Hello and Welcome to the site.
We are a friendly bunch here and welcome new players and visitors with open arms.
Many sites have a forum thread for new visitors (and old) to introduce themselves and make the leap from viewer to commenter – this is that thread.
You can tell us as little or as much about yourself as you want.
Stuff like how long you have been playing FPS games, how long you have been visiting the site, favourite games etc etc.
You don’t even need to be a registered member to comment on this, or any other post!
Also remember, that every comment with a link has to be approved by me, please don’t try to bypass that control.
Thanks to Ade for suggesting the idea.
So, with that out of the way, it’s over to you….
My name is William, I enjoy long walk on the beach and have sandy blond hair…
Back in 2003 I worked for a website called halflife.org, in fact if you can dig far enough you can find one of my original articles entitled “To Steam or not To Steam” — it was written on the release day of Steam beta and was a highly critical article that circulated quite well among the press.
Soon thereafter I worked for GameSurge Radio — an online IRC radio station, we celebrated things like CPL (Cyber Professional League) and the release of Half-Life 2.
I worked on GamersUnited Radio, contributed to ModDB then started Podcast 17 with PlanetPhillip.
I am a self proclaimed Half-Life historian, but there are others out there who do a much better job at that.
Either way, I’ve been part of the half-life community for many years under many names:
– NeoGeo007
– CubicVirtuoso
– cvirtuoso
– William
You can check out all my latest endeviours over at http://www.podcast17.com and on my youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/thepodcast17
Good stuff!
I’m an older gamer, maybe not so skilled in the configuration side of things.
I love the Half Life franchise. I cut my gaming teeth fragging aliens on Duke Nukem 3D.
I’m pretty much single player only, I enjoy the space to explore and poke about.
I love this site, it’s a great resource for non- builders like myself.
Perth, Australia
Hello, and thanks for having me!
I’m bboyl3r (buh-boiler), a rudimentary writer and an avid lover of the Half-Life franchise. I live in America, possibly somewhere on the East Coast and bordering Canada. Though I myself haven’t modded (yet), I enjoy all of the amazing mods and maps—along with the intricate stories, as well—here on runthinkshootlive.
I am mostly a writer, though I have tried sketching out some basic maps for a Combine-occupied City—and trust me, that did 𝘯𝘰𝘵 go well.
I still, however, like planning projects for when I start modding, perhaps after college sometime. One of my primary projects is that of a man deciding to head for North America, to find out for the Resistance why there has been little to no information concerning the western hemisphere of Earth.
Let’s just say that he’s in for a surprise…
He’ll be traveling by boat, across the rampant waves to North America. It’ll be in the HL universe, though there will be much more freedom in the story.
More information is forthcoming, as I culture this story.
Anyways, thanks for letting me ramble and introducing myself!
—bboyl3r
I like your mod playthrouhs
Hi, I’m Liam and I’ve been a fan of half life for a long time (planning a Gordan Freeman cosplay for my local comic-con) but just found out about this site through VNN.
Hello folks, thought I’d say hi as well.
Been mapping since pretty much forever, started with Starcraft 1 and got stuck with the Hammer Editor in the end.
Looks like I won’t escape it’s claws just yet.
Hello i am looking for some help, i want to know if its possible to add working gargantua for my hl2 map.
Nice to hear, William! I hope you never forget the glorious game series that is Half Life. Oh, yeah.
Don’t forget to pray to Gabe Newell.
Hello! I just joined because I like Half Life 2 including Half Life!
I find mods really enjoyable! Because it like a new campaign to play. Also keep releasing more mods
Hello There
Greetings, my name is UnknownInfinite. Though you call me Unknown.
I love the gold source and source engine a lot, and Half Life is one of my favorite games of all time.
I am trying to get into modding and mapping for Half Life 2 and the episodes.
I’ve played Half Life 1, Half Life 2, Half Life 2 Lost Coast, Half Life 2:EP1 and EP2, Half Life Opposing Force.
Wow…The last comment was in 2012??? Is this site even active anymore???
I was unable to leave an “Introduce Yourself” post, and the “Contact” link is inactive…
There is a note that unless you comment within three days of registering, you will be deleted. So, I guess this is my comment…
I know, I’m late to the party, and didn’t bring any beer…but I didn’t know there was a party going on until I looked for H-L mods…
I just want to make a lot of cool maps, honestly <3
I am Miigga and I also go by the name Brutwarst.
I’m a 20-year-old Finnish guy who makes singleplayer maps for HL2:Ep2.
You can find my maps here: http://www.planetphillip.com/miiggas-maps/
And you can find my interview here: http://www.planetphillip.com/posts/audio-interview-with-miikka-erkkila
I am also not very verbose so I don’t know what to add.
Brutwarst? Isn’t that supposed to be “Bratwurst” instead? (Be warned, I’m German!) 😛
There was a time when I went by the name Bratwurst. Then I swapped some letters to make it Wratburst instead. People kept calling me “Wrath”, which was not my intention so I changed it to Brutwarst.
And yes, bratwurst is in fact a type of German sausage.
I see. “Wratburst” was just killing me! 😀
Just loving games with words or mixed letters, so much pun! 🙂
yeh miigga … i used to live off brakwursts when i was based in germany ( with the british army ) and i was based in a small town called fallingbostel …..
ive seen some so called brokwursts in the uk shops but they dont taste anything like they do in germany ….. we used to call them brokkies … and the wagon would turn up at midnight just when we were stumbling back from the local pub/tavern …. good old days
My name is Leon (SPYmaps) Brinkmann (48) and am around on PP.com and the total HL2 community for a lot of years now. Back in 1999 I started with SP-mapping and have been doing so from that time on. Many fps games I used for making sp-mappacks and sp-mods. As soon as Hl2 was released I started with that game and I have been using it and its episodes to make severel large sp-mods that can be found here on PP and on other sites. For instance Strider Mountain, Coastline to Atmosphere, final Project Diary, Leon sp-mappack. And the last 2+ years I have been working hard on my 5th and last big HL2 (ep2) sp-mod called Episode 3 (check moddb). I hopefully will release this one before the summer ends, this is however my last Hl2 project (for now). After this I finally will start with my first own indie fps.
Leon
Hi leon
How have things been going …. are you still ok ( in regards to what you went through last year ) ….. and anymore news on the next mod ?
ive been looking at reviews of your mods on other sites apart from planetphillip (damn,im still using that name ) and one thing that you find is theres guys ( such as me ) who absolutely love your mods and maps and then theres some who think there ok,and finally theres a small few that dont like them ( poor people ,what are they missing )
final project is the only game i run every month… infact ive probally got just as many gaming hours on that than i have on half life 2 ! … and i never get bored of that game …..
if i was to be honest my favourite mod/map is final project and the leon map pack … these could of easily been converted into a mod,however due to the size of your other maps it wouldnt of been received well ( not because of the quality but the size )
anyway all the best leon and good luck for the future
take care mate !
wow, thank you so much!!
And i am amazed to read that you play Final Project each month!
I am very flattered by that!
ABout how things now go, well, still mapping, still modding!
You talked about the size of my mods, well, they all will still look small compaired with the one i am now working on because the total play time of it will be at least around 20 to 25 hours, really!
Its by far the biggest and most detailed one i ever made, and i spent also by far the most time on it building it, 4,5 years now. I am very glad to say that i am about to rap the whole thing up. I know i said many times before that it would be done by then. And each time i had to delay the release due to different issues. But, now i can say that it will be released this summer. Hopefully June or July at the latest.
(mod name; Episode 3; The Closure).
thank you very much for the kind words, and i really do hope you will like this new one to.
Leon
Can’t wait Leon. Your maps are always first class.
My name is heppa, and I am Phillip’s inner child.
I wondered what that annoying voice inside my head was. Always asking for ice-cream and candy.
Hi All! First, man o man do I love this site. Big thanks to Phillip for his years of work and dedication…seemingly all for our enjoyment!? Amazing sir, amazing.
I saw you shut it down last week and my heart sunk, but I understood. Then, days later, it’s baaaaaacccccckkkkk!
Been playing video games since about 1978. PC games since the old floppy demo days (Apogee) and I still play games to this day.
Currently enjoying the Steam Summer Sale where I bought the Hitman series and Painkiller Resurrection…
My favorite games of all time are:
1. Half Life series
2. Thief series
3. Deus Ex series
4. Elder Scrolls series
5. Super Maryo Chronicles
Sure I like GTA, Fallout, CoD, FarCry and all of the rest of them…but these above games do it for me.
My favorite HL/HL2 mod has to be Research and Development.
The only MP game I play is HL2 Deathmatch…you’ll see me on servers as NugsKillah. Haha…
mine too!
me too!
You must be twins separated at birth.
ahhaha that made me laugh so hard, thx 😀
I am Alex “Kaito Kid” gilbert. I am 16 years old, and I have been playing Half-Life since I was 8. I only played the original game and the expansions for a lot of time, then about 1 year ago I discovered unofficial mods, and most of them are pretty cool. I also discovered speedruns, and started training to become a speedrunner too. I played at least 40 different sp mods, and I play a lot of deathmatch and adrenaline gamer deathmatch. I also like Half-life too and source games, but I will always prefer goldsource.
does that mean you won’t be trying ag2?
yes, yes I will be. I play hl2deathmatch frequently because I love fighting with the gravity gun, but I find gameplay too slow compared to hl1. if there ever is a ag for hl2, and the gameplay is faster I’ll surely play it alot
I’m andyb,47? from Canada.Been hangin around here for ever it seems.Played to many Portal2 mods lately and got sick of it so am currently in a HL1 mod craze playing everything over again.Just finished Adam and Hour Glass today.
I am Tobias. A normal swedish guy who lives in the forest.
On the internet I go by many names, First It was Tabe but I figured it people would call me name-stealer cuz of the popular CoD player Tejbz.
I have not really decided yet, but right now I go with anything with the word Tab in it.
I fell in love with the Half-Life series about 10 years ago when I played the demo of Opposing Force. I was a kid so I thought it was scary as he**.
Anyways, I’m also into the Elder Scrolls series with is like the second best games ever made after Half-Life.
I started mapping years ago but I never finished or released a single map. Unknown Hazard in the DoorVille comp was my first map to get onto the internet. After that, it returns, I begin a map, make a room then quit. I have read lots of information on Mappers Block and stuff but I think I just need to plan my maps better.
Anywas part 2, I really enjoy this site and was horrified when Philip threatened us with closing the site. I know its hard work, but always know, its VERY appreciated by many people.
Played over 400 HL1 SP mods, mostly thanks to PlanetPhillip 😀
I also have experience in mapping for goldsource, as well as some part of coding. Also currently making a mod for HL1 myself, but I’d appreciate if mappers would help with the project, since I’ve just done a bunch of new entities for the mod too. About Planetphillip: I remember back when Stef, mel, goddess alyria, piledriver and friends were on the site, so I think I’m pretty old too. lol.
I wonder where they are now 🙁
As old as the metaphorical hills (in gaming terms).
Thinks of PP as a relative newcomer to the HL scene (3dmaprealms is where I started downloading mods back in the day).
Nowadays only lurks and only comments when there is a really good reason to…
(Good to have you back Mr P.)
I’m Gambini. I’ve been building maps for games since I was 14. And being 31 now, I have two of my three kids building maps too, which is like an heritage.
While most of my work has been done for Duke Nukem 3d, i’ve been trying to do stuff for HL too for a loooong time. I’m pretty young for the internet (i have internet since 2008) but still got an awesome response over the work I did for Duke Nukem. I left undone at least two projects for Half Life 1 and still on the works with a big one for HL2. The only thing I have ever released for HL2 is a map for the ElevatorVille contest.
Lately I have been taking a rest from modding and have played a lot of games.
Howdy! 17 years mapping is a long time. Way longer than I have been running this site.
You should have a family mapping day.
Yeah when I come back from work my older son is already waiting to fill my brain with his questions and to show me his progress on whatever he’s doing.
And funnily enough I did never to make him follow this hobby. He just began with it alone because of seeing me doing it so much. Most of my efforts toward him point to make him do other stuff, like outside sports 😛
That must be so cool: having your son interested of his own accord in your hobby.
I have been enjoying Planet Phillip for many many years and Phillip runs a clean fair fun ship. The mods are checked and the contests are for real.
You can have a great time, with lots of people who enjoy playing and participating in the Half Life Universe.
when episode 3 is released the mods will flood us and we will have so many to play. In the meantime, developers keep generating great mods and some of them are so professionally made the content, storyline and graphics make you wish valve would “get with it” and produce something.
anyway, welcome friend.
Welcome aboard, me hearty!
I am Dr. Amazing. I hail from the land of corn (Illinois). I am 14 and have OCD, ADHD and am generally anti-social. I like My Little Pony: Friendship is magic. I’ve got 2muchtimeonmyhands (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XcKBmdfpWs) . I am just a little bit crazy. I love Half-Life 1 and retro gaming. I am currently permanently banned from The Whole Half-Life and Half-Life Creations. My favorite film of all time would have to be Dawn of the Dead (1978). I love music from the 80’s. I like to go to Goodwill and try to find games. I call it GoodWill Hunting. I do not like the Call Of Duty series. I hate it when mods have mismatching arms on the view models. I also hate wheat bread.
Well that got off track.
was that u in kbx the other day? 😛
kbx?
I am Aaron aka BlueWolf72 been following PP for a long time. I started out making models and went to make a mod for HL called Water wars. I gave up making mods to help launch HL radio and moddb.com. Created the Mod of the year awards for the site and interviewed mods so word would get out. Did the public relations for mods. Created radio shows for gamesurge and my own.
Joined PHL and HL2.net to help keep focused on the community. Decided to launch my own site to support steam the way I wanted with SteamContests. I am working on launching a new project soon that will focus on less fortunate gamers all around the world who would never get a chance to play video games. The site will allow gamers to get games for free.
the group will stay open please join I will be giving games away from the summer sale http://steamcommunity.com/groups/contests
if you need any models use my stuff 🙂
http://www.moddb.com/members/bluewolf72/addons
You are being modest. You started the ModDB Mod of the Year awards too, I hear. Plus prolly lots of other things.
Not much to say about me really, name’s Duke, 58 year old Biker, English but living in Bulgaria, loves Half-Life, scuba diving and cooking. My gaming started way back with the release of Realms of the Haunting (still wish someone would re-make that), then all the Doom series and clones…I can’t make maps or mods, been “online” since “95. That’s about it. (or at least all I want to share here)
What bike are you currently riding?
I think I mentioned once I use to Have a Vincent Comet, with sidecar as I hadn’t passed my test. I used to go to Steam Fairs and ride a friend’s Black Shadow. I remember going somewhere with a disused runway. I went up and down that for ages. No helmet, no goggles, water streaming from my eyes to my ears. Probably wasn’t really fast but I was 19ish at the time and it certainly felt like it.
big boys don’t cry!
I have no problem admiting when I cry, but this was just water from my eyes because of the speed.
I’m sure it was
A Vincent Comet? wow. My other hobby is bikes too, how I could forget that? I’ve always been a mechanics enthusiast and therefore built a small garage plenty of tools to fix and restore my bikes and my friends’ ones. Never owned big bikes because I used to live in a small house where a big one would not fit through the door, and now that I moved to my own large house have no money for them because of the mortgage. I’ve restored my own 1979 Yamaha GT80MX which can face up any twice or three times larger motorized bike though 😉
So it was a choice: Big house – no bike or small house and small bike. That’s a tough one.
I love that era of bikes. Not too big, easy to maintain yourself etc. Nowadays, it’s all about power and style. Retro for me!
I currently have a Yamaha Dragstar (V Star in the USA) 1100 classic, customised.
Hi, I’m Mazur.
I’ve been mapping for HL1 since it’s release in 1998 and still do. I only started to do stuff on source in 2008, but quickly ended up with more than 1500 hours in the Source SDK.
Beyond that there isn’t much. I like to make maps and will be releasing a few on PP. That is, when they’ll be done.
Well hello there. 1500 hours is quite a lot, can’t wait to see some of your maps here.
I think after so many years, I think it’s about time I said hello 🙂
I’m Kyrrii, I just turned 20 and I’ve been an avid FPS fanatic since I first watched my dad play Doom 2 back in 97′. Naturally, after procuring enough funding I decided to build my own game collection, and naturally, on the PC.
After many bouts of trying to convince my mother that steam isn’t a criminal organization hell-bent on stealing my money and that Half-life doesn’t involve killing naked prostitutes, she finally let me buy Half-life… in 2007.
Ever since then, I’ve been downloading prolifically from PP and I will continue to do so until the sun burns out, hopefully XD
I just can’t believe how such a site could be such a massive resource for my two favorite games, ever. Half-life 1 and 2 were incredible alone, but considering how many hours I spent playing and adoring maps and mods, It makes me wonder why companies these days are refusing to give their customers SDK.
I do know for one thing, however, is that the Half-life modding community is far from dead, and I will continue to love their work, and the dedication of Phillip and his wonderful site, to the end 🙂
Well hello there, Kyrii, and I’m glad you finally made this step to say “hi” 🙂 May this be the first of your many posts here.
Yes, Hello there. Sorry to hear it took you mother 10 years to allow you to play HL.
Whilst Steam might not be built by a criminal organization, Valve sure want your money!
Have you never thought about learning to map?
I have to admit, I assumed all gamers your age did a little bit of mapping.
I had some interest in developing maps for Half-life 2 back in 2005, when a friend of mine showed me the demo and some custom-made maps, but after viewing some tutorials, I was overwhelmed by how much work went into making even the simplest of maps and over time, I abandoned the idea.
I might take it up again in the near future, but who knows 🙂
And yeah, my father was very laid back (Hence why he let me play Doom 2) but my mother was the over-protective kind, it wasn’t till I was 14 she relinquished control of whatever I played. However, she had full control of whatever I wanted to buy at the time, hence why it took so long to get Half-life D:
Hello dear readers,
first of all I’m no mapper/modder just a true gamer from Germany.
I’m a 30 year old (?) fart but I look and feel (and sometimes act) like a 20yo 🙂
Been playing computer games since 1992, the first games were “Battle Chess” (great sound and animation!) and “A-10 Thunderbolt” which I couldn’t understand how to play 😛
Then there were a few years I was playing only Super Nintendo games.
Back in 1996 or so I started playing PC games again and found out that I love FPS games, so I played “Duke Nukem 3D”, “Quake” series, “Hexen”, some other Build Engine games like “Shadow Warrior” and “Redneck Rampage” until some very neat masterpiece saw the light of day – “Half-Life”.
I soon started to play HL1 singleplayer mods like the classic “They Hunger” series, “USS Darkstar” etc.
Then there was a “Return to Castle Wolfenstein” phase but sooner or later I went back to HL…
Having played around 1000 HL1 SP maps and mods I’m like a tiny database for that, so if anyone has trouble finishing a map or mod, just ask me for help 🙂
My computer was getting old so I couldn’t play HL2 all the time until the late of 2011 where I finally bought a new one and that was the first time I played HL2 and its Episodes (shame on me, I know!).
Been here on the site for almost a year now, but there’s just no other place for me to hang out for HL related stuff and I like the site’s look more than every other HL site (dark background, white letters!).
Now and then I also play other genres like Action RPG’s, so at the moment you can “find” me often in “Diablo 3” 😛
However, I visit PP every day and checking all new comments and posts and altho I don’t comment a lot here I do enjoy reading, it’s always a great atmosphere somehow and readers opinions are usually very interesting.
Enjoy your stay here on PP people, and all the best wishes to Phillip! You’re doing a very good job so thank you once more!
My name is Ross Cooper but online I’ve been known as RossBond and now RossBondReturns. I just turned 36 years old and have been writing since the age of ten- I’m also from the U.K. but live in Southern California.
In 1998 I got a used desktop with a floppy drive and used it to write, I also picked up Half-Life and a CD-Rom drive. I played through all of HL in software mode for my first play through. After installing more RAM and a Riva TNT I played through again accelerated. Ahh the memories.
Since I’m a writer of fiction, short stories/manuscripts/screenplays I found it natural to offer my help to the HL modding community as a writing/concept developer for modifications. Sadly none of the mods I wrote for ever came to fruition- my recent short Waking Nightmare is my first HL fiction in years.
I’ve been coming to PP for quite awhile and have enjoyed the entire experience.
I have done most of my writing in the Terminator Universe and have three online full length scripts that can be downloaded through
http://www.terminatorfiles.com/media/scripts/#fanmade.
In fact I have to thank James Cameron for encouraging my screenwriting since the age of 19. Hopefully soon you’ll see my name up in writing credits. I have two Independent scripts that are set to be made into films…and am currently acting in an Independent Christian film called The Thief in The Night.
http://www.facebook.com/TheThiefinTheNight
Other than that I have all the time in the world.
Cheers.
Hello,
My name is Gordon Freeman, I’m a scientist working at the Black Mesa research facility. Last week something bad happened, we had a system crash and PlanetPhillip went offline. This made me very sad. From then on out alot of crazy sh*t happened, aliens attacked the facility, marines started shooting up the place… oh well you know how it goes. Luckily we’re safe for now. What’s that Barney? Something about a beer? Sure I’ll be right there.
Oke, for real this time.
My name is Yordi and I’m a huge fan of the Half-Life universe. I’ve played and continue to play alot of mods ranging from Half-Life to Episode 2. Alot of those mods I’ve downloaded from PlanetPhillip. At least once a week for the past 5 years I’ve visited the site and read the articles. I almost never post a comment, but I thought this would be a good time to come out of the closet 🙂 Thank you Phillip and thank you modmakers for the joy you have brought me.
Hello and welcome Yordi. I’m glad you made the first step and commented. What’s your favourite mod?.
Wow, let me think for a moment. I’ve played so many it’s difficult to choose. I still hold warm memories for the HL-mod Azure Sheep. I think it’s one of the greatest mods out there.
Names Richard, AKA Rikersbeard, 45 year old ex Telecom Engineer.
Interests included SciFi, film soundtracks (especially Jerry Goldsmith’s work), film SpFx, 2000AD comics (early), F1, Tour de France, air & space flight and astronomy.
Model maker, both actual and virtual when using “Imagine” on the Amiga or PC. Could not get on with “Lightwave” or “Real 3D”!
Favourite real model is my 4ft high dragon, poised on a mountain top, wings held high in a ” V” ready to fly. It is a mod of a very crude resin sculpture which took me about ten years to complete, with a new tail, wing membranes, all 36 teeth and numerous horns and one or two repaints! The first paint was red and green!
Best digital models so far are my “Space 1999” Eagle transporters with “realistic” internal cabins and my 16-crew Manned Mars Mission designs. With the crew in a 0.6g habitat ring and two landers.
First computer game played, Dragster Racing, played via a teleprinter! (1978).
First computer game played on monitor via a keyboard, Start Trek on a mainframe where the Klingons were “K”s! (1980).
Favourite arcade game was “Tail Gunner” (b/w vector graphics game).
Home computers: ZX 81, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 (used as my games console while I programmed on the ” QL), Sinclair QL, Commodore Amiga 500 and 1500 then PCs.
Games consoles: binatone TV game, Mattel Intellivision, (lots of game carts & voice module) and Colecovision, (ton of games)!
A few of my Favourite Games: Kennedy Approach (C64), Dungeons & Dragons (Intellivision), Donkey Kong (Colecovision), Super Frog (Amiga), Falcon (Amiga), FS2004 (Heavily modded at 40.9GB) (PC), Alien Trilogy (my introduction to an fps on the PC), AVP (PC), System Shock 2 (PC), Deus Ex (PC) and, of course, the Half Life series of games and they’re multitude of mod titles, very especially “G-String”.
