TresCom Forums

'Ello,

I've been lurking in this forum for a while now, and thought about (finally) making a thread about couple of projects i've been working on for Source engine (Orange Box - branch) for a while now,
lately with Mike & Tatu (thanks, guys ). While there is still a lot of stuff to do, the two levels are slowly shaping up.

Both levels are initially being built for Half-Life 2: Episode Two as "walking simulators" (everyone loves those), however they are more or less compatible Garry's Mod,
lab complex having loads of things (namely triggers), which can break up pretty badly and hilariously Garry's Mod.



Hunter's camp

Trespasser was supposed to have the camp, however it ended up being scrapped. (Plantation House level does exist, however there is very little of the camp in it,
namely some wrecked vehicles, tent poles, burnt crates and the song. Burnt crates alone give it away the area is the camp,
since in the movie the camp is seen being partially burnt during the havoc.)

Hence instead of using the (intended, partially implemented but eventually scrapped) Trespasser version i picked the movie version as a reference.
Concept arts (and fan arts), movie clips, Trespasser developer walkthrough and JP wiki have turned out to be invaluable resources in this.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/184028055 ... 0659786227


Lab complex

Due to grid size limitation building the entire level was not plausible, so instead i picked the key area from the level and went with that.
Some of the textures are original Trespasser textures, which have been upscaled with neural networks. There are also some Trespasser textures TheIdiot upscaled, and kindly
allowed me to use them.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/184028055 ... 0659536001

While Trespasser has only one Cray, Hammond talks about three of them in his memoirs, and also mentions site B being the most advanced genetics facility in the world at the time,
which really wouldn't have been be possible with just one Cray... That and the fact the vault does have room for three Crays overall, so i added the other two.

Keycards+locks and Cray boot up sequence puzzle are also already impletemented, but there is still huge amount of stuff to be done.



That's about it for now, and hello again

Glad you posted about this! killer98 have showed a lot of this on the Discord and has done some amazing work with this!

Yeah, very cool. The screenshots looks sweet. Very nice work.

Looks really cool so far. Nothing beats the way the Lab looks with proper lighting (except maybe the Town if it were done the same way at night).

It's unfortunate that there's a limit in map size for the engine as I would have liked to have seen all of the levels done in Source. What's the rough maximum size of a Source level? I know I've played some pretty big Left 4 Dead maps before, which certainly seemed larger than the Lab level.

Also, not to change the subject, but I must as usual insist against using the JP wiki as a primary source of information if you're trying to be accurate...a lot of what's written on there is fan theory and guesswork.

TheIdiot wrote:What's the rough maximum size of a Source level?

32768 units from end to end on each axis.

TheIdiot wrote:I know I've played some pretty big Left 4 Dead maps before, which certainly seemed larger than the Lab level.

In reality most of the stock L4D/2 levels are somewhat small. They have been built in a way, that gives an impression of huge size, 3D skybox being one of the tricks. There are also various paths, which the director randomly opens / closes in each match.

In my version the valley is built in-map, similar to the original. However i'm not a fan of invisible walls, so the road leading to the harbor has been blocked with a gate (similar to the one seen in the movie version of the town) with electric fences on both sides.

TheIdiot wrote:Also, not to change the subject, but I must as usual insist against using the JP wiki as a primary source of information if you're trying to be accurate...a lot of what's written on there is fan theory and guesswork.

I mostly use the wiki for the camp. The surrounding area is described in a detail (i have seen Trespasserguy's hunter's camp, and it seems he too has used the wiki in shaping up the valley surrounding the camp...Or he has seen the movie more often than i have, and spotted more stuff. )

There is also a list of dinos the hunters had been evidently captured before the havoc, which helped a lot with the cage building. (The cages have been made in hammer, and then compiled into models. However the tool handling this, Propper, doesn't work that well with concave collisions, so the model's config file needs to be edited a little, then compiled with Crowbar.)

I like it.

killer89 wrote:

TheIdiot wrote:Also, not to change the subject, but I must as usual insist against using the JP wiki as a primary source of information if you're trying to be accurate...a lot of what's written on there is fan theory and guesswork.

