Changelog07/01/13
==1.1 Hotfixed Final (v1.11)==
Assorted/General
-Implemented subtitles and closed captions. All important dialogue on my maps should now have subtitles and closed captions available. Based on work done by Ulrik (thanks, man!) but I re-adapted it to be consistent with BMS's closed caption system. I also added some captions for various important sound effects.
C2A5G
-Fixed a bug with some of the parking lines displaying incorrectly.
-Fixed a bug where one of the elevated road sections was not displaying stripes correctly.
-Fixed some Z-Fighting on the second floor roof.
-Quick fix for some plant clipping by the destroyed truck near the helipad.
C2A5H
-Made it so that AGrunt that throws the Marine through the wall should roar every time now.
-Fixed up a few gaps in railings.
C2A5I
-Fixed some plant clipping through a pipe.
06/01/13
==1.1 Final== <-- Surface Tension Uncut - Finished Edition
Assorted/General
-Numerous bugfixes/clipping fixes.
-Actually reworked a few small details, did a bit more than I thought I would but it's made things better.
-Probably lots of misc fixes which I forgot to note.
C2A5G
-Probably lots of misc fixes which I forgot to note.
-Added battle sounds to the Garage which play after you flick the switch in the side room. Makes it more obvious you're meant to be going that way and makes it so that the sounds no longer magically start when you open the door.
-Re-did ALL the model based destruction for the two holes in the garage. There should be literally NO Z-Fighting anymore. It should all look good now.
-Re-aligned and increased scale (from 16 to 8) the lightmaps for the ceiling on the ground floor to fix weird lighting abnormalities on the ceiling (particularly between the destruction and the fixed part of the ceiling).
-Moved the light by the ground floor exit sign down a little bit to make the lighting consistent.
-Fixed some of the tight curves by the ramps so that they no longer have visible texture/lighting seams. They still exist due to the unavoidable nature of the way curved textures work, but they should be FAR, FAR less noticeable now.
-More lightmap fixes on the top floor to make the shadowing less abrupt.
-Managed to address most (but not all) of the lightbleeding on the top floor walls.
-Fixed a pretty serious areaportal bug in the drop-down vent which caused the sky to be rendered for a few seconds on dropping down.
-Fixed up some more railings near the TOW courtyard.
-Hopefully fixed a few seams in the big red wall leading to the helipad.
-Fixed up pretty serious (yet somehow unreported!) texture seams at the edge of the map, between the rock, rough sand, and smooth sand. They were actually really bad.
-Fixed the sides of the raised walkway by the helipad so they no longer got merged into one face by VBSP, making the railings look like they were floating from certain angles.
-Fixed up the Laser Manta's approach path so he no longer does a really awkward L motion.
-Reduced the hangar door's openings a little bit.
C2A5H
-Probably lots of misc fixes which I forgot to note.
-Added blood to the Barney desk at the start.
-Fixed up the hole a bit so it's less possible to get stuck on it.
-Edited the sound script at the start of the map to match that I used on C2A5G. Much better, (and less annoying) system.
-Fixed some Xen Moss clipping through the vents near the bathrooms.
-Lowered the pipe in the satpipe to reduce the "bounce" effect a little bit. It's still present, sadly, but a bit less apparant (physics engine bug).
-Edited the Furnace Room layout a little bit. Moved the fire extinguisher next to the fire alarm, added some more pipe/valve systems to where the extinguisher used to be.
-Added another headcrab and adjusted HECU positioning and node positioning a bit. Battle should favour Zombies massively now, though it doesn't really matter too much if it doesn't.
-Many misc. artistic edits around the gasworks, most too minor to warrant a mention. Trialed a system where some of the lights in the ceiling were off/ruined, but it made the lighting/shadowing in the gasworks look awful.
-Fixed a stupid gap in the railings in the gasworks.
-Swapped the control panel in Barney's Room for one similar to the one used in the security hut.
-Fixed a pretty serious (and very, VERY dumb) bug where the door was 1/4 clipped into the ground at the end of Barney's Room.
-A few misc fixes by the end of the level.
C2A5I
-Probably lots of misc fixes which I forgot to note.
-A few miscellaneous clipping and seam fixes around the garg chase hallway.
-Moved around some of the fencing near the end to eliminate clipping with the electric fences.
