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Incline Half Life and Half Life 2 - List of recommended modifications and mini campaigns

lightbane

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Dec 27, 2008
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I would like to add a mod to this list of yours: http://www.moddb.com/mods/cthulhu

Cthulhu mod

As its name implies, it is based on the Cthulhu Mythos. As such, it features creatures from Lovecraft's tales such as cultists, Deep Ones, the Great Race of Yith, the Hounds of Tindalos, Cthulhu himself, etc. It also has time-travel, sanity-draining magic and well-done levels (in spite of HL's engine limitations). Unfortunately, the mod is not really that good gameplay wise: many weapons are underpowered, enemies do too much damage and medikits are extremely limited, to the point of frustration/quick-save abuse.

Even then, in my opinion it's worth a play-trough if you like the Mythos.
 
Last edited:

Kutulu

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ger
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex
Half-life is awesome...
HL1 is quake, quake is the fastest shooter there is.

I circle-strafe-jumped through half-life, finished the thing in under 90mins in my first try, game is sooo fast.

PPL that are shit at quake dont get it, same ppl that consider unreal/ut movement fast & or complex.

Edit:
Played through Afraid of Monsters & Cry of fear this year, they quite the different to what i usually like in shooters.
These things try to be Silent Hill & fail at that quite a bit. Because in the end you do get just enough ammo to
simply kill anything you see.

Still good, especially Cry of fear, you have a tiny inventory so you have decide what weapons you will take where etc, you
can store weapons by simply dropping them somewhere in the Hub-Like city level. Cry of fear also comes with a lot of modern
stuff like: unlockable items etc You can even unlock another mode of the game where you can play the primary villain & see
shit from his perspective.
 
Last edited:
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Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Cthulhu mod

When I was making this compilation, first I wanted to include it in the list. But after refreshing my memories I changed my mind. For a one playthrough it can be nice if you are into Lovecraft mythos. But the fighting is very painful due to the amount of ammo that you need to kill the single monks, not to mention the monsters. The most memorable is of course the ending, preety cool use of half life original models. Still, you need to meta game it a lot with abusing save/load just as you said. As I've said, I wanted best of the best list, and this mod isn't first person Alone in the Dark as I've anticipated in the beginning.
 

tormund

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Check out Survive in Catacombs series, if you want another TC with great horror atmosphere (especially part 2) but also questionable and unreasonably difficult gameplay (especially part 2).
 

lightbane

Arcane
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
Messages
10,156

I'm not native English, but I can tell the main character's voice actor needs more work. Or better said: he talks too much. Still, the mod doesn't look bad, although IMO Half Life's graphics engine has aged badly.
 

Riskbreaker

Guest
Just played thru this really sweet recently released mini campaign:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/arctic-incident
Really good and polished stuff. Maps are pretty straightforward and light on puzzles. They look great, however, and combat is pretty enjoyable and not too difficult, with ample supply of ammo and chargers. Really loved how fresh and different this felt as far as visuals go, what with snowy environments and appropriate reskins for all the enemies you'll encounter.

Screenies:
16A22FEE7962AC605055F6E059212B8942721680

4CC932F1FF89168BDD28DCB4A160C7D912C10970

7FE24F80184300805867C22EEA94609B6EF7EA0B

A14DFE7B95E47BFBA58D9827C24358636C628BF2

E3EA8EC551EB41F24FDFC1E8C76D461AB3EE59FE

159EAB4078BB730EA3EC392F56CC0967C5AA7125

54294DE79AE64D7E8CD818D8C446CD1180304403
 

Akratus

Self-loathing fascist drunken misogynist asshole
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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I played a campaign where you are one of the vortigaunts once, it was great.

Yeah, Point of View. Good one. Really the only single player campaign mod I remember playing. Other than that I only played Opposing Force, Blue shift, Vanilla and a fuckton of Sven-Coop.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
The latest issue of Retro Gamer (149) has a retrospective on Half-Life. Interviews with various related people (including that ingrate from Gearbox), a recount of some good mods, and a look at the inspiration the game provided for others, to the point of mentioning "Scenic Tour Intro" being a trope on TVTropes.

Compared to HL2, they say that while HL2 is a superb game, its legacy leaves something to be desired, while HL1's legacy is long, undisputed and awesome.
 

