Black Mesa Releasing Sept. 14th

My memories of playing HL1 are so intense that this feels like a weird form of time travel.
 
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biggles said:
How do you activate cheats?

I am stuck on surface tension. The part with the dam and the apache helicopter. I don't have the ray gun or the crossbow. I am assuming you need those to destroy the helo and the giant fish? Everytime I dive into the water the giant fish and helo shots kill me before I can make it to one of the buildings in the water.
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You can use your pistol under water, on normal difficulty a whole mag will kill it no prob. As for the heli you need the Tau Cannon because I don't think you have the RPG at that time.

s0lid said:
Finished on normal and hard.

Not really hard, sure the soldiers shoot right away if they're alarmed. Hecos were a pain if you didn't position yourself properly and use right timings.
But nothing that good tactics and .357 with good aiming couldn't solve :D

Kinda sad that they removed Tau Cannons recoil/knock back effect when charged, no more fun TC boosting like in HL1. Also bunny hopping has become tricky.
Gladly there's still some speedrunnable parts.

Either way, top notch work bringing the HL1 to the modern fps era as community project, still holding to some bits that make old FPSs better than new ones.
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I think the old one was harder and longer :D <-- no pun intended lol. But yes the .357 is like the best gun besides the Tau Cannon and Gluon gun.
 
jbz7890 said:
Yes, that part is a pain. I don't remember the original game being so hard at that part.

To activate cheats type "sv_cheats 1" into the console. To activate god mode, type "god" and for no clip type "noclip 1".
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Also, you can type impulse 101 to get health & charge and all the weapons and ammo.
 
If you missed the guns and would rather play it rather than noclip/godmode, I believe it is sv_cheats 1, then player.giveitem <item#>, which you can google.
 
ballpoint said:
My memories of playing HL1 are so intense that this feels like a weird form of time travel.
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They did a good job not making things look too different. Had they been, it probably would not be nearly as weird & enjoyable.

The success of this hopefully spawns other remakes in a similar fashion, where you don't touch the game play, level design, or even much of the sounds... just give everything higher res textures and models. I'd love to see the original Quake get that kinda of treatment, for example.
 
Quake would definitely be a good one for rebuild. We've seen Quake 2 get Quake 4, and Doom get Doom 3. I want to see some new shamblers.

Q3A should not be touched.
 
I would play the shit out of that for sure..

and I just want to mention again, I am sure everyone knows about it, but Classic Doom for Doom3 is pretty cool.. (no eyefinity support though, I have tried and tried every tweak I know about- oh well).
 
biggles said:
How do you activate cheats?

I am stuck on surface tension. The part with the dam and the apache helicopter. I don't have the ray gun or the crossbow. I am assuming you need those to destroy the helo and the giant fish? Everytime I dive into the water the giant fish and helo shots kill me before I can make it to one of the buildings in the water.
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There is ammo for the ray gun in the boxes of the building right before the damn. Will take care of the helicopter real quick.

Also, you can use your pistol underwater.

I just finished this last night. WOW is all I can say. That was a completely fun and enjoyable game, I cannot believe it was free.
 
I'm eagerly awaiting the rest of the game.

I guess what most impresses me is that it definitely felt like HL1 as far as the environment and how the NPCs acted.
 
Still no steam version, the devs have signed a NDA so no one knows when it's coming out and what it will include when in launches on steam ( bug fixes ? xen ? black mesa deathmatch ? )

Sooooo , since i had the day off yesterday, after 5 hours of playing hl1 from the very start "to residual processing" i broke down, downloaded the mod and played non stop until the "on the rail " chapter

all i can say is WOW!

Everything looks so detailed and realistic, the game is excellent for both HL1 vets and HL2 newbies alike ! the AI, the voice overs, the GORGEOUS graphics that they have managed to pump out of a 8 year old engine, everything about it is 99% perfect and well worth the wait !!