Thanks to PlanetPhillip.com, which I discovered a few years back somewhere around the time “Strider Mountain” was released, I found many HL mods easily instead of trolling around the net or nabbing them off a magazine CD. Although I did find a brilliant Russian language HL site for a lot of my early mods, but speaking only English and bad English this site was a challenge to navigate. But I had downloaded a few planes for FS2004 from Russian sites so I had an idea what to click, sometimes!
Never liked “Doom” and for some reason have no interest in games consoles, especially their hand controllers, its mouse and/or joystick for me.
Most memorable Half Life moment:
Loading my new “Half Life 2” game and discovering “Steam” for the first time and the joy of a daylong installation thanks to my dial-up connection! Then I heard about all the trouble people were having with steam worldwide and some of the things they were saying online were quite rude! One American said that all he had was a $30 silver disc! Me, I had no trouble and just played HL2!
I was “got” a few months later, when I could not get my password recognised for a couple of days!
I think that’s enough!
Welcome Richard and thanks for the bio.
Looks like you have plenty experience in a variety of things.
Do you still have all those old computers? If so, if you ever get time, please put them together and take a photo. I’ll publish it. Maybe even get people to do their games collection photo, like I did with the desk setup a while ago.
Actually, I think I will do that. I’ll have to allocate a morning to it though, as all my games are in boxes in my basement.
I’ll give it a go. My Intellivision and Colecovision were still working the last time I tested them before their loft imprisonment. As was my QL and Amiga 1500. I’ll see what’s up there and take a photo of all the games devices, games and a couple of handhelds. Even my old LED Space Invaders game that still works!
I fear my specky, C64 and Amiga 500, were sold or trodden on by someone working in the loft, poor 64. and my sack, yes sack, of C64 games may have been ditched!
My name is Alex, I’m 30 years old and I’m a coder.
I did some modding, but not for the Half-life games, but for AvP2.
I started visiting PlanetPhillip.com after hearing about it on Podcast17, and I stayed for its interviews and (non HalfLife but gaming in general) articles.
I like games with a nice story (doesn’t have to be happy mind you) and a well created atmosphere, and I loathe games that offer only eye candy. Besides games and coding I like to do a bit of stargazing once in a while. I’m no stranger to electronics but the last time I touched the soldering gun was two months ago (after a break of more than 6 years) when I built an (ugly, but working) automated feeder for the dog.
Welcome Alex.
You have been WAY to modest. Just so people know, Alex is the coder who made MapTap possible! Without all his hard work there probably wouldn’t be MapTap, except as an idea in my head.
Thinking about your automatic dog feeder, you now need to build one of these:
tee hee
I’m HEC, my name is Hector and I live in mexico, i’m a pure HL and valve, gamer, so much more a mod gamer and reviewer, I got addicted to review moods since I use almost daily PP.com since 2009 or so…
I just love to play the mods and review them, I love this site because it also allows me to practice my writing in english that some or many times is loosy in the comments, so sorry about that if you found some wierd writing in my comments, i’m not an english native speaker, but I make myself to understand.
Anyway, I allways love when some of my comments started a good point to discuss about and I also enjoy to read what other gamers have to say about the mods and maps we experienced.
Soo, regards to everyone and as we say in my country, LARGA VIDA A PLANET PHILLIP Y HALF LIFE!!!! 🙂
Hola Hector.
Do you know if they made a South American Spanish version of Half-Life 2?
MM, I don’t think so, better I don’tg have idea!, the verssions here in Mexico of HL, has that peculiar spain spanish accent…
Hey I’m Blue Lightning. It even says so on my birth certificate.
Actually, Im Tim, and my age is somewhere in the 40’s. I of course love HL2, Ep1 and Ep2. I thought Ep1 was better than Ep2, probebly the only one that thinks that. I DL and play HL2 mods. I’m not crazy about HL1, although I liked it…but I dont play HL1 mods.
I’m a long time member (5 stars) on the Steam forums also under the same name of Blue Lightning.
I’m a long time member (super duper) on the 2K forums, under the same name. I love Bioshock and Bioshock II, espicially for their atmosphere. Looking forward to Bioshock Infinite in Feburary.
I’m a member of the JR clan on Red Orchestra/Darkest Hour online mulitplayer. Our clan mainly deal with driving and operating tanks, in WWII. Our clan puts up the most populated server.
I am a member of Duke4Net and love the original Duke Nukem 3D (1996). I regularly dowload and play the single player maps made for that game, as it has a nice community of fans who make maps for it.
I’m of the opinion that Dark Messiah Might and Magic is the most overlooked underatted FPS of all time, and the best overall single player FPS ever. And Arkane did it using Valve’s Source engine! But Valve didnt learn anything from Arkane’s use of their own engine. Sad.
The SDK was not released for Dark Messiah because Ubisoft wouldnt allow it (damn publishers). However I heard that it was “leaked” to the public but it is full of bugs. As far as I know, no single player mod has been made for that game, but some people are rumored to be “working on it”.
And that’s about it I guess. Oh, I think PlanetPhillip is the best HL2 source out there.
My name is Merril.
I have a bookmark folder for HL related websites, mods and wikis. I really enjoy the HL story so I glean as much as I can. Thats why I follow PP. I’m not a mapper or modder, but greatly appreciate all of those that create community content.
I was a big fan of HL1 and CS/DoD, but I didn’t really appreciate HL1 for more than an amazing modding platform.
When HL2 came out I found it lived up to its hype and then some. I love the story telling, the graphics and the variety of weapons (in that order).
I’ve become somewhat bored of HL2 mods and gameplay… mostly because of the aging AI code and mapping limitations.
Now I’ve found myself spending most of my time playing portal 1 mods. I think I just like the spatial puzzles, portal 2 mods bring too much into the equation.
Hello, I’m Laviniu from Romania
48 years old, playing HL since 1999. When I met my (second) wife she thought that I’m not quite sane… playing HL for hours…
But that was ONLY THE BEGINNING.
Now she considers that as normal… :))
Thanx for being part of my life PP, really a great work you make!
Hola para todos nuestros amigos 🙂
Salut si bine ai venit!
Unq here, aka Unquenque. Real name is Don although for the internet it’s Unq.
Bought Half-Life the week it came out and have loved it ever since. I started mapping in mid-1999 and have loved that ever since, too. I still prefer Goldsource partially because of familiarity, partially ease of use, and partially the challenge.
Been aware of Planetphillip since its inception but really only became a true regular visitor less than a couple years ago. Last year’s Summer Days of Nostalgia event cemented me in place as a very frequent visitor and occasional contributor. I really enjoyed the podcasts we did, I guess I just love talking about Half-Life 1 maps. I wrote a bunch of reviews at Ten Four and still fondly remember the old review sites like Radium, 3D Map Realm, and Hangar 16.
I have several short HL1 mods and projects designed and partially built. Working on a new one now that was inspired by the TREE event and is hopefully coming in the near future.
Hi, folks!
I’m Zekiran (on Steam and assorted online venues), also known as lethe-gray on deviantart. I’m proud to be a middle-aged woman into fps and sci fi. I wasn’t introduced to Half Life until very late in the game, when Portal came out I bought it and THEN picked up the Orange Box. The rest, as they say, is history.
I’m a huge half life universe fan. Though I’m nowhere near as good at the modding side of things, I do write constantly, and have a variety of HL related items in my DA gallery. Notably I’m writing a massive fanfic mashup of the HL/Portal and Fear universes, Repurposed.
I really enjoy playing mods and maps, and when I have time I like to give commentary. I wouldn’t mind doing some voice work though I’m not a pro by any stretch. Some day I hope to work for Valve, but then who doesn’t.
Anyway, I’d like to thank Phillip for creating a site like this where I don’t have to muddle through all manner of crap to get to the gems. It’s great to see so many talented modders and fans able to get together and enjoy their favorite subjects.
Oh, hi there! Welcome to the site, the female committee is growing!
I was we had more female members.
We’re out there, but it’s kind of difficult to get us all in one place. 😀 Generally I’d say we started out as Portal fans, though a good number are “played console/gaming as a kid” too. I’d love better demographic representation, honestly. 😀
Hello, I am Mr. Happy but I also use other names that contain happ because variety is the spice of life. I have been reading PP for years. I love this site! PP is one of my go to pages and a site for which I will proselytize quite vigorously upon meeting someone whom knows not of it. Sometimes I try to make maps though I have not made any for HL2 that are good enough for release yet. If you make maps we might have met on the battlegrid throwing Hammers at each other.
This is one of my favorite sites on the internet. I don’t use many websites regularly anymore since I am bad at the internet but PP is in my top 4 that I still look at. Without PP I never would have played many mods and without that I doubt I ever would have stuck with trying to use Hammer. I have made TF2 and Portal/2 maps. I hope to participate in a 6×10 contest although I am overwhelmed with something at the moment.
I am a massive Half-Life nerd. I carry a crowbar at all times and dream of conversing with vast atmospheric intelligence’s. Right now I am wearing a headcrab hat. Now my dog is wearing the headcrab hat. Now my dog is biting the headcrab hat. Now the headcrab hat is biting my dog. Hold on I’ll be right back this isn’t good.
I have commented/reviewed on a few maps here before so hello to anyone that I have talked to before and hello to everyone that I have not.
Nice to meet you MrHappy. You’ve got some great work in your portfolio. Is it okay if I add Wavelet next week?
I really hope the other 6×10 themes interest you.
I’m so happy that my site might have contributed to your continued use of Hammer – things like that make all the hard work worth it.
Nice to meet you too! Thanks for your kind comment. Absolutely please add Wavelet to the site! I’m afraid I don’t market my work very well, somehow I wasn’t able to put two and two together and realize you might be interested. I will definitely send you any and all future SP work.
All of the 6×10 themes and previous contests have interested me, it is only other aspects of life and commitment to other ongoing projects and obligations that have stopped me from entering.
My name is Mitten Romney, and I change my Steam username a lot (from Mitten Romney to The Obamatrix: Unreloaded, you get the point.) I like to play Half-Life, since I completed Source. Now I just play lots of Mods.
I may or may not be contributing to this site, I do have the tools necessary and the Hammer 3.4 set up thanks to a tutorial by HLCRAZY on ModDB. I love to play TF2 some times, but for the most part lots of Brink. Oh, and I’m an Atheist.
I will be on lots of this site for this time being because I found a bunch of cool mods I want to install. I hope I get something up in time!
Hi, Mitten(s)! 😀
Well, hello there.
Welcome to the site. Hope you manage to start making maps or at least review some!
Urby here. I’ve been a fan of Half-Life for as long as I can remember and I picked up Hammer for the first time in 2000. Since then I have worked on countless maps and mods, zero of which have been released. All of that will soon change however. For the past two years I have dedicated a lot of time to a Half-Life mod called ‘the Core” which is gradually approaching its long awaited release.
When I’m not mapping I’m usually working or gaming. I play a ton of BF3 as well as the usual mods for HL and HL2. I’m also a part of the MOTM (map of the month) review team at TWHL. I also record the occasional video blog when I remember to.
Welcome, welcome!
And on behalf of the BetaTestersCollective, may we offer our services for your future release? 😀
Yes, as Ade said, welcome, welcome.
12 years is a long time to have worked on maps but never released anything.
Glad to see you hear and I’m sure I speak for everybody when I say we can’t wait for The Core.
Of course, I agree with you 100% there. It is a very long time indeed.
Sadly, until recently I never really had much interest in multiplayer so everything I worked on was singleplayer. As such, development times were much longer and because I worked alone I often lost interest and cancelled the whole thing.
I dare say the same thing would have happened with The Core, however after posting media online and getting support from the community, I was able to enlist a couple of guys to help keep me motivated, as well as producing some stunning work themselves.
I owe them, and of course the fans, a great deal indeed.
Please don’t think I was criticising – just observing.
It’s interesting what you say about the media response keeping you motivated.
Hiya everyone, I’m Daniel! I’m from South Africa and have been into computers since I was about 6 (2002). I first played a valve game in 2005 (Half-Life) and they have been part of my life since then 🙂
I’ve never really gotten into Source modding, but my interest has been renewed by this site! Also, I’m currently working on a game engine of my own and am hoping to get some experience with content creation and mapping using Source so that I can release something with it one day.
Looking forward to sharing stuff with y’all!
Welcome Daniel.
Might I suggest participating in my mapping competition to help you get some experience in mod time management?
Thanks for the welcome 😀
I’m planning on entering the 5th contest when it starts 🙂
I have been with you guys since 1998, I never had time to post any condolence for Jasper RIP, wish you would have played the black mesa release Jasper. Anyway I have tried to keep the same handle “rossi” ever since back at the HANGER 16. I have been away at school to try and build a career for the second half of my life. I played HL last weekend for the first time in 2 years, same as how long it has been since I visited here. Hope to get time to come back soon.
Wow, welcome back 🙂
Yes, absolutely, welcome back. Hopefully, you’ll find some interesting content.
Hello everyones, my name is Nikolas, but you better call me Tosh.
im from Canada, but my parents are bulgarians, when i came in bulgarian y never speak very well my language, I’m studying English non stop, i just speak Spanish cause i live about 12 years in spain.
For the first time in my life I’ve tried to play Half Life when I was 9 years and I love this video game, not only for Action, no weapons. But by the story that the game. When i finish Half Life, i´ve play a lots of Mods and i like it so much :D.
i play Half Life 2 and the episodes, and i begin a play these mods with good work like (Underhell, ect.)
well, i glad to register this side just for share my view about the mods 🙂
Hello everybody!
I am Emnu, a mapper from Finland. I started mapping in 2008 or something, and I remember this site from bashing my “awesome” maps 😛
These are my “awesome” maps:
http://www.runthinkshootlive.com/posts/escape-from-shalkamaz-half-life-2/
http://www.runthinkshootlive.com/posts/mall-of-the-zombies-half-life-2-ep2/
http://www.runthinkshootlive.com/posts/apocalypse-half-life-2-ep2/
Nowadays I’m known for my popular tf2 map and my horror maps. I decided to register here and maybe I’ll participate some of the contests (If I remember to check in to see when they start :P)
P.S. Why isn’t this PlanetPhillip anymore?
Hello Emnu and welcome to the site! I just checked your “Awesome” maps. Everybody has to start somewhere and I respect anybody who builds and releases something. The Hell’s Island Horror Map looks pretty good. Will it run in Ep2?
I hope you do decide to enter the competitions.
I changed the name to help the site grow and reach a larger audience.
Technically you can play it in EP2, but it has puzzles that can’t be bypassed without having 2 players in there :/
Pity.
Hi everyone, I’m Tom, FPS-loving gamer and Half-Life enthusiast from Italy.
I love this website and I deeply respect all the people that made the effort to produce this huge library of Half-Life maps/mods, owner of the site and mappers/modders/reviewers alike.
I’m very interested in learning some mapping and modding myself, though I’m a complete n00b and in serious need of help. I already started going through the Source SDK documentation, and I found some tutorials here and there even though I don’t have a specific direction, but I do want to try and create some kind of map to begin.
Does anyone know if there are any specific resources I should be looking for to start?
Hi Tom607, welcome to the site.
I can’t offer any advice about the mapping, since I don’t map myself – sorry.
Well, I’m in the process of teaching myself level design. The best way to learn is probably by doing. Aim to complete something for a 10 day time limit in order to keep it small fairly small in scope. A lot of the ville map competitions work with this limit and it’s a good way to keep your scope limited to increase chances that you’ll actually get something out.
If you run into problems the forums at interlopers.net are a great help when you’re stuck on something (search the forums first as it’s probably already been asked), there are also some pretty good tutorials there.
There are a few worthwhile articles at worldofleveldesign.com as well.
I would also recommend the betatesterscollective.com as we can test your map and give you advice on how to make it better.
Finally have a look at vmfs of other mappers there were a bunch released with CityStreetsville so that’s probably a good place to start although they can be quite disorientating if you don’t know what you’re looking at. To that end VMEX is a very useful tool that lets you decompile maps to view them in hammer. Though sometimes the maps don’t decompile right. If you’re doing this bear in mind that it’s OK to learn from this but it’s not OK to directly copy stuff unless you have the creators express permission.
Hope this helps.
Thank you for all the useful resources, I’ll definitely try to make the most of them.
I already started looking through some tutorials in interlopers.net, but I’m really at the beginning and I still have to learn how to use most of the tools, so I’ll stick with something simpler and just add up stuff when I feel I can learn something new.
Unfortunately right now I don’t have the time to spare to create something in a limited set of time, but I’ll try to do that when I’ll get the chance. Thanks again for your suggestions.
Perhaps we should start by defining a simple direction. Pick an idea you want to do. Maybe it’s some setting in Half-Life 2, or some kind of gameplay scenario you enjoyed. Then, aim to create your own version of that. I find it’s much easier to take that next step, beyond the high-level “This is how you build a room” tutorials, when you have an idea of what you want to aim for. Don’t be afraid to start small either. Things have a way of naturally getting more complicated as they go along. 🙂
And once you think you have a grasp on things, get others to look at it, like the BTC or here. I think you’ll find that once you get into the feedback loop, if you enjoy building maps, the enthusiasm will start to grow on itself.
Right now I’m following the “Your First Map” tutorial in the Valve developer community Wiki, just to get acquainted with the tools and the very basics, but I have some kind of idea that I want to try out.
It should be some kind of “office complex” type of map based on a real office floor, and I already have a (very rough) basic layout for it. I don’t aim for anything particularly original or pretty, just something I can fiddle around with and try stuff out.
Thank you for your advice, I’ll see if I can produce something in the next few weeks, though I don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to mapping apart from the weekends, but I’ll definitely be glad to show it and get some impressions when the time comes.
I look for a HL2-game : shoot with a Pizza. Can you help me ?
Hey People, I’m Julian, I like mapping and playing games, currently as of April 2015, I’m creating a puzzle mod for Half Life 2 and a map for RaisingTheBarVille, I’ve played Half Life 2 in 2010 and absolutely loved it, from that point on, I started mapping.
Hi
My name is brian ( aka brianthesnail ) and ive been using both planetphillip and runthinkshootlive for many years … and i came across the site when looking for single player hl2 mods and maps ……
apart from half life 2 i also enjoy other first person shooters especially older titles like “chaser” and “alpha prime” and im also one of the only guys in the world who actually likes the game “you are empty” ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbRbBF1b3Sw ) …. the reason for this is the way the developers “1c company” went out their way to make the game look crazy …..
i also build pc,s for freinds and mates and recently built a core i7 based pc with twin “msi HD7950,s” in crossfire …. along with 16gb of ddr3 ram and a 256gb samsung ssd (550mb read ) and 2tb of storage it goes like a rocket …. ( images : http://forums.aria.co.uk/showthread.php/135970-HD7950-crossfire-nearly-there-! ) ……
to finish i would like to thank phillip for the work he has put in to make this site what it is today …… granted there are other sites were you can download sp half life maps and mods but none are as user freindly as this … so thanks phillip … its much appreciated
cheers and peace !
Hey all, I’m Red (which is short for my actual name), I’m an English teacher, living and working in Malta.
I don’t map, just play, although I’d like to maybe have a crack at mapping sometime.
I was brought up (so to speak) on Goldeneye 007, then PS2, took a long break from gaming and have only really discovered the joys of PC gaming in the last few years, so I’m loving the work of the modding and mapping community, it’s been a revelation.
Welcome Red. Have you been lurking or are completely new here? I see you just reviewed G-String. Did you know that the author is working on version 2 and has a slight hope that it could be released later this year? If the modding community is new to you, you have many, many hours of gaming in from to of you.
BTW, I’m an English teacher too.
Thanks Phillip. Yes I’ve been lurking for a little bit, I downloaded and played Spherical Nightmares and Calamity from this site before I signed up, I might post reviews of those soon. Yes, I do know about G String Version 2, I’ve seen the preview video on ModDB, I’m really excited for it.
Good old Goldeneye.
I mean, yeah, it’s aged terribly. But for its time… heck, even now when you understand the technical limitations it had to deal with… it’s pretty impressive. Read up on WIkipedia about the hardware shortcomings of the Nintendo 64 and you’ll rack your brain trying to figure out how Goldeneye worked at all, let alone Perfect Dark: the console’s texture cache was only 4 KB.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_programming_characteristics
Yes, I’ve read a lot about Goldeneye and Perfect Dark’s developments, those guys were miracle workers (the TimeSplitters games they made after leaving Rare where great as well), although they’re dated they’re still the pinnacle of console shooters for me, just a shame about the stupid N64 controller.
Hi My name is asterixer,
Im working as an sys admin for Linux. I try to play all mods under linux. if i put a comment here the reviews i post is only a comment on if the mod is running and how.
My Game Machine: Core i5, 12gb ram, Suse 13.1 amd64
Welcome asterixer. We are pretty much a Windows community but it’s always good to know whether mods run under other systems. Perhaps in the future I could create a TAG or custom field related to Linux and MAC.
Out of curiosity, when you run mods under Linux, do you run them in the native HL2 and Steam clients, or the Windows versions through Wine? Last year, when I was messing around with Linux Mint, I actually felt that the Wine method worked better.
Also, Hammer sort of works in Wine. You can build maps, browse models, compile, etc. The only thing – and it was rather annoying – is that the viewports didn’t update properly. So, if you moved a brush in one of them, the change wasn’t reflected in the others until you hovered the mouse over each one.
It’s taken a long time, but Wine is a real beast of a program these days. I played through all of Borderlands 1, in online co-op no less, using Wine. And with Steam voice chat! While I had to disable some graphical features for performance, the fact that this worked as well as it did was amazing to me.
I’ve no doubt that, if I didn’t have Windows for some reason, Mint would be an absolutely viable alternative. As someone who has dabbled on-and-off in Linux since 2000, my experience with Mint was the first time I walked away completely impressed.
I run all mods under Linux directly with the Linux Version of HL2, Ep1, Ep2. That’s the reason some ports doesn’t work other without problems. If there are some modifications done to client or server DLLs then this will not work for Linux.
Hello, everyone!
My name is ZikShadow, been playing and modding HL since i was in my elementary school days.
My Valve gaming history is rather garbled, starting with CS, Redemption retail, Wanted Retail, HL2, HL1 “The Escape” (From someone’s personal website, horrible map), DavSub, numerous custom HL1 maps, EP1, finally actual Valve’s HL1, EP2.
I’d rather not talk about it.
I preferred modding for GoldSource than Source, i don’t know, it’s easier.
I’ve been on PlanetPhillip for a while, possibly during it’s early years, when it actually hosts maps other than HLs, i even recalled downloading an RTCW map from here back then, decided to join today because i’m late like that.
The only mapping experience i had is mapping for Cry of Fear, creating maps such as :
Second Community Collab Chapter 9 : Psycho
Halloween Community Collab Chapter 5 : Psycho Continuation
http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-scrolls-of-shaimoon-20-full-version/
http://www.moddb.com/mods/nostalgia
I have this urge to mod practically anything when i can, even if it’s simply a sound or graphical change, examples such as :
http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-gate/addons/the-gate-re-modded
(Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZRCnISXhcE )
http://www.moddb.com/mods/tour-of-duty-redux
http://www.moddb.com/members/zikshadow/blogs/the-stalin-subway-mod
I have this entire folder of mods that i have practically tore apart and reshape, but of course, with my weak arse internet, that is currently not possible, perhaps when i have the speed.
That’s all i guess.
Name’s Larry.
I’m an older guy from GA who used to be an officer in the U.S. Army. Now that I’m retired and my daughter is adult and out of the house, I started gaming. I mostly play FPS but I also like point-and-click games, puzzle games and alternative games (like The Stanley Parable). From time to time I also play strategy games and racing games but those not so much.
