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Black Mesa Nearing Completion, Trailer Released
Posted by
Soulskill
on Tue Dec 02, 2008 03:10 AM
from the silencing-naysayers dept.
from the silencing-naysayers dept.
Today, the Black Mesa Team released an impressive trailer for their remake of Half-Life . The remake is a total-conversion mod for Half-Life 2, bringing the updated graphics and AI of the Source engine to the original game. The team has been dropping hints lately that the project, which began in 2004, is almost done, and the trailer confirms that it will be out in 2009. They also recently announced that they've "dropped Counter-Strike: Source as a requirement for Black Mesa, and from now on, the only thing you'll need to play the mod is a Steam account with any Source engine game installed! Black Mesa is now running completely off of our own content and base Source shared content, and we felt the vastly increased user base more then [sic] justified creating all the extra assets needed to make this switch."
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One word! (Score:2)
Yey!
Re: (Score:2)
Ok, they got me...
I never made a steam account but I will for this mod. I've been waiting for this mod for ages now. This is definatly worth a few bucks.
Half-Life 1 is in my books simply the best game ever made. From what I gathered this mod team has really put in a lot of effort in the remake. I say bring it on...
I wish the modteam all the best in their future carreers, by the looks of it they just secured it.
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Re:One word! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Or download a demo.
The AC is right, of course -- Orange Box is worth it, or if you don't want to spend that much, Portal is absolutely worth it. But if, for some reason, you don't realize that yet, it'll probably work by downloading the Left 4 Dead demo, say.
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The demo still works fine on the 360.
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The Left 4 Dead demo no longer exists. If you have it on your Steam account, Steam will insist you don't own it and will try to get you to purchase it (which is impossible since it's a demo).
Also Source mods have NEVER been playable using a demo of a Source engine game. You need a full game, which will unlock the Source SDK Base (and Source SDK Base - Orange Box) which needs to be installed to play Source mods.
One word!:R6034 (Score:2)
And make certain it doesn't generate any R6034 [overclock.net] errors.
Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
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Fingers crossed (Score:2)
As much as I hope this mod pulls off the feel of the original Half Life, I think an even bigger hope will be for the mod to be actually finished.
Either way, I hope these guys get the recognition and financial success they deserve.
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I agree. While I give them my emotional support ("Go, go, go!"), I can't be too excited until the mod is finished and released. Showing a trailer is nice and all, but if I can't play it, then the trailer is just a tease.
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Either way, I hope these guys get the recognition and financial success they deserve.
I agree. This has to be some kind of record in terms of the breadth of effort put into a mod. They apparently re-designed all the levels of a full game, re-created the models in higher resolution, added additional models, made new cut scenes (and I would think the HL style of cut scene where the player retains control are harder to do well), and did original voice acting. I've been reading their dev blog and it sounds like they've done some relatively low-level tweaking of the base game mechanics as well
Legalities (Score:5, Interesting)
Are they legally allowed to do this if Half-Life is still for sale and as Half-Life: Source exists?
When we built a port of the original Teamfortress Valve came to us and made it quite clear we can't use the same set of weapons, names for classes and so forth because that would infringe on their IP even though all our assets and code were built by us from scratch. This was admittedly for a different, competing engine to Valve so I suppose it's slightly different and looking back I can imagine thus Valve probably weren't completely honest about what we could legally do.
I'm suprised Valve are willing to allow this if it will risk the admittedly small sales of Half-Life they may still get or do they feel this will instead increase sales of newer source engine games?
Of course the other question is how is this any different from Half-Life source?
Still I don't want to detract too much from the achievement this is. Releasing a mod of this scale can truly be a time consuming task that requires a lot of effort and discipline and I have to congratulate them on reaching this point. I truly hope Valve don't waste their time with a last minute cease and desist!
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Re:Legalities (Score:4, Insightful)
And with the original HL now for sale for less than a dollar on steam combined with the fact you will be paying a minimum of $10 to be able to play this (must own a "source" game already), I don't think Valve will mind at all, the fact this has gotten so far along without them nay-saying is likely a good sign.
Parent
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That was a 10th anniversary sale that only lasted for a few days. It's back up to 10 bucks now, and has been for a few weeks.
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Plus, I believe that this mod was originally called "Black Mesa Source" (hence the website URL), but Valve requested the name change so that it wouldn't be confused with an official project. If they didn't approve of the project at all, they would have just shut them down then instead of only requesting a name change.
