November 2014 General Chat

1st November 2014

Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3

We had an incredible October here in the Basque Country (Euskadi) and the weather has been better than August. I’m not joking.

Work on the new theme is progressing nicely and I am currently adding the special pages and putting the finishing touches to the “table” page and something new called the “timeline”. Integration with the Recommendation System is proving harder than expected. I’ll be calling for beta testers in a few weeks.

Anyway, what’s been happening with you? Hoping to play some new games this month?

I will be streaming Hard Reset from later today and you can follow my progress live on my Twitch channel and then on the YouTube channel for recorded playthroughs.

This Month’s Sci-Fi Movie

In June, I started to use a poster from a classic Sci-Fi move as the background for the post image. This month it is from Metropolis (1927). “In a futuristic city sharply divided between the working class and the city planners, the son of the city’s mastermind falls in love with a working class prophet who predicts the coming of a savior to mediate their differences.” I have started to watch this once or twice, but always get interrupted. I am ill this weekend, so maybe it’s the perfect time to download it and snuggle up on the sofa.

9 Comments

  1. JG

    Metropolis is a movie you need a bit of patience for because it’s quite long, but if you get caught in the whole “How in the world did they pull this off in the 1920s?” aspect, it goes by fast. It went on to influence a lot of movies and video games after it.

    I love Metropolis because it’s a glimpse into the future as pictured in the 1920s. If you enjoy things like this, be sure to check out the Paleofuture site at http://www.paleofuture.com and http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com – it’s very interesting stuff.

    1. JG

      Also, because the Civil Protection enemy is internally known as npc_metropolice, I like to think they intended to pronounce it “Me-TRO-polis.” 🙂

  2. Recently, I made a very big decision; start HL1 mapping. I know the first map is gonna suck, so don’t expect any miracle to happen.

  3. Mega Sean 45

    Well if I were to talk about anything, I wanna say this: there should be more HL2 mods with Ground Turret NPCs; they’re barely used and I like fighting them. Offshore, Strider Mountain, a couple of maps on Obsidian Conflict, Human Error, Eye of the Storm, and Deep Down are pretty much the only mods I know that have Ground Turret NPCs in them. I tried making that NPC in my Underworld entry on GravityGunVille, but I wasn’t able to get them to work.

    For you mappers, I’ll give you a free star if you put a Ground Turret NPC in your mod / map(s). 🙂

    1. Out of curiosity what is it you like so much about fighting ground turrets?

      1. Mega Sean 45

        They’re just a pretty cool type of NPC that can just pop out of nowhere and they’re difficult to defeat sometimes. Plus this is just one of the many contents in the game that are rarely used in mods. Hundreds of mods and yet certain content is rarely used.

  4. Blue Lightning

    Metropolis is the first real “modern” type movie. It is amazing that it was made in the 1920’s, a time period considered to be the old world, yet it was the first decade of the modern age.

    The old 6-frames per second “silent” movies and old crude pictures with all that sepia tone or whatever, is why it seems to be an old time. It looks crude. Yet the 20’s was when most of our inventions were made…refrigerator, television, dependable cars, manufacturing of packaged food (not a good thing), cellophane wrap (still very important), the list goes on.

    It was also the first time we had 24 frames per sec “real-time sound movies”, or “talkies” (as it was called then). 1927 was the first movie that had a part in it that was real time (the Jazz Singer). Real time film had been made in 1924 of President Coolidge making a speech (On You Tube), so the tech was there. It makes us wonder why a futuristic movie like Metropolis was not made in real time 24-frames per second, instead of a 6-frames per second silent film?

    Anyway, Metropolis is an amazing feat for the time. Some of what’s in it did come true…some did not. But it is interesting to see what they thought the future would look like. The problem I have is the fact that it is a silent film. It’s hard for me to watch a silent film for very long…I get bored.

    Still, a great movie.

  5. I have a question. I used to manually load maps and mods from this site with no problems for quite a while. The last few times mods loaded into my ‘sourcemods’ folder have worked just fine. However, I have not been able to manually install maps for ages. Despite putting the bsp file where it belongs
    eg steam apps/ my name/half life2/ hl2/ maps folder or the maps/ maps folder the search in the console says the map does not exist, or is invalid. Map Tap seems to overcome this even though it seems to be placing the functional bsp in the same place. I am using WinRAR to open the downloaded file as usual. Got me beat so I would be grateful for any insight. Map Tap seems to have problems of it’s own so I prefer to manually install. That is why I am asking.

    1. JG

      That’s not where the maps go anymore. You need to put them in steamapps/common/Half-Life 2/(hl2, episodic, or ep2)/maps.

      hl2 = Half-Life 2 maps.
      episodic = Episode One maps.
      ep2 = Episode Two maps.

      This is something that changed in the Steampipe update. If you’ve had the same Half-Life 2 installation for a while, Steam may not have cleaned up the old folders correctly (although they usually don’t contain anything). On a fresh Steam installation, the “my name” folder doesn’t even exist now.

Leave a Response

Comment Formatting Guide

Well formatted comments are much easier to read. Please copy and paste the HTML Tags to use in your comment

  • HEADER: <div class="fix"></div><div class="sbe3">TEXT HERE</div>
  • BOLD: <strong>TEXT HERE</strong>
  • ITALIC: <em>TEXT HERE</em>
  • SPOILER: <span class="spoiler">TEXT HERE</span>