-Painted even more rocks in the Garg courtyard to reduce the instances of VBSP procedurally placed plants clipping through pipes.
-Made the Crownvic near the end of the map destructible by the mortars. It exhibits really horrid bugs when it's destroyed (Devs fault, not mine, it's a bug in the physics engine), but it's probably better than it being indestructible.
-Fixed a bit of blue debris near the end of the map (hopefully).
Final
-FINISHED THIS PROJECT! ON TO GREENER PASTURES!
01/01/13
==1.0 FINAL RELEASE CANDIDATE (RC3)== <--Surface Tension Uncut - THIS REALLY IS THE LAST RELEASE CANDIDATE, PROMISE - Edition
Assorted/General
-Final layers of polish, bugfixes. There is nothing left on any of the maps anymore that bugs me personally.
-Clipping errors - clipping errors everywhere. Won't comment on them all - only the prominent ones.
-Used propper (GREAT tool by CFoust) to convert some problematic brush based details (mostly lathed objects such as the big red wall on C2A5G or the furnace's base) into models. Should eliminate seams and bugs.
-Fixed all sparks (hopefully) so they no longer clip through walls/the floor. Note to any mappers reading this: do not allow the origin of the env_spark to intersect anything, like with lights it seems to break them a bit and make them not calculate proper collision.
-Painted a lot of rocks onto the sandy displacements to try and reduce instances of plants (procedurally placed by VBSP) growing into things. Should be significantly improved, but not eliminated.
-Did a lot of standardization. All buttons for doors should now be standardized across my maps in terms of distance from door and height. All health/HEV chargers now match the standard height used in Black Mesa, 38 units.
-Worked a bit on the somewhat crude laser beam effect from the Mantas. Added secondary lightnings and a tesla effect on the impact area. More impressive now.
-Fixed up security cameras. Some should now be fixed but facing logical directions.
-Fixed up a lot of railings on my maps.
-Added quite a few cubemaps to every map to make reflections more accurate.
C2A5G
-Increased lightmap scale a bit near the level start - the BM Dev team had it really low here for some reason, making some blocky lighting. It's weird because that part had high scale lightmaps on C2A5F.
-Fixed a few misplaced objects in the generator room (BM Devs faults, not mine!). Connected an i-beam to the wall, connected the pipe to the wall.
-Edited up the generator activation a little, mostly reducing/moving the sounds so it's a bit less in-your-face.
-Reduced the brightness of the green lights by the stairwell in the parking lot to be more consistent with the rest of Black Mesa.
-Changed two Crownvics from static to dynamic props. This bug was causing them not to show up in the game before, when I wanted them to. Should make the ground floor more interesting now.
-Tidied up some of the concrete by the holes a bit. It will be nearly impossible at this stage for me to remove some of the Z-fighting which causes flickering textures, but it should be improved a bit.
-Fixed a bug with the lighting which caused the pedestrian exit on the ground floor to be lit in a bright reddish tone when it shouldn't be.
-Significantly improved, but didn't remove (engine limitation) the light-bleeding under the stairs in the stair well. It's now very negligible.
-Tidied up the barrier used to eliminate Ulrik's early spawning in the street bug. It's now uniform and less intrusive. In addition, I've eliminated the bug by making the triggers more conservative.
-Removed all but one of the blueish lamps on the top floor, to signify the structural damage. One has been replaced by a dangling, sparking cable with the light on the floor underneath it.
-Added a red light near the entrance to the vent. It now has a really cool glow which serves as a directional hint but also looks great.
-Rotated the lighting decals 45 degrees to match the light cages. Now looks correct.
-Adjusted the light at the top of the ladder in the vent so that it no longer intersects the curved section. Looks much better.
-Made the lighting at the drop-down more uniform and less strange.
-Swapped the Crownvic on top of the carlifts in the garage for the joop in an attempt to eliminate a rendering order bug by the windows. It didn't work, but I prefer the jeep's look anyway, so I kept it.
-Fixed a clipping rope by the ambush explosives.
-Moved the marines around a bit to make the fight more exciting, and alleviate a bug where a marine would get stuck behind the ambush debris.
-Attached a floating light by the TOW to the wall.