I started playing HL mods quite late and now with the internet around it’s really easy to get my hands on most of them. And since I’m a HL 1 fan, I thought “Why not?”. So now I play HLSP mods a lot – my Steam screenshot database speaks for itself. I’ve been watching this site for a while and today I finally decided to register.
Anyway, nice to meet y’all. Make sure to leave me a message if you want to talk.
Howdy Larry, welcome to the site.
Where’s GA?
As a retired Army guy do you enjoy the gritty realistic FPSs? I could never get into them myself as I much prefer SCI-Fi stuff.
Please tell us more about the minor texture hacks you do.
Probably the state of Georgia? 😉
Yeah, probably and I could have easily looked it up, but I wanted to engage him.
Yup, it’s Georgia.
Well, I treat FPS games like a work of fiction. I mean, nothing can describe those tough situations you sometimes find yourself in, really. Better not think about it. I like both FPS and sci-fi genres though.
About those hacks: I use Milkshape and my hacks usually just consist of slapping one model’s head onto other model’s body. Then I add custom textures and what I get is something new. I managed to make a “military stalker” (S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: SoC) recreation using this method.
Welcome, Larry. Good to have another Half-Life 1 lover around. Although your avatar is tempting me to smash his face in.
What are your favorites from the HL1 mods you’ve played? The Hall of Fame is always a good place to get ideas for what to play next.
Heh, I’ve got a few things in common with that guy in my avatar. More than a few actually.
I’ve already played almost every SP mod for HL1 I found. It’s just that I registered here kinda late and thought I might want to write a thing or two about them as a review. In order to do that I’ll have to replay them again though.
I really dunno which mods are my favorite. To be honest, I like pretty much every second mod/map I try. I’m not very picky. There aren’t even any specific requirements for a mod, so I end up trying everything. I’d say I’ve got a soft spot for Black Mesa themed mods. You know, new points of view.
I like playing bad mods too cause that’s usually quite educational as you can see all the mistakes done by the author and, let’s not lie, even have a laugh at some decisions like “new textures” made in paint or author’s face slapped onto NPC.
These are just some examples of my favorites:
Absolute Redemption, Afraid of Monsters, Azure Sheep, Brave Brain, Half-Life Visitors, Half-Quake Amen, Ispitatel 4, Issues, Life’s End, Paranoia, Poke646, Portrait of Freeman, Reissues, Survive in Catacombs, Sweet Half-Life, They Hunger, Times of Troubles, Todesangst, USS Darkstar, Vlokam 2
Hello! I played a lot of HLSP up until a few years ago, and now I’m going back to play the classics, and newer releases. I pretty much scourged TenFour and Hangar16 back then. Now doing the same with RTSL. Fantastic to have a dedicated resource to the original Half-Life – and know I’m not the only nostalgic.
Welcome Cardinal. What made you stop a few years ago? You must be enjoying all the new (new to RTSL anyway) HL1 maps and mods I have been adding lately.
I guess just having played through most of the mods, and with few new releases my attention drifted elsewhere. Most importantly – Team Fortress 2. I’ve been meaning to join the planetphillip community for a while, and with the relaunch I had no choice 🙂
Hi, I am Peter Brev, I am a level designer for the Source Engine since 2004.
I am currently working on a new HL2DM map called dm_hydro: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=434894382
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=434894305 (WIP)
I have been playing the Half-Life games since I am 5 (I am 18). I played many HL1-HL2 mods too.
I am really happy to be on this site because I feel like we have a family here and we can share our thoughts without any hassle.
I am looking forward to some new challenges because I just love mapping 😉
Welcome Peter. Good luck with the DM map, I love dams.
We are a family.
Just a quick note, for really long mods, the review has to be at least a few paragraphs before you can use a Rec. image.
Been lurking for a long long time. I sure appreciate this site!
Hello turbochris. Thanks for making the jump from lurking to commenter. Do you play maps and mods for all games or just one or two?
What’s the one thing you would change about the site?
Hi, i’m Bitl, and I have been modding the Source Engine ever since 2010. I’m mainly a coder, and I have worked on mods like Half-Life 2 Beta Deathmatch, and my 2 upcoming projects, FIREFIGHT RELOADED and SURVIVOR (SURVIVOR being a remake of Half-Life 2 Survivor v2.0’s Battle Mode). I plan on hosting some of my mods here later.
Haven’t really came to this site much, but since I registered I hope to have a pretty fun time here!
Hi Bitl, welcome to the site. What’s your favourite Source SP Mod?
Black Mesa and Missing Information
God morgon! I am Superlundh, or as my Steam name may say, Avast: Magical Biohazard. I have great intrest when it comes to mapping and level design. Since I am rather young (about 16) and have not had much experience with mapping, I still have a lot to learn (coding for example).
I’ve been playing people’s maps from this site before and decided to get an account for my own uploads. As time goes on, my creations will most likely improve in quality.
alsoigottagetagripwiththickskinifyouknowwhati’msayin’
Oh gosh, most of the folks on this page seem to have some pretty impressive backgrounds and qualifications regarding the Source/GoldSrc community. I’m Faith, I just play video games.
I’ve been slowly getting through mods for years, since I was much younger. I’m pretty sure that the first mods I ever played (as far as I can remember) were Combine Destiny and Antlion Troopers Deuce (something I could never make much progress in). Since then, I’ve slowly played through the more popular, polished, and classic Source mods that I’ve spotted on Moddb.
I only recently found Run Think Shoot Live, and it’s given me a lot more exposure to mods and maps I’d personally consider more obscure, which I’ve definitely appreciated.
Uhh, as far as personal quirks regarding Source mods go, I think I should definitely mention that I suck when it comes to tension and the possibility of scary stuff. I have a pretty unfortunate mental list of mods I’ve been unable to finish because I couldn’t keep going, though I’ve managed to knock through a few, like Dissolution, and really enjoyed the rest of the experience. I don’t figure I’ll ever finish Underhell, of course.
Sadly, I haven’t played a single GoldSrc mod or map; I simply haven’t bothered to find my old Half-Life disc, but maybe I’ll get around to it sometime soon.
I’m obviously just putting down whatever comes to mind, but, whatever;
Heya!
Welcome to the site, Faith, glad you decided to introduce yourself. Don’t feel bad about not having an impressive background as most of us don’t. I’ve dabled in Hammer (the editor for making the maps) but have nothing to my name and it’s quite possible you’ve played more than I have.
The main thing is that you play and continue to look for interesting releases.
I’m not into scary mods either, so we definitely have that in common.
What would you say your favourite mods are from the Hall of Fame?
Oh, and I hope you get around to looking for that Half-Life disc because with the Classic of the Mod event running, you could be having some serious mod fun.
Ooh, there’re a lot of personal favorites of mine in the Hall of Fame. I loved Mistake of Pythagoras, CSS SCI-FI 3: Hardwired (RIP), Research & Development, Mission Improbable, and Human Error, all for fairly different reasons.
Hi, Geoff here, played half-life when it came out in 98..still playing mods and maps now…may it never end! cheers all.
Welcome to the site Geoff. I wonder how many people who played Half-Life back in 98 are still playing the game and its mods?
Hello im Rafael, and i like play HL2 mods, hope i found some! thanks for the web page it is nice.
Hi Rafael, welcome to the site. What are your favourite mods?
Hello ! I am big half life fan ( maybe hardcore fanboy ) and I enjoy playing good maps and drawing .
Hello melc311, welcome to the site. Do you draw Half-Life stuff?
Yes I do draw half life stuff . I like to draw concept levels to pass the time but I never got to making a map because I am setting my standards too high and I end up scraping it .
Do you have any links for us to see?
Sadly no because I usually draw on scrap paper and I usually loose them . Actually I ll try to search for some of them :p
Hello, I’m Gabriel and I am a big fan of the Half-Life series.
I start to make half-life maps since 2008 i think, but i never make a full half-life mod until i decided to make Prototype 98, not a great mod but i hope for a better one.
I also have trouble with english.. ^_^ but i’m trying to learn it.
BTW, I’m glad to see people still playing half-life mods.
Hello Gabriel, welcome to the site. Protoype 98 was quite good, you should be pleased with yourself. Don’t worry about yopur English. What are your favourite mods?
Hey, I’m Spencer. I’m a huge fan of the Half Life series, in fact I just finished Half Life 2 for the 4th time (though I have met people who have played it 10+ times). The story, characters and everything are just amazing. I enjoy drawing stuff too, mostly from Half Life, also I kinda wish i had joined this site a while ago, I’ve always wanted to get in touch with more of the HL community.
Hi Spencer. Yeah, 4 times isn’t really that many. Perhaps the new guide should be: if you haven’t played Half-Life at least once every couple of years then you aren’t really a fan. Just kidding. Don’t worry about taking a while to join, you are here now. How about a link to some of your HL drawings?
Yo, I’m Alex. I come from Cardiff in Wales, I really like Half-Life and the series, I’ve being trying to get into mapping for a while now but I’ve never really made it to far as I’d always scrap something when I started to make it. I think the only map I’ve ever released was on the recent shitty maps night on Interlopers.net. I hope that I can motivate myself enough to start mapping again, I enjoy seeing all of these challenges that happen! I also enjoy exploring abandoned buildings though, I’ve seen most of them in my area since we have so little, I think I still have a imgur gallery of some of them somewhere, I’m also planning on buying a camera to continue making short films as I found that I enjoyed them from my media college course, I’m unsure when I can actually upload it to youtube though. I’m also planning on taking Game Art for a University Course so I gather I’ll learn a bunch through that, too. 😀
I think my favourite multiplayer mod was the first Zombie Master, which I racked up so many hours on. I really like Neotokyo and singleplayer-wise I enjoyed Black MEsa and Transmissions: Element 120.
Hi Alex,
Welcome to the site. My family on my mother’s side are from Wales and I have visited Cardiff many times – I like it a lot. Abandoned buildings are fascinating, although I never really done it, if you don’t count breaking into empty factories as a kid!
Sounds like you have lots of plans, which is great. I hope the Game Art course works out for you.
Hi Phillip, it’s Spencer. I had to make a new account, I couldn’t get into my other one. But as you asked, here is one of my HL drawings. In fact, I think its one of the first drawings I did digitally. Also, I have a question: I read that my account will automatically be deleted if I don’t comment within 3 days of creating the account. Does this one count?
Hi Spencer.
It looks like a link to one of your drawings is missing from your comment.
Yes, that comment will ensure your account is not deleted.
Hello! My name is Oscar/Superlundh/Avast: Magical Biohazard. I am a 16-year old male Swede with great interest in source mapping and modding (altough I still suck at it). My focus mainly lies on Single-Player mapping. Big fan of Half-Life and its mods, as well as of TF2, Hotline Miami, Payday 2, Portal, and so forth. I hope my content will be appreciated 🙂
My Steam Account: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198049598800
Welcome Superlundh. Glad to hear your focus lies in SP rather tham MP, at least as far as mapping is concerned. I just had a look at your Steam Profile: 907 hours of TF2. I wonder if there is a special reward for gatting to 1000?!
Heh, wish there was. Like a special item or something.
Now we just got conga and skins.
Hi, I’m Skeezix and I’ve been a lurker on RTSL for a long time. I live in the United States in a sleepy Midwestern town.
I’ve owned a computer of one kind or another since I was 13, which is saying something considering I’m, as of this writing, old.
I came by Half-Life in a roundabout way. My CD copy was given to a friend of mine by a work acquaintance who said he was “done with it”. My friend couldn’t get it to run on his computer and he mostly just liked racing games, so my friend gave it to me.
That was around the turn of the century, and I haven’t been “done with it”, yet.
I always wished there would be a Half-Life movie, but then they made one and due to an apparent clerical error, it was called Resident Evil.
I have a cat. His name is Tiger. I think that’s the default name for cats and since he was here when I moved in, I just went with that. Since he’s a cat, he thinks the house is his, and he may have a point, what with being here first and all. He’s a big cat, so I’ve considered renaming him Cat Food Vacuum but I think he has delicate sensibilities.
My other interests include classic Sci Fi, MST3K, Marvel movies, creative writing, photography, and flashlights.
Anyway, I thought I’d lurked long enough.
P.S.
You can call me Zix.
Mom does.
Welcome Zix. If your mom calls you Zix then so shall I. I doubt I’ll ever be “done with” Half-Life, CD or no. Tiger probably thinks of you as just another interloper (see what I did there?) and as you say thinks he owns the place, which in a way he does.
Flaslights is unusual hobby – care to enlighten us (OMG, I am on a roll!)
Ah, Phillip, you punny fellow! And I’ve not searched the site, but I wonder if your name isn’t a pseudonym, since it’s the same as a certain character from a classic movie. Not to mention the name of the movie but it’s set in the city of Casablanca. If that’s really your name, I’m so envious, because I got stuck with Skeezix.
Yeah, mom calls me Zix. My middle name is Tarantula.
(I suspect she was hoping for a girl.)
Anyway, you really don’t want to get a flashlight nerd started. Yes, there’s more than just me. We collect them, we mod them, we rate them, we spend absurd amounts of money on batteries. And on flashlights.
I didn’t really mean to start collecting them. I was trying to think of something that I could buy to commemorate the turn of the century, and with Y2K hysteria running high, I thought a flashlight would be a good idea (not that I suspected for a minute that the computers actually were going to crash at 12:01 on Y2K, nosir, not me, buddy!). It was a nice shiny 3 D cell Craftsman with an aluminum tube and adjustable beam. (And I didn’t buy it because I was concerned that the lights would go out. Nope.) Anyway, after that I started noticing flashlights so when the really neat LED lights came on the market I got me one of those. And as they got smaller and brighter I kept finding new, interesting designs, and then suddenly I had a lot of flashlights.
Some flashlights cost well over a hundred bucks and are dazzlingly, blindingly painfully bright.
(I just realized that one of the reasons why I like Half Life so much is that nifty self-recharging flashlight.)
No, my actual real name is Phillip Marlowe, but mine has two Ls, whereas the private dick has one.
So, in your part of the world girls are name after poisonous spiders?
I’m slowly becoming and EDC man, so talk of flashlights doesn’t scare me off. I only have a few rechargeable ones around the house, in the car and in my daily shoulder bag, oh and one right by the bed. What’s your favourite?
And I just realized that Marlowe wasn’t in Casablanca. Bogie’s character in Casablanca was named Rick. Sorry Bogie!
A favorite is hard to choose, and I have some real mutants in my collection. But here’s one that I wanna get–a Fenix HP25 which looks very flexible and very sexy and would serve my plan to move to only AA battery lights for EDC.
Since you’re sorta into flashlights too, I’ll mention that being a flashlight collector definitely has a practical side. I live in tornado territory, and having a few dependable, rugged flashlights for myself and for others has come in mighty handy.
Hello, I’m James, I live in Scotland, work in IT, and I am currently making Half-Life Echoes, which I hope will appear on these pages one day!
I just want to say thank you to everyone who has contributed, or has an interest, in Half-Life modding. Half-Life is still my favourite game, and I love to see it still has such an active community!
Not long after Half-Life blew me out of my chair for the first time way back in 1998, I was astonished at the variety and imagination of the custom maps and mods coming out for it, all being released at an incredible rate.
I am glad to see that people still are still creating, and preserving all of this content, large or small.
I attempted to try out mapping myself not long after the game had been released…
http://www.runthinkshootlive.com/posts/operation-randomosity/
A half-baked mini map based for a competition that never went ahead.
Hopefully, my next attempt (after almost 15 years) will do this great game justice!
http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-echoes
Although I am still following the good old Black Mesa storyline, I hope to surprise people still, and perhaps bridge a few links to later instalments in the series…
See you in the test chamber!
Welcome to the site James.
I’m looking forward to Echoes and as you say hope it will appear someday (soon!). Do you map for other engines?
I am glad you are looking forward to it!
I have never tried modding for any other engine, or game for that matter. I do not have any background in art or design, and so the limitations of the GoldSrc engine really work in my favour.
Once Echoes is finished, I may create a mini-mod for Half-Life 1 again, but I doubt I will try something on Source, as the scope for that engine is much larger.
Yes definitely looking forward to Echoes, I had but a taste last year when I tested it for you. 🙂
Good to see someone from the old Valve ERC days too!
Hello everyone, my name is Supercapo999 and I absolutely love Hλlf-Life mods, I even have a whole series dedicated to them on my channel and it’s been running for 7 years now 😀
Anyway, someone told me about this site and I thought it was amazing, I can find lots of good quality material to work with here and hopefully I’ll get to know some modders and mappers along the way
I think that’s all, I just love this website, too bad I didn’t find it sooner
Yay! Welcome! It really is an amazing place, with all the single-player goodness you’ll ever need. Plenty of great mods with excellent reviews and hints if you need them.
Hi Supercapo999, welcome to the site. I’m sure you will find plenty of mods to use for your channel.
Pleasure to meet you guys, name’s Bastion. and maps are the only thing I like to do with my time.
Currently I hold three competitive count strike maps under my belt as well as a few other maps for community gamemodes.
I am a freelance mapper and currently have two jobs that have been giving me funding to improve my computer in order to be more efficient and comfortable with my creations.
Half-Life is one of my favourite games and is a delight to map for, I still have a old bsp file of one of my earlier attempts at a proper level, turned out well in my opinion.
See you soon, I’ll make sure to play as many mods as I can get my hands on.
Welcome to the site Bastion. Maybe you’ll enter one of the mapping challenges soon. Is that BSP you mention, single player? If it is, would you like it released?
Think I will bring it up, its SP EP2 map so it should fit in 🙂
hello my name is Zachary and if I have to be honest im only 12 years old and I have only been playing hl2 and hl1 for about 2-3 years now. My dream is to make at least a decent hl2 map. Im working on it right now actually but it’s so confusing 🙁
Hello Zachary, welcome to the site. You could well be the youngest member here. Good luck with your map. I won’t bore you with too much advice, but try to keep it small but of high quality.
Hia, my names Badhamknibbs. I’ve been doing mapping for about 2 years, but never really finished and released anything decent. I have a couple of one-off maps in the steam workshop, and made some community-exclusive maps for some communities I’m in.
I’ll probably join into a few mapping contests here and there, and hopefully I’ll get somewhere with mapping. Right now I just do it in my off-time and experiment with different ideas.
That’s just about it for me, not much else to say, and hopefully I have a warm welcome here.
Yay I hope that you do find the time to enter! Always love seeing new folks join in.
Welcome to the site Badhamknibbs. That’s an interesting name, how did you create it? Are your maps SP? Looking forward to playing your maps, as Zekiran said, it’s always nice to have new members, especially if they are content creators.
I got the name through a random name generator, I ran it a couple times, swapped out stuff and eventually ended up with this. Most of my maps so far have been SP, My most popular one being the FNAF map I helped Keithy with on the Workshop.
I was hoping to get into the horror mapping contest because I had some pretty good scare ideas, but currently I’m swamped with tasks and I might not be able to get it in within the deadline.
Also, as a general sidenote because I didn’t mention in the main post, but my favourite level designs include either water or very tall heights (Citadel and the likes).
Have you made any HL-related SP stuff?
Currently, all of my maps have been made for ZS (A gmod gamemode, 40+ multiplayer). I’m planning to do some more SP stuff since I’ve gotten here.
I’m personally a bit overwhelmed by this forum layout (It’s much different compared to most forums I’ve used), but I should manage.
It’s a standard blog format, which if you are used to forums (which this site isn’t) it can seem strange.
Uh, hi! Figured I should start somewhere.
I’m Mythos, long-time Half-Life fan and member of a few related communities over the years. I own a “site” (well, it’s barely a site) called Metrocop, where I host a bunch of comics created using the Source engine, some of which may be familiar if you were around sites such as PHWOnline back in the mid-00’s.
I’m perhaps best known for a series of comics called The Adventures of Hercule Cubbage, an action-adventure story (I refuse to call it a comedy as it’s not exactly written to be hilarious) about the son of Odessa Cubbage you never knew about, unless you’ve read the comic already, in which case let me thank you for that. It even got referenced at Kotaku once on a veeeery slow news days, which were my 15 minutes of e-fame and I will not let anyone forget about it, ever.
In any case, the closest I’ve gotten to modding is doing reskinning/’hexxing’ of models for use in comics, but I felt like it was time to join the site at last as a member of the community. So, yeah, hi! Thanks for letting me in, it’s safer here.
Hello everyone, name’s NintendoOcho. Long time Half_life fan and absolutely love playing random mods and maps.
I heard about this site on the Half-Life subreddit quite a while ago, and I finally decided to stop by and join on in! I’m hopping to become part of this community, so here’s to you all!
Oh my if you’re just getting around to THIS site… you’re in for a treat. 😀 So many mods and maps. And the Villes. The mapping competitions are wonderful showcases for the talented modders around here. Welcome!
Hello. Welcome to the site. As Zekiran says, You are in for a treat. There is a lot of great stuff here. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.
Hey guys, I’m Weperlol and I’ve been lurking around this website for a while now and it’s about time I start interacting with you beautiful people 😀 .
I’m 14 but I started playing like a 19’s kid I guess XD I started with a nintendo and so forth.
Half life series is like a gift from the gods to me. (Lord Gaben that is.) and I am slowly learning about making goldsourc maps and perhaps one day I will make my own mod 😀
Welcome Weperlol. Thank you for calling us beautiful. Maybe not on the outside but we all are on the inside. Well, all except Breen. That guys is evil – selling the Earth out like that.
Good luck with your mod making, hopefully one day we can feature a release on this site.
Hi, I’m Seth.
I’ve been playing HL mods for only a short time, but since I realized computer game modding was even possible a couple of years ago, I’ve developed a love for mapping, texturing, sound design and most other things that go into making a map. I don’t think I have the creative ability to actually make a map, but I’d like to think I have some technical skill with the amount of time I’ve spent reading/watching tutorials and messing about in Hammer. Despite my lack of creativity, I have a tremendous affinity for pretty and fun maps, whether they be in Half-Life or any other modifiable game, like TF2, the Counter-Strike series, Insurgency, and Quake to name a few.
I’ve known about and downloaded mods from this site for awhile, but my friend Corvatile recently submitted a map to the HalloweenVilleTwo contest so I finally registered to review his and the rest of the entries. I’ll probably go on a reviewing frenzy in the next few days and go through as many old mapping challenges and mods as I can. After all, playing maps objectively is one of the best ways to improve as a mapper. Authors can’t be good authors without reading a lot; the same is true for mappers.
Check out my YouTube channel, I’ve recorded a few mods without commentary if there aren’t already enough of those.
https://youtube.com/channel/UCHleZN3moybxzu349IaWRFw?
I agree wholeheartedly. Welcome to the site!
Hi Seth, sorry it took me nearly four months to welcome you. I must have missed your post as I have replied to others.
Anyway, hope you enjoy the content and let me know if you have any questions.
I guess I should start by saying… hi?
How did I get here?
I was looking at the mods Synergy supported and one of the mods was on RunThinkShootLive. I downloaded the mod, played through it, and when I came back to close the tab, a screenshot of “Truss” from VerticalVilleTwo caught my eye. So I decided to click on it and see what it was about. I played through the contest entries and decided to have a look around the site.
Who am I?
