"I think you could argue that the main character in Half-Life is Black Mesa itself," says Engels. Our team is talented, but it’s vastly different to modernise hallways than to create an alien world completely from scratch."Īs for the Black Mesa facility itself, the team went above and beyond merely remaking the existing levels. "It’s both mechanical and organic, which is a difficult balance to strike. "Our biggest challenge was designing the Xenian technology," says Engels. "The online world can seem like it wants everyone to fail, and to have a community that wants us to succeed… well, we never take it for granted." Adam Engels, project leader Even if we built a 1:1 replica of the old levels (which we haven’t), we still have to ask ourselves: how was this supposed to look?" It’s unclear whether this weird place was supposed to be as barren as it is, or if Valve had intended it to be much more elaborate and detailed. "With the earth-based assets, even if they were super vague due to technical limitations, we at least had an idea of how Valve wanted them to look," says Engels. When Valve created Xen, technical and time limitations had an impact on how it looked. We want the borderworld to feel like a place that exists, even if we humans don’t have the capacity to understand it." "In the end we wanted to build a world that is bizarre but contiguous. "We made the design with these in mind," says Engels. They’ve all been remade and expanded, and some sections Valve had to cut out were reintroduced. In the original game, what most refer to simply as ‘Xen’ is actually five chapters: Xen, Gonarch’s Lair, Interloper, Nihilanth and Endgame. "We can tell you from our own experience that taking your game to a new world is more challenging than it looks on paper." "We see a lot of support for the old Xen on our Steam forums." The consensus in the community, he adds, is that Valve ran out of time and wasn’t able to iterate on the alien levels like they did with the rest of the game. "I think the dislike of those levels might have grown in our minds as time has gone on," he says. We’ve been using Google Docs recently and they’ve been a huge help."Įngels thinks history has been crueller to Xen than it deserves. "We try to schedule a few meetings or playtests where everyone can get involved. "We try and use chat to work out specific problems, then use forums to document what we talked about so we can refer to it later." Time zones are one of the biggest hurdles for such a disconnected team, and it’s basically impossible to get everyone together at once.
"We use chat programs and online forums," says Engels. That's about all there is to it.The team doesn’t work in one office, which can make orchestrating such a huge project difficult. A value of about 100 generally works for glass, but you can experiment and choose something that suits you. 255 is fully opaque, and 1 is transparent. To make your glass translucent, open your new brush's property sheet (right-click it), set Render Mode to Texture, and type some numerical value between 1 and 255 in FX Amount. You will find that almost all of the brush-based entities you can create in Hammer have these basic properties: Material Type should be Glass, and everything else can stay as it is. If you are using the func_breakable, set Gibs Direction to Relative to Attack (looks a bit cooler this way). Obviously if you'd prefer indestructible glass you'll have to use something different - try func_wall. Choose func_breakable from the entity list that pops up. Once you've created your brush, right-click it and select Tie to Entity. Double-click the texture you want, and create a simple cube somewhere. Click Browse on the texture panel in Hammer, and type 'glass' into the filter box. Only when it's an entity can it be translucent and breakable, and it's not difficult to set up.įirst you need your brush. any brush with one of the 'glass' textures covering it), it will just look like any other object.
If you create a slab of glass in Hammer (i.e. There's nothing particularly special about Half-Life's glass, apart from its unique bullet marks.