-Made the Harrier takeoff about as good as it possibly can be. Added a jet contrail, and a subtle sound to go with its launch. It now takes off at a much more acute angle, making its transitions less sharp. It's still not perfect but it's the best I can do.
-Rotated the barbed wire fences 180 degrees so that their function is now to keep people out, rather than keep people in. Works much better, functionally speaking.
-Fixed up the railings by the marine on the balcony, so that they no longer abruptly end on the 45 degree bend.
-Switched out most of the rock models on the road to the helipad for alternative ones (also made one of my own from displacements). The old ones were Black Mesa models with no back faces, so to work around this I'd clipped them into the wall, which looked dumb. Should look an absolute tonne better now.
-Quite significantly rebalanced the LAV fight. It's as close to perfect now as it can be. It was a bit extreme before - too many survivors on either side. I've now balanced it so there -should- only be 2 - 3 survivors on the winning side, which is nearly always the aliens now. I did this by making it so the 4 running marines now nearly always run over to the helicopter, rather than 2 hanging back like they did before. This significantly increases the chance that they'll die to the Manta beam, which removes somewhat the random factor of there being extra Marines when the LAV comes charging out. To make the second wave a bit fairer on the humans, I fixed a bug where the LAV would try to shoot the Grunts that were attacking it, but couldn't - because they are in his "dead zone" where his gun can't fire. He no longer tries to engage those aliens. Instead he'll normally take down 3 - 4 other aliens before always going down himself, whereas before he used to kill 1, then try and shoot the grunts attacking him, and end up doing nothing.
-Fixed a bad seam at the bottom of the stairs.
-Added another wall to the invisible barrier surrounding the helipad. Debris falling down and blocking the paths (also confusing the AI!) should now be EXTREMELY RARE, if not completely eliminated.
-Fixed a seriously bad bug where if you backtracked from the helipad at a certain time, you'd go past where an invisible trigger was supposed to spawn which starts the TOW courtyard rendering again, allowing you to walk into nothingness. Shouldn't happen anymore.
-The two Marines providing covering fire up on the helipad used to spawn in plain sight. They now spawn further back and run up to their positions.
-Cut up/added a few displacements around the army tent by the helipad to add more foliage. Area should seem a bit less bare now.
-Eliminated a displacement seam I was covering up with a plant which clipped into the pavement. No more!
-Moved the cactus by the minefield to give a better view of the skybox.
-Overhauled the railings around the helipad. They look MILES better now. Used curved ends for the railings, and now the only weirdness in the railings is by the stairs, which I cannot do much about.
-Messed around a bit with the hangars. The doors at the back of the main hangar now open symmetrically and are open a lot more, to give a better view. The background hangar has been revised - the Harrier no longer clips into the ground, the horribly harsh blue light has been changed, and a back has been added to it (the old one somehow got deleted, I definitely made one before though). You can no longer see rock at the back of the background hangar.
-Changed the emergency light at the end of the level for one used previously in Blast Pit.
C2A5H
-Made the first window by the dead Barney level with the door frame (OCD Mode: Activated).
-Fixed the horrible pipe Z-fighting near the start of the map by moving the pipe so it clips into Barney's break room rather than through the other pipe. To counter this visible clipping, added a vent system to the break room which entirely engulfs the pipe, so you can't even see it.
-Fixed a light which was almost entirely merged with the wall by the Marine-Wall-Throwing-Angry-Roaring-Alien-Grunt (my affectionate nickname for him).
-Added a playerclip brush to the destroyed wall which activates when the player jumps out. No more backtracking up that way.
-Extended the Manta's destruction to slightly under the tank, though results may vary. The tank doesn't always go to the same place.
-Fixed some fairly serious missing faces on the wall by the small building on the street. Looked awful.
-Fixed a visible seam between the road and the wall near the gasworks.
-Swapped out all the beams on the red wall for model based variants - should improve performance marginally.
-Removed the giant tree of doom from the skybox, replaced it with some more normal looking trees instead.
-Fixed a bug in the skybox where some of the windows on buildings in the distance weren't rendering, and you could see the sky through them.
-Removed 2 signs from the front of the security hut, and stacked the ones inside vertically.
-Replaced the control panel in the security hut with one from Blast Pit. Looks a lot better. Also moved the illuminated button to a more prominent position and brightened it a lot.
