robotriot

Our Half-Life 2 Deathmatch mod Babel Babel is finished! Well, sort of. There’s still a bunch of bugs and unfinished stuff in it, but it’s playable. You can grab it over at the Babel Babel website.

In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to create a deadly trapdoor triggered by throwing physics objects at a certain point. In our HL2DM mod Babel Babel, the teams playing against each other have the option of throwing boxes lying around the arena at targets on the other teams’ side of the level that trigger a series of trapdoors in the ground. If one of the enemy teams’ players happens to be standing over one of these hidden trapdoors, he will face his certain death at the bottom of the pit.

I had some trouble getting this trapdoor to work at first, since it seemed to work fine – as long as no player was standing on it at the moment it was triggered. In this case, it simply refused to open at all. After browsing the net a bit I found several hints on how to make the trapdoor work correctly and combined them in the following tutorial. As always, you should already be a little familiar with Hammer, because I won’t tell you all the icons you have to click on.

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Babel Babel got a major graphical update yesterday, the lighting looks much better now, with shadows finally being visibly cast into the arena. Most of the time we were struggling with the usual problems you get when you’re exporting models from Maya for HL2. Textures not working, invisible props etc. We’ve had all these problems before, but somehow you always forget one of the 1000 possible solutions that you have to use this time. We also had a bunch of ideas on how to improve the look even further, so stay tuned for more updates in the future. You can take a look at a bunch of screenshots at the new website for the game here.

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This is the second in my series of HL2DM mapping tutorials. Today, I will demonstrate a way to restart your map in HL2DM, without losing the teams’ scores and resetting physics objects that might be scattered around your map. We needed such a game mechanic in our mod, because it’s based on “rounds”, where each team can score, and then the map should reset. This is very specific to our mod, but I think you can always use parts of the techniques explained here for your own map. Again, there might be easier ways to do this, but this one works for me so far.

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I’m currently working on a mod for Half-Life 2 Deathmatch for our game development course at the FHS. I’ve decided it might be a good idea to share some of the things I’ve learned creating the game logic with Valve’s Hammer editor. Since nobody in our team can code, we have to entirely create the game with Hammer. Of course, this severely limits our possibilities, especially since we’re creating a multiplayer mod, and Valve disallowed pretty much all commands to be executed on clients. However, I found out that there are usually always a couple of things you can do to create interesting and different gameplay in HL2DM nevertheless. If I’m motivated enough, I’ll make an entire series of tutorials to cover the creation of our mod, but we’ll see. The tutorials are aimed at people who already know their way around the editor.

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