Blogs - The_Guardian™

Been a while since I've made a blog post about my overall progress in regards to any mod development, whenever it is Radical Problems or not... Things simply took a turn for me, trying to develop on Radical Problems becomes a bit more hard now, with my wish to keep it unique in design and eye catching, but I know doing so is rather impossible, I know that myself... but ideas continue to pop out more and more, as soon as I've heard that Entropy Zero 2 has a Workshop now, I literally dropped down anything I was working on (Mostly some progress I was doing on some stuff I was doing in Black Mesa) and started doing a mod in Entropy Zero 2 called Excalibur 1-6.

But why? It's not that I don't like the Half-Life 1 Radical Problems project, I love it, and things go way back ever since I was a kid when I was doing a lot of Half-Life 1 ideas on paper, so many that I always wanted to develop my own Half-Life 1 ideas and flesh them out, but why did I suddenly started on doing more stuff than I can handle...?

There is a reason for all of this, but in short... I have more than 1 dream, my first dream as a kid was to make my own Half-Life 1 story, but that's not where it all ends, as soon as I was also able to get my hands on Half-Life 2 when I was around 11 or 12 (this is really estimate honestly) I really just loved the Combine, their dropships, their uniforms and all, I always seen them as cool guys despite the narrative portraying them as the bad guys for the most, yeah yeah they kill humanity, suppression field bad blah blah... But the reality was that not many people were really looking into them, but why?

There were so little mods to play from the perspective of a Combine soldier it was so disappointing, 2 of my most memorable mods being Human Error and Combine Destiny, so, I guess that's cool, right? So I also want to make my own combine mod using Entropy Zero 2, sounds simple with the Source Engine knowledge I've also acquired trough the years, but it is not as simple as it sounds. I've made a lot of progress as shown above... in 4 months, and when I say this, it sounds like for a 15 minutes playtime map to take 4 months to create is absolutely absurd, but the reality is that life and friends takes the most of me, not only that but getting burned out now and then from focusing only on modding, and it's not fun, I love fleshing out my ideas, and wish to share my imagination with you all for when I believe they are ready to be shared with everyone, and hopefully that my ideas and imagination to be loved alongside everyone, as much as I did when creating them.

So now I work not on 2 projects, but 3 instead- Wait wait, you were talking about 2 projects before, not 3, what's the third one now? Well, I work on a new project that SellFace wished on being committed on, so I've offered my help to this new project of his as well, not only doing Level Designing, but also Textures, Sounds, Lore Writing, the project itself is pretty ambitious with him wishing to release the mod on Steam as well, and I wish for this as well, but we still have a long road ahead of us, so I will share some of the progress I've made on this project.

Pretty cool stuff so far, right? I have to admit that it is a fresh breath to work on this project with Hammer++ instead of Valve's janky Hammer Editor for Entropy Zero 2, and there's a interesting thing I have discovered about the AI world, one knows how popular AI Speech Synthesizer got popular, right? The AI world grew from doing much more, one of which most hate is the AI learning from people's arts, but while I had trouble and the desire of creating fresh new Skyboxes, my curiosity got the better of me and wondered "There is a lot of AI revolutionary tech, isn't there anything for creating Skyboxes as well though?" and I was right, there was actually a AI Skybox generator named BlockadeLabs, which is eh... but with some edits, the AI Skyboxes were ready for use, as shown above in the pictures, the night skybox is actually not the default Half-Life 2 Skybox used for Ravenholm, but a generated AI Skybox which with edits was good to pass for usages.

Radical Problems has not been forgotten, I have made some progress for it as well, worry not, however the progress done is not too much unfortunately, but I took some of the time into playing with Blender and learning a bit more about modeling and editing models, and the results out of that are actually outstanding this time, unlike last time when I was yet to learn how to use weight painting.

Yup! Made some nice details for the Opposing Force models, which are gonna be used for Radical Problems, code is well implemented for them as well, as observed in the image above, the helmet is added to their waist according to the head whenever they do indeed wear the helmet or not, other than that, on the pants could be observed that they were added a left tight pouch and the pistol holster from the Opposing Force Engineer, and to make it even more immersive, I've also added the Half-Life 1 pistol into their holster.

Do I plan om adding more stuff to them? Honestly... I don't think there's anything else to add to them currently, as they look fine enough with the additions they have now. Were these details needed? No, but makes my consciousness be at peace knowing they have these details now, besides that, they were a good modeling example for practicing some of my rusty modeling skills, not like that I have any knowledge in modeling at all... but enough to know how yo make simple things.

There's also something important I learned about bodygroups while I was experimenting with the Opposing Force models:

Apparently in Values of the monster_human_grunt there's no such thing as body by default... but that doesn't mean if it is not there it cannot be used. However, that feature is also limited by the code, and overriden by the code if a custom bodygroup is set trough mapping methods. From what I have tested, the heads are overriden by the code if the marine is set to be something, the case applies in a few aspects: Is Shotguner, Is Squad Leader. If they are one of those 2 things, the head will be set accordingly to what's set with in the code, BUT the torso will INDEED change according to what you set. Besides that, the way the body value works is like... 0 -> 7 (Different heads + Torso 0 [DEFAULT TORSO]) 8 -> 15 (Different heads + Torso 1 [SECOND TORSO IN THE TORSO BODYGROUP])

The project started somewhere in 2018, Radical Problems, not being my first mod though, as in the past, probably 2017, I attempted a mod named "The Clean Up" that got discontinued for various reasons, in 2018 I decided to move from Source Engine and try GoldSRC again, funny yet that the mod started out of some testing maps I was creating to learn more about how GoldSRC works, not much different from Source Engine in some cases. Radical Problems got inspired out of old mods that I liked, unfortunate that I can't live the old days again, but is this really a disavantage?. Doing the setup for Radical Problems felt like impossible, sometimes telling myself "This won't go anywhere....", as it implied sounds, coding, and adding in more files that I couldn't be bothered with.

Radical Problems started to shape over time, story, goal, name, etc. I'm quite ambitious about it, but motivation is also hard to be found in certain cases.

Making new enemies and friends was probably the interesting part in doing this, yet, a long road ahead. So far as I type this, the mod has 9 levels, sounds a lot but I consider it small for how long I plan this mod to be, up to 3 or 4 hours if I can. And to be fairly honest, I'm going full blind in regards to escaping Black Mesa, as in I don't really have a full plan in regards to everything, so at best, the levels I make are random in Resonance Cascade scenario. But I do have some of the stuff planned, even if I go blind in making some scenarios.

Eventually I was speaking about test maps at the beginning, I hope I will find a place for them in this project as I develop it, probably I will eventually. As for new enemies, they are not a new race, but rather a sort of division, there will be more revealed about them later. As for HECU, all they got is model replacement, that being Opposing Force Low Definition models.

As for now, I'm not ready yet to make a Mod DB page about the mod YET, but I plan to once I get half the mod done, probably 2 years more, depending on the motivation as well.