-Fixed some texture seams near the jump pad.
-Added a missing bit of fencing to the enclosure near the jump pad.
-Made a new rock by the jump pad, replacing the placeholder Xenian one. Blocks the player from jumping onto the jumppad at an angle which crashes the game.
-Added a connector to the vent by the snark spawn so it no longer looks like the broken vent was connected to solid metal.
-Moved around lots of the plants in the wrecked bathroom to solve clipping. Gave the Xenian purple stalks default idle animations.
-The Zombie now auto-dies once you drop down into the satpipe, to prevent players from being able to hear him all around the map.
-Rotated the powerboxes the player can use for cover 180, so they face the right way.
-Changed the enclosure on the roof to a layout which makes sense.
-Replaced all the i-beams leading up to the rooftop with new, better designed brush based variants. No more seams in their design and there's no more clipping, either.
-The Zombie's room now has a more logical design - the powerboxes are no longer obstructed by the door when open.
-Added a third light to the satpipe tunnel, and changed their properties a little.
-Lined up and changed around the signs at the exit of the satpipe tunnel.
-Reduced the spawn timer on the headcrab-HECU war just a little, so the players can't sprint in and see them spawn in.
-Replaced the lathed base sections of the furnace with newly made model-based variants. No more seams on the furnace. Hooray. This one's been bugging me for months.
-Unfortunately, had to tone down the reddish lighting effect in the furnace room. The interaction of the flickering red light on the 1 unit/luxel lightmaps I used in parts of the furnace room was SERIOUSLY tanking the framerate. Looks less impressive, should run a lot better.
-Increased the sizes of the two other levels of fire in the furnace, to seem more impressive and obstructive.
-Eliminated a bug where water drops were falling out of the water tank into the furnace room.
-Added a new pipe in the gasworks which connects to the 6 valve pipes which were attached to the walkway, seemingly for no reason and no end. Looks a lot better and ties the room together nicely.
-Due to the new blue/greenish pipe, switched the colour on the large pipe back to blue. I only had it the blue/greenish colour before because I thought it looked good.
-Adjusted the sparking light by the window a bit so it's more obvious and less buggy.
-Fixed a cubemap bug which gave the blue pipe's 90 degree bend a red glow.
-Removed a magical floating light from the gasworks.
-Removed a few objects here and there from the gasworks. Should add some frames and make it a bit less cluttered. I'm happy with the gasworks now, it has that perfect claustrophobic feel all around that I wanted, without being too excessive.
-Added yellow caution stripes to the stairs (about half the stairs on Surface Tension have them). Should make the way up just that little bit more obvious. Some friends of mine were playing it and it took them far too long to see the stairs as they're a bit tucked away.
-Increased the scale of the window cubemaps so the reflections no longer look like an opaque blob but rather resemble the actual gasworks layout.
-Added some boxes/military equipment around the sandbags - partially to cover up some bad clipping. The clipping itself isn't solvable without widening the road by about 16 units - which is FAR more work than it's worth.
-Removed one of the fires on the walkway to prevent the aliens that spawn there from being dumb. They should engage far more intelligently now. The Vort on the ground floor is still really dumb and I have no idea why. An added bonus: absolutely tiny framerate gain.
-Fixed the lasers for the tripmines in the security office. They now terminate in the correct place.
-Standardized height of the gun racks.
-Heightened the light on the stairs in the security office.
-Fixed a bug where Barney would still press the button in the security hut even if you pressed it first.
-Removed the white door at the end of the level which supposedly led to the new room, but had no counterpart in the new room.
-Fixed up the railngs a lot at the end of C2A5H/start of C2A5I. No more gaps, less dumb joins.
C2A5I
-Removed the railings on the stairs. Lots of complaints about them.
-Rotated the cage light decals 45 degrees so they fit the cage's design.
-Swapped some red lights above doors for white ones (BM Dev's doing, not mine!)
-Lowered a rope in the tunnel a little so it doesn't clip with the ceiling.
-Fixed up the lighting on the double doors in the tunnel a little, though it still isn't perfect.
-More rock painting around the Garg coutryard. Less plants growing in things.
-Moved one of the water towers back behind the barbed wire fence. Freed up some space in the courtyard and eliminated some bad clipping.