I mostly use the wiki for the camp. The surrounding area is described in a detail (i have seen Trespasserguy's hunter's camp, and it seems he too has used the wiki in shaping up the valley surrounding the camp...Or he has seen the movie more often than i have, and spotted more stuff. )

There is also a list of dinos the hunters had been evidently captured before the havoc, which helped a lot with the cage building. (The cages have been made in hammer, and then compiled into models. However the tool handling this, Propper, doesn't work that well with concave collisions, so the model's config file needs to be edited a little, then compiled with Crowbar.)

I quickly read through that article and see a few points in the description that have no definitive proof - that it was "near a small creek" (presumably because there's a shot of Sarah and Vince Vaughan walking away from a pool of water soon after?) and that it was located on the north-eastern side of Isla Sorna, which I'm going to guess is stated there because somebody saw the old JP Legacy map of Isla Sorna and took it as fact, even though we now know that JPL's maps were mostly just guesswork - unless of course there's a shot of Sorna somewhere in the movie with the camp's location visible.
My problem with the JP wiki isn't that it uses guesswork (something that HAS to be done since there isn't a huge amount of detailed JP information out there), but that it presents this guesswork as fact, which leads to misinformation becoming widely spread.

In any case, your hunter's camp nonetheless looks great. You got what we can physically see exactly right, and that's really the best you can do without having been there on-set. Beyond that, it's all up to your imagination.

TheIdiot wrote: I quickly read through that article and see a few points in the description that have no definitive proof - that it was "near a small creek" (presumably because there's a shot of Sarah and Vince Vaughan walking away from a pool of water soon after?) and that it was located on the north-eastern side of Isla Sorna, which I'm going to guess is stated there because somebody saw the old JP Legacy map of Isla Sorna and took it as fact, even though we now know that JPL's maps were mostly just guesswork - unless of course there's a shot of Sorna somewhere in the movie with the camp's location visible.
My problem with the JP wiki isn't that it uses guesswork (something that HAS to be done since there isn't a huge amount of detailed JP information out there), but that it presents this guesswork as fact, which leads to misinformation becoming widely spread.

In any case, your hunter's camp nonetheless looks great. You got what we can physically see exactly right, and that's really the best you can do without having been there on-set. Beyond that, it's all up to your imagination.

Trespasser (scrapped) version was near riverbed.

https://youtu.be/kXXVtdZmw8c?t=1307

I am so glad Glitch recorded the early levels.

I'm unsure whatever the devs really had a good location for the camp. I guess some parts of PH would've ended up being changed in order to make it work.
I've also been thinking lately that both the T-Rex and Jeep was just added as eye candy to anyone who tested it (similar to IJ2). I'm unsure that would be in the "final" anyway.

tatu wrote:I am so glad Glitch recorded the early levels.

I'm unsure whatever the devs really had a good location for the camp. I guess some parts of PH would've ended up being changed in order to make it work.
I've also been thinking lately that both the T-Rex and Jeep was just added as eye candy to anyone who tested it (similar to IJ2). I'm unsure that would be in the "final" anyway.

You are right, it doesn't match the developer walkthrough.

However Trespasserguy's version is clearly based on it. (I'm too using the developer walkthrough to get an idea of the surrounding area,
so there are some similarities with Trespasserguy's version. The camp structure itself is based on the movie as accurately as possible.)

Pretty neat stuff. There is a substantial, fairly accurate recreation of the Hunters Camp as seen in the film, with the removed laser fence added in, in JPDS~trails. Would be interesting to compare the versions. (Sadly JPDS had no humvees available..)

hunter_camp_v170010 by Michael -, on Flickr

hunter_camp_v170012 by Michael -, on Flickr

hunter_camp_v170011 by Michael -, on Flickr

Have I already said that I like it...?

And don't worry about not being able to include the harbor area of the Lab level, originally they were separate. (The coastal area was called "shore" and was later integrated into the lab; it may have included the Geothermal Plant from Pine Valley, too, though it's not clear what the "delimiter barrier" between the actual Pine Valley and the GTP would have been if that was the case...)

Keep it up...