Half-Life 2 Source Engine Project

[Square Bottle]

A friend of mine came to me and asked me to help him out with something. Of course, I agreed to help however I could, and thus have signed on as the web design guy in his project. He came to me wondering if I could help him out with the programming aspect of his project, which is a mod for Half-Life 2. I'm not familiar with the source engine though (I'm not familiar with most programming stuff yet, to be honest), but I agreed to help him try to find people who could give him pointers or something. Anyway, I'll let him describe his own project:

"This is a project for bringing an original half-life mod up to speed with new textures, polygon levels, and special effects. Experienced/somewhat experienced/eager to help out all welcome!"

So yeah. I imagine this wouldn't be the most difficult project in the world, but if you think you could help or if you could just help nudge us in the right direction, then just post a reply or PM me and maybe you'll be famous or something.

Thanks.

[ed]

I wouldn't bother with the Source engine. Why? Steam.

The HL is only a modified Quake engine and HL2 still uses code from Quake. Since the Quake source code has been GPL'd there have been a number of Quake engines which can play HL maps. The best of these is Darkplaces. I'd suggest you look at Darkplaces because then rather than releasing an old HL mod as a mod for HL2, you could release it as a whole standalone game under the GPL. That's much better.

Darkplaces is graphically more advanced than Half-life 2, you just need to create good enough content for it which it looks like you'd be doing anyway.

I do have quite a bit of experience with Quake 1, it's mods, engines and have done some game design work.

[Square Bottle]

I'll definitely be passing this on to my friend. Thanks for the info.

In fact, I'll see if I can get him to come here directly and post for himself.

[Zeus Hands]

Hey, I was asked to post here. My main question is how quickly I can dish out a pre-alpha, just to give everyone some hope that this might actually happen.

[Square Bottle]

Hey, I was asked to post here. My main question is how quickly I can dish out a pre-alpha, just to give everyone some hope that this might actually happen.

( This is the friend I was talking about who came to me. )

[cvill64]

It depends on your coding ability ....

[Zeus Hands]

from what ed said it would be as simple as adding the quake content of the game. Should be a simple port right?

[ed]

Not strictly simple but probably easier than porting to HL2. First thing to try is download the latest stable Darkplaces engine and put your HL1 mod underneath it and try running it. Darkplaces normally gives quite useful error codes so see what you get. I would expect that progs.dat would cause it to error (it should do) which means that you'll have to do some QC. If you need content or an example of a DP based game, take a look at Nexuiz. The SVN repo is open to the public (I've no longer got the link but search the alientrap.org forum) so you can see all of their development work including game code.