==1.1 Hotfixed Final (v1.11)==
Assorted/General
-Implemented subtitles and closed captions. All important dialogue on my maps should now have subtitles and closed captions available. Based on work done by Ulrik (thanks, man!) but I re-adapted it to be consistent with BMS's closed caption system. I also added some captions for various important sound effects.
C2A5G
-Fixed a bug with some of the parking lines displaying incorrectly.
-Fixed a bug where one of the elevated road sections was not displaying stripes correctly.
-Fixed some Z-Fighting on the second floor roof.
-Quick fix for some plant clipping by the destroyed truck near the helipad.
C2A5H
-Made it so that AGrunt that throws the Marine through the wall should roar every time now.
-Fixed up a few gaps in railings.
C2A5I
-Fixed some plant clipping through a pipe.
06/01/13
==1.1 Final== <-- Surface Tension Uncut - Finished Edition
Assorted/General
-Numerous bugfixes/clipping fixes.
-Actually reworked a few small details, did a bit more than I thought I would but it's made things better.
-Probably lots of misc fixes which I forgot to note.
C2A5G
-Probably lots of misc fixes which I forgot to note.
-Added battle sounds to the Garage which play after you flick the switch in the side room. Makes it more obvious you're meant to be going that way and makes it so that the sounds no longer magically start when you open the door.
-Re-did ALL the model based destruction for the two holes in the garage. There should be literally NO Z-Fighting anymore. It should all look good now.
-Re-aligned and increased scale (from 16 to 8) the lightmaps for the ceiling on the ground floor to fix weird lighting abnormalities on the ceiling (particularly between the destruction and the fixed part of the ceiling).
-Moved the light by the ground floor exit sign down a little bit to make the lighting consistent.
-Fixed some of the tight curves by the ramps so that they no longer have visible texture/lighting seams. They still exist due to the unavoidable nature of the way curved textures work, but they should be FAR, FAR less noticeable now.
-More lightmap fixes on the top floor to make the shadowing less abrupt.
-Managed to address most (but not all) of the lightbleeding on the top floor walls.
-Fixed a pretty serious areaportal bug in the drop-down vent which caused the sky to be rendered for a few seconds on dropping down.
-Fixed up some more railings near the TOW courtyard.
-Hopefully fixed a few seams in the big red wall leading to the helipad.
-Fixed up pretty serious (yet somehow unreported!) texture seams at the edge of the map, between the rock, rough sand, and smooth sand. They were actually really bad.
-Fixed the sides of the raised walkway by the helipad so they no longer got merged into one face by VBSP, making the railings look like they were floating from certain angles.
-Fixed up the Laser Manta's approach path so he no longer does a really awkward L motion.
-Reduced the hangar door's openings a little bit.
C2A5H
-Probably lots of misc fixes which I forgot to note.
-Added blood to the Barney desk at the start.
-Fixed up the hole a bit so it's less possible to get stuck on it.
-Edited the sound script at the start of the map to match that I used on C2A5G. Much better, (and less annoying) system.
-Fixed some Xen Moss clipping through the vents near the bathrooms.
-Lowered the pipe in the satpipe to reduce the "bounce" effect a little bit. It's still present, sadly, but a bit less apparant (physics engine bug).
-Edited the Furnace Room layout a little bit. Moved the fire extinguisher next to the fire alarm, added some more pipe/valve systems to where the extinguisher used to be.
-Added another headcrab and adjusted HECU positioning and node positioning a bit. Battle should favour Zombies massively now, though it doesn't really matter too much if it doesn't.
-Many misc. artistic edits around the gasworks, most too minor to warrant a mention. Trialed a system where some of the lights in the ceiling were off/ruined, but it made the lighting/shadowing in the gasworks look awful.
-Fixed a stupid gap in the railings in the gasworks.
-Swapped the control panel in Barney's Room for one similar to the one used in the security hut.
-Fixed a pretty serious (and very, VERY dumb) bug where the door was 1/4 clipped into the ground at the end of Barney's Room.
-A few misc fixes by the end of the level.
C2A5I
-Probably lots of misc fixes which I forgot to note.
-A few miscellaneous clipping and seam fixes around the garg chase hallway.
-Moved around some of the fencing near the end to eliminate clipping with the electric fences.