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Valve certainly knows this exists, and did not object to it; their only interference was requesting it not to be called Black Mesa: Source, as once planned, so people wouldn't think it is an official mod.
Half-Life:Source took the original game and moved it to the Source engine. Same old models, same old levels, same old textures
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Valve has mentioned Black Mesa more than once in Steam news updates, usually shortly after Black Mesa releases a media update. They've said they're really looking forward to it. As such, Black Mesa has been officially sanctioned by Valve, and there should be no legal concerns. It'd be very strange for Valve to sue them after promoting them.
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When we built a port of the original Teamfortress Valve came to us...
Seriously? You were part of that first Source port of TF? I mean, no offense, but I would have imagined a dev on a project like that would know the huge difference between HL:Source and Black Mesa.
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No, I've not done any mod work with Valve engines, as mentioned in my previous post it was for a competing engine.
I've not really had much to do with Valve engines at all other than playing through their games without really playing with available mods or their mod tools bar a little bit of mapping for the original Half-Life many years ago.
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Re:Legalities (Score:4, Interesting)
I was fortunate enough to work on quite a few good mods through the years but it was the politics that put me off in the end.
There's a lot of time wasters out there and you find yourself spending a lot of time dealing with them. As your mod picks up pace you can start to get some good people on board and not deal with this but getting their is tough. When you do get there you still have the issue of people having differing visions and sometimes showing their true colours when they don't get their own way and stuff like that.
This is why I have to have a lot of respect for people behind projects like this here because I know all too well what the hazards are in getting this far. Building a mature team that's willing to accept a single person in charge of the actual vision of the mod/game whilst having someone capable of carrying that vision through in a solid manner and not pandering to personal nags or people on the team simply not adhering to that vision is easily as hard as actually producing the game assets and code- particular in a distributed environment like many mod teams across the internet.
The alternative is to go it alone and build code based mods- presumably this is how Garry's mod started, I don't know if that's still that way if it ever was but his mod is about the only HL2 mod I tried and even then only shortly after it's early releases but it was pretty fun to play around with.
Parent
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I think all considerations of legality are rendered moot when Gabe Newell knows about the project and says: "Dude, you can call it 'Black Mesa' but you can't call it 'Black Mesa: Source' because 'Source' makes it look like an official Valve product."
In other words, would it be illegal to do so without the original author's permission? Probably. But it's quite clear that Valve has said: "Go on, you crazy kids, have fun, go nuts!"
How is this different from Half-Life: Source?
HL:S was redesigned with the HL2
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Yeah, you pretty much summed up what I was going to say. Everything you said was accurate except for the DOS thing.
"Half-Life: Source" was done as a proof-of-concept. In other words, Valve made Half-Life: Source, to find out how long it would take a mod-team to port from the GoldSrc/HL engine to the Source/HL2 engine.
If I am not mistaken, the end result of Half-Life: Source is the exact same as the original Half-Life. The only value added is shiny water and rag-doll physics. Which to be quite honest, Ha
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They likely didn't discourage you to continue on your mod because of the original TF but because of their own sequel, TF2, already in the works, which would have had to compete against a similar product without a pricetag. "Nah, don't buy the lame
Modding hints at future OSS gaming (Score:2)
Though modders have a completely different ethics about free/non-free they do put lots of work into stuff they basically give away for free (beer). The entire community is one the FOSS crowd should look into, as it hints towards the quality we can expect once the race for better GFX is over and we've reached realistic RT rendering and OSS engines finally can catch up.
Right now modders use the best engine they can get (often Valves Source for Windows nowadays) and the best tools they can get (non-commercial
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By all rights, we should have a good open source game engine already.
Technically, we do, they're just a generation behind -- but there's still quite a lot of good open source mods for Quake 2 and 3.
But it always frustrated me how pitifully slow CrystalSpace development seemed to be -- and how pitifully slow the results were to run.
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Please don't knock the FOSS programming crowd.
Applications don't normally get as much interest as do games and if you do show a genuine interest in a FOSS project as a potential user with some good ideas, they do normally listen to what you have to say - just bear in mind that these people have a "because it's there" attitude and if you express positive and negative things about what they're programming, they're generally very receptive.
