Scornkeeper

Did you know that in Hammer, if your selection is obstructed by something (like a transparent model), you can click Page Down to "cycle selection" and select what's behind the obstruction?

In SLE the hotkey's shared with '3' (faster to reach).
(Page Up and '4' do the same in opposite direction)

It should be compatible with Mapbase, I've made many maps under Mapbase mods with it. I'm not sure what HL2 VR is, however. If it's made with Source SDK 2013 then it should be.

In a traditional, historic, even, fashion, I forgot a vital file. This has been rectified and the GitHub releases were both updated with it.

It comes with offline help file, like Worldcraft 3.x. Online wiki will be put up soon, also on GitHub.

Everything important should be included in either the readme or the help file.

I will also be replying to this post, building a chain, highlighting or explaining various bits.

Presenting Source Level Editor - my personal fork of Hammer.

I've been working on this for a few years, tuning it to my mapping style, with bugfixes, some automation, expanded functions, even a couple new tools.

Now it's available for everyone interested on my GitHub.

github.com/Cvoxalury/so...

Concrete Scorn.

Make a *pasechnik* simulator where you maintain your apiary by adding fresh bees to empty hives to get honey.

Hivehand thornets are technically monsters, so a trigger multiple with Monsters flag can detect them, making the Hivehand a viable ranged trigger tool.

A photo of my warez copy of Half-Life 2 from 2005, published by an (in)famous distributor "Fargus".

September 2005.
New school year begins and I learn from classmates about a new-ish game "Half-Life 2" (had no Internet, didn't read gaming magazines, didn't know).

I've been playing HL2 for 20 years now. While I have many favourite games, this one's the dearest, and must've influenced me the most.

HL2 Lost Coast Trivia

Those who pay extreme attention may notice that each time you start Lost Coast, a board falls from the sky and splashes near the Fisherman.

This is because on spawn, one of the boards on Helicopter arena clips into scaffolding collisions and gets forced out by the physics.

Bird poop decals intended by the developers of Lost Coast, viewed in editor. The entities are too far from the rock to apply to it.

The fixed bird poop viewed in the game. The entities were moved to the right spot and given proper class and inputs to work.

HL2 Lost Coast Trivia.

A rock near the ship wreck was intended to have seagull poop splattered over it. Except, it was moved during development. The decals ended up being too far from it, & they use the wrong class (work only on brushes).

Not to worry: just shy of 20 years later, I fixed it all.

HL2 EP2 nonsense:

Sifting through the code, came across command "striderbuster_allow_all_damage 0". It prevents anyone but player from detonating Magnusson Devices.

"Sweet", I thought, "I'll just switch it on and let rebels blow up Striders w/ bombs."

Well it works. But it also blows up the game.

A screenshot from the official Episode Two trailer.

The broken crate with pumpkins which Sweepy promptly begins to sweep away. The screenshot is taken on the same early map version as the trailer shot. In the final game, a similar script is there, but involves a server rack being pulled instead of the crate, and nothing breaks. Sweepy's still there, too, but sweeps at nothing but dust.

The last part of the trail: cut, but not forgotten.
The EP2 Trailer shows a control room near the rocket's engines. That early map has a script w/ rebels dropping a crate; bunch of stuff spills out. Including pumpkins.

So, rebels had a pumpkin operation spanning the region.
Also, Sweepy's there.

3 pumpkins at the entrance to the barn on the abandoned farm in Episode Two.

More pumpkins next to a crashed truck on the road connecting the White Forest Inn to White Forest base. There are 4 pumpkins total, only 3 are visible in the picture.

HL2 EP2 Trivia: The Pumpkin Trail

Ep2 adds pumpkins. The first 3 can be found at the farm before the Advisor. There're dead rebels; stands to reason they visited/used the farm. Station 21 isn't very far.

Next 4 are after White Forest Inn, on the road to WF Base. The inn also was used by rebels.

The unused animation "lamarr_space" has her floating motionlessly.

The script that rolls the credits on the pre-release version of ep2_outland_12a also calles for a "viewcontrol.lamarr" 3 seconds before rolling the credits. The viewcontrol entity itself is not found on this map.

HL2 EP2 Trivia:

It's been known since 2007 that Ep2 Lamarr has an unused animation "lamarr_space" where she's floating.