-Painted even more rocks in the Garg courtyard to reduce the instances of VBSP procedurally placed plants clipping through pipes.
-Made the Crownvic near the end of the map destructible by the mortars. It exhibits really horrid bugs when it's destroyed (Devs fault, not mine, it's a bug in the physics engine), but it's probably better than it being indestructible.
-Fixed a bit of blue debris near the end of the map (hopefully).
Final
-FINISHED THIS PROJECT! ON TO GREENER PASTURES!
01/01/13
==1.0 FINAL RELEASE CANDIDATE (RC3)== <--Surface Tension Uncut - THIS REALLY IS THE LAST RELEASE CANDIDATE, PROMISE - Edition
Assorted/General
-Final layers of polish, bugfixes. There is nothing left on any of the maps anymore that bugs me personally.
-Clipping errors - clipping errors everywhere. Won't comment on them all - only the prominent ones.
-Used propper (GREAT tool by CFoust) to convert some problematic brush based details (mostly lathed objects such as the big red wall on C2A5G or the furnace's base) into models. Should eliminate seams and bugs.
-Fixed all sparks (hopefully) so they no longer clip through walls/the floor. Note to any mappers reading this: do not allow the origin of the env_spark to intersect anything, like with lights it seems to break them a bit and make them not calculate proper collision.
-Painted a lot of rocks onto the sandy displacements to try and reduce instances of plants (procedurally placed by VBSP) growing into things. Should be significantly improved, but not eliminated.
-Did a lot of standardization. All buttons for doors should now be standardized across my maps in terms of distance from door and height. All health/HEV chargers now match the standard height used in Black Mesa, 38 units.
-Worked a bit on the somewhat crude laser beam effect from the Mantas. Added secondary lightnings and a tesla effect on the impact area. More impressive now.
-Fixed up security cameras. Some should now be fixed but facing logical directions.
-Fixed up a lot of railings on my maps.
-Added quite a few cubemaps to every map to make reflections more accurate.
C2A5G
-Increased lightmap scale a bit near the level start - the BM Dev team had it really low here for some reason, making some blocky lighting. It's weird because that part had high scale lightmaps on C2A5F.
-Fixed a few misplaced objects in the generator room (BM Devs faults, not mine!). Connected an i-beam to the wall, connected the pipe to the wall.
-Edited up the generator activation a little, mostly reducing/moving the sounds so it's a bit less in-your-face.
-Reduced the brightness of the green lights by the stairwell in the parking lot to be more consistent with the rest of Black Mesa.
-Changed two Crownvics from static to dynamic props. This bug was causing them not to show up in the game before, when I wanted them to. Should make the ground floor more interesting now.
-Tidied up some of the concrete by the holes a bit. It will be nearly impossible at this stage for me to remove some of the Z-fighting which causes flickering textures, but it should be improved a bit.
-Fixed a bug with the lighting which caused the pedestrian exit on the ground floor to be lit in a bright reddish tone when it shouldn't be.
-Significantly improved, but didn't remove (engine limitation) the light-bleeding under the stairs in the stair well. It's now very negligible.
-Tidied up the barrier used to eliminate Ulrik's early spawning in the street bug. It's now uniform and less intrusive. In addition, I've eliminated the bug by making the triggers more conservative.
-Removed all but one of the blueish lamps on the top floor, to signify the structural damage. One has been replaced by a dangling, sparking cable with the light on the floor underneath it.
-Added a red light near the entrance to the vent. It now has a really cool glow which serves as a directional hint but also looks great.
-Rotated the lighting decals 45 degrees to match the light cages. Now looks correct.
-Adjusted the light at the top of the ladder in the vent so that it no longer intersects the curved section. Looks much better.
-Made the lighting at the drop-down more uniform and less strange.
-Swapped the Crownvic on top of the carlifts in the garage for the joop in an attempt to eliminate a rendering order bug by the windows. It didn't work, but I prefer the jeep's look anyway, so I kept it.
-Fixed a clipping rope by the ambush explosives.
-Moved the marines around a bit to make the fight more exciting, and alleviate a bug where a marine would get stuck behind the ambush debris.
-Attached a floating light by the TOW to the wall.