I've heard some complaints about soldier AI, the mp5 and the loading times

First, the soldiers are indeed VERY lethal on hard, HL1 grunts are pretty much useless compared to them, so far it's manageable for me, even when on low health and no armor i can still manage to outsmart them with various tactics including tripmines - jack in the box etc

I have nothing bad to say about the mp5 except its sounds, feels like you're shooting with an invisible suppresor attached :S maybe they should rename it to MP5SD or something lol, the spread pattern is pretty much ok compared to the SHITTY hl2 smg, its 40mm grenade launcher is very powerfull and VERY fast , it does need a "thump" sound tho :D

now about the load times, i have the game installed on a half-full ocz vertex 60gb SSD, load times are like 7-8 secs and MUCH less frequent compared to vanilla HL1 running on goldsrc, particulary on the "blast pit" chapter !

2 things have bothered me so far, the vorts ( they look fight and sound terrible/very different compared to HL1 ) and the OST, all the music that i have heard so far sounded mediocre at best, Ed Harrison (neo tokyo mod ) should have given them some help :)
 
Loading times are maybe 10 seconds max for me...(SSD :))

I did stop playing though because of some annoyances with HL in general. Aiming down the revolver is less accurate than just shooting from the hip! lol
 
I thought the difficulty of enemies was off-centered. Soldiers were hard - Aliens easy. That should have been tweaked better......at least making the different versions more variable in difficulty.
 
finally got around to loading Black Mesa...the mark of an all time classic when you can still enjoy the game almost as much today as 10 years ago...the facial animations are 100% improved...overall the game looks really good...the extra lines of dialogue are also a great addition
 
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polonyc2 said:
finally got around to loading Black Mesa...the mark of an all time classic when you can still enjoy the game almost as much today as 10 years ago...the facial animations are 100% improved...overall the game looks really good...the extra lines of dialogue are also a great addition
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10 years ago was HL2 :eek:
HL1 is more 15
 
it's been so long since I last played Half Life that I forgot what a PITA some of those jump puzzles were...the 'Apprehension' and 'Residue Processing' levels were filled with those...doesn't help that you need to use both the crouch and jump button together to time a lot of those jumps correctly...exercise in Quicksaving
 
BMS goes retail? What does that mean for the free version? (can't view the link at work)
 
SoFGR said:
happy 15th birthday half-life + black mesa source goes retail !!!!!111!11!11ONEONE

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/BlackMesa#announcements/detail/1371639504554053878

I WANT TO PREORDER NOW !!!
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Well, considering how long I waited for Black Mesa to release and seeing how well Half Life was carried over by that team... I wouldn't mind buying it off Steam to support them. I know it took them a long long time to release it, and missed a couple release dates but the game still turned out really well. It was very faithful to the first game.

However, I am confused as to how "Xen is still a ways off," and why they felt the need to port the entire game over to a new engine. The whole point was to make it a honest recreating of Half Life on Source. Should have spent that time and money on completing Xen. Xen was not even that long as I can remember it. Lot of low gravity jumping and other small nonsense until the Nihilanth. I haven't played Half Life in a while so I could be wrong, but I remember Xen being vastly shorter than any of the other chapters of the game.
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
BMS goes retail? What does that mean for the free version? (can't view the link at work)
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They said they wouldn't stop support for it, but that the Steam version will have features you just can't get in the free version. Not sure what that means. I hope they don't mean Xen. Or perhaps you won't be able to see the game in the new engine they are apparently porting it to.
 
zamardii said:
They said they wouldn't stop support for it, but that the Steam version will have features you just can't get in the free version. Not sure what that means. I hope they don't mean Xen. Or perhaps you won't be able to see the game in the new engine they are apparently porting it to.
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They've had the most jacked up development cycle I've ever seen for a mod & now that it's going to be a commercial product, it's even worse. Why switch engines? Are they trying to copy the false glory of Duke Nukem Forever & fail horribly? I find it odd that they're going to paywall people with "locked benefits".
 
Im all for it. the best/ambitious mods always have the most screwed up development cycle. and how can you compare it to dnf they already released a very large portion of it and it is awesome.
 