And if we're talking FOSS games, then let's not forget World Of Padman,
HL1 is the greatest game ever. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, I do not know if HL1 is the greatest game ever; for me it was. I never had so much fun with a computer game. The reason? a note from the article that I really liked may shed some light into it:
"Maybe I'm leaning too much on fond remembrance here, but I prefer the isolated, solitary feel of the first Half-Life to the more character-driven atmosphere in the sequel."
I couldn't agree more! I like HL2, but it did not give you the isolated solitary feel of HL1. I really like FPS games that put me as the solo action hero against the universe. I really miss FPS games of this kind. I have put all my hopes on DNF, but it seems like it will never be released...
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"Maybe I'm leaning too much on fond remembrance here, but I prefer the isolated, solitary feel of the first Half-Life to the more character-driven atmosphere in the sequel."
I couldn't agree more! I like HL2, but it did not give you the isolated solitary feel of HL1. I really like FPS games that put me as the solo action hero against the universe. I really miss FPS games of this kind. I have put all my hopes on DNF, but it seems like it will never be released...
I find that sort of thing can get rather boring. Half-Life 2 I thought was a great technical exercise but a tremendously boring game. Why? They got the storytelling all mucked up. Half-Life was a breath of fresh air after Doom because of how much further they pushed the ideas. Doom was just about shooting crazy monsters. Quake was nothing special, just shades of brown and no other shooter had really beat Doom at its own game. Now here comes Half-Life simulating a world with speech, characters, all this shit
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I wouldn't necessarily say, though, that they "mucked the story and pacing." It does definitely have a different feel, because the setting is completely different. HL1 was all about Gordon Freeman, one man just trying to survive. HL2 was about Gordon Freeman, somewhat of a legend but still just one piece in a planet-wide war.
Everyone was going on about how cool the striders were. Where? I didn't see cool, I saw yawn. It didn't feel like a war. That Medal of Honor game in the late 90's, was it Allied Assault? The one with the huge D-Day mission. That felt like a war. And those same guys went on to do the Call of Duty games. Those felt like huge wars. The river crossing at Stalingrad was unbelievable.
It's all a matter of the imagination of the designers working with the tools they had at hand. We've seen limited 8-bit games that
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Alyx was the worst part (Score:2)
Especially in Ep. 1 when she tagged around with you pretty much THE WHOLE TIME, and gave you directions, directed your attention, etc. ("There must be a fuse box around here. Gordan, see if you can find it.")
How would it be to play HL1 with Alyx? http://www.flickr.com/photos/23108889@N06/2212589455/ [flickr.com]
It got worse in Ep. 2 when SHE forced y
Thanks, been waiting for this for a long time. (Score:2)
if this mod team isn't already pro, they've just written their own ticket.
The work I see is excellent. very polished stuff.
Diablo Source. (Score:2)
I'd so love some modders to try doing total conversions of non-FPS games.
Can you imagine replaying an action RPG from the inside? RTS?
Zealot-Life.
Half-Diablo.
Guitar Hero, Angry Mob. "After his first try at Through the Fire and Flames, The hero tries to get back home alive."
For the next project, I've got just two words: (Score:2)
Well nuts (Score:2)
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The only downside was it's only the first episode. Of course, that could have changed, last I looked at it was at least 2 years ago. But it ruled.
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It does look very promising and I'm looking forward to it more eagerly than any commercial game (with the possible exception of World of Goo, which I haven't had time to get yet). I particularly like the attention to detail: the care taken over the G-man's expression, the cockroach at the end offering a taste of the bugs they're building in, the wonderful lighting in the tram ride, and so on.
At first I thought it looked like the tentacle creature had some minor clipping issues with the railing -- but then i
How about Deus Ex and System Shock 1/2? (Score:2)
I'd rather see more-or-less faithful recreations of Deus Ex and the two System Shock games.
I've seen projects that claim they're working on them, but I'm pretty sure none of them will ever finish :(
Hell, I'd pay $50 for a professional modern remake of any one of those games, especially if they got some better voice acting for certain parts of Deus Ex.
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Ha, agreed. I love the whole trilogy (yes, even the much-hated 3)
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Actually the loading zones couldn't have been eliminated on the PC version. Don't think people didn't try, once the level editor was released. But the architecture doesn't actually line up, and it would be a heck of a lot of work to fix everything and make the levels work. Not to mention that the engine simply couldn't have handled it on the hardware of the day. Things were jerky
Re:PS3 (Score:5, Funny)
Cower before the might of our mods, puny console gamers!
Parent
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Err.... It's free. It isn't being released by Valve either.