Campion

Novice
Joined
Dec 19, 2015
Messages
22
I know this thread says Half life 1, but the one mod I usually play Half life 2 with is Smod. It improves the once vapid gunplay into something actually damn exciting with a bunch of weapons way better than the base game to choose from and adds a few setpieces of its own change things up. It also offers up a great amount of customization for things like ragdoll behavior, bullettime, difficulty and whatnot. One of my favorite things to do was give all the enemies and NPCs random weapons to the point of having combine shoot rockets at you from rooftops. It's just one of those mods that really make me appreciate that mods exist.
 

tormund

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Aug 15, 2015
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Penetrating the underrail
Is there a way to turn out those weird head movements in Black Ops Redux? Everytime I move mouse in one direction, camera and crosshair will make slight movement in opposite direction once I stop. It's distracting as fuck and googling revealed that is this mod's "Feature, Not A Bug"(TM) but it didn't reveal if there is any sort of config entry or console command for turning it off...

Im liking the mod so far btw, but weapons and movement physics are completely different beast from vanilla HL.
 

tormund

Arcane
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How is everyone feeling about this?
http://store.steampowered.com/app/399120
Another big HL2 mod has gone commercial with Valve's blessing...

"Prospekt begins in the Nova Prospekt prison in the Half-Life universe. Gordon Freeman is slowly being overrun by soldiers in the prison, however unknown to him his Vortigaunt allies manage to find some help from a forgotten hero.

  • Substantial, highly-polished and totally new addition to the Half-Life 2 universe, comparable to Half-Life 2: Episode One in length
  • Developed by one person, 25 year old Richard Seabrook
  • Official Valve approval for Half-Life 2 license and assets
  • Standalone PC game built using the Source engine - no requirement for Half-Life 2
  • Continues the story of Opposing Force, Gearbox Software’s (Borderlands) update that tells the original Half-Life 2 story from the perspective of the Marines."
 
Self-Ejected

Jack

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Insert Title Here
How is everyone feeling about this?
Conflicted. I really wouldn't mind if Valve pimped out their HL licence and let third party developer studios make standalone half life expansion packs or whatever but I don't like that amateur efforts have become commercialised. It's not as bad as when they tried to jew up mods but I still don't think it's a good thing.
 

Astral Rag

Arcane
Joined
Feb 1, 2012
Messages
7,771
Sven Co-op is coming to Steam

"On this day in 1999, two months after the release of Half-Life, I posted the first public version of the Sven Co-op mod to the Atomic Half-Life fan site. Now, seventeen years, thousands of custom maps, and millions of downloads later, Sven Co-op is about to be released on Steam as a stand-alone game.

Sven Co-op will be available to download for the bargain price of USD$0 this Friday, the 22nd of January! All donors past and present will keep their bonus features in the Steam version. "
 

Astral Rag

Arcane
Joined
Feb 1, 2012
Messages
7,771
Sven Co-op is out and apparently you don't have to own a copy of HL to play it. :happytrollboy:
 

Latro

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well, anyone playing sven? never seen so much new blood before, hopefully sven has more players than it did in the past
 
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Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Black Mesa Developer Chon Kemp, who we previously interviewed about his work on the upcoming Surface Tension Uncut update, has released the cut chapters of Black Mesa’s On A Rail chapter as a free mod for the Steam version of the game.

tumblr_o1ivwmt3P01s1rufio1_1280.jpg

tumblr_o1ivwmt3P01s1rufio2_1280.jpg

tumblr_o1ivwmt3P01s1rufio3_1280.jpg

tumblr_o1ivwmt3P01s1rufio5_1280.jpg



Here is the whole interview with some additional pictures.

http://lambdageneration.com/discuss...ension-uncut-info-on-xen-livestream-giveaway/


LambdaGeneration:

According to Raising the Bar, Surface Tension was designed to pop that claustrophobia bubble developed through the game and to show that things aren’t that nicer on the surface. Did you play the original feel of the chapter straight, or did you innovate it with your own reinterpretation? If so, can you tell us what your artistic aim was?


Chon:
Our artistic aim with the entirety of Black Mesa was to expand on the original masterpiece in ways which were simply not possible at the time due to the technology, as well as putting our own unique flair and artistry on it. Surface Tension is one such chapter which showcases this process of reinterpretation.