Only now I found out the pre-release version of Ep2's last level, from March 2007, calls for a Lamarr camera entity before rolling credits. The entity, however, is missing.

It is possible to do, but it wasn't in the scope for DI. Once upon a time I built a system for Cremators to find corpses and burn them. It worked on smells (all that underlying framework is intact in Source). Another matter is making lines for NPCs to comment on smells (Alyx has some in EP1...)

For those wondering about the practical side: look at ::Event_KillOther(...) in npc_alyx_episodic.cpp (or these DI enemies). The useful part is where CreateCustomTarget(...) is.

Bonus trivia: the only other enemy that uses that function is the Hunter (though for a different purpose).

The reason it was implemented is, frankly, just for fun. The Alyx's code was noticed by accident and sounded useful. It sells the more chaotic/scared/cruel AI and sometimes even leads to gibbing the corpse, so it was a nice synergy, since corpse gibbing is also an added feature in DI.

DI Trivia (it's been a while):

DI's Combine Soldiers, Metrocops, Citizens, and Stalkers have extra AI to shoot already dead enemies "for good measure". It may seem trivial, accidental and hard to notice, but it was intentionally copied from Alyx's Episodic AI (the only such instance in the games).

While it is well known that since the 2010 engine update it was harder to outrun the train, I believe it had nothing to do with the speed of the train, and everything to do with the buggy's script, that has changed across the years. I wonder if the latest update changes the train or the buggy?

HL2 Trivia:

I've examined the Bridge Point train's speed across the years.

2004: max speed is 800. "game of chicken" trigger starts the train w/ speed of 245.
2006: 800/245
2009, before Orange Box engine switch: 800/245
2013-2024: 800/245
2024, Anniversary update: 800/240
2025: ??? (info pending)

Top left - screenshot of Ravenholm's pistol, taken at 12:40 of Noclip's main documentary video. Bottom left - HL2 pistol viewmodel texture. Top right - same screenshot from video, with elements of texture painted in different colours. Bottom right - HL2 pistol viewmodel texture with the same colours used to relate parts of the texture to where it is on the model.

HL2 investigation:

The broken pistol texture in Arkane's Ravenholm is the usual pistol texture from HL2; they must've changed the UV and not the texture. I painted the recognisable elements here. The dead giveaway to me is the little circle above the index fingertip, comes from the grip part.

Fascinating. There's a conceptually similar thing in Source ($blendtintbybasealpha) that I love using for things like cars but it hadn't occured to me GldSrc had it all along too. Do you use it for any other env objects?

It's soon after you leave Alyx (after talking with Eli through the glass). After you crawl through a vent into a corridor with a bunch of fast headcrabs and a laser mine, there'll be a soldier ambush. In the corridor where they come from, there's two turrets. The camera is above them.

An abandoned/shelled house from Half-Life 2's Highway 17 (d2 coast 03).

The same shot on the updated version of the location.

Ditto.

Ditto.

HL2, decided to freshen up this area for a side project.

The amusing brush camera in Entanglement's first level, d2_prison_06.

The other brush security camera in Entanglement's last level, d2_prison_08.

Yet another brush security camera in Entanglement's last level, d2_prison_08.

In HL2, I've always loved this crude brush security camera in the first level of Entanglement. Now I just found out it has two counterparts in its last level, albeit tucked away in an out of bounds area. They serve to guide actual camera entities when Alyx uses the monitors.

If you see this, quote post with a robot that isn't from Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who or Transformers.

Robot Grunt from Half-Life

Effect in action:

Flowmapped toxic sludge before entering Arlene's workshop.

Flowmapped toxic sludge before outside Arlene's workshop.

Flowmapped toxic sludge reflecting a building.

A canal filled with flowmapped toxic sludge.

HL2: a test of replacing regular toxic slime (lightmappedgeneric that uses a cubemap) with flowmapped water shader (based on Alien Swarm) that combines realtime reflection and flowing sludge layer on top.

The window on the first staircase, edited to render the white brush invisible, and broken by throwing junk at the glass. The brick wall behind it is encased in its own sky box, like in the first post.

Turns out there's another such window on the first staircase, facing the raid corridor. Both windows are also set up to be breakable, but they share data, so breaking one affects the other.