I’m Niker107. I like playing Half-Life 2 Roleplay in Garry’s Mod, making 2D games and maps for the Source engine. I’ve been mapping for a few years (I honestly don’t know how much) and I managed to gather quite a lot of experience. I don’t think I have any finished projects, though. I always make test maps and concepts that drive me to do something else instead. It doesn’t mean I can’t finish anything, but I never get around to doing it unless I really need to. I enjoy mapping, but the internet seems to just have tutorials from 2008 and long-forgotten forums. So, naturally, I am quite happy that I found RTSL. This is, at least, a bigger community than I managed to find so far. I’m mostly attracted to the mapping challenges, not to win, but just to get told to make something interesting and get given a deadline for it. I hope to participate in some. I also like knowing that there is now some place where I can show any work I do, since before it seemed to me that the only way to show your maps would be to make a mod on Steam, which probably wouldn’t even make it past Greenlight (seriously, how do you get greenlit in that system?).
Hopefully, the community here will accept me and I might post stuff I do in the future, as well as give reviews for mods I can find.
PS. I am actually sort of disappointed that I didn’t find this site earlier. I’d have loved to participate in the mapping challenges since a few months ago.
Welcome to the site Niker107.
I’m glad to hear you like the mapping challenges and hope you enter at least one. While you are waiting, why not select on of the previous challenges and make something in the same time frame as the original?
Greetings RTSL community! My name is Alex and I’m the guy who spent ~4 years in hammer. I’m fan of Half-Life universe and sometimes trying to work with it (mostly with Portal so far). I’ve released some texture packs and E3 recreations for Portal and Portal 2, helped with P2 “Cosmogony” mappack and currently trying to get into HL2 mapping. I hope I will become valuable user here one day.
Hi Alex, welcome to the site.
I really enjoyed both Portals but found too many of the mods too hard to finished, so I stop playing them.
Hope to see an SP HL2 map from you eventually.
Heyo everyone! I am Trolldozer, and before you jump into conclusions about my name, let me tell you one simple thing: I do not actually troll. I honestly just LOVE watching others rage and troll, and I just love memes. Wouldn’t like to call myself Lord of Le Memes though, as that sounds too predictable. My first game was Worms 3D, a turn-based shooter 3D platformer by Team17. I soon got interested into Half-Life after playing the Left 4 Dead 2 demo and the Orange Box demo (which all the demo contained was the Half-Life 2: Episode 1 or 2) on the XBOX 360.
I am that kind of guy who usually just wants to be cool with everyone but also not wanting to be involved in most serious situations about depression or stuff like that (I fear that I might be a terrible support). I am really just a gamer, though I am in the process in trying to start a Youtube Channel. I am planning on deleting my Youtube Channel to create a new one (hard work for nothing, though I might create my channel first and get everything onto that channel before deleting my old channel, so it will be like a fresh start on a preset). Though I do not want to mention my old channel as I think that will technically count as making a link, and I need permission to do that, so don’t ask. Anyways, I look forward to meet others, and be part of this community.
Edit: I am dearly sorry if this counts as spamming, but I did not know I wasn’t logged in, and will log in to my account. If anyone can, remove this, as I am reposting the same message but with my account instead of an anonymous account.
Edit (2): I need help. XD I have no idea why but the links to confirm my account just takes me to the same link where it says my confirmation link is invalid all the time.
Welcome to the site. Don’t worry about your name, I’m not a planet either.
Are you a big fan of mods or mostly games?
I have emailed you regarding your registration.
I’m quite a fan of both, though it’s hard to look for mods. And thank you so much for helping me out, I was a bit confused.
im new here,but ive visited this site so many times when it was planetphillip. im glad to be apart of this community and wish the best for all the modders to make the best they can make,cheers!
Welcome BlazerZX, glad to hear you keep coming back.
Do you mod or just play?
Hello!
I am from the Netherlands. I’ve been a Half-life fan from the beginning. I played all the games from the beginning to the end at least 5 times. So now I found some beautiful mods to play. The guys who make these mods did a really great job!
Gr Jeroen
Jeroen, welcome to the site. How long after the release of the game did you play it?
Greetings, RTSL! I join the likes of other Half-Life fans and I’ve been doing mappin with my friend for the last two years, working on a project, which was just finished! I’m hoping to upload it soon and get some feedback on it after many many hours of work.
I play a lot of games other than the HL-series, but Half-Life will always be the dearest to me, because they were the ones that introduced me to the world of PC gaming with my dad. Now that my dad doesn’t play games anymore (family takes time) I hope to still keep on playing until my old days.
Hello iRocket, welcome to the site. So sorry to here your dad doesn’t have time for gaming. Have you shown him your work? I’ll be posting it tomorrow here on RTSL.
He has actually played and enjoyed this thing we’ve been working on! It was fun seeing old Half-Life habits coming from the old man’s fingers. We sometimes play some Mario games on the Wii U, but otherwise work, relationships and otherwise trying to make a living takes his time.
Glad to hear it.
Hello everyone at RTSL, I’m FRAG!
Been visiting the site on and off for a few years, always wondered why I never joined so here I am!
I’m currently a level designer for Operation Black Mesa, I like mapping a lot but after many years of my head in an editor I’ve started some courses to expand my skillset into 3D modelling & C++.
I love Half-Life, it’s my first love and still is, even if the wife can’t accept that but she’s accepted the fact that our daughter gets ever closer to learning about it, and that day will come.
Anyway, love the stuff you do here!
Hi Frag! Welcome to the site. I’ve seen your work and love it. I will feature it on the RTSL Tumblr and FB page early next year. Let’s start a new project. Instead of “Take your Daughter to Work Day”, let’s create “Teach Your Daughter Hammer”. What’ya say?
Hey!
Very happy your enjoying the media, would be awesome to see it featured 😀
I think you’re on to something there with that “teach your daughter hammer” maybe an idea for a future feature 😉
Hi, I’m Newgoods! I’ve done some Portal 1 mapping in the past (even though I didn’t release anything) and I’m looking to move into HL2 mapping to get a bit of practice in. There’s nothing I love more than good lighting, pretty level geometry and proper use of space, so that’s what I mostly focus on. (Currently in an open relation ship with toolsblocklight and env_projectedtexture. :P)
Welcome to RTSL Newgoods. Glad to hear you are looking to move into HL2. Hopefully, you can enter one of the upcoming mapping challenges.
Hey there!
So, I’ve been playing games since I was a kid, there hasn’t really been any one point in time where I just got into games.
It’s just been as natural to me as watching TV is for most people.
Naturally I developed an interest in how games are made, both the technical side and the artistic.
Most of my time growing up I’ve spent learning about these things, which branched my interests and made me learn other things not strictly related to the field of games, like filmmaking.
Other than programming, level design, 3D modelling, animations, and other such things, I’ve also accumulated skills in cinematography, editing, visual effects, motion graphics, audio engineering, etc.
I’m constantly trying to apply everything I’ve learned to my own projects, and continue learning from that.
Unfortunately most of my projects never go public, they’re mostly shown to friends and family.
Mostly because I don’t deem them to be good enough to be put up for display.
Any good game or film requires a lot of time, thought, and resources to be put together well enough.
Time happens to be one of those things that come in short supply, so I’ve never been able to get a foot in the door and prove my skills on a professional level.
I’ve dabbled in everything from writing my own engines, AS3 and Flash, to Unreal engine 3 and 4.
Even had some short films on display in film festivals.
Nothing ever came of these things though.
I’ve been to this site before when I used to play a lot of mods, but I paid no special attention to it.
I recently stumbled upon it again after hearing about mapping competitions, and I figured if there’s any place I can reignite my pipe dream of getting into game development and share my creations, this is as good as any.
A little too personal pehaps?
Anyway, glad to be a part of this community, let’s create some amazing things.
Welcome to the site. Thanks for describing your background, it’s always nice to understand the motivation of users.
Hope you consider entering the next mapping challenge, which happens to start tomorrow.
Oh yes please participate! Creative folks who actually know how to use the tool sets! 😀
Hey, everyone!
My name is Marten and i also go by the name Docta.
I am from Estonia and after so many times, i’ve finally got myself an account here.
I have done some mapping for hl2, ep2 and csgo, but theyre quite basic and im still learning.
I have been playing hl2 related games for 6 years now, when a classmate showed me episode 1,
which was super spooky and full of adrenaline, because we played lowlife. It was when I was about ten and that makes me feel like i am one of the youngest people on this site because im getting 16 now and most of the people on this site seem twice as old as me. 🙂
after that I got myself a steam account and my first game was episode 2 which i loved alot.
I now play SP mods and hl related stuff quite often. I also play alot of games that is also have on my library.
I have done some artsy stuff and some mapping but nothing professional as i said earlier.
I enjoy scenic, details, scripted scenes, etc in maps the most. about 60/40 overweighing gameplay.
Anyways, I hope that i will love being in this community with all of ya!
Thanks for being awesome.
Hi Docta,
Glad to hear you love the HL games and don’t worry about your age. We treat everybody here based on what they say and do, not on the number of times they have orbited the Sun.
Hello,
I’ve made around 20 half-life maps. Mainly multiplayer maps like ag_crossfire, dabo, many ctf maps for mods, some castle maps and other maps with tons of secrets. I love half-life
Hi Twitch, welcome to the site. You say “mainly” multiplayer, have you made and released any SP HL maps?
Hello,
I’ve been a fan and a follower of Half-Life custom maps and level design in general for over 3 years , but only now I decided that I wanna be part of this unique experience.
Welcome, Dan. Do you do any level design yourself? If you’re interested you should definitely keep an eye on the mapping competitions here (the “Ville” mods)!
I’ve done a map for tf2 and a lot of small maps from which I learned to use the hammer tools and I will definitely participate in the ChasmVille2 of this year !
Hi Dan, welcome to the site. I’m just catching up on welcoming people. Glad to see you entered the mapping challenge.
Hello I’m The Butterman.
I run a bad let’s play channel and been coming to this site a lot for mods to play.
Been playing Half-Life since 1999.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgSVGAfW4ZfmghjiNxdXUFg that is my channel if you want to give it a go. I will say its pretty bad.
I decided to join after many of years of sitting on the side line.
Hello I am the Butterman.
I’ve been a lurker since god knows when. Guess back when planet Half-Life was a thing.
I come here a lot to find mods for half-life 1. I do have a lets play Channel The Evil Squid Foundation its a channel my friends and I started, sadly its been mostly me, and my terrible play through of games. Just felt it should be time to register to be part of this community.
So many lurkers coming out of hiding, and new visitors! Great to have everyone registering and hopefully participating! 🙂
Welcome to the site. Are you still uploading videos to your YouTube channel?
I’ve been following and reading and downloading since the old days over at Planetphillip!
Finally I’ve signed up and will be commenting a lot.
Thanks for this place I check in every day.
Hi Ross, welcome to the site. hope to have some interesting discussions with you.
This should probably be a “welcome BACK to the site” – I recognized your name, and also noticed a post from “RossBondReturns” much earlier on this page! 🙂
True. I did a web search of “ross bond” because the name was familiar.
True.
I was just too lazy to get a new password probably. 🙂
Too excited to play Wilson Chronicles.
Hey all, my name’s Nick and I’m honoured to be a part of the RTSL community.
I’ve been playing Half-Life since about 2003 and started messing around with Hammer 3.4 in 2008. Despite the long amount of time I’ve had to learn Hammer I’ve been pretty slow as it was more a hobby than anything I was dedicated to, though that’s changed in the last year.
I’ve started various projects for Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and I also intend on participating in the Hammer Cup as a way to build my skills in level design. I have no real intention (or expectation) of winning but I am very happy to simply be a part of what will end up coming out of the competition.
As for my other technical skills, I have some knowledge of modelling, texturing and sound design. I also have a small amount of knowledge of c# in Unity but that’s as far as my programming skills go. I mainly focus on level design as I intend to one day pursue a career in it, preferably at the AAA level.
Aside from all that though, I’m a horror fan and love any game with an engaging story. My favourite mods are Afraid of Monsters: DC and Underhell, and some of my favourite games are Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Doom, System Shock 2 and Half-Life. I’m also a massive fan of Titanfall, despite it being multiplayer only.
That’s pretty much all I have to say for now. I look forward to hanging out here and getting to know you all!
Hi Nick. Welcome to the site. Thanks for a well-rounded introduction. It’s also good that have you your finger in a few development pies. Glad to hear you will participate in the Hammer Cup.
Hey, my name is Walter, thank you for letting me join the RTSL community.
I enjoy making video games and it has been too long that I have avoided jumping in to the Source editor and systems. I’m interested in making SP mostly but I am happy to learn as much MP stuff as I can. I was looking for a place on the net where I could learn more about using Hammer and making SP levels. I am looking forward to trying out the mapping challenges that I’ve read about (I think I’m a little late for the current Cup). My plan is to learn a bunch from the community and hopefully be able to give out some knowledge once I have more of it!
I’m mostly a scripter by trade and I can understand enough code (C#, etc) to read what may be going on. Art and sound are my weakest abilities and mapping ability is low because I don’t work it out enough. The Radiant engine is the system I know the best.
I like a lot of games and always freeze up when I talk about myself. I’m looking forward to learning from other mods and becoming helpful to the community.
Hi Walter, welcome to the site. We are glad to have you here.
You are not too late for The Hammer Cup but definitely for the first challenge.
Anyway, I look forward to seeing and playing your work.
Hey, My name is Inti or juanchoclo, i’m 15 years old, i’m Chilean and my inglish is kind of bad.
I dont make maps or mods but i love Half-Life and anything that let me kill more headcrabs.
Beside Half-Life, i mainly play indi games such as Darkest Dungeon and FTL, my favorite mod is Point Of View and i barely play MP games.
i’m looking forward to be part of this community.
Welcome 😀
I know lots of people who have learned English by playing games, don’t be afraid to also post in your native language if you can’t figure out the ‘right’ words!
What’s your favorite headcrab-killing weapon? I like the crowbar best for that.
Hey there!
I learn English through WWll shooters at the PS2, By trying to figure up the objectives, at that age, i don’t even know about Half life
I normally use the 2 bullets of the pistol, but using the shotgun its extra satisfying
Thanks for the greetings, Cheers
(Any hidden gem mod that you can recommend?)
Hola Juanchoclo, welcome to the site. Don’t worry about your English, it’s good practice for you to use it.
It seems we all love killing headcrabs!
Hello, my name is GamerNinjaX. I am 18 years old and have been a Half-Life fan since I was around 12 to 14. My first Half-Life game was Half-Life 2, I have played through all of the games in that series, and many years later I played through Half-Life 1.
I am not a mod creator or a game dev; I am simply a fan who is interested in this website and the many mods it carries. I have a very outside passion for video game design and love to analyze games in a review format. I have done a lot of articles on Screwattack.com under the name of gamerninjax206 and while I currently do not review or blog on that website; there are still many reviews archived there under my account. I am a big fan of the Half-Life series for it is my favorite IP from Valve.
I actually have not played very many Half-Life mods, I have had experience with Black-Mesa, The Stanley Parable (yes I have bought the retail versions of those games), Goldeneye: Source, and I am currently waiting for Prospekt to come out. This is why I have registered for the site, to experience and play more Half-Life mods and occasionally give my thoughts on them.
I am glad I have registered and I will try the best I can to be an active member of the community and play the mods they have in store.
Oh you will really enjoy a lot of the mods that have been collected here! Welcome to the site!
For both you and juanchoclo – I would recommend going up to the ‘Play’ section in the top of the page, and click on the “Hall of Fame”. (and yay Phillip thanks for putting an easy link to Gauge there too!!)
There are a LOT of very good mods that showcase what clever things people have done using the Source and Goldsource engines over the years.
You might also want to sort through the mods by ‘rating’, or other things. You can search for specific things now, and read the comments to see if that mod is for you. Some might not be, even I’ll admit that I didn’t much care for a few on the Hall of Fame list, but many did.
Welcome GamerNinjaX. Looks like you been a Half-Life fan for almost one-third your life. You really are the Half-Life generation.
I hope you find time to start review or at least playing all the great mods here on the site.
If you ever have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
It’s Turbo Man, I go by many different names, and I’m officially the candidate of playing sum’ games 😎
In all seriousness, I made this account to track my favourite and upcoming mods from the community. I’m loving the web design and ease of use when downloading mods (no timers or ads!). Sadly I won’t be contributing much (other than possible donations) as I have zero experience in goldsource and source mods but hey, when source 2 SDK is finally out I’m going to be very tempted to give it a go (I don’t like the quake tier tools from source 1).
On the other hand, I will try to play as many mods and review them so maybe expect me in the review sections of the mods 🙂
I don’t really have much to say other than thank you for this glorious website. Bon voyage and best of luck in your future endeavours.
Fair reviews and well-thought-out critique will make the modding community better! Welcome!
Welcome TurboBr0, let’s hope you get to start making maps with Source 2 SDK.
As Zekiran says, having great reviews also makes the site better.
Hey I’m Greencapps. I have only recently gotten into the Half-Life series (I’ve only beat HL1 through Blue Shift and I’m currently having a go at Decay*)but have been playing various other valve games since 2013, specifically Portal and TF2 lots and lots of TF2. I also already have some experience with playing mods because of Portal so making the jump from Portal mods to Half-Life mods wasn’t to jarring.
To be honest I’m here out of necessity the reasons being:
1. I want more Half-Life but I can only run GldSrc at the moment , Source runs at a smooth 13fps with all settings a low so even though I own HL2 and its episodes I cant play them.
2. This is the best site to both get mods and keep track of what you have played, which is why I’m reviewing things.
Then again the reason why I’m here isn’t important what is, however, is that I am and I’m going to attempt to play and review all the mods on the site.
See you in the reviews section!
*No HL2 spoilers please!
Having had my one main desktop go belly-up shortly before (literally12 hours before) Portal 2 dropped, I had to resort to using my old XP laptop to play *anything*. Still runs Goldsource but no source games on that rig.
You’ll enjoy a LOT of the HL1 (and blue shift and op4) mods and maps, many of them are quite challenging these days, but since what you’re coming off of is more half life 1 they may prove less of a difficulty than for people like me who went the other way (from portal to half life 2, to half life 1). I notice you just reviewed Someplace Else 😀
Yee I love challenging shooters, well at least ones that are fair (Still stuck on T&R in legendary mode on HaloPC), because of that the older HL games and mods have really hit the spot. 😀
I’m also a HUGE fan of good stories in games so mods like Poke 646 (a mod I should be reviewing once I’m done with my current playthrough), Someplace Else, and Point of View really excite me.
Sidenote: Why does Blue Shift not have it’s own tab under play? Is it because it adds nothing new or are there just not enough mods for it to warrant it have a dedicated link?
I suspect that it’s mostly just repeated stuff that is not unique. OP4 has its own because of all the new critters and weaponry added. I guess I more meant Blue Shift as a style – playing someone other than Gordon, which is also done in OP4 but it’s got all that extra stuff to build on.
Welcome to the site Greencapps, sorry to hear about your PC. Sounds like you need a rich uncle to buy you one. Fingers crossed.
I am Fox McGee (I used to go by the name UCeNSHNOW). I have been playing mods for Half-Life since the year I bought it. I’ve always wanted to get into modding or mapping, but I never knew anyone who had similar interests in the place I live and Valve’s Hammer editor was confusing for me to start off with. However, I got myself to start a map via Jackhammer, and I think I’m doing pretty good. I am still currently working on the map.
My top 5 favourite games in order:
Half-Life, Doom, Metal Gear Solid 3, Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, and Halo 3
My favourite mod would be Sven Co-op
My least favourite Half-Life game would be Episode 2… I just can’t stand Episode 2. I never beaten it, although I know how it ends.
Always glad to see new mappers participating. TWHL is always a good place to go for mapping tutorials and help by the way. And check the forums for info on Sledge, an open source Hammer replacement that is about on par with Jackhammer.
Have you tried the new Sven Co-op 5.0 yet? Some neat new maps and modes to play.
When I started I was a bit lost, but I remembered when I was attempting to use Hammer the first time I was learning from the tutorials on TWHL. If it weren’t for TWHL I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.
I have sadly not played SC 5.0 yet because I was busy with work, transferring my old hard drive to a new one, and working on my map.
Welcome to the site Fox McGee. Good luck with JackHammer. I’d love to release your work, so just let me know when you have something ready.
Hello RTSL.
My name is Jamie Dietrich, i love Pikachu and Huskies so i got the nickname Pikachusky from that, but you can call me Husky if you like. I’ve been mapping for many years, I started out with a program called Red Editor back in 2005. Does anyone remember Red Editor from Red Faction? Red Editor took me several weeks to figure out anything basic since there was not to much info on it.
I’ve Discovered Source SDK sometime in 2007-2008 when i first got Steam. I discovered steam when Steam had nvidia offer for HL2:DM, HL2:LC, Portal First Slice was out. than i looked into The Valve complete Collection. Ever since 2008 i’ve been a Huge Valve addict! i own every valve game from Half-Life 1 to Counter-Strike Global Offensive, and probably played all there was!
I’ve watch multiple youtube videos and read about level design from interlopers when i first started, after i got the basics down i started mapping for Half-Life 2 Deathmatch. My first and only released map i ever did was an edited version of dm_lockdown and i had my own server at the time. Ever since then up-til-now i’ve been doing lots and lots of test, reading more info, gathering new stuff for my knowledge of hammer. I have done test from Advanced Doors, up to puzzles and such.
Since i discovered Source SDK Wiki Level Design page i heavily rely on this. I know a lot about mapping, but i always double check everything with this.
My Favorite Games Are:
Half-Life 1
Half-Life 1: Opposing Force
Half-Life 1: Blue Shift
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2: Episode One
Half-Life 2: Episode Two
Half-Life 2: Deathmatch
Portal
Portal 2
Left 4 Dead
Left 4 Dead 2
Counter-Strike GO (sometimes)
Garry’s Mod (even though not released by valve)
I have a lot i want to do. I do a lot of Level Design analysis so if you need help i can help!
Here’s Projects i want to do i have alot of potential and i want this year to be the year i start publishing maps!
#1: Remaking dm_lockdown
I want to do this because i had so much fun before doing this it will be awesome to see what i can do now!
#2: Enter in Mapping Competitions
Everyone seems to have fun, but the only difficult part is i work 12hour shifts so 19 days turns into 10 days, and i have 2 kids so juggling between anything will always be a challenge.
#3: Start a single-player mod
always wanted to do this!
You can Contact me on Skype! (Huskyx94) if you ever have trouble mapping or anything of the sort, or just to talk, i love to talk about Hammer Editor and Map Design! its like my gossip lol.
Feel free to ask or comment anything on your mind!
Thanks guys!
Hope to chat with anyone!
Can always Skype me, I’ll talk whenever i can!
Hi and welcome to the site Pikachusky. I know we have already chatted privately and sorry for the trouble getting you registered.
Anyway, looking forward to your being part of the growing community.
Hello. My name’s Ian, and i’m here for the mods, so don’t expect much from me. 😛
Have a GREAT day!
Hi HellHoundWarrior, welcome to the site.
Don’t worry, we don’t expect everybody to write long reviews etc.
Enjoy the site.
heheh Welcome Fox, Husky and Hound!! 😀 Such an influx (and such wow, much canine… shoot me now mmkay) of folks!
Even if ‘all’ you do is play mods or maps, always consider leaving a review or a comment about them as you play them. When others see more replies in the Recent Comments section, or a new mod pops into view, that means more folks will play them, and that’s always good.
This might be to VNN shouting out RTSL in his newest vid but its just a hunch….
If not for VNN’s introduction, I wouldn’t have known that PlanetPhillip lived on as RTSL – though, I tried REALLY HARD to like his channel – and failed.
Hmm… doesn’t matter anymore 😀
Thanks Zekiran! I do a lot of mapping just never released anything besides an edit of dm_lockdown
Greetings from China.
Haven’t seen PlanetPhillip for a long, long time, wondering where it’s gone.