When you play the original Half-Life 1 Surface Tension nowadays, it doesn’t quite live up to that goal stated in Raising the Bar. It all feels very closed off, quite repetitive, and featureless overall – and is mostly memorable for its really great use of set pieces and story development. For Black Mesa, the larger scope of the Source engine allowed us to take those outdoor areas and make them feel like they are part of a really large world in the middle of a New Mexico desert.


Surface Tension

I think it is fairly indisputable that our version breaks the claustrophobia far more than the original does. A great example of this is the cliffside vista on the map C2A5C, which anyone vaguely familiar with Black Mesa will probably able to recall. In the original this was just a simple 2D painted background which was really, really limited. Not only did we expand it into a fully 3D, beautiful backdrop, we also expanded it into part of the larger world by having the structures in the distance destroyed via airstrike – a memorable scene in and of itself which helps to break the player’s bubble and show them that things aren’t just going badly for him [Gordon], there’s stuff going on absolutely everywhere else too.

We also did this in many other ways in other parts of the chapter. Sound in particular plays a huge role in this. In our version of Surface Tension you can hear distant airstrikes, gunfights, and many other small touches around the maps which simply couldn’t be done back in Half-Life 1’s day.


The Surface Tension Uncut maps will take this a step even further. We’ve taken things several notches up with this one and designed an extremely expansive and interconnected environment which ties into the larger world and really breaks down what I would consider to be the weakest segment of the original chapter.



Where Half-Life 1’s Surface Tension at this point devolved into several repetitive boxy hallways, we have now blown them up into huge, realistic environments which we tried hard to visually connect to many other parts of the facility and ascribe a useful, real-world purpose. Every hallway and room tells a story of its own now, and sometimes these are stories which run outside of the player. We think this really helps to fulfill the goal for the chapter stated in Raising the Bar.

LambdaGeneration:

Did you face any particular challenges in recreating this chapter? How did you fare with the part where the player can summon missiles to destroy the landscape?


Chon:
Surface Tension Challenges:

One of the greatest challenges of the chapter was trying to come up with a theme and architectural style which was cohesive and true to Half-Life 1, but also had its own unique character. We originally started out by sticking fairly closely to the HL1 style and lighting, which was blueish and gray, but later settled for the more colourful and stylized design (built more around reds and oranges) which you see present in our game today.



The set pieces were challenging too, because they were all incredibly memorable parts of this chapter in Half-Life 1. If you ask anyone what their favorite moment from Surface Tension was in the original, you will probably hear a huge variety of different answers because it had so many memorable and well executed set pieces.

Whether it was the Manta Rays dropping off Alien Grunts, the game of “whack-a-Gordon” with the Abrams tank, the jets flying past on the Cliffside scene, or the laser trapped explosive warehouse, this chapter was full of set pieces which we had to deliver well.

This was a particularly great challenge due to the Source pipeline. Very often the set pieces had to be divided between multiple disciplines (choreography, animation, sound, level design, modelling, etc), and it could get really challenging – particularly on the Surface Tension Uncut stuff, where the Gargantua introduction scene was a nightmare from an implementation standpoint.

Gargantua Arena Challenges:
The part with the missiles (which we call internally the “Garg Arena”) was a particularly tricky section to design. There were just a lot of major design obstacles to overcome. The first major challenge was the controls of the actual airstrike designator itself. In the original the controls for the designator were just really cumbersome and finicky, and the actual device and map itself was absolutely enormous for what it was supposed to do. We modernized it into something more manageable and sensible, and tied it into a fancy new interface – more real time and less clunky.


Black Mesa’s Version of the Tactical Map

Getting that to work programmatically was pretty challenging as well! We also had to figure out how much we wanted physics and the airstrikes to play with the surrounding environments. The radio tower collapsing and forming a bridge through the wall was one such idea which made it through to the final release, a remnant from the original’s ability to destroy quite a few things in that courtyard.

The second challenge was the design of the arena and the area itself. If you really look at the design of that area in Half-Life 1, it just made no sense at all, as well as holding little or no real world purpose – particularly the entrance to the Lambda bunker. The arena underwent many major overhauls from its initial design. I redesigned it for the retail release (after the mod release but before now) and then we have now further redesigned it for the Surface Tension Uncut update.

