(1/9/2002)

I'm feeling confident enough to give my project a working title - The Best Laid Plans. The name was chosen because a recurring theme throughout the story is plans going awry - for both Gordon and the Administrator. After all, why should they get off any easier than I am in creating this level?

(1/9/2002)

In the last chapter I managed to create the basic section of mine tunnel that, with many variations, will make up most of the first map or two in this level. Now I need to add the details that will make this section of tunnel into an entrance area. I've added an outdoor area, complete with a custom sky, so that you can see where Gordon has come from.

The sky texture is Morning Mountains by SuperCrazy, the foreground trees are from ED_terrain by Evile Dick, and the grass is from IK2K by Likka "Fingers" Kernen. All were downloaded from The Wadfather.

The entrance shown here will be blocked with phoney barricade of boards that Barney will be putting back in place as the level opens. The idea is to create the illusion that this little mine is part of a much larger world. The barricade will prevent the player - if he/she was so inclined - from bravely running away. Not that they could get far - the great wide world out there is a room only 512 units deep and 1152 units wide.

This brings me to my next challenge: Barney needs to close the barricade as the level starts, and then should give the player some instructions, or at least a greeting. The barricade is no problem, that's just a rotating door. Making Barney look like he's closing it is the problem. This will require a scripted sequence or two, and a multi manager.

There are surprisingly few good tutorials out there on how to do this. Complicating matters is the fact that many of the tutorial links on The Handy Vandal's Almanac are outdated. I finally found what I needed at Valve-ERC, under entities. There are a number of tutorials by Autolycus (I think) that proved very helpful.

The key to all of this is a multi_manager that is started by a trigger_once placed directly beneath the info_player_start. The multi_manager causes Barney to walk to the barricade (rotating door), appear to pull at it as the "rotating door" activates and closes, then Barney turns and greets the player. The hard part is getting all these events to coordinate properly.

(1/24/2002)

When Barney turns and greets the player, I couldn't settle for a stock sentence like "Hello sir". No that just wouldn't do. I wanted him to say something that was unique and related to the mission. Since I don't know anyone who can sound like Barney, I figured I could just cut words from his existing sentences, and paste them together to make him say what I want (did I say the hard part was getting the events to coordinate? ).

All of Half-Life's sentences are in .wav format, so the first order of business was to obtain a .wav editor. Everyone's first choice for this is SoundForge - but at over $400 it's a bit too pricey for me. Most people's second choice is GoldWave, a shareware that costs $35. I'm even cheaper than that (and, in unregistered form GoldWave has some annoying limitations), so I went looking for freeware. I found several, but the two best ones are WaveFlow and ProWave. Three other decent freeware .wav editors available are Audacity, Encounter2000, and SoundEngine. Each has some unique features, and before I'm done I'll probably use all five.

Then came the hard part. It was easy enough to pick out the words I needed from the existing sentences and paste them together in the order I wanted, but they sounded very unnatural. Getting the finished product to sound right was difficult, and required a lot of playing around with the sound filters, as well grafting parts of words together to get just the right inflection. This has proved to be tedious, time consuming work, and I expect to be tinkering with it for some time.

Having created this new composite sentence, the next task was to get Barney to actually speak it in the game. This was accomplished by first putting the .wav file into the Sound\Barney folder, and then modifying the Sentences.txt file. In the Sentnces.txt file I went to the end of the section for Barney, and added

"BA_BPL01" being the sentence name I will enter in the scripted sequence, and "barney/greet1" being the folder/name of the .wav file.

It worked! Barney now gives the greeting I put together.

Return to Top