-Made the Harrier takeoff about as good as it possibly can be. Added a jet contrail, and a subtle sound to go with its launch. It now takes off at a much more acute angle, making its transitions less sharp. It's still not perfect but it's the best I can do.
-Rotated the barbed wire fences 180 degrees so that their function is now to keep people out, rather than keep people in. Works much better, functionally speaking.
-Fixed up the railings by the marine on the balcony, so that they no longer abruptly end on the 45 degree bend.
-Switched out most of the rock models on the road to the helipad for alternative ones (also made one of my own from displacements). The old ones were Black Mesa models with no back faces, so to work around this I'd clipped them into the wall, which looked dumb. Should look an absolute tonne better now.
-Quite significantly rebalanced the LAV fight. It's as close to perfect now as it can be. It was a bit extreme before - too many survivors on either side. I've now balanced it so there -should- only be 2 - 3 survivors on the winning side, which is nearly always the aliens now. I did this by making it so the 4 running marines now nearly always run over to the helicopter, rather than 2 hanging back like they did before. This significantly increases the chance that they'll die to the Manta beam, which removes somewhat the random factor of there being extra Marines when the LAV comes charging out. To make the second wave a bit fairer on the humans, I fixed a bug where the LAV would try to shoot the Grunts that were attacking it, but couldn't - because they are in his "dead zone" where his gun can't fire. He no longer tries to engage those aliens. Instead he'll normally take down 3 - 4 other aliens before always going down himself, whereas before he used to kill 1, then try and shoot the grunts attacking him, and end up doing nothing.
-Fixed a bad seam at the bottom of the stairs.
-Added another wall to the invisible barrier surrounding the helipad. Debris falling down and blocking the paths (also confusing the AI!) should now be EXTREMELY RARE, if not completely eliminated.
-Fixed a seriously bad bug where if you backtracked from the helipad at a certain time, you'd go past where an invisible trigger was supposed to spawn which starts the TOW courtyard rendering again, allowing you to walk into nothingness. Shouldn't happen anymore.
-The two Marines providing covering fire up on the helipad used to spawn in plain sight. They now spawn further back and run up to their positions.
-Cut up/added a few displacements around the army tent by the helipad to add more foliage. Area should seem a bit less bare now.
-Eliminated a displacement seam I was covering up with a plant which clipped into the pavement. No more!
-Moved the cactus by the minefield to give a better view of the skybox.
-Overhauled the railings around the helipad. They look MILES better now. Used curved ends for the railings, and now the only weirdness in the railings is by the stairs, which I cannot do much about.
-Messed around a bit with the hangars. The doors at the back of the main hangar now open symmetrically and are open a lot more, to give a better view. The background hangar has been revised - the Harrier no longer clips into the ground, the horribly harsh blue light has been changed, and a back has been added to it (the old one somehow got deleted, I definitely made one before though). You can no longer see rock at the back of the background hangar.
-Changed the emergency light at the end of the level for one used previously in Blast Pit.
C2A5H
-Made the first window by the dead Barney level with the door frame (OCD Mode: Activated).
-Fixed the horrible pipe Z-fighting near the start of the map by moving the pipe so it clips into Barney's break room rather than through the other pipe. To counter this visible clipping, added a vent system to the break room which entirely engulfs the pipe, so you can't even see it.
-Fixed a light which was almost entirely merged with the wall by the Marine-Wall-Throwing-Angry-Roaring-Alien-Grunt (my affectionate nickname for him).
-Added a playerclip brush to the destroyed wall which activates when the player jumps out. No more backtracking up that way.
-Extended the Manta's destruction to slightly under the tank, though results may vary. The tank doesn't always go to the same place.
-Fixed some fairly serious missing faces on the wall by the small building on the street. Looked awful.
-Fixed a visible seam between the road and the wall near the gasworks.
-Swapped out all the beams on the red wall for model based variants - should improve performance marginally.
-Removed the giant tree of doom from the skybox, replaced it with some more normal looking trees instead.
-Fixed a bug in the skybox where some of the windows on buildings in the distance weren't rendering, and you could see the sky through them.
-Removed 2 signs from the front of the security hut, and stacked the ones inside vertically.
-Replaced the control panel in the security hut with one from Blast Pit. Looks a lot better. Also moved the illuminated button to a more prominent position and brightened it a lot.