And it’s here. And alive. Best fricking news for me, after digging through a mere of 400+ mod updates on ModDB, stating those MODs themselves are dead. Turns out that I’m totally left behind on RUNNING – so I suppose I’ve got to catch up and do some more THINKING and SHOOTING.
Test post for Phillip
Last Test For Phillip 😛
Hi all, my name is John and i’m from the U.S, Specifically Illinois near Chicago. I am 15 years old and i’ve been playing FPS games for more than 10 years now. My first games were brought to me by my dad actually when i was about 5 years old. He showed me games like ocarina of time, counter strike(the old original xbox version), and half life 2. Half life stood out more to me and ever since 2005 when i first played it, it’s been my favorite game ever, along with the expansions and sequels.
I got a laptop about 2 years ago which was only able to run gmod and half life 2 at 40 fps, but it was good enough for me. I got a better pc about a year ago and started downloading lots of half life mods. Some of my favorites are The citizen, Precursor and Get a Life. I also started watching videos on youtube that related to anything valve pretty much. SFM animations, things about valve game histories and other things. A specific channel i watch is valve news network whom i started watching about a year ago when he made videos about the half life 2 beta.
I have a decent experience with mapping, i made a couple maps for myself on gmod and actually made a map that got put on the suicide barrels server in gmod. So i know most basic and some intermediate things about hammer. I have some pretty good ideas for mods for hl2 and maybe some day ill actually take part in a mod developement. But i wouldnt consider myself an expert by any means.
Thanks for reading!
Awesome, welcome to the site!
Definitely look through the hall of fame and game-specific areas, there might be hints on how to do things you aren’t familiar with or haven’t gotten around to doing in mapping on some of them, particularly the Villes and Competition pages because the mappers actually do communicate some hints and tips there.
Maybe you’ll work on something for the upcoming challenges, too!
…. Also way to make me feel like a geezer, lol. you’ve been gaming 2/3 of your life. Kudos to your dad (who’s doubtless closer to my age heh) because he introduced you to games! that’s wonderful though 🙂
Welcome to the site Tooshady. It’s amazing that most of your life has been playing Half-Life – that is so cool.
Glad to hear you have a better PC, let’s hope you decide to enter some of the mapping challenges.
Eyy. I’m Neon, and I’m obsessed with Half-Life like we all are here. Future me is probably making a mod, but current me is just here to write reviews. Off I go then.
Hi Neon, welcome to the site. You mention Future You and Current You, what about Past You?
Past me is a lot of different mes, a lot of which I’m not too fond of. Present me is the best me there is, although maybe future me is better.
Hi!
I´m Kosan, a 10th-grader from Düsseldorf, Germany.
Half-Life was my first FPS and it´s also my favourite game of all time.
My favourite HL singleplayer game is HL2 Episode 2 and my fav. multiplayer game is HL1DM.
You could say it changed my life. It´s the reason I´m interested in the games industry after I finish school.
Probably as a level designer and/or 3d artist. I love making maps for source engine (I wanna learn UE4 too though) games (especially CS:GO), but I haven´t ever made a singleplayer Half-Life map.
If I have enough spare time, I will very likely make a map for The Hammer Cup 2016.
I have plans on making a HL mod one day, but maybe that will turn into a Source 2 project, once we all get our hands on it.
I love this site btw, nothings better than free DLC for my favourite game franchise.
Welcome to RTSL! 😀 It’s good to see that you have interest in making something for the competition. Sometimes what you need is a direction and rules to put your first works together. Definitely keep branching out for different systems too, because if you intend to get into the industry that is the best way, knowing many types of engines. It keeps you flexible!
Hi Kosan, welcome to the site. Hard work and a focused attitude can accomplish many great things, so I hope you reach your gaming goals.
Hi everyone!
I’m Nush and I’m a 16 year old Canadian.
I love everything about the Half Life community and it was introduced to me by this site (It was planetphillip Back then). I was holding off making an account until now, but I hope it will be worth it thanks to the great community on this site. I’d love to make a Half Life 2 map but all of the tools are just so overwhelming. I started off making a (Crude) CS:GO map, which showed me a basic way on how to map. Trying to make a Half Life 2 map was something else. All of the scripting really threw me off. But having finally made an account on this site I hope to learn how to make much better maps!
Welcome, Nush! I’m sure that you will find a lot of helpful ideas and comments from the more experienced modders here. Don’t forget to read the comments of maps or mods that you’ve enjoyed, because sometimes there are conversations about aspects that gave the map maker issues, or how they could do them better. I’m sure if you ask around you’ll get great advice.
Hi Nush, welcome to the site.
I truly wish I had enough time and experience to make tutorial videos for HL and HL2. I really do want to help more people become SP modders.
Anyway, good luck creating something we can all play
Hey, Nush! We should really talk sometime! You can add me on steam @That Guy Bishop
Hello, i’m Sejievan i’m from Brazil, i do mapping for quite some time 4, 5 yrs i think, most of my work is for Portal 2, but i kinda wanna expand my horizons and improve my mapping skills for the other valve games too. I hope to make a full game (or mod) someday, but for now i’m happy with just playing mods and mapping. =)
Welcome to RTSL! I do hope you participate in some of the competitions, or even just make something inspired by another mod or map.
Howdy!
My name is Chris, but I go by Bishop!
I’m 17 and I’ve been a fan of Half-Life and FPS’s for as long as I can remember! I’ve been a lurker on this site for awhile and I just recently decided to make an account.
Let me start off by saying I love this community! I get a huge kick out of seeing very talented and capable mod makers get recognition for the work they do. I just wish I was as talented as you guys are! One talent I would say I have is voice acting. It’s always been a passion of mine. If any of you need a voice actor, I’d be happy to help! 😀 But yeah! I’m a huge fan of Half-Life and Half-Life mods!
Thanks for reading,
Bishop
Hi Bishop, welcome to the site. People are often looking for voice actors. You should definitely put a demo reel together.
Where could I post it?
Hello!
I’m Cherry, but I do use Kyo Comics on some sites and for an old comic series I did.
I’ve been playing Half Life games for a while, had the first Half Life on the playstation 2 back in the day loved it even in that form.
I have some skills in Hammer but nothing really useful for single player maps but I do hope to change that with maybe making a few for Half Life 2 or maybe even for the first Half Life.
Welcome Cherry!
Welcome Cherry and Bishop!
I do hope that everyone can benefit from learning more about mapping, you’ll find lots of helpful modders around here (and more every day).
Hi Cherry. Hope you get the motivation to make some SP maps soon.
Hey guys, names Agameofscones and I’ve been out and about on Mapcore.org, occasionally Interlopers and most actively that place called Facepunch. While I usually hide behind a front of Team Fortress 2 related mapping, HL2 mapping will forever hold a special place in my heart. I started mapping in 2014 in CS:GO and quickly swapped over to Garry’s Mod. Since at the time that seemed to be my only outlet for HL2 related mapping. Boy was I wrong. I was steered here like probably many a new member by the one and only Tyler McVicker who recently did a video concerning briefly the Hammer Cup of 2016. Truly an exciting prospect. Hopefully not only will I get to meet fellow like minded HL2 mappers I’ll finally get something to chew up my free time (I’ve got a lot of it.) I may be young compared to most of you, but I can only get older no? It’s a promising future, and I hope to see some damn good maps in the end.
Perhaps I’ll finally find someone who appreciates painful amounts of over detailing.
You might get older but you don’t HAVE to grow up 🙂
Welcome, welcome to RTSL. It’s… well, I dunno about safer. <_<
Hi Agameofscones, welcome to the site.
I LOVE detailing, so we could be friends!
Age is not important here.
Hello!
I’m luck.
I joined this website because i really like valve source engine games.
And i want to say hello to everybody. 😀
Howdy Luck. Welcome to the site.
Thanks for the welcome :P.
I am a gamer who loves everything created by valve. My dream job is to work at valve as a level designer. Whenever I have spare time, I like to learn more about level designing. I joined RTSL so i could compete in the hammer cup 2016.
Looking forward to seeing what you’ll make! Welcome to RTSL!
Welcome to the site. I’m glad you joined by there is no requirement to join the site to enter any mapping challenges.
Hello, my Name is David von Diemar
– No I’m not nobility xD
– I’m a German Teenager who has fallen in Love with Half-Life
– I’m currently running three different YouTube channels
– No I’m not nobility xD
– I’m a Motion and Graphic Designer
– If you have any questions feel free to ask 🙂
– If you are interested in my Computer Specs or Setup this might help you ?
>> http://pastebin.com/bwCi9NSx
Hi byCyber, welcome to the site. What YT channels do you run?
Music Reuploads: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyaNw_33W-KLUICXlTOoKvg
German Gaming [Including Half-Life]: https://www.youtube.com/user/SuperCyberplayerLp
Motion Designing: https://www.youtube.com/user/CyberzArts
Hello everyone my name is Andrew i’m 18. and i used to be a mapper but gave up along ago.
I really wanted to get into it again but again i don’t have the time to do it, because of School and a job but one day i will get back to it. I’ve been playing half life games since 1999 and every since, i became a big Half Life fan with a lot of mods that i play. I also got to work on a mod Called Black Mesa : Resonance as a concept artist but sad to say, it got scraped.
I hope to be able to work on another black mesa mod in the near future.
BatCornMan
Hi Andrew, welcome to the site. You mentioned BM twice. Is that the only place you want to re-create?
Welcome BatCornMan! 😀 With a big workload no one could possibly blame you for not putting in the hours that it takes to make a mod or map. Hopefully you’ll get some time, but don’t beat yourself up if you can’t.
This page is getting way too long.
Hello there!
My name’s Michael, currently 20 in college for game design, and I’m just your average gamer. Of course, Half-Life is my favorite video game series of all-time.
Don’t have any modding experience unfortunately. I do hope to learn one day, but right now, I just settle with playing the awesome mods made in the community. Some of my favorite HL mods include Underhell, and of the course the fantastic Black Mesa.
Welcome to RTSL! You’ll find so many great mods. I’ve been replaying Research and Development, which imo is probably the best ever. 🙂
Hello, My name is SleekBones, okay it isn’t, my full name is Noah Luna, I love to make things in hammer, Source is my favorite engine, I am new to hammer, and working in the source engine, I want and am currently making a zombie type horror map, You should expect that in the comming months hopefully. I really want to make horror maps that aren’t just in the same area for about the whole map, different places give more diversity. I have 231 hours in Half Life 2, yes I know I have a problem, I would be amazed if one of my maps ever got it to the Hall of Fame, that is my goal, I have no idea if that will ever come true, but I hope you like the maps I will make. 🙂
Sounds awesome, welcome to RTSL and I look forward to seeing your maps! You’ve got a good goal set up – no place like here to practice.
Welcome to the site Sleek. Great to hear you are working on a map. Let’s hope you release a HOF map, my fingers are crossed for you.
Hi Everyone,
I run a small YouTube channel that focuses on Half-Life. I do full length walkthroughs all in a single video, in 1080p60FPS and NO Commentary… I think you’d enjoy my stuff!
You can check out my channel @ http://www.bolloxed.com
Enjoy!
Bolloxed
Hi Bollox, I just realised I haven’t welcomed you officially.
I am Sphoonerino. I’ve been playing shooter games ever since I could remember, and I love above all Half-Life! I’ve played them all multiple times (I can recite the beginning of HL2 from Gman by heart) and I’ve played Half-Life and mods for more hours than I can recall. Rocket Crowbar anybody?
Welcome to RTSL 🙂
And bonus points because I suspect you always read the word ‘difference’ as ‘difffffference’.
HI Sphoonerino, welcome to to the site.
I challenge you to type the opening Gman’s lines from memory. Obviously, I can’t see if you have cheated, so we will have to trust you.
hello! i’m a… late bloomer? when it comes to FPS. i bought Half-life 1 in the 90s… but didn’t have a good enough PC to run it reliably. PC gaming was never really part of my life (or other gaming? my newest console is a Wii. no U)
in 2015 i went to PAX East. i already had a Steam account at that point, and a few games here and there. i started in March of 2015 playing through Half-life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2, and Lost Coast.
then i backfilled and played HL1, OF, BS. wanting more, i started trying to get mods to work on my Mac (i have macbook pro 3.1ghz i7 w/iris 6100 graphics). a few worked, but ultimately i knew i needed to boot Windows. so i BootCamp’d Win 10 and moved most of my gaming to that partition.
in addition to the HL universe i absolutely love Portal & Portal 2, i’ve played through them both a couple times now (lately with my kids watching! they were so bummed about Wheatley). they’re not quite ready for Half-life yet tho (currently 5 & 6yo) but someday.
i’m working on building out a dedicated gaming rig, i should probably have that done before Source 2 is released, right? 😉
Welcome! You did the same kind of back-tracking as I did, though I started with Portal 1 and moved to the Orange Box, myself, before hitting the HL1 anthology.
Most systems will run HL1, unfortunately many older rigs (including my own laptop) won’t run Source so I know that pain.
Zekiran i kinda figured we had similar situations, i really liked your review of the ep3 mod, very close to my experience.
my laptop can play pretty much anything, except some games, even ones that aren’t super 3d heavy make the cooling fans run so hard i can barely hear the game (like Gone Home – why did that melt my laptop into an aluminum ingot?)
Thankfully I have a pretty powerful desktop machine. But my own laptop is an ancient XP device with an onboard chipset and zero chance to upgrade. 😀
Anyway – I look forward to seeing what you think of some of the terrific mods here, there are soooo many, with wildly different styles and expectations.
Hi Bloomer, Welcome to the site. I keep thinking about building a gaming rig but don’t have enough time or money.
Fingers crossed yours is finished in time for Half-Life 3!
I’m Anders. There are many mods I like, including Black Mesa, Missing Information, Black Mesa: Hazard Course, MINERVA, Dear Esther, Mission Improbable, Half-Life Decay PC port, and more :-D. The newest mod I want to play is The Closure mod, aka, episode 3, but I cannot get it to work :'(
Hi Ander, welcome to the site. Have you managed to get The Closure to work yet?
Hi Phillip
More than a year later I finally managed to get it to work. It’s an awesome mod!
Hello
I am a small Youtuber known as Slevans92. Some call me Sarah….and some call me Serena…either way you can call me either name…i am a part time student attending a local community college for an Associates Degree in Cyber Security Specialist and a Masters Degree in Photography and Art…i am also working on a minor in Journalism…after i finish my minor im going to be getting a Degree in learning how to create video games and such…but overall i am busy all the time….whether it be with college homework,appointments irl or making content for my subs….youll find i am a go-with-the-flow type of person….
Welcome to RTSL Sarah. Quite a range of courses you are taking ontop of a youtube channel. What kind of content do you make on youtube by the way? is it playing maps (because if so there are so many to try here) or do you prefer to make videos on other things?
Yay, welcome, another Sara(h) (mine’s no h hehe)!
I look forward to seeing reviews and commentary here!
Welcome to the site Sarah, hope you enjoy your time here.
Hey everyone,
I’m Ryan and have been mapping properly for a little under a year.
I’ve played Half-Life 2 for around 100+ hours on one of my steam accounts (old family shared account) and many many more on my private account, thanks to my urge to replay it at least once a year (and that usually ends up turning into a Half-Life spree, with me playing Black Mesa, Ep1+2, HL1, going crazy about it etc.)
Every couple of years or so, I would try to learn mapping – creating a basic room and so on. But I would never actually stick with it until almost a year ago when I started mapping for Black Mesa. Now, I’m working for a GMod map for an RP server and also a singleplayer mod for EP1 (on the 2013 engine of course). It’s more of a map pack with a running storyline then a mod, but hey, it has its own custom main menu and etc.
I’ll be having a look into the upcoming mapping challenges as I think they will benefit my mapping skills. You’ll see me around!
Oh sweet, I hope to see stuff you’ll be making. It’s definitely the case that Villes and other mapping competitions can really flesh out skills and help with questions you have. The existing competitors rarely hold back their hints and tips, it’s a friendly competition here!
Hi Ryan, welcome to the site. I like the sound of the SP for for EP1, hope we get to play it soon.
G’day everyone,
I’m one of the developers of car-poral keys. I do mapping, modelling, scripting, texturing, subtitles and sound for it.
I’ve done more ‘serious’ work on counter-strike maps, which you can find on my steam profile if you really want to.
I look forward to entering some mapping challenges and putting my own spin on things (nothing as insane as cpk, I promise!)
Welcome Rekurer. Sounds like you have a wide range of skills. I hope you find the next mapping challenge theme interesting.
Hey, I am Evan, I f*&king love Half-Life, I play Half-Life 2 roleplay on gmod alot.
Hi Evan, welcome to the site. No swearing please.
Gmod Roleplay huh?
Which server, I might use the same one as you.
Hi! I’m Florian.
First, it took me long to find out about RTSL, but that’s definitely the best place to find quality content! So much good mods. And the community! So active on the comments and reviews.
I love it!
I’ve always loved half life (the sci-fi environment / the panic when the first head crab jumps on you).
HL1 must have been the first FPS i played.
Then came hl2 (let’s not talk about anon-beta, but yeah, I was there too).
Physics, physics, physics. I’m still amazed by the source engine, and still think it’s yet unbeaten concerning physics.
I’m a web developer during the day. The kind that loves gnu/linux, and nerdy stuff.
Which makes me trying to make everything work on linux.
First natively, wine otherwise.
HL2 supported on linux was such great news!
But still, most of the mods here don’t work out of the box on linux.
Hopefully, you guys work with the SDK 2013, with steampipe content.
Which makes it easy to fix.
So this is my usual story with RTSL.
Download a mod, and modify its sources (mainly gameinfo.txt) to make it work on linux.
I wanted to know if anyone here is also a linux gamer?
If so, I’d love to hear about it!
Cheers!
Flo.
PS: Phillip, your website is a wonderful idea.
So you know, some of the comments indicate that there are ways to make many mods work under Linux but you’d have to search for those yourself – at least one person specifically seems to be looking out for that functionality.
Welcome to RTSL!
Thanks 🙂
@Zekiran: Ho, I should have searched previous posts first.
Indeed, @asterixer posted the same kind of linux related-stuff. Hi @asterixer 🙂
I’v found some topics on this subject (mainly http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/828938532638150996/ and http://steamcommunity.com/app/220/discussions/0/405691491119676588/ )
The good news is that I’m able to run most of the mods here!
The only thing is that I need to slightly reconfigure it 🙂
I’d like if the mods were packaged with a universal gameinfo.txt.
I made a (very) simple shell script that allows me to install any mod here, without having to do anything manually.
Cheers!
Hi Florian/docteurklien, welcome to the site.
It’s always nice to hear from people who love the Half-Life games, especially when they have been playing them for a long time.
I’ve thought about trying to do more with Linux with regard to the site, for example, have a TAG for mods known to work with it but it’s a little problematic as that may change over time and the TAGs shouldn’t be like that.
Hi !
Thanks for the warm welcome.
As stated in an answer to @Zekiran, I made a simple script to play on linux (native).
As soon as it’s an hl2:ep2 mod, it will work out of the box!
So, in theory, if you repackage the mod correctly, every mod should work on linux.
The script is so simple I’ll paste it here:
https://gist.github.com/f9867744e8cf6fa2df01fb5fcdc647d9
You can provide a custom config.cfg (and videoconfig_linux.cfg), but that’s optional.
Hope it helps!
Cheers.
Hi everyone, my name is Lucas, and that is all that you will know about my personal information as I am not a fan with sharing my stuff on the Internet.
I first started with the Half-Life series and Valve by purchasing The Orange Box on the Xbox-360. After completing all 4 games, not TF2 as I don”t particularly like it, I loved the series and wanted more. So I started watching YouTube videos on Half-Life 1, its expansions, and mods. Then I branched into Half-Life 2 mods and such stuff. After getting a Steam account soon later and purchasing all the Half-Life games in a sale bundle, I found a RTSL member’s YouTube channel, I’m talking about you Bolloxed! After watching some mod playthroughs, I saw the link to this page and yeah, thats where I am now…
As for mod and map creating, I have no idea about how to create one or even download one, yet I really want to. So as time progresses, I will figure that out and start to review and create maps/mods.
And so that ends my introductory comment… Pretty boring I know, yet I hope to fill it with new ideas and facts involving RTSL.
Welcome!
In order to use many of the mods on the site, you can download and install the ‘Gauge’ program, which used to be called ‘Maptap’ (so if you see references to Maptap, it’s new name is Gauge). It’s found up at the top of the site, in the PLAY tab, bright blue, you can’t miss it.
It will help you browse for, download, install, play, and uninstall the many maps and mods found here. *not all* work properly in it – some are too large to be downloaded BY Gauge, some are just kinda ‘broken’ due to the many changes that Valve has done to their systems over the years. But by and large Gauge is the right tool for the site!
Enjoy!
Hi Lucas/Razman, welcome to the site. I’m glad you found your way here. Installing maps and mods is pretty easy but don’t ever hesitate to ask for help.
Hello,
I’m Strontvlieg (but in real-life known under the name Mark) and I thought it couldn’t hurt to register on this site.
I’m not an avid gamer anymore these days and I tend to focus on Indie games like Kerbal Space Program, but always liked the Half Life series. Messed around with map editors in 2003 and 2008 but never succeeded in fabricating more than some blocky maps crammed with enemys. Decided to give the Source SDK another spin two weeks ago and managed to squeeze out a map that’s actually coherent and more or less resembles a Dutch neighborhood under Combine occupation. Perhaps I could publish this map on this site if permitted? Its 95% done as I speak.
Ooh I would love to see such a thing. If it doesn’t have much plot, you might consider it for Gmod, where people could just wander through it.
Good to see another new person! Welcome to RTSL!
Well, it has a (thin) plot; get from area A to area B in order to escape the Combine. Nothing epic though.
Environment resembles a typical Dutch residential areas build in the 60’s and 70’s. There are some custom made textures that I fabricated from stuff I photographed myself and stuff I found on the WWW. See if I can upload it tonight … !
Hi Mark, welcome to the site. Fingers crossed it sparks more creativity from you.
Well, it has a (thin) plot; get from area A to area B in order to escape the Combine. Nothing epic though.
Environment resembles a typical Dutch residential areas build in the 60’s and 70’s. There are some custom made textures that I fabricated from stuff I photographed myself and stuff I found on the WWW. See if I can upload it tonight … !
Hello Everyone
I found out about this website when look for mod for half life 2 and i saw the when i was in the google search page and i though to my self “wow this site is great” the i started to download mods that i like even the mapping challenges the are good to play and i love them,
Now a little about my self
My name is Parker Oeltjenbruns, and i love video game i been playing them for about 3 years way be for i knew what steam was at the time and i love steam i meat to friend on steam the gift me game and the hole half life 2 and half life games, then i got garry mod and Conter Strike Source.i started to play on one of the best server on Garry mod and it name was noxiousnet.
(sorry if my spelling and sentences are bad sorry about that)
ModernGT, welcome to the site. I’m glad you think the site is great. Hope you keep participating.
hello all.
My name is Trevor, And I live somewhere in Wisconsin.
as a new user to the site, I come here with not that much info regarding the community, I have mapped before, but many maps would be like the kind that you would never show anyone. plus, i am not very good at working on maps for long time periods. I hope that the community is not as vile as some other communities
Thanks, and I hope to enjoy my stay
Howdy Trevor, welcome to the site. I guarantee that this community is friendly, helpful and knowledge. I retroactively moderate each and every comment personally and I will not hesitate to edit or delete any comment that I feel may cause offense. If ant any time you see a comment that you think is rude or offensive, just email me and I will double check.
Hope you can try to make a map for one of the Ville (not vile!) mapping challenges.
