October 2016 General Chat

4th October 2016

Hi guys, Unq here again, posting while Phillip is on sabbatical.

So, not too much has been happening here at RTSL although we’ve had a handful of new mods posted in the last month, and of course the usual weekend streams are still going. I have some spooky streams planned for this month.

It’s already October, autumn is here and more importantly Halloween is coming soon! Any good costumes planned? Anyone setting up a haunted house perhaps?

Happy October!

What is this post?

Over the last few months, RTSL has gotten a lot of new readers. Anyway, unlike many other sites that also have a “proper” forum, RTSL does not.

So now, each month we create a “General Chat” post for readers to post whatever they want within the limits of being a family-friendly website.

Please don’t post reviews, questions or comments about maps and mods listed on the site – post them on the respective post – all those comments will be deleted. We do this to ensure that when a reader visits a map or mod page, all the information is in one place.

This Month’s old FPS game

Back in June 2014, Phillip started to use a poster from a classic Sci-Fi movie as the background for the post image. Starting in June 2016, we started to use images taken from old FPS games.

This month it is Serious Sam – The First Encounter (2001).

The First Encounter was the first Serious Sam game, kicking of a series of high adrenaline arena shooters. I’ve generally not been a huge fan of arena shooters in the past but I fondly remember playing the Serious Sam demo and having a grand old time with it. Loved the headless kamikaze bombers somehow screaming as they charged you. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

23 Comments

  1. JC

    Funny you should mention this game… Serious Sam is one of my favorite game series after Half-Life (I still play SS:HD and SS3:BFE).
    It’s basically the best coop game you can play 🙂

  2. Not doing too good, college has been throwing things at me to the point of mental exhaustion.
    It’s like i have little things to do but fun and games before and WHAT DO I DO THERE’S TOO MUCH HELP ME after.
    And i also have an ear infection on my right one, can’t even open my mouth or eat without feeling like someone had lit a small dynamite there, that’s fun.
    It’s also raining a lot here, so the complimentary cold and fever’s not really doing great on my days.
    Can’t even properly do stuff in college due to the family laptop having its fan broken, making me fan the vents manually (dunno whether i should try to disassemble the thing myself or if i should take it to someone better, Acer Aspire has this thing where you pretty much have to tear the whole dang laptop apart just to get to the fan).

    On a positive note, i’ve finally finished the Ispitatel Remod (though i did skip some of I4’s texture translations), college schedules made it so that Wednesdays are basically “red letter days” (though it does means that the other study times are multiplied, but eh), and not only i got a hack ton of Doom mods to finish, there’s quite the number of ECWolf mods too to play.

    Though i do have this sudden urge to play games like SS and/or Hidden and Dangerous Deluxe at some point, i’ll do that later.

    1. Bob

      Keep at it man! You don’t want to be in your 60’s working on a degree. It’s a ton of fun but multivariate statistical analysis is a lot harder when you’re many decades out of school.
      Bob

  3. I’m more excited for Serious Sam 4 than for Half-Life 3

  4. Oh yes, Serious Sam HD. I have it in my Steam library but never even tried it. Any reasons to do so?

    1. Unq

      Yeah, if you are looking for an old-school arena shooter with just action. No plot, no sense, just scores of enemies at once.

      1. Ok, that seems fun ! A lot of the games I tried never went below Doom’s level of world-building. Played a lot of games with LITTLE story, have yet to WITHOUT a story.

        I’m still going to give it a try but now I wish I did so earlier. I got the first’s HD remaster via a redeemed code and also got the second. Presuming it was both games (although my source said it was just the first) I let it be. Not it’s no longer there. Think it was just a demo. :'(

        1. I love Serious Sam too, and if you already have the remasters I’d say go for it, but it should be noted that the HD versions get rid of some of the fun stuff. I know the gravity gimmicks, and as a result at least one of the secret levels, are for whatever reason nowhere to be found. I’m sure they’re still fun to play, just missing a couple of nice little touches.

        2. serious sam has more story than doom, but that’s not a compliment

          1. Well for all I know there’s this Sam guy in an alien-infested Egypt. Can’t remember if there was any mention of their origins or where the heck they even came from.

  5. bkadar

    revived pc, linux, used graphics card, 70fps on sdk 2013 .no crashes yet. this could be a replay all fall in the hl universe.

