MMod compatible campaign (Like 30 of them that we know of) but also making individual edits to each one of them individually to make them feel more unique.

I will let our testers know so they can keep an eye out. Thank you for being specific!

Just a little skillful use of stuff we took from other creators. Thank Sage J. Fox, Banana Maximus, and Juniez for these 3 models. Expect even more diversity for non gordon campaigns like metastasis.

We are currently using the MMod HLA combine soldiers but they do cause crashing unless we turn off drawing blood decals on them. Until a fix is made for that mod we are unsure what we will release with.

We are trying to include as many files as we can within reason. Depending on what permissions we get it may be one large package with single step installation or a massive list of steps for how to get certain things. MMod will likely not be included but Cinematic Mod likely is due to our optimizations to its file structure somehow making a standard cinematic mod installation larger than our completely uncompressed development build of AZ.

The combine sniper rifle uses a set of animations designed for vanilla HL2 but we are still deciding on which of these 2 mods to use as each have their own strengths and weaknesses.
Gamebanana.com
Gamebanana.com

Coast will probably be set to night be default but both will be included.

We have not encountered a problem with enemies spawning only when you see them so we might have unintentionally fixed it.

We use this metrocop model with RNG glowing eyes. Gamebanana.com

Reducing the lensflares might have done that already but we will look into it.

That is a really nice headcrab mod. It will be used where applicable. Keep up the good work finding content for us!

Gamebanana.com

It really is an incredible model. We plan on further improving its textures and sounds for this pack.

The more questions the better. It helps bring attention to things we may not have considered. If you are interested in joining our community discord for live conversations with our team and others interested in the project, PM me and I'll let you in. Do ask your major questions here first so that others may find the answers.

We plan on going for the highest resolution and quality on everything until we start experiencing performance issues. If the pistol were to cause any noticeable problem with performance we would definitely make a lower quality version however something so closely viewable would be a low priority object to downscale. I will be sure to include lower quality textures for the mods we release as standalone.