LambdaGeneration:

Are you planning on updating the chapters in order of appearance? If not, can you give us some insight into how you pick which ones will feature in the next updates?


Chon:
We don’t have any further chapter updates planned as of yet. Any updates which we roll out in the future will likely be alongside features or assets developed for Xen or maybe multiplayer. We are fairly fluid in our development, in this sense.

Though it probably would have happened regardless, one of the reasons Surface Tension as a whole is being updated (rather than this update just being the Surface Tension Uncut maps added onto the end of the chapter), is because of the creation of newer assets which were developed for other parts of the game. Godrays, for example, were written for Xen.



We had quite a lot of new, really nice looking rock assets made for the new multiplayer map dm_stack. We had some brilliant new cinder block textures made for Crossfire, which far exceeded the old ones in quality. We had many new, higher quality world textures and models at our disposal in retail because of multiplayer. For Xen we had been testing a technique which used World Machine to generate some amazing 3D skyboxes, and this resulted in the creation of the wonderful vista we use in Surface Tension Uncut.


All of these new assets and features influenced our decision to update Surface Tension as a whole. None of this could have been possible without multiplayer and without the retail release in general and the bump in overall quality which has come with it. Any chapters we decide to update in the future, if we do any, will likely happen as a result of developments for Xen which we decide to bring back into the existing campaign in some way.

LambdaGeneration:

Of the all the chapters, which one is your favorite? What about it do you like? If it’s one of the ones that have not yet been updated, is there anything in particular you’re looking forward to recreate or add to it?


Chon:
As a team member who originally started out as a fan, this question is quite poignant for me. Black Mesa was a huge level design inspiration and the main reason I got into mapping. My favorite chapter personally was Unforeseen Consequences. It just took the atmosphere of destruction and chaos from the original Half-Life and really cranked that dial up to 11.


Unforeseen Consequences

I remember the level of detail in that chapter just blowing my mind, with all the sounds, effects, just how bad everything had gotten. And we had even put our own unique game play spin on it by moving the crowbar to a lot later in the chapter (which turned out to be quite a controversial change which some people did not like so much!) To me it made the chapter feel even more about desperate survival and the story of the world around you, rather than yourself. That chapter will probably not be updated further, beyond bug fixes.

LambdaGeneration:

This one is probably going to be a very loud “NO”, but is there any chance you can give us a rough time frame for when the whole game will be completed?


Chon:
NO!

To put it less glibly, we are really trying to steer clear of giving any kind of time frame, at least for now. This is mostly because doing so would be entirely guesswork for us.
One of the things we think is quite tough to understand is that with a project like ours, while what you see in the game is the result of countless hours of hard work and talent that we put into Black Mesa, what you don’t see is the much higher number of hours that goes into work which ends up on the cutting floor.

For example – the helipad area on C2A5G. It’s really simple. It is just a helipad next to a road by some buildings. You wouldn’t believe that it took me between 10 – 20 hours to design just the layout for that section. This is even with a previous base to work from – my old mod material! But it did!

We work to such a high standard on Black Mesa that the amount of work we end up completely scratching or redoing is quite unbelievable. It’s all just a natural part of the necessary process of iteration and I don’t think people realize quite how time consuming this aspect of game development is, even for relatively simple things like a helipad. Now take that and apply it to Xen – an entire alien border world which was considered to be the most heavily flawed section of the original; incredible in scope and ideas but mixed in execution.


A hint of what’s to come – Xen in Questionable Ethics

The process of iteration for Xen has been and will continue to be gruelling, but we will keep pushing through it until we deliver an incredible, beautiful and fun ending befitting of the Black Mesa experience. Not only that, but the Source engine itself and its development pipeline at its core are just not very suited towards creating the kind of world. We’re pushing the limits in every sense. We won’t be providing any estimates for Xen until we are reasonably confident ourselves that we can stay true to our word.

LambdaGeneration:
Any special messages for the people who keep asking for a specific chapter?


Chon:
If it’s On a Rail – I will put my expansions to it on the workshop when I am back from my holiday!

If it’s Xen – please be patient. Our track record with BMS shows that we will do it. It will be awesome!
 

sullynathan

Arcane
Joined
Dec 22, 2015
Messages
6,473
Location
Not Europe
Black Mesa is looking good.

I tried brutal half life, it's pretty cool.
 

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