Greetings RunThinkShootLive,
My name is Derek. (I used to use the screenname 1upD, so I’ll use that here as well.) I’m a college student studying Computer Science in Michigan.
I’ve been a fan of Half-Life since 2008. I discovered it on an old CD in my dad’s PC game collection. By that time Half-Life was about ten years old, but it still blew me away. The level of immersion and interactivity in the environment had me captivated the whole way through, and going in without so much as watching a trailer made it all the better; I had no idea what to expect. As you can imagine, I was only more and more impressed as I progressed through Opposing Force, Portal, and Half-Life 2 and the episodes.
I’ve played quite a few Half-Life, Portal, and Half-Life 2 mods over the years. Sadly, I’ve only reviewed a handful. I really regret not getting involved with the Half-Life 2 community until now. I used to make mods for Star Wars: Empire at War, and having people actually play and enjoy content I made was a really rewarding experience. I haven’t really had any serious interactions with the internet since then, and it feels like something’s missing.
I signed up here because I’m interested in participating in the Mapping Challenge / Ville competitions. I’ve been using hammer for fun for years, but I’ve never completed anything that could be published online before. I’m currently working on a Source 2013 mod with at least one other person, but we don’t plan on announcing it until we have something to show for it. I still have a lot to learn about Hammer and game design in general before I can fully realize the mod.
I’m excited to follow and hopefully participate in upcoming events here.
Awesome, welcome to RTSL!
I love how many new folks we’re seeing and that plenty of them have some amount of interest in the competitions!
Hi 1upD,
Welcome to the site. Glad to hear you are interested in mapping for the challenges.
Hi my name is Jacob I am 16 years of age and I love the Half-Life series. From Half-Life 1 to Portal 2. I love the games. I love going on this website to see talented developers doing on their own spin on. I always dreamed of making my own HL game in the future to publish here and on steam.
I also play other games such as Life is strange, Team Fortress Classic, Deathmatch classic,Outlast, Sven coop, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 dead, undertale and etc
Anyways that’s enough about me. I hope I can contribute in this site in the near future Thanks for reading.
Hi Jacob, welcome to the site. It’s always good to meet new HL fans.
Thanks man. I hope to make some Half-Life mods/games in the future. And contribute to this website. I am looking forward to the things that this place will be planning. 🙂
Its me again. I am planning to make a series of games in the future set within the HL universe. I haven’t done any major work but I did wrote down on some ideas. https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfLife/comments/4gc4wx/a_game_idea_i_had_lambda_stories/
With this site I am hoping to learn more about level design and basic coding.
Hi! Nice to be here, following PP from many years, I was a little disoriented at first, but we can’t live without P. My name is Andrea, I like to play FPS as well as RPGs, and of course HL mods and maps.
RTSL is an inestimable resource for HL fans and I hope You flourish for the years to come. I’m not very discursive, but I hope to make some appropriate comment in the future, thanks for let me join.
😉
Hi harrison3001,
Glad you took the plunge to register. Fingers crossed the site flourishes for many years to come.
Hola, I am Robert. I am here to play as many mods and maps as possible.
Well are YOU in luck! We happen to have a TON of em! 😀
Hola, Robert. If you want to play hundreds of single player maps and mods for the Half-Life series of games, you have come to the right place!
Greetings, I am GreenPepper and am currently working on a singleplayer modification for Half-Life 2: Episode Two.
Excellent! Looking forward to seeing what you do! Welcome to RTSL.
Welcome to the site. I’ve been following your work.
I am Nightfang118 and I hope to play some of the best Half-Life mods around.
Welcome! When you play them, be sure to leave commentary! Also of course, keep in mind that some of the mods are very old, may not work, or may have weird bits that need to be tweaked in order to run. I recommend using Gauge (formerly Maptap) found in the blue section of the Play dropdown. It will help install most problematic mods and maps, and let you run them without needing to start up the full games and use the console.
Hi Nightfang18, welcome to the site. I have a feeling you will find some pretty good mods here.
Hi, I go by Paynamia. Longtime lurker, first-time… register..er…
Um…
I do a little miscellaneous modding and stuff. I’ve never had much of a consistent place to release such little titbits, so they kinda float everywhere.
Recently I’ve been working on a bigger project, but it hasn’t been going too well. Lots of issues I can’t seem to pinpoint.
Anyway, glad to finally join the site!
Hi and welcome to RTSL!
Don’t be afraid to ask questions of the folks that you see posting their Ville and other maps in here, they’re all remarkably cool 😉
Glad you registered. As Zekiran says, feel free to ask your questions in the general chat threads.
Hey, I know you! Welcome to RTSL!
Hello Everyone! IntelMercs here.
Huge Half-Life fan, as well as most classic FPS games. Was hoping to start streaming and thought Half-Life mods would be fun. Searching for just that, I stumbled upon this amazing site! Now I’m itching to start showcasing some of the great stuff here!
Also excited to leave reviews as I go through it all. I don’t even know where to start!
Welcome!
I would say, start with the often-played and often reviewed mods, but there’s also the ‘random’ button in Explore. Since we all have our own preferences, it’ll be interesting to see another new reviewer looking over some of the stuff in here, just to see whether many mods and maps stand up to new standards!
Welcome IntelMercs. I’m sure you will find some great mods, may I suggest LiberationVille for Episode Two. It has some amazing entries.
Hello, I go by Balimbanana on most platforms.
I mostly design support for sp mods to be played co-op in Synergy.
Hi Balimbanana, welcome to the site. I really should try Synergy again – one day I will.
I’m Jan (yes I am a male)an older player I’m almost 57. I live just south of Atlanta. Like some of the other folks here I generally just play single player except for some Modular combat and Seven co-op. I have steam and I like hunting around for new single player mods.
Welcome to the site Jan. I’m sure you will find plenty of great SP mods here.
Greetings,
My name is Max. I’m what some might call ‘late’ to the gaming world in my mid-fifties. How I got there isn’t so strange however. I was one of those teen boys in the arcades back in the mid-seventies, stuffing every quarter I could get my hand on into Pong, Asteroids, Tron, Galaga, and many others as they debuted and faded. But girls, partying, the military for many years, marriage, divorce, marriage, & family ultimately occupied the intervening years.
As chance would have it, one lazy summer work day in 2000, at a local HVAC company I worked at, the owner showed me Half-Life on his laptop, which he got from his twelve year old son. I was memorized. I felt like… I was viewing it from Edison’s perspective or something because, for me in that moment, it was remarkable on so many levels from what I had seen and played years ago.
He installed the game on my laptop and I spent, quite literally, the next thirteen hours or so completely immersed and dedicated to… Finishing. It. It was so f*&king long (hope the color is ok, or colour if you prefer☺). Took me days. Frustrated, exhilarated, & frustrated me. My boss and I would call each other in different sections, not understanding what the puzzle was. Obsessed my free time. Missed work to play it. Played it sick. Hated Xen. Glad that was last, in hindsight. Had enough of it to last a lifetime, or so I thought.
That was my introduction to modern gaming ten years ago. About two years ago I picked up a screaming deal on a native LCD (400W!) 1920 X 1080 native display for my computer, an aging, but relatively fast quad core 2.66, 8 mb of RAM, with a Radeon 5600 video card. I could achieve playable fps of 30-40 at that high res which was incredibly immersive, especially since my monitor is approximately 40 inches away from my face when playing. It’s like sitting in the third row of the theatre (that was for you Phil☺). It fills just about fills my field of view. The fps was better at 1600 X 900, but honestly, I was willing to trade fps for quality video.
Recently, my roommate and daughter’s gpa, simply out of kindness, bought me a new computer. It’s an i7 quad (virtual 8) and it. just. screams. CPU clocks out over 3.8 ghz under load. Lower video specs that my old box but 60 fps pretty consistently at 1600 X 900 even with the card settings bumped up a bit for quality. HL2 gets reinvented for me once again.♥ that old man.
So here I am, back into into an entirely NEW Half-Life series with HL2 and the episodes (and Black Mesa, ♥ Black Mesa) but eventually, even playing them in slo-mo with low gravity (15) at host_timescale .15, they DO get old (no-clip on at the apex of the slo mo ascension for most entertainment… really fun after a tug on the pipe☺ Plus, it’s a nice vantage point for crossbow use. The RPG in slo mo is badass when you zoom in immediately after firing. ♥ watching those gunships explode in slo mo, zoomed in. It’s cinematic). If any developer made it to the end of this paragraph, I’d like to pitch higher ceilings (roofs?) on your mods and consider the view from say, 300 ft in the air. Take an aerial view in HL2 or the episodes and you’ll see what I’m talking about. The view is pretty nice up there. Just sayin’.
So off to Google to see what there is to see and yet again, I’m dumbfounded to find a dedicated community of developers and supporters who keep the game fresh, alive, and more importantly, take it in creative new directions. I especially love the outside-the-box efforts I’ve enjoyed, Underhell in particular. I must compliment each and every developer and lover of the series here for making an old gamer like me who’s rediscovering the genre feel like he’s sixteen again. Major kudos for that.
I live in the US state that is farthest north, west, and… east. Before you challenge me on that, consider the planet’s meridians. Wins me a drink at the bar in other regions of the US. Just sayin’. My twelve year old went through an Undertale phase (glad that’s over… that one did nothing for me), and I have a parrot, a cat, and a fat tire bike. Thanks for having me here, and I look forward to getting to know anyone who’d like to reach out, and enjoying more of the great content you all make happen.∞♥
Hi Max, welcome to the site. Thanks for a great introduction. It’s so cool to read other peoples’ stories about how they first discovered the series. I have no idea which state you leave in, but it sounds s fun puzzle to pose to people.
Tell me more about your fat tire bike. I’ve seen them for sand and snow but do you ride it on the streets or mountains?
Phillip,
The fat tire bike goes literally everywhere. I ride it on the streets and trails as well. 3.7 in (94 mm) tires on 26″ rims makes it feel like a 29er. Low pressure in the tires (13-20 psi) means bumps get soaked up like a full suspension even though the bike has no intrinsic suspension system. I also run a ST Thudbuster on the seatpost for a little extra cushion.
I have another conventional mountain bike and it’s fast and sleek. Kinda like a Ferrari. In comparison, the fattie is like a pickup truck with balloon tires. And just as fun.
Welcome, glad to have another “old timer” here. We have to stick together!
I never knew Alaska crossed the international date line. Learn something every day.
Thanks for the welcome. And you figured it out! Nicely done. Nice to know I’m not the only ‘old timer’ here.☺
Allo everyone. Since I didn’t want my account to be banned, I decided to come here and introduce myself. I’m a young teenager who loves the Half Life series. Besides playing the great games of the past and Indies on my potato laptop, I also play a few Nintendo games now and again, though infrequently. This seems like a great community to try joining, and I hope to try to lean how to mod HL and HL 2 soon
Hi Medi-Yogurt, welcome to the site. I love some nintendo games. I think I would prefer to own that than a playstation of Xbox.
I’m gamenew09, a programming that can mod Half-Life 2. Decently. I’ve been diving into C++ more and more, and I’m starting to get to the point where I can actually make a decent mod. I’ve also been mapping for other games such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and I’m hoping to get into mapping for Half Life 2, which I know is the same but I just need to find what I could do.
I hope I can get back into Mapping for games that aren’t just Global Offensive.
I’m also bad at jokes.
HI gamenew09, I hope you can release an SP mod on here one day.
Hello all.
After years of playing COD I have found half life… Love it.
Will be trying the mods asap.
Cheers
Hi MrDaz, Glad to hear you’ve got the Half-Life bug.
Hello everyone, I am a 15 year old boy from Finland, I have started learning mapping and animation, still a beginner in both.
I have only made test maps, released none of them.
I hope I will start creating more Half Life singleplayer maps.
I started playing video games when I was little, on the PlayStation 1. My first ever game was Ant’s life. I still have some of my PS1 games such as Spyro the Dragon, but sadly I have lost some of my favorite games in the past.
Anyways, my favorite game series would be Fallout, Half Life coming on the second place.
I am terrible at writing anything or chatting in general, so I really don’t have much more to say.
Thank you for reading this introduction.
Hi Siphon, welcome to the site. Glad to hear that you will start making a single maps soon.
You have great English, BTW.
Hi there! I am Agustín, I’m 18 and I live in Argentina. I am soldier, but when I’m not on uniform, I like running, listening to music and playing HL!
I used to play Pac-Mac, Super Mario Bros, Bomberman, and Battle City . When I was 12 (2010) my parents bought a PC and the first PC game I owned was Carnivores, a very good game about dinosaurs.
One day I downloaded Counter Strike, but it came with another game in its folders, it was Half Life, the best FPS of the history (I do not need to explain, you all know why is it the best)
The first mods I played were Absolute Redemption, Azure Sheep, Point Of View and Sweet HL (Absolute Redemption is still my favorite… of those four)
I started drawing maps for my own mod in 2011, I also downloaded VHE, but it took me two years to configure it correctly. I managed to run a map that same day, It was a box with 8-10 zombies, a crowbar, a pistol and a revolver. I lost that map, it would be a great remind 🙁 I made several maps like that, each map was worse that the previous one. lol
One day I started to map but my mapping skills were null, so I started “writing” it. A guy from Facebook read it and he got interested. He made several maps for my mod ( several awesome maps ) but I was eager to map by myself so we took different ways ( anyway he is still helping me)
It’s 2016, I make maps for CS and I am also making a short mod for HL, my mapping skills are still poor, but I know the most important tool is the imagination. If I imagine a detailed room, that is what I will get. It won’t have sequences or light effects, but it will look good, I am sure. My goal is to make a mappack, short and detailed, like HL uplink, but longer if possible.
I am a defensive player, as I said in my profile, I do not run in games, I hold the SHIFT button to walk silently. I test every mod and map on HARD difficulty ( my goal is to finish Half Life on hard without any single death, not F6 / F7 allowed, if I die I must type “c1a0” )
Ok that is all for now. I am a very friendly person, if you want to talk or ask something, do not think twice!
Have a safe and productive day! Sorry, but my english is still very bad
Hi Agustin, welcome to the site. Thanks for taking the time to write such a good introduction. It’s interesting to note that you never run in mods. I think I need to try that more often.
Please never apologise for your English, it’s great and much better than my Spanish even though I live in Spain.
Hiya! I go by Astraxis, and I’ve been a fan of Half-Life 2 and all its subsequent mods for the past five years (out with my PS3, in with something much better). While I myself don’t have the skill to make mods, I highly respect and encourage those who do; thank you for the fun times! I can’t wait to see what’s in store!
Hi Astraxis,, welcome to the site. Let’s hope you find plenty of SP mods to rock your boat.
Hi
It’s Petrick
I love old school Half-Life stuff.
ps. I still miss Half-Life Radio 🙂 Ye’re the Jerk!
Hi Petrick,
Welcome to the site. Sorry it’s not Half-Life radio, but hopefully my videos will partially replace it.
Hello RunThinkShootLive!
Before I introduce myself i want to say how much i love this website as a whole. This website contains Modders and Mappers that are Valve-Grade-Quality, all the way to starters who still try and do decent stuff. I hope I can fit in somewhere here.
About me i’m more of a Mysterious Person, I promise you will learn more about me as time goes on. For now i must leave it as this.
Welcome to the site!
Are you a mapper yourself or do you just enjoy playing them? 🙂
Hi CyberHusky,
Welcome to the site. I’m glad to hear you like the site. Looking forward to hearing more about you.
Hey all, I’m Oradull, lurker extraordinaire.
I’ve been playing Half-Life and its mods since sometime before Blue-Shift was announced, can’t remember exactly when I started. My favorite thing to do back then was to bounce around the various HL mapping sites and check out the competitions to see what people could do. Ever since those sites all petered out and died I’ve kinda stopped looking into maps and mods too much, but I’m glad to have found RTSL, what a nostalgia rush. Really glad to see there are still dedicated sites to single-player gameplay.
I’ve dabbled in mapping, but have never learned enough to make anything release worthy.
Welcome, Oradull! If you’re wanting to jump back in to playing HL1 maps, a good place to start is the Hall of Fame here, or the Classic of the Month streams that I’ve been doing. That page is here although it’s slightly out of date.
And if you’re still interested in mapping, we’re only on Lesson #3 of the Level Design Academy, where I’m tutoring Phillip on mapping for Goldsouce / HL1.
Thanks, Unq!
I’d actually planned on doing just that, once I’d played through the competition maps, as old habits die hard. Looking at the HL1 Hall of Fame is like looking at a childhood mod list, I think there’s only 4 or 5 I’ve never played. Of course that was back in the day where “sv_cheats 1” was a requirement for me, so going back through them now that I can actually beat Half-Life without god mode will be a treat.
Hi Oradull,
Welcome to the site. You’ve now gone from Lurker to Commenter! YAY.
Hello everyone !
I’m Shepard62700FR, I live in France and I love playing and modding video games, especially when it comes to Half-Life series. Unless there is another Shepard here on RTSL, you can just call me Shepard for the sake of simplicity ^^
Some people will recognize me from TWHL and/or ModDB (Shepard62FR), I’m one of the developers of the well-known Half-Life : ARRANGEMENT, the leader of another less known mod called Revenge of Love and one of the programmers behind Hard Duty (that’s a lot of HL1 mods).
I’m also known for teaching/helping beginners that dive into the journey of programming for the Gold Source engine, I like to “pass the torch” by sharing my knowledge and techniques.
If you have any other question about myself and/or the projects I’m working on, feel free to ask (or interview me) and I will provide my best answer (unless it’s a silly question like “Can you say ‘baguette’ in your microphone ? xD”)
Little question to RTSL admins : is it normal that GMail consider RTSL e-mails as spam ? I had some trouble finding the validation e-mail.
Hi Shepard62700FR, welcome to the site.
I’ll be checking out your work soon.
With regard to the emails, I have heard some people say they have had trouble with the email, but I can’t seem to find a solution.
Thanks for the welcome Phillip ^^
Greeting users of RTSL,
I am Monkeymo and I’ve been part of the Half-Life community since the first game came out. I’ve lurked on this site since ~November 2015. I’m generally a quiet person that doesn’t speak much; I hope to change that by making an account here to review mods and interact with the community.
I found out about RTSL through the Human Error mod. I found the character ‘Larson’ particularly interesting and studied more about him. I saw that the voice actor was none other than Phillip Marlowe and started to notice that name coming up more often in Half-Life 2 mods. After a bit of research I found his site and here we are now.
If you’re interested in what type of gaming I do, you can check my Steam profile (it’s linked on my profile here). I like to diversify my games, try a bit of everything, though, I lean more toward strategy or games that make you think.
I have become somewhat of a Half-Life fanatic; I want to know all there is about the game and the engine it’s built upon. I’ve read the entirety of the Overwiki and watched countless ‘Half-Life documentary’ videos just to satisfy my need for knowledge. To say that I’m hyped for Half-Life 3 would be an understatement.
Well, I believe I’ve rambled long enough, I have it on high authority that my time here will be worth it. See you in the future!
-Monkeymo
Hi Monkeymo,
Welcome to the site. “They say between love and hate is a thin line”. Glad to hear you found the site through my voice acting.
It’s pretty impress to hear you have read the whole of the Overwiki. I might have to ask you to create some quiz questions for me.
Thanks for the warm welcome Phillip; I can already tell my time here will be splendid.
I’m pretty sure I could beat you in any ‘Half-Life lore’ quiz. There should be a Half-Life lore challenge on this site to see how much everyone here knows.
Hello, I’m Salakirby! I’ve been on this site for a while, but I was very nervous to make an account ^^;
I’m a mostly silent person, I’m not very good with conversation, so sorry if I don’t post much.
I’ve always loved every mod people put their hard work into, and I love playing the HL2:EP2 mods the most!
I own nearly every Half Life game, and I consider myself very good at HL2 the most! Sadly, I have no mapping experience, so I can only play for now, but one day I’ll consider it! 😀
Also, I love to break every single breakable in a given map. It’s my bad habit! >w<
Hello everyone, my name is Luca.
I’ve been using RTSL for a long while now, but i had never thought of making an account here. I’m someone who doesn’t really speak a lot, unless i’m told to.
I made an account here so i could voice my opinion about the mods hosted here and other things of which i can’t think of right now.
I have in my library the complete Valve collection of games, and i guess i’m good at Half-Life (don’t try me please). I play on Hard every single map/mod i download, because i like a good challenge.
As for modding myself, i have next to no experience. I have watched tutorials on YouTube and made a couple test maps to see if i get the basics of mapping atleast, but it’s as far as i’ve gotten.
Since the commenter above me pointed out his bad habit, I guess i should too. My bad habit would be arming makeshift barricades before any kind of battle.
I look forward to getting along with all of you! 🙂
Hi Luca, welcome to the site.
When you decide what opinions you have feel free to share them.
Let’s be clear: Arming makeshift barricades is NOT a bad habit but a glorious one. It’s pure coincidence that I also happen to do the same. As can be seen from image 24 on the Courage page.
I’m sure we’ll get along like a zombie and a headrab at a party with free pizza and a disco light.
My name is Tyler (mostly known around as fattback). LIke most of you, I have been playing Half-Life and many other games for a bit now and enjoy them greatly. I don’t know much about modding or creating maps myself, but I came here with interest and a will to learn. I want to improve my skills by learning from others in this community and am excited to see what I can eventually create!
Edit: I also OF COURSE am going to check out all the maps/mods on here and leave a constructive opinion to help enhance it’s appeal!
Welcome Tyler, glad top hear you plan to review the maps and mods here. I’m looking forward to reading them. Please don’t hesitate to ask anything related to the site and I’ll do my best to respond quickly and helpfully.
My name is Samuli i am a finnish teenager who has an interest in half life and modding it.
Yes i am going to play all the mods here or atleast try them.
Hi Samuli. welcome to the site. Hope you find something you like. Don’t hesitate to ask any questions you may have.
Hi there. My name is Hiran Patel, but you can call me Scout, Scopy or Real Beta, doesn’t matter what you call me, to be frank. I’m from the United States and currently reside in Arizona, where it’s literally an oven.
I became a fan of Valve and the Half-Life series somewhere around 2009 when I played the Orange Box on Xbox for the first time. After that, I loved it so much, so, around 2012, I decided to actually join the community.
Currently, I’m the creator and storywriter for the HL2 mod, Genetic Variation. My future plans in the works are to start modeling and animation, so I can pursue work in the gaming industry.
About me, I’m a quiet guy in real life and I used to play trumpet. If you talk to me, I hope I get to know more about you 🙂
http://www.moddb.com/mods/genetic-variation
Hi Everyone,
I am an Ukrainian youtuber who regularly uploads videos about Half-Life 2 mods and I am the only one who does this in the Russian segment of Youtube.
You can check out my channel @ https://www.youtube.com/robosergtv
Hi, I’m Pev.
I’ve been a Half-Life fan since its release. I remember the feeling of awe I had playing Half Life 2 and lately I’ve been wanting to get back into that feeling. So I have been playing through the series again and playing mods.
Searching for communities to help me has brought me here.
When my eldest son was small he was the shooter furiously pressing the ‘ENTER’ key as I drove Gordon through the episodic games. My ammo would deplete quite quickly, still it was great seeing the enjoyment on his face. Now, at 15 he’s a bit too big for that. He’s great at CS:Source, and spends a lot of time. When I watch him play HL, I can’t keep up with his speed of play and thinking.
I made a promise to follow my passions and be the best dad I can be, and so I’m currently indoctrinating my youngest son into the world of Half-Life too, and he’s loving it.
I’ve given up on my daughter!
