Success! Of A Sort.

Inspiration hit me pretty hard yesterday.

I blame the one named Hieronymus over at The Game Chair and this link he(she?) sent me. The link leads to a multi-part site, of which one part details making an Unreal II mod. Well, a map, I suppose, but one with more dialogue variety and NPC behavior than a typical Unreal II map. Everything is well-explained and examples are shown.

So I fired up Hammer and resolved to do something.

Up until yesterday, my proficiency consisted of being able to make a solid and hollow it and paint textures. I've been able to do those things since Worldcraft was released.

I searched and searched for some good tutorials.

For a long time I've been resisting any kind of video tutorials. I like being able to jump back and forth on a page and follow things step-by-step. While, yes, this is possible with video it also takes a light touch sometimes to find the exact place you want.

But I went ahead and got a video tutorial on making rope bridges from Filefront's great archive. While the tutorial narrator has a pretty strong accent to me (welsh? not 100% positive), he is informative and thorough.

I didn't make any rope bridges. But I did find a few other sites that got me going.

Valve's Developer wiki is pretty cool. I don't like the way it's organized, but if there's something specific to search for it's useful.

Interlopers.net has a good listing and I haven't run into any broken links yet.

The final product of all this?

I made a box-shaped level with a nice skybox*, a big pool of water, a spotlight, a small shack with a usable hinged door, a citizen with RPG launcher, a physics prop car and a Strider.

And it worked great. Popping into the shack, I hear the citizen shout "Strider!" Grabbing my own RPG and some ammo, I open the door to see the poor citizen collapse under that horrible Strider gun. I retreat back into the shack and the door closes.

When I open it again, there's that damn Strider, standing right on his path_corner and squatting down to try and get at me. I run out and head for the water. As the Strider follows it kicks the car hulk around, finally launching it toward me.

Some well-placed RPGs and the monster falls.

Sure, the architecture is ugly and the textures are boring.

But I made it.

*Skybox tutorials suck. Except for the ones concerning 3d skyboxes. But for normal skyboxes, I have yet to find a tutorial that specifies that you must use the texture labeled "skybox" rather than one of the skybox textures (i.e., skybox/sky_03_06) because, well, a skybox is a collection of textures. Then, to set the actual skybox, you go to Map Properties, down the Skybox data and type in which one to use. I know, I'm an idiot. I still feel the difference was never made clear.