Half Life with Neuro related mods?

[glossy hollow]

With the addition of a workshop to half life 2 as part of the 20th anniversary update and since you've played the portal series with neuro on stream, you could try Black Mesa (which also has workshop support) and Half Life 2 with neuro.

[ebon silo]

[glossy hollow]

The thing is, while workshop support can make things chaotic and fun, I wouldn’t want it to become so chaotic that it shifts the story too much. Think of it like the current Neuro mod https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3366478244&searchtext=neuro that just changes the combine soldiers

and actually idk if there's someone in the server able to make these mods

[charred arrow]

I'm certainly capable of making Source engine mods (Source is one of the easier engines to mod, and I made the Neuro Portal 2 mod Vedal played), but there's the issue where I lack Half life 2, so can't currently mod it because of that (I don't own the game)

[glossy hollow]

it was free a couple of days ago with the anniversary update

[charred arrow]

Then it would have been quite useful to know about wanting mods for it a couple days ago I guess

[glossy hollow]

yeah i should’ve made the post earlier tbh i was busy at the time

[charred arrow]

Understandable, people do get busy sometimes

[past blaze]

hey, what's your steam account name?

should prob ping actually

@charred arrow

[charred arrow]

Steam account name? The one it displays in the interface?

[past blaze]

yes

[charred arrow]

This one from here at the top bar?

[past blaze]

what's the avatar you use?

[charred arrow]

I don't have anything special set

[past blaze]

found you i think

[charred arrow]

Never bothered to change from default

[past blaze]

accept friend request pls

[charred arrow]

I think that worked

[past blaze]

yep

check now

@charred arrow

[charred arrow]

What should be there?

I think I figured out what it is

[past blaze]

happy modding

[charred arrow]

Will first have to play the game to figure out what I can change

[past blaze]

[charred arrow]

Hopefully I'll have time while Wispers makes the Evil V7 dataset

Probably at least some models should be possible to change I assume
And maybe textures if I get someone on board to make those

I'll try to see if I can figure something out

Step one is to install the game, play it and locate the VPKs

(and to figure out how to plug assets into this specific game, since the methods vary a little bit)

[glossy hollow]

https://www.youtube.com/live/HMVlOEPAt4Q there are videos with a bunch of mods added if you want to see that later in what more could be added or smth, to give more ideas if you want to watch it after you’ve played it

[charred arrow]

Noted

[barren agate]

Is this happening? I might be inclined to join in modding the game

[charred arrow]

It is entirely possible
I already figured out all kinds of parameters (like the audio storage format)

[barren agate]

fun thing about this is I could literally copy paste some of my gmod workshop item to hl2~ with a bit of editing~ its basicly the same game

[charred arrow]

Interesting
You could probably quite easily handle stuff like models, since you appear to be good at those
Source engine model porting is easy
The one thing you would just have to figure out would be the animations needed

(I spent a while fixing a missing animation when modding Portal 2)

[barren agate]

I mean~ we did fix those eventually, just a minor headache

[charred arrow]

Well, I just copy pasted some other animations that fit

It was a fairly simple fix once I understood the formatting

At this point I would likely be best at making audio stuff, I've been doing a ton of audio stuff recently
Model porting is easy enough, but you can handle that probably better than I can
And then there's textures, I'm not an artist so swapping textures to something that looks good isn't that easy
Will have to figure something out (maybe Xoda could help? I have no clue)

[barren agate]

Im pretty bad at texture replacement stuff

[charred arrow]

I know how to replace textures in a way that works, I'm just not good at actually making good textures

[barren agate]

yep I meant this

[charred arrow]

We could use some artist
I could ask Xoda if she wants to help, or we could look for someone else

[barren agate]

[analog axle]

my ability to help depends on what is to be replaced, so i'd like an example

[charred arrow]

Still yet to be figured out, this is all still in initial stages

I still have to figure out fully what the game even has, so that I can find things that could be modified

[charred arrow]

Well, appears I just beat the base Half life 2 or something
Sure was interesting

Gave me some ideas I guess

Will think further about what to do tomorrow probably

[charred arrow]

Well, a few things I think could potentially be retextured to Neuro versions could be all the weapons the player gets to use and the vehicles the player gets to drive
I think there's some potential there
Something along those lines
Should be easy enough to find the textures in there

[glossy hollow]

what about a neuro fumo instead of a crowbar

or evil neuro fumo intead of headcrabs since headcrab = chicken =

[charred arrow]

Maybe
Model swaps would be up to Taprieiko due to how complex rigging models is though

Could be potential ideas if rigged correctly with all the animations though

[charred arrow]

So, I guess should maybe try to make a proper plan of some sort
Could try some of those model swap ideas if Taprieiko is up for modelling/rigging
Could try to reskin the weapons in the game to be themed around Neuro, with the gravity gun could even change the orange glow to pink or purple instead to better fit
Could also try to reskin the major vehicles the player gets to control in the game (the airboat and car things)

Model swaps are up to if Taprieiko feels like it
Texture swaps are up to if Xoda (once she