I write stories as a passion too, and see games as a way of exploring my writing. I will be trying out the mods, broadening my HL horizons to give me more insight into how stories can evolve.
And maybe in time I will branch out into learning about creating my own maps.
Great to be here 🙂
Hey Pev!
Its great to have you here. You will not be disappointed with the amount of mods on RTSL and the quality of many of the mods. Its great to see veterans at Half Life still interested in maps and mods!
Greetings all! I’m Alex and I’ve read/downloaded from RTSL/PP probably since around 2009, so I decided to finally make a permanent account. I used to comment here (and still do on ModDB) under the name Mr. Walrus.
I’ve done a bit of mapping and worked on several mods (which hopefully will one day be released…) and made one entry to a ville competition some time back in Doorsville.
Just wanted to introduce myself and say this is an absolutely fantastic website! The reviews, discussions, and accepting behavior of the people on this site makes for such a friendly and interesting Half Life group, not to mention the incredible work and time put into this wonderful site by Phillip. Thank you all!
Welcome to official membership.
Fingers crossed you will release something else soon and thank you for your kind words about my work.
Hello there, fellow Half-Life fans! 😀
I’m Kacper, but I am more commonly known as blueshit199, Blue Shit or simply Blue. I live in southern Poland and I’m gonna go to college this year.
My cousin introduced me to Half-Life universe when I was a lil’ headcrab, then I’ve played Half-Life 2 and it’s Episodes for the first time in 2009. And so, I’m now a loyal fan of this series, I love it’s atmosphere and the attention to details.
I’m known for commenting on Half-Life related vids and other media on internet. I used to work on some mods for games like Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind, but nothing for Half-Life yet. But I have a couple of ideas in my mind 😉
And btw, I have a YouTube channel and a ModDB account.
Welp, here i am again doing this thing because something went horribly wrong with my last account.
Hello my name is Samuli and i am a finnish teenager who loves the world of half life after playing for the first time in 2010, yeah it took me that long to discover it. Plans are to play a lot of mods and try to make some myself.
Hello all. I’m an American teenager who has been attracted to Half-Life for a while, but not as long as some people on here. I’m really big into movies and books and currently torn about wanting to invest my future in cinematography or journalism. I hope to be involved in some mods eventually. I plan to try to involve myself in the community one way or another.
I’m a Source and GoldSrc modder, I’m currently doing some of the voice acting for a HL1 Alpha mod called In Deep, I’m also working on a few other mods. I also do some writing and occasionally I do videos for YouTube. I am planning on porting the 12 Half-Life Decay maps to Source for a full remake of the PS1 co-op mod (not the cancelled one).
Hi I’m Brad and 30 yo, for years I’ve been playing fps games however Half Life is by far one of the best out there. I’m a non-builder for now so I won’t be of much technical use on here which is cool there’s no barriers around here. I’ve learned to speed run on games and many little tricks that do not involve any cheating I am against cheating on HL! By now I can play any mod and totally nail it so I am pretty aggressive in the Half Life universe of mods and maps that blow my mind every time.
Not much else to say other than cheers good luck and have fun!
I am not sure how to describe myself. I guess you could say I am a mod developer, but I have never released any sourcemods, and the one I am making may never even see the light of day. Before I get off topic, I have every Half-Life game and a variety of mods. My playing style differs between Half-Life and Half-Life 2, but it typically involves explosives, a shotgun, and a revolver. I guess you could call that aggressive.
I am going to admit. I played Garry’s Mod long before I played Half-Life. It was funny how little I knew. I thought Eli and Alyx were a married couple and the Combine arose after a zombie invasion or something. This was years ago, so please don’t make assumptions.
My modding experience isn’t very vast. I’ve created a few popular add-ons for Garry’s Mod, but I’ve also been making a mod for Half-Life 2, which is far more relevant and was mentioned at the beginning of this post. This probably isn’t the place to talk about it, but it is more than a map pack. (Probably too late to the modding party for it to be as popular as other mods.)
Anyway, from what I’ve heard, this is a great site with my kind of people. I am looking forward to my time with RTSL.
GREETINGS!
I am A-J(shortened) and I am a huge Half-Life fan, from the west side of Canada. A few years ago, I got a Steam account just to play TF2, after seeing a bunch of TF2 SFM & G-Mod videos on YouTube. About a year later, I got G-Mod and I played it for hours on end. I downloaded some maps but the textures weren’t working right. So after looking at some guides, I needed to get Half-Life 2 and CS:S. Seeing that I had 12 dollars left in my Steam account I went ahead and bought Half-Life 2 first. That’s when I fell in love with the Half-Life series and the FPS genre in general.
I’m still learning loads of things about the GoldSrc & Source engines, and I love seeing what’s happening in the modding community. Expect to see me around here often!
Hi, I’m Alessio…strange name, huh? Well, I’m Italian, so don’t consider my name strange ;D
Anyway, I have a large gaming carrier, even if now I’m 14 (shortly I’ll be 15).
Back when I was 6, I started playing Flash games on CDs that I bought back in the day (I hadn’t Internet at that time). Meanwhile my parents gave to me “Magical Racing Tour”, a Disney car game.
When I was 8, me, my mum and my dad transferred to a new home, and we bought a new computer (the one I’m using now): a Windows 7 (the best Windows of all time). Back in the old house I had a Windows XP. At the same time We’ve taken a Wi-Fi Router.
When we’ve moved I got Halo: Combat Evolved from my uncle; my first FPS and “real” game, so excited after the installation. I still play it now, so contact me if you want to compete, I’m pretty good at it :D.
At 9 years old I got my Father’s GameBoy, with a lot of games, such as Tetris or Super Mario Land 2. And that’s how I got into Retro Gaming.
When I was 10 I’ve started playing Minecraft…Not one of my favorite games, but I still play it (not a lot).
At 11 I got a Nintendo DSi XL with a R4.
Finally, at 12, I’ve discovered three things: Retro Games Emulators, Steam and the Half Life World.
I first saw a HL2 gameplay/walkthrough in my recommended list on YouTube, so I decided to get informations about it. I got almost all games of the series plus HL2 Deathmatch (not HL2: Lost Coast and HL: Blue Shift).
Meanwhile I got into general FPS gaming.
At 13 I started playing Geometry Dash, one of my favorite games now.
At the same time I’ve started to play Half Life and Half Life 2 mods, Counter Strike, Team Fortress Classic and the second one, GTA: San Andreas and Warframe.
From the past year I’m interested on the leaked content of Half Life 2, and still now I’m searching very well built mods about this. Meanwhile I started to follow Valve News Network on YT (starting with his Beta Content videos XP), and I started to play a really famous MP mod for HL…Sven Coop (Now it’s even a game. YAY). Now I’ve a Windows 10 OS (the PC is the same, by the way), and three months ago I bought Garry’s Mod.
Welcome to the site! 🙂
Hello, I’m Isaiah. 99% of people misspell my name, so if you mess it up I really wouldn’t care.
The first Valve game I played was the Xbox 360 Port Portal 2, later on I played Half Life 2 and the Episodes, Portal, and then completed the main Half Life story by buying the original Half Life on Steam. I’ve now purchased 90% of the Half Life series on PC. Minus Blue Shift and Opposing Force
I started mapping with TF2, never got very far, then later purchased Half Life 2, and that’s where I really started to improve, later on I got Episode 1 and Episode 2. Now I’d say I can create some nice looking interiors, and now I’m trying to improve my skills with outside areas. I’ve now learned how to map with GoldSrc (I’m not very great at it, tbh), Source, and the Doom Engine (barely).
I’ve decided to join the Source community only today, I’ve lost quite a few friends, and I’ve been pretty down in the dumps. So I’ve decided to try to join something like this and hopefully will boost my self esteem and maybe I’ll make a few friends along the way.
Sincerely,
Totinos,
Howdy, I’m Kawoofish.
I was a huge fan of the PlanetPhillip site back in the day, as it really got me into the Half-Life 2 universe and stuff, but I never made an account or commented (which I really wish I did). I’ve mostly done mapping for Garry’s Mod, specifically for the NoxiousNet Zombie Survival Server (not trying to promote), in which I’ve made multiplayer maps and edits to existing older maps. I enjoyed doing it as a hobby, but recently I’ve really been interested in doing singleplayer maps, as there’s a nice opportunity to tell a story though an interactive experience. I’ve been mapping since 2010 (although I’d say it was mostly dabbling and learning for about 3 years). I haven’t used RTSL recently, but I’m planning on checking out a lot of my favorite mods from the past again and seeing the new ones as well. My fav mods were Minerva, Station 51, and Transmissions Element 120.
Recently, I was taken up as a level designer for Hunt Down The Freeman, and the main reason I agreed to help (I initially declined) was mainly because I wanted a new experience in working with a mod team and I usually have a terrible work ethic so my own mapping endeavors were going by very slowly. I did a lot of work for the HDTF demo, and although I was somewhat pleased at the final result, I feel that due to the time constraints and other stuff I had going on in my life, I wasn’t able to get the full experience out of the first map the way I wanted. I’m a fan of the HL2 storyline, and the beta storyline (which I found to be an interesting parallel). I look forward to seeing new mods and maps on RTSL, and hopefully in the near future I will have the time to contribute towards the site with new maps.
Welcome Kawoofish! 🙂
I’m an old guy who’s been gaming since ‘Leisure Suit Larry’ in 4 bit colour on a 386 with 4MB of ram. I’ve played EVERYTHING FPS from the first Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, and Castle Wolfenstein. I loved…absolutely loved the HL universe and have played most of the single player maps from Planet Phillip and other mod sites. After a long hiatus due to work and hobbies, I’m back to kill zombies again. I’ve retired after 41 years in the Royal Canadian Air Force and now have some time to waste-spend-enjoy with Gordon and his crowbar.
Bob
Pleased to meet you Bob. Not sure how long your hiatus has been but there should be plenty of great mods for you to try.
Hey guys, I’m Count ( real name is Derek ). Been playing maps and mods from this site for a while now and decided to sign up and partake in the community. I’ve been a dedicated pc gamer since I was just a toddler. I grew up mostly playing Doom, Quakes 1 through 3, and Diablo 1 all of which were introduced to me by my dad. As a teenager I pretty much spent most of my time gaming and exploring the world of modding. I have a decent bit of experience mapping for source games, although I’ve never actually released anything. I’ve also spent a good bit of time mapping for Doom and a bit of modding for Bethesda games such as Oblivion and Fallout 3.
Today I live with my girlfriend who is a great mapper. I’ve learned a decent bit about hammer from her and my interest in mapping has increased as of late due to her. Hopefully one day I’ll release a map or two to share with you guys. In the meantime I’ll be downloading and playing a ton of the maps available on this site.
Hi Count, glad you decided to join the community.
Also, great to hear you and your girlfriend are mappers. Hope to see something from you soon, maybe the next mapping challenge?
Hi everyone! My name is Sam, or you can just call me MissBubbles ( or Bubbles for short. ) I’ve been a lurker on this site for a couple of years now, ever since I first heard about the EP2 mod Mission Improbable. After discovering what a great database of maps and mappers this site has I’ve been returning intermittently to check out new content. Over the past couple of weeks my boyfriend (Count) and I have been playing as many HL2 mods as we can get our hands on from RTSL, and after taking notice of how friendly and inviting the community is I decided it was finally time to join!
I’ve been a mapper myself for about 10 years now, but my interest in level design goes back further. I grew up playing games like Doom and drawing top-down maps on graph paper ever since I was about 5 years old. Being too young to grasp the concept of designing maps, let alone knowing it was possible for someone like me to do that, I continued playing games into my tweens until I finally discovered Hammer. My boyfriend showed me how it worked, and from there I was hooked. I spent years making levels, reading tutorials, studying other peoples work, listening to game/level design commentaries and talks and just absorbing everything I could about level design. I’m very passionate about it, but also have a difficult time finishing my projects and am generally shy about sharing my work.
Currently I have been working on some levels for Black Mesa. I would love to see more maps for the mod and hopefully publish some myself in the near future.
Welcome, Bubbles & Count. Always great to have long-time lurkers join in. And especially mappers! Hopefully you’ll consider participating in one of the Ville mapping challenges, which are great places for small and experimental maps, and we’re always welcoming of new mappers.
Thanks for the warm welcome! I’d love to participate in one of the mapping challenges provided that the theme is of interest to me. Hopefully the mapping challenges would be a good means to motivate me to create and release a small project from time to time.
Welcome MissBubbles. It’s always interesting to hear other people’s stories about how they got into modding and gaming. I agree that more BM maps would be good but for some reason there hasn’t been that many. I’d love you to consider entering the next mapping challenge but I also recognize that it’s a big jump from never having released anything to releasing a map with a restricted theme and a time limit. Anyway, welcome to the site again.
Thanks! I personally think that the reason for the lack of BM maps is that few people are willing to buy the retail version of the game, so there isn’t a very large playerbase, which limits the potential pool of mappers wanting to work on BM projects. Hopefully with the eventual release of the Xen content we’ll see more people dabbling in modding the game. It’s a great game full of amazing assets but you can only play the campaign so much!
I’m eager to see what’s in store for the next mapping challenge. If it’s something I think I can create a suitable contribution for then I’ll definitely jump at the chance!
Yes, you certainly could be right about the retail point. I hadn’t thought of that.
Hello everybody.My name is Can Şermeter.I born in Turkey and ım still living in Turkey.I got black curly hairs, black eyes and ım 2meter tall :).I played basketball for 9 years then ı had to stop because it was affecting my school performance.Now ım 19 years old ım studying Computer Programming in “Uludağ University” which is one of best university in Turkey.So ım mapping for 5 years ı only released 1 map which is Dread City its on RTSL…so thats all ı got to say 🙂
Hello, my name is Kaede. I’ve been watching over this for quite a bit before I signed up last year.
Some stuff about myself:
I was born in Germany where I lived for the most part of my life. Since being a child, I always admired all kind of police forces and other emergency services, especially the department of crimescene investigation. At the age of 17 I decided to went to police academy, where I had a 3 year education and became a part of the German “Tatortermittlung”. At some point I moved over to Japan because of Japanese exchange students, whom I became close friends with, invited me to come over for some time. Originally I planned to go back on January 30th 2017 which didn’t happen! I am now an official Japanese citizen and continue my work in the Japanese Crime Scene Investigation. Currently I’m a rank 9 junior detective and work together quite often with SAT (Special Assault Team).
Modding:
With no experience I recently started working on my own HL2 mod, in the setting of an alternate Half-Life 2 storyline. I coded several cut enemies to fully functional. Including enemies such as the Ichthyosaur, Advisor, a roaming Combine Sniper and few others. They are (unsurprisingly) still quite buggy at points but I give it my best to fix as much as possible. While not in any state acceptable to be shown public, if there’s some interest in it, I’d like to give out an alpha exclusive to RTSL when being fixed the most important issues.
Greetings everyone, my name is Ilya but people more commonly call me by my pseudonym siger (which is the way I prefer it). Please, forgive me my English, it’s not my native language after all.
At the time of writing this I’m twenty years old (1996-01-15) and currently studying programming on my own. My hobbies and interests include digital and traditional visual arts such as drawing, painting and animation, software development (combination of all these leads to the computer game development), free/libre software-related stuff and something I like to call “digital archaeology” – collecting large amounts of relatively old digital content for archival. I am also a giant fan of the cyberpunk subgenre and subculture.
I started playing games when I was around four years old and my first ever game is Battle City on Nintendo Famicon. After that I also had Sega Mega Drive console. Before I got myself a personal computer, I was a rare visitor of popular back then computer clubs. There I mostly played Counter-Strike 1.6 and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
My first experience with the Half-Life franchise can be traced back to the birthday party of my classmate where he was gifted a copy of Half-Life 2. I fell in love with the game at first glance due to the fact (I think) that it was the first game where I could experience the so familiar to my eyes and dear to my heart post-soviet urban setting with amazing localization (which might be the reason behind such popularity of the game in the Post-Soviet states). When I finally got myself a PC around 2006 and one of the first games I installed was Half-Life 2. At this point I can’t remember where I actually got myself a copy of Half-Life 2 but I bet it was one of the unofficial DVD anthologies because getting anything official back then was virtually impossible. Funny thing to notice, the PC I got had literally the same case design as the in-game prop model of the white computers that you can find in some locations (it was a sign).
Due to the fact that I had no Internet connection back then, my only source of modifications for the game were CD- and DVD-disks that come with video game magazines. I was mostly buying the magazine called Igromania. Such disks usually had a bunch of maps, skins and less often fully-translated modifications (such as The Citizen).
After some time I got myself another DVD anthology with Half-Life 2: Episode One on it and playing it “ruined” my belief that Half-Life was made by a Russian developer because the game had only text translated. This anthology also included the WON versions (for some reason) of the previous games from the Half-Life series and fan-made modifications. Feeling shameful now but back then when I launched Half-Life my first thought was “This can’t be the original Half-Life! The graphics look too crappy!”. Though, after finishing it I fell in love with it as well. Playing the modifications included on that disk made me respect and love any kind of fan-made content despite the quality or the quantity. At this point I can’t remember all the mods included on that disk, all I can remember is that it had original Day Hard map-pack before it later become a full modification, Half-Life: Retribution, Xen Forces: Breath of Xen and the mod where you have to destroy some kind of a giant cube with a face that talks with the voice of the Combine Overwatch (I still haven’t found this mod after all these years).
Some of the modifications on the Igromania DVDs were requiring Steam version of the game and forcing them to work with my pirated version is pretty much how I started modifying the game myself. At the same time I was getting into Adobe Photoshop (CS3), so, I also was fooling with the textures.
Sooner or later I had to play Episode Two and Orange Box in general, so, it happened. Being honest, I didn’t like Episode Two as much as I liked Episode One for two simple reasons: the atmosphere of the first episode is absolutely stunning in my opinion and I consider the setting of destroyed City-17 more appealing and original then some caves and woods that you can see in millions other games. Though, I understand that Episode One doesn’t offer much new in comparison to Episode Two. Playing Portal at first made me think that it was some fan-made modification that pirates had put on the DVD again but as it turned out later it was an official game by Valve. The game still stands as the gold standart of the great atmosphere for me (which can be easily ruined by the sequel). Obviously, I couldn’t play Team Fortress 2, so, the only thing I could do with it is what I was doing with any multi-player-only game I got my hands on – running around the empty maps and looking at stuff.
Later in life one of my classmates told me about Garry’s Mod (10) (though he never really was a fan of Half-Life) and I finally learned how people were making all these “funny” pictures I kept seeing in the readers-made section of the magazines. Together we were playing Garry’s Mod and by “together” I mean we were making stupid poses and constructions and sharing the screenshots and save files with each other. To get add-ons we had to go to the other friend of our and use his PC that had the connection to the internet. Though, our fun was ruined later when Garry’s Mod Related Files started requiring logging in via Steam to download files. This is also how I learned about machinima and got hooked up by it.
Finally, in 2009 I connected to the internet and the the first things I started doing include downloading tons of fan-art of Half-Life and Portal, maps and mods for them and, most of all, watching all the Source machinima I could find. The first on-line game I started playing was some fan-made “distribution” of Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. Sure, I installed Steam but I couldn’t actually do anything in it since most of the functions require you to purchase at least on game, something that was pretty expensive for me at the time because all the prices were in U.S. Dollars. I also was playing Alien Swarm quite a lot when it came out. When I finally got enough money I bought myself Team Fortress 2 on the 4th of December, 2010 and was playing it non-stop. At this point I was really into the idea of machinima and was a fan of one Russian machinima-maker. One day playing Team Fortress 2 I completely accidentally found them playing on the same server as me and added them to my friends telling that I’m a huge fan of their work. That later somewhat opened me a way into machinima-making. We had our own small closed-off community of people passionate about the thing they were doing where I met all the people who later become my closest friends and even loved ones.
So, basically this is the reason why Half-Life (and the sequel in particular) is my favorite game (if not the “thing” in general) of all time. Because thanks to it I found myself friends, the loved one, learned English language and it generally made me who I am right now.
Years later I found myself being able to experience only a fraction of what once was one of the greatest community ever. Source– and GoldSrc-related web sites were shutting down left and right, content was disappearing and so on. I can only compare this to GeoCities (when Yahoo! decided to shut it down) i.e., a giant part of the history being destroyed. This made me genuinely mad (mainly because I never had a chance to be a part of that community) and I set myself a goal to preserve as much of this history as I can, even if I’ll have to do it against the will of the content’s authors. Right now I have tons of maps, mods, fan-arts, tutorials and whole web sites related to Source, GoldSrc and other engines on my hard drive and I’m not planning to stop anytime soon. In my plans to later sort all this data and make it available to everyone.
Besides Half-Life and all of the pre-2010 games by Valve, I also love such games as QUAKE, DOOM, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, the original Crysis and many other games most of which are first-person shooters and usually included in the “video game necrophiliacs starter pack”. My favorite film is Stalker (directed by Andrei Tarkovsky). In terms of music, the array of the genres I like goes from the Portal-like ambient to the Russian post-punk, depending on my mood, so it’s really hard to pinpoint what I actually like.
After finishing college I plan to start mapping more and actually release something, spend more time learning about software development and my biggest dream is to make a game completely from scratch.
The only other thing I can add about myself is that I love to nitpick the smallest details and an awful perfectionist which some consider very annoying. And some people might also hate me for my views on certain subjects due to the fact that “political correctness” isn’t my strongest side but I usually try not to talk about controversial topics.
I knew about PlanetPhillip ever since I started looking for mods on the internet but only registered now because I felt the urge to be (or at least feel like) part of something bigger and I want to thank you personally, Phillip, for doing the god’s job and keeping this web site more than alive for all these years (though, it would be really nice to see Portal mods and maps here, now that web sites like Thinking With Portals are no more).
Hi there everyone! My name is George or xTasteless as i like to call myself over the internet. I was born in England in the year 2000 and moved to Sweden a year later and i am fluent in both languages. I have been wanting to make mods and maps ever since i saw a YouTube video about someone who had made his own level for Half-Life 2 back in 2008. I always thought i was too dumb so i never tried it out so i told myself in 2014 that it’s finally time to try it so i loaded up the CS:GO SDK and had fun for HOURS and i made 2 or 3 different maps to upload and play on with my friends! They weren’t as excited as i was for the maps but i did end up making a map that i still update and play with them to this day. I have been on this website for little over a year now downloading and viewing what people have made but i never made an account so here i am now.
Hi I’m Kyle,
I’m fairly new here but I love all things Half Life. I got tired of waiting for Half Life so decided to check out this. I wanted a new community after being with the Fallout wiki for a while. I really like what I see on this website and hope that I can join up with you guys. I have very limited knowledge on Half life mods or how to make them so sorry. I started out with G-Mod and then TF2 and finally to half life. I live in Illinois in the U.S.A. and spend most of my time reading or playing video games.
Hi there,
I’m totally new to Gauge (found it via ModDB) but have been gaming since the original Pong. Began at home with a ZX80, then a UK TRS-80 compatible called a Video Genie, then a Spectrum, Various Amigas & finally (after a while with my beloved A1200) I jumped ship to IBM-Compatibles & have never looked back.
Been playing – & loving – Valve games since WON, & greatly enjoy trying out all the Mods, TCs, etc. so should have a bloody good time trying out the ones I never discovered/got around to with this wicked app, Gauge!
Many thanks for putting this thing together – I’m gonna have a blast!
Cheers,
zarathustra =]
Hi there!