-Fixed some texture seams near the jump pad.
-Added a missing bit of fencing to the enclosure near the jump pad.
-Made a new rock by the jump pad, replacing the placeholder Xenian one. Blocks the player from jumping onto the jumppad at an angle which crashes the game.
-Added a connector to the vent by the snark spawn so it no longer looks like the broken vent was connected to solid metal.
-Moved around lots of the plants in the wrecked bathroom to solve clipping. Gave the Xenian purple stalks default idle animations.
-The Zombie now auto-dies once you drop down into the satpipe, to prevent players from being able to hear him all around the map.
-Rotated the powerboxes the player can use for cover 180, so they face the right way.
-Changed the enclosure on the roof to a layout which makes sense.
-Replaced all the i-beams leading up to the rooftop with new, better designed brush based variants. No more seams in their design and there's no more clipping, either.
-The Zombie's room now has a more logical design - the powerboxes are no longer obstructed by the door when open.
-Added a third light to the satpipe tunnel, and changed their properties a little.
-Lined up and changed around the signs at the exit of the satpipe tunnel.
-Reduced the spawn timer on the headcrab-HECU war just a little, so the players can't sprint in and see them spawn in.
-Replaced the lathed base sections of the furnace with newly made model-based variants. No more seams on the furnace. Hooray. This one's been bugging me for months.
-Unfortunately, had to tone down the reddish lighting effect in the furnace room. The interaction of the flickering red light on the 1 unit/luxel lightmaps I used in parts of the furnace room was SERIOUSLY tanking the framerate. Looks less impressive, should run a lot better.
-Increased the sizes of the two other levels of fire in the furnace, to seem more impressive and obstructive.
-Eliminated a bug where water drops were falling out of the water tank into the furnace room.
-Added a new pipe in the gasworks which connects to the 6 valve pipes which were attached to the walkway, seemingly for no reason and no end. Looks a lot better and ties the room together nicely.
-Due to the new blue/greenish pipe, switched the colour on the large pipe back to blue. I only had it the blue/greenish colour before because I thought it looked good.
-Adjusted the sparking light by the window a bit so it's more obvious and less buggy.
-Fixed a cubemap bug which gave the blue pipe's 90 degree bend a red glow.
-Removed a magical floating light from the gasworks.
-Removed a few objects here and there from the gasworks. Should add some frames and make it a bit less cluttered. I'm happy with the gasworks now, it has that perfect claustrophobic feel all around that I wanted, without being too excessive.
-Added yellow caution stripes to the stairs (about half the stairs on Surface Tension have them). Should make the way up just that little bit more obvious. Some friends of mine were playing it and it took them far too long to see the stairs as they're a bit tucked away.
-Increased the scale of the window cubemaps so the reflections no longer look like an opaque blob but rather resemble the actual gasworks layout.
-Added some boxes/military equipment around the sandbags - partially to cover up some bad clipping. The clipping itself isn't solvable without widening the road by about 16 units - which is FAR more work than it's worth.
-Removed one of the fires on the walkway to prevent the aliens that spawn there from being dumb. They should engage far more intelligently now. The Vort on the ground floor is still really dumb and I have no idea why. An added bonus: absolutely tiny framerate gain.
-Fixed the lasers for the tripmines in the security office. They now terminate in the correct place.
-Standardized height of the gun racks.
-Heightened the light on the stairs in the security office.
-Fixed a bug where Barney would still press the button in the security hut even if you pressed it first.
-Removed the white door at the end of the level which supposedly led to the new room, but had no counterpart in the new room.
-Fixed up the railngs a lot at the end of C2A5H/start of C2A5I. No more gaps, less dumb joins.
C2A5I
-Removed the railings on the stairs. Lots of complaints about them.
-Rotated the cage light decals 45 degrees so they fit the cage's design.
-Swapped some red lights above doors for white ones (BM Dev's doing, not mine!)
-Lowered a rope in the tunnel a little so it doesn't clip with the ceiling.
-Fixed up the lighting on the double doors in the tunnel a little, though it still isn't perfect.
-More rock painting around the Garg coutryard. Less plants growing in things.
-Moved one of the water towers back behind the barbed wire fence. Freed up some space in the courtyard and eliminated some bad clipping.