Wonder how all the people who contributed to BMS and will not be paid or compensated feel about this.
 
shifty68 said:
Im all for it. the best/ambitious mods always have the most screwed up development cycle. and how can you compare it to dnf they already released a very large portion of it and it is awesome.
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Not comparing it DNF as a whole. Just pointing out that the engine switch could be chaotic & lead them down the long road of delays & empty promises.
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
Not comparing it DNF as a whole. Just pointing out that the engine switch could be chaotic & lead them down the long road of delays & empty promises.
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zamardii said:
However, I am confused as to how "Xen is still a ways off," and why they felt the need to port the entire game over to a new engine. The whole point was to make it a honest recreating of Half Life on Source. Should have spent that time and money on completing Xen. Xen was not even that long as I can remember it. Lot of low gravity jumping and other small nonsense until the Nihilanth. I haven't played Half Life in a while so I could be wrong, but I remember Xen being vastly shorter than any of the other chapters of the game.
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I'm assuming it's not an entirely new engine, just a newer version of Source. I say this because of the "One is we believe we can make the game even better by having full access to the Source engine." line in that post. Do modders have access to the latest versions of Source from CS:GO and DOTA 2? Or are they stuck on an older version such as the EP2/TF2 version? Because having full access to the source engine would be pointless if they were porting to another engine. So, i'm putting my money on their being features or tools that are available only to those licensing the source engine for retail releases.

EDIT: Maybe not. From the lead dev on the BMS forums: "You should really fix your title wording. We aren't taking features away from the free version. The free version of the game has been ported to Source 2013. Right now, that version is functionally equivalent to the released version of Black Mesa we released a year ago. When we got on greenlight, we were forced to move to another engine. Right now, we can't tell you what that engine is due to our licensing agreement. Being on this new engine allows us to change how the engine works, modify tools, etc; things we plain and simply cannot do for the free version. I plan to open source the black mesa code for the free version. I also want the paid version to be open source (only client and server, nothing else) but we need to talk to VALVe about that. We want both versions of the game to be as moddable as possible. I don't have a timetable on that part just yet.
"
 
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zamardii said:
I haven't played Half Life in a while so I could be wrong, but I remember Xen being vastly shorter than any of the other chapters of the game.
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Yea it was pretty short, it fealt like 1 or 2 levels.

I guess the organic nature of it makes it more time consuming to update. And that final boss was pretty big/complex compared to others. The only way I'd pay for BM is if they did the Xen level well though, because I really enjoyed that in the original game.
 
zamardii said:
They said they wouldn't stop support for it, but that the Steam version will have features you just can't get in the free version. Not sure what that means. I hope they don't mean Xen. Or perhaps you won't be able to see the game in the new engine they are apparently porting it to.
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achievements and hats ;)
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
Not comparing it DNF as a whole. Just pointing out that the engine switch could be chaotic & lead them down the long road of delays & empty promises.
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I agree. That's the one thing I simply can't wrap my head around. There is no reason to port the game to another engine, but whatever.
 
As long as they aren't taking anything away from the free version, I'm up for whatever. I'll be buying the paid version and can't wait to see what they can/will do with the new engine. If nothing else, we still have Black Mesa, which despite multiple, multiple delays and doesn't include Xen, was excellently done. That sentence needs more commas.
 
what happened with the remaining Xen levels?...are they ever going to be released?
 
It's official, HL3 confirmed.

You see, they're going to bundle BM:S, HL2, + EP1 and EP2 and sell it as a package deal. But when you complete the transaction, and/or enter the activation key, you don't get those games, but Half-Life 3 mysteriously appears in your Library instead.

I'm calling it now.
 
castun said:
In another ten years. Just in time for HL3!
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Probably. Black Mesa itself looked dated, even for a Source game. When the graphical remake looks dated you know you're taking too long. By the time the remaining levels come out, HL2 will look as dated as HL1 did when HL2 released.

... and a remake of HL1 or HL2 on a new engine will have begun. :p
 
Black Mesa looked fine, not sure which game you were playing.
 
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