  6. 2muchvideogames

    if you enjoy having 100 of those headless bomb holders rushing at your all at once, then this is just the game for you

    1. one of the scarier things in gaming,,
      you can hear them screaming–
      but where are they??? LOL!!

  7. I’m considering doing a new Halloween contest for Metrocop.net, last year we had one and it went fairly well. That said, I’d rather have people make content because it’s fun and they want to, rather than being motivated by prizes. So, I’m still torn on that but have to make a decision soon.

    I admit, I’m still a little saddened by the state of RTSL. I’ve been a member of Half-Life communities long enough to see them all dwindle away, including the GMod comics one – sure, Metrocop’s doing okay and we’ve got plenty of content to release every week, but it’s not the same as 10 years ago. RTSL is one of the stronger of the remaining communities, so I’m a little worried seeing everyone burn out on it. I hope it bounces back somehow!

    By the way, have you guys been reading Marc Laidlaw’s blog? He’s been posting a bunch of stuff from the Half-Life 1 pre-release days, it’s really interesting.

  8. JamaicanDave

    Mappings ground to a halt due to a lack of motivation and the purchase of Deus Ex Mankind Divided. Brilliant game, if you haven’t I strongly recommend trying it. I’m also thinking about picking up Fallout 4: Far Harbour. Has anyone played it?

    1. I have play a lot of far harbor. It is by far my favorite expansion. If you like the base game or even think its okay, you will love far harbor. I liked Nuka world but it was not as good. I think the setting for Nuka world was fun but the content was nowhere near as good as far harbor.

      1. JamaicanDave

        Cheers. I really enjoyed Fallout 4 and Far Harbour sounds like the perfect excuse to dive back in. Last time I played was when they updated the survival mode, which was an awesome addition. Skimming over the updates it seems they’ve also fixed my only gripe with survival by introducing a save on exit feature. Definitely time for some more post apocalyptic fun.

  9. JamaicanDave

    Maybe not the best place to ask this, but what the hell. Has anyone worked out the Hue, Saturation, Brightness settings for a typical colour temperature chart (an example can be found here: http://www.shutterstock.com/blog/understanding-white-balance-and-color-temperature)?

    1. It’s embarrassing to say I didn’t have an immediate answer for this, despite years of interest in video production, but doing some research now I find it’s an even more complicated topic than I’d have thought, and there don’t seem to be any readily available calculators online.

      Search for “color temperature kelvin to rgb” if you’re interested in learning more about the topic itself, but you might find some use in Tanner Helland’s Kelvin-to-RGB code, or if you’re a less coding-minded person this chart of blackbody color values from Mitchell Charity.

      For the former, you could use the code to get RGB values and then use one of myriad online converters to get HSL/HSV/whatever values. The latter site is a chart of Hex values, but the same applies, there are plenty of calculators available with a simple search that can convert them for you. Note of course that the second site is also using a theoretical “Black body” as the basis of its colors; it’s a subject well beyond my level of science education to understand, but the practical implication is that the chart isn’t a perfect representation of the RGB colors of real world lighting. I linked it simply because looking at the colors, it seems like it’ll get you close enough to be useful, and if you need to tweak the results to get lighting that looks right at least you have a starting point that’s in the neighborhood.

      1. Of course I didn’t realize this until well after posting, but for the second link I posted it turns out you don’t need a calculator at all. Right underneath the chart is a link I didn’t notice at first; click “more detailed table” to see a chart with all the conversions worked out for you. Toward the right, just to the left of the hex values, will be the 0-255 RGB values you can just plug into Hammer. Sometimes (read: most times (read: all of the times)) I’m dumb.

        1. JamaicanDave

          Thanks, that’s the kind of thing I was looking for – especially the second one with the RGB. As we’re talking mapping here I don’t think slight deviations from real world values will kill us 🙂 Thanks again.

    2. Bob

      There are numerous small and free utilities that will give you RGB, HTML, and any other value of a colour under your mouse pointer. Look for ‘Desktop Colour Picker’. They’re much faster and easier than firing up Photoshop to find a colour.
      Bob

  10. bkadar

    all hallows eve times b movie-might be more c- but silly, frankenhooker.
    http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0099611/
    could be better in 3d . just hope the vcr still works

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