My name is Andrew and I am the native resident of Russia. I am undergraduate software engineering student, fond of video games and everything related to game development. My obssession with Half-Life series began since I was introduced to HL2 while visiting our former family acquaintances. I was 9 at the moment, so I begged to play some videogames after seeing the shiny and modern rig in the nearby room. I was playing NFS Underground 2, since it was my favorite game at the moment, but then one of the hosts decided to show me other games like FarCry and Half-Life 2. I got really fascinated with all the presented graphics and open-world possibilities in FarCry, but, when I turned to HL2, I pretty much became speechless after the G-Man’s introduction sequence. It seemed like I hadn’t seen something similar even remotely. Lip-synced language-localised dialouges, state-of-the-art graphics, lots of physics-powered interactivity, the Post-Soviet vibe of City 17… It was the most charming first impression I could get from a computer game.
As time passed by, my old cheap PC setup had been replaced, so I could experience the brave adventures of Gordon Freeman in the most genuine way. Well, sort of genuine, since there was no conceivable way to obtain a licensed copy of HL2 via Steam, so I had to play a bootleg CD version with broken saves and occasional ai_disabled 1. These small inconveniences led to hours of gameplay full of frustration and despair, because not only I had to play entirely from chapter to chapter to save my current progress, but also some of the important disabled NPC sequences rendered the further walkthrough impossible. Thank god I was told to type ai_disabled 0 to get rid of the last issue, but still the game was too hard for me to deal with, considering my young age and complete lack of first person shooter skills.
When I got access to the Internet I finally could be able to dig deep into the franchise, including all the episodic content and the grand GldSrc trilogy: HL, Opposing Force and Blue Shift. I fell in love with Valve games and Valve related content. It was a neat era of Orange Box and Garry’s Mod 9. I really miss these days, when I started tinkering with GMod after reading the Concerned comic. I was full of ideas about my own GMod comics, although I couldn’t really keep my patience to finish a single one. I also tried a bit of Hammer mapping following the simple tutorials. I firmly believed in the bright future of Valve as a company, capable of delivering great products for their wide and creative audience.
Back then I couldn’t really think of weapon skins, hats and other digital cosmetic items. I couldn’t admit the fact that such a benevolent company is able to take this profit-inducing direction. But it happened at some point. I don’t want to blame them for doing what they decided to stick with, but I don’t feel this enthusiastic spirit tied to their work anymore. Maybe I’ve drawn too ideal picture in my mind or maybe I am too old to feel the same pure sensation. One thing for sure: it feels like these guys are not the same anymore. They’ve promised to show something interesting next year though, and I wish it would be something I could be stunned with. We’ll see how it goes, I guess.
Speaking about this particular site, I was wondering if I could find an active platform, where people talk about mods and mapping, after indulging myself in nostalgic feelings of good old Source-powered days. Thanks to Bolloxed, I was able to find this great, still mantainable community. I am looking forward to grabbing some mods to regain the sensation of playing HL for the first time. I wasn’t really following the modding scene a lot, but I might as well give it a try. Maybe I will be inspired enough to pick Hammer Editor once again and come with my little creation of myself, who knows…
Quite familiar story, heh.
Hello, my name’s Phillip and I created and run a website called RunThinkShootLive.Com which lists and reviews singleplayer maps and mods for the Half-Life series of games. In addition to the reviews, I also create articles, videos and podcasts directly related to the content. I created this site back in 2003 and it’s been a hobby ever since but now I want to take it to the next level.
Kaede, please don’t make comments like this.
My apologies for that Phillip, however it wasn’t actually me doing it. Guess I really can’t leave those girls alone here without them doing some kind of mischief. I’ll tell them to not do anything like this again while using my PC. Again sorry for that.
are you going to become a fps game? ?
Why Hello, everybody
My name is Mark, I have recently come to this community.
I have been dabbling with Hammer: world editor for a while but never released anything before.
well, I tried to submit to Hard!ville, but something happened so maybe you will see my map maybe not. I’m currently living in Ohio, US. I Train parkour and also teach it.
Good morning/afternoon/evening everybody! I’m Txiki, a young French(Basque) Gamer and a Map/Mod maker!
So, there is no much to say…
I’ve got some idea for some mod, here they are:
-Maze: The four elements
-Country side
-No Jump
You can learn more on my profile!
No WAY! KAIXO! I live in Amorebieta, Bizkaia. Where are you. Iparralde?
NO, are you kidding me? I live in Urketa, near Baiona, Lapurdi!
Hello reader(s).
My name is Ryan, or as I am known online, Xtron5. I live in North Carolina, in the United States. I have actually have been on this site for quite a while, but decided to make an account to hopefully start reviewing, and with some time and lots of practice, eventually upload something to the website. I enjoy playing video games, swimming, and reading. I’m glad to be a part of this community.
Hi, my name is Javier, last name’s Jimenez. I’m Mexican American, and I tend to game a ton. Love walking at night, like to go out for a bit of bike riding as well. I draw, listen to music, play an instrument, and do something different once in a while, like mapping. I would love to one day take mapping seriously, and make it one of my career choices, but I’ve also considered career paths that have something to do with hardware, or software. Voice acting is up there as well so I’ve got some thinking to do.
Hi, I’m AJ AKA CharlieHadronTimeAgent, I voice the Irish scientists in the Half-Life Alpha mod by Jackathan, In Deep. I have a lot of ideas and very little ability to follow them through but I am learning as I go.
Hi all,
Half-Life Fan since launch in 1999. Fondest childhood memories of playing the Uplink demo on my Pentium 200 mx with 32mb of Ram in Software mode running at 400×300
Never forget!
10 four was my go to place for years. Great to discover this gem of a site. Can’t underestimate how well this is run.
I grew up with PC gamer magazine disks which first introduced me to mods for HL1
They Hunger & Uss Dark-star the most memorable of those.
I still have the original Disk for both game and the mods itself.
Anyway, great to join the site. Hopefully I can contribute with some reviews.
Its nice of you to join us mickie50!
Hi, my name is Aleksandr, I am map/mod maker, fan of Half-Life franchise and just a nice guy. I am living in Estonia. I came to this community to hone my mapping skills and look for others works.
Hi, my name is Daniel, and I’ve been a fan of the Half-Life series since 2014.
I purchased the Orange Box for the original Portal, and I decided to play Half-Life 2 as well. Soon afterwards, I discovered this website and the wonderful community around it. I recently made an account so that I could post my critique of other’s creations and maybe post some of my own maps.
Hello everybody, my name is Eusebiu Marincean (AKA Spyde3r) and I use hammer for a while now and wanted to see what I can make and post here.
I was a fan of half life since a was 5 years old and I enjoyed every moment of the game. I was always fascinated by games and how where they created so I found this program which is called hammer and tried to play with it and wach tutorials on the internet until I got the hang of it.
For anyone who wonders, I seen this website by watching bolloxed’s gameplay on his channel 😀
Greetings, RTLS
It is wonderful to still see a thriving community, which focuses on not only the games that I’ve loved and played for the good part of my life, but also the creation of content for those games.
I am Christian Petersen, a developer and designer by day and game- and level design enthusiast by night.
Since the early 2000s, I’ve been captivated by games such as Quake, Half-Life and their countless mods created over the years. After spending the good time, playing and understanding those games, I became increasingly interested in creating content. I have always been fascinated by the level design in those games, especially after discovering the limitations, that made me appreciate them that much more.
I have had a great amount of free-time to learn, explore and improve my experience with level design tools, especially for GoldSrc. The limitations gives me so much more room to be smart about things and still make spectacular things, that I couldn’t believe was possible.
The best of times are when I share my knowledge and learning from others, which is what leads me here.
Best Regards.
Hi, my name is Jack, I love Half-Life and all Valve games. I dream of working for valve and making games. I also want to create Half-Life mods for the time being. I would love to get involved in the community and get to know everyone who makes mods.
Hi Jack, welcome to RTSL. How long have you been mapping?
I haven’t been mapping for too long, only about 1 month or two. Sorry that I uploaded to this twice but I finally made an account. However i am very excited to play all these maps and learn more about map making. Thanks for getting back to me. 🙂
P.S This is Jack Btw
Hello fellow RTSL members. I am Zach, and I have found this website while looking for HL2 mods because I was bored. I have been a member of Steam since September, 23, 2013. And now on January 3, 2017 I have found my dream website. A mapping community that has not died off to have only 2 dedicated active users a day, but is also not mainstream enough for me to feel like I am just another user on this website. Just how I like it. I will love to be apart of this community and post things of my own, not like I have anything else to do.
Hi Zach, welcome to the site. We are more of a playing community than mapping but there are plenty of mappers here. Looking for =ward to reading your reviews and hopefully playing your releases.
Hello, Im FoxMarine, and I want to learn how to model my own player models.
I came across this sight some time ago to get support for a old outdated version of half-life. but it was outdated, so yeah no dice. but I came back, for the modding community. and the want to make Models.
Hi, my name is Jack, I love valve and all their games. I want to learn how to mod and want to speed run all half-life’s. Can’t wait to get to know the community.
Hi Jack,
Welcome to the Half-Life (2) modding community. Glad to hear you love valve and their acclaimed games. Hope to see some of your work published and see some screenshots of pre-production.
Little notes to help you out!
*Source Engine Mapping: you can find written tutorials and information on Source SDK Wiki!
** Just Google “Source Engine Level Design”
*Mods: If you are creating a mod i would suggest put everything on Moddb and stay active on it. this way we can see your progress and than show Phillip your work when completed since everything goes thru him before its uploaded here!
Happy Modding/Mapping,
Pikachusky!
Hello guys, I’ve been here for a while now yet I’ve not posted for some stupid reason! I’m pretty much a simple gamer who is addicted to the likes of Doom 1-3, Left 4 Dead and the Half Life series. Little more beyond those for “modern” gaming… I’m always impressed by the whole HL2 universe and have even funnily enough had many dreams but that’s not something I usually admit to in public :] I play using my Apple iMac through Steam, which I think is superb. Anything to get my Source fix 😉
I also enjoy retro gaming and run a little humble website called AtariCrypt (Atari ST) but HL2 is about as modern as I get, if I’m honest. There’s no need for much else, this game is incredible and I thank Phillip for running this brilliant website. Okay, it’s best I stop waffling on and leave it there…. 🙂 Cheers all, Steve
Hey peoples. Been somewhat of a lurker around here for the last few years, but decided to get an account set up in preparation for the next challenge of THC ’17.
A little about me:
I’m currently a 24 y.o. college student working on getting a CS degree. Been mapping for Valve engine games for over 16 years now (started early!). Someday I’d like to start my own company, but as of right now, I just map as a hobby.
My first experiences with FPS started back with Doom 1, and my first multiplayer FPS experience started with Quake. I also played a lot of CS and TFC back in the days before TF2 and L4D came out.
I first got into level design back in 1998/99 when I played the mod ‘Absolute Redemption’ for HL1. At that time, you could access some of those mods directly from the HL: GOTY disk, as well as from sources like PC Gamer and whatnot. I ended up playing a bunch of the oldies like They Hunger, USS Darkstar, and wanted to learn how they made them. I found out about Worldcraft being on the disk and I was pretty excited, cause back then I thought you had to pay for the program (I was 8 years old at the time). The rest is history from there really. Took me about 4 years to really get the hang of the program, but I’m happy I decided to stick with it because it’s become one of my favorite hobbies and someday I may decide to turn it into a full time profession.
Over the years I’ve become pretty experienced with both the GoldSrc and Source engines, having made maps for various mods/games, such as Sven Co-op, TF2, CS: Source, and Left 4 Dead.
Some of my most notable releases:
CH Cyprus Park for Contagion (official map)
Fatal Freight (2015) for Left 4 Dead 2
Black Mesa Nightmare (2007) for Sven Co-op
MVM Oilrig (2013) for Team Fortress 2
I was coerced by a friend into signing up to participate in the next Hammer Cup segment, which is why I am here. But it’s also nice to see a close-knit community revolving around one of my favorite engines. So hopefully I’ll meet some of y’all and maybe try out your maps!
– Zorbos
Welcome to the site. Just so you know, you don’t need to be a registered member to participate in The Hammer Cup 2017.
It sounds like you have been around a long time within the mapping community, even though you are still pretty young.
Anyway, I’m looking for to playing your creations.
Oh ya I know, I figured it was a good time to finally make an account anyway 🙂
My name is Anoop,
I’ve always loved Half-Life and I’m looking for ways to squeeze more playtime into my beloved games. I hope this site will help me do that!
Hello, my names Andrew. I’ve been playing the Half Life series since 2010. I have some experience in the Hammer editor, but haven’t released anything worth looking at yet. I’ll be honest, I’m still a newbie at heart when it comes to Hammer. I’ve been to this site a few times before, when it was PlanetPhillip. I look forward to playing more of the content the community has on offer here.
Thanks!
Welcome (back) to the site, Andrew. Good to see more mappers joining and participating in the community! A good way to practice your mapping is to make a map for one of the Ville challenges here – ToxicVille was just announced today!
Hi, I’m Sasha, but I’m a guy. First experience with Half-Life was Half-Life 2 in or 2005 not too sure, even though I was a huge game fanatic by then Half-Life 2 was special even though my Pentium 4 could barely run it.
The atmosphere plus the fact that the architecture reminded me of home so much (Ukraine) it was very surreal experience at the time.
In fact I remember the moment my friend let me borrow it in a school locker room and another friend of mine said the antlions were scary as shit, I don’t remember how I got any other game.
I wanted to learn how to map since about 2007, but only got my hands into it around 2009. I’ve never publicly released any of my projects, I’ve done beta testings with small communities but I don’t have a single finished map that has been released on workshop or any mods, pretty sad, I just can’t release something until I feel like it’s perfect.
I’m here to lose my bad habit of not releasing and I will enter into ToxicVille and release the map no matter how far I get, as long as it’s functional of course 🙂
I’ve been a lurker on here since 2015 and played many villes and mods released or featured on here. My YouTube has some clips of a map that’s still WIP and has been since 2015. (Check my Profile) Excited to enter the Villes, not for the prizes but for interesting projects and seeing others ideas!
Hi, I would rather not share my real name but i can say that i have loved and played the Half Life games for about 3 years now and when i discovered mods it all changed. Like i used to (and still do) watch Bolloxed and i always loved seeing these mods people made and so after looking around and testing with other mod websites like mobdb and game maps i found RTSL and the gauge tool (Which is way easier than going into my HL files) And so i’ve been downloading mods and maps from this website for a while now and I’ve finally made an account. And i just want to say thank you to all those modders and website admins that inspired me to create my own maps and just enjoy HL mods in general.
Hello, I’m Ridonkulous.
I’ve been stalking RTSL for quite some time and making levels for Source even longer, and only came out of my shell now in light of the up-and-coming ToxicVille competition. I was impressed with the welcoming attitude of the community and decided now would be an appropriate time to introduce myself to another pool of Sourcemod enthusiasts.
Have a great day; I can’t wait to get to know everyone here.
Hello!
Half-Life 2 has been the first game I’ve made a map for, and ever since I’ve discovered the amazing world of mapping, I’ve tried to find new and fun gameplay for Valve games for 10 years. English is my second fluent language, and I started learning it in 2007. Meeting new people online in communities has always been an adventure for me, and I can’t wait to experience what this great community has to offer!
Hi All,
I’ve been lurking since I discovered this site last year, but since I’ve just submitted a toxicville entry I thought I should say something.
I’m in Australia, so the live streams are usually at a bad time for me. I watched the start of the recent fundraiser, then woke up early the next day hoping to contribute. All I heard was Phillip saying “adios” and the stream stopped! I hope I can arrange things better next time.
May the community and the site live long and prosper!
Belting site…hardly any work done since I found you 🙂
Glad you like it. Sorry to hear you haven’t done much work.
I’m Bockismtor. I enjoy the Half Life series and the content that stems from it. Learning to make my own content seems like a fun endeavor. That’s all.
Hello Bockismtor, welcome to my site. Please don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions.
Hi, I’m Fake, I’m an avid lurker who’s been here for a couple months now, and spends an unhealthy amount of time on Reddit, browsing mods, Hammer tutorials, and grammar editing my internet posts. I’m avidly teaching myself how to map, and will probably release some.
Hi, I’m Robert, and I have zero experience in making mods, but would love to start playing them. Especially if they take place in Black Mesa
Hey!!
I’m Mazinger, i’ve known this site throught reddit. English is not my main languaje so sorry if i don’t speak perfectly. Something like this site is what i’ve been searching for years. I love half-life and i used to play a lot of half-life 1 mods, but when i was younger.
Now it’s seems that i’m going to start playing again, this time more and better mods. I don’t know where to start…
Greetings!
Is this how it works I don’t know >///< anyway
I'm Tristan
I'm basically a no one I'm just a kid with way too much free time well I haven't been a Half-Life fan for long only for the past couple of months but no community I've been in has been so nice and well not toxic. My favorite game in the Half-Life series is Episode 2. I haven't worked on any mods or anything like that I guess I would like too learn hammer one day nor do I do voice acting, like I said a nobody. If you want anything add me on Discord Sweddy#3611 I'm basically always on.
Hi Tristan, welcome to my site.
As the intro to HL2 says “It’s safer here.”
Just because you don’t create, doesn’t mean you aren’t valued. Imagine a world with people who only created media but didn’t consume it.
Hey there. I’m Lord Grabby. I’ve had around 2 years of private mapping experience making maps for me and my friends in CS:S and CS:GO, etc. but I’ve wanted to get into more single player / story-based experiences. Although my skills aren’t the best, I hope I can improve my skills by creating more maps.
Hello Lord Grabby, welcome to the site. Good luck getting more into the SP scene.
Hi, I’m JamaicanDave and I’m an alco… Sorry bad joke (or is it??).
Anyways I’ve visited the site on and off for a year or so now, and following on from Phillips tweet thought perhaps it’s time to add my name to the official introductions.
What can I say? I enjoyed Half Life 1 and Opposing Forces. I think Half Life 2 + Eps are hugely over-rated (quick get the pitchforks) – but like looking at mods people make for it. I currently play and map for Black Mesa and am looking forward to Operation Black Mesa.
I have a few small Black Mesa map releases to my name, which can be found on this site and the official BM workshop.
That is all.
Hello, I’m HighFire, I am a new mapper, who started by making maps for csgo, my current csgo project is on hold because I can never think of what to add to it, but I almost never have the motivation to finish it anyways. I started making hl2 maps when I found RTSL, I started with ToxicVille, where I started on the Friday before the deadline and ended up with something that is not very good. But even with that, I am always ready to learn something new, even outside the world of sourcemodding, and can’t wait to make more maps.
Hi,
I I really appreciate all the mods for Half Life you guys make. I am older than probably many here,and i didn’t get into pcs until about 2001. I remember buying a Half Life CD from Ebay about that same year, and did not know I had to have a KEY to play on Steam. I did get a refund. So i then played Duke Nukem, Quake,2 and 4.Unreal Tournament, then I got Half Life on Steam about 4 years ago. Yes, that’s right, I did not play HL till recently.Bummer…..FPS is the best for me, all the time while my sis tries to get me to play WOW…….haven’t yet. To me, HL franchise is the best there is. I probably will not be making any mods, cause my strength seems to be pc hardware, learned most by experience, Anyway. I just LOVE your site, and maybe soon I will review some mods. Blessings to all……
OMG, 4 years ago. You might be the newest player to the community. ANyway, welcome to my site and community – It’s safer here.
BTW< have you played any of the other HL games yet?
I’m GreenViking, I love pretty much all of Valve’s games! I used to play tons of gmod and TF2 but my favorite Valve game of them all is HL2. On gmod I got involved with HL2RP and return to it periodically. Anyways, I hope to find some good mods on this website.
Welcome to my site GreenViking. I’m sure you will find plenty of great mods.
Hi, I’m JargonJC, (known alternatively elsewhere as “jccreszMC“, “jccreszMinecraft” or simply “Jacob“.
I started mapping in Portal 2 first using the PeTI editor, and then over the course of several years finally learned the Hammer Editor. Quality control is high priority with me so unfortunately it slows me down.
I’m a level designer by heart and nothing else feels right to me. Hammer is my go-to tool for creation.
Welcome to the site JargonJC. Quality is always good as long as it doesn’t stop you from actually release maps!
Hello! I’m Jones… Sunfish Jones
I came here expecting nothing more than a compilation of mods…
little did I know the amazing care that has been put on this website and the awesome community surrounding it
I’m a friendly and kind guy. I’m more than happy if you decide to talk to me
Hello Sunfish Jones, welcome to my site. You are right, there is an awesome community here. Feel free to chat in the monthly chat posts.
Hello all, i have joined because I like to play half life and the mods. I currently live in Colombia, South America– long story, married a Colombian girl 15 years ago, and stayed here. Originally from Houston Tx.
Hi Joe, welcome to my site. Just so you know, there’s no need to join to download mods etc. Only reason to join is that you can use the Recommendation System, which allows you to add recommendation images to reviews and easily find maps and mods you haven”t reviewed.
Hey everyone.
Discovered this site a while back in my quest to find new source mods/maps. Haven’t visited in at least a year though — saw a notice for a new release and now I’m back. Thought I’d make an account and discuss some of these releases with you guys!
Howdy Pretender, welcome to RTSL. May I ask where you saw the notice of the new release?
Hello, RunThinkShootLive!
My name’s Winterman! I discovered this site because I was wondering where did Bolloxed get his maps from. Even though my profile said I joined in June, I just be able to log in yesterday because somehow my password was broken XD
Am I the only one who’s from the East here? I’m also maybe the youngest here. (Nevermind, 2nd youngest (?), I saw HighFire’s profile)
Half-Life 2 is the first FPS I’ve ever heard of in my entire life, just be able to play it a few years ago. Seeing a lot of people playing it made it kinda easy for me. But I think some people never noticed that they were playing on Easy. Because shotgun can 1-shot almost anything in the game.
It pretty much made me think it’s so OP until I actually played it.
I’d be checking out mods and custom maps. Whatever that catches my eye, and also I’d love to give my feedback on the Hammer Cup maps. (Have played DefendVille 1-2, ToxicVille, MinimalismVille and just finished BridgeVille before typing this)
For some reason I love playing -ville maps, they act like custom map packs and I can learn about how to design a level right. Because I have a dream job making shooter games.
Hi, im griffin22
I know rtsl for 4 years. Its previous name was planetphillip. Idk how but i just found out this site and i thinked it is cool. So i downloaded some mods and mapping challenges. That days i didnt had a original hl2 on steam so maps were buggy and i didnt play them anymore.
But in 2016 i found the bolloxed youtube channel and i remembered planetphillip. I typed it to google and there was no planetphillip. Cuz it changed to RunThinkShootLive.com. Today i have hl2,hl2:ep2 and hl2dm on my steam
When it comes to mapping im trying. I try mapping for 6 months. I know basics of the hammer but im lack of designing ability. I’ll do my best. Who knows maybe i join to a mapping challange?
Hello i’m ThunderVIII
I’ve been playing Half-Life games for a long time, and the first Half life was also the first FPS that i have ever played. I enjoy all kinds of videogames , but my preferences would be FPS, JRPG,
Hack-n-Slash and Stealth games.
I don’t really play online a lot, except for games like left 4 dead 2 , and sometimes i like to instal counter strike and play it for a few days , but unless it’s co-op , i lose interest quickly in multiplayer games, even if i do have a lot of fun.
I’m not really THAT good with mapping, but i made some maps, and released a left 4 dead map on
the steam workshop. I don’t really have anything else to write here , sorry if there are a few mistakes
as i’m not english, and i hope to have a lot of fun with you guys.
Hello, I am SNW. I’m mainly here for the occasional source map competitions as I find playing other fan-made maps pretty cool. That’s about it… don’t expect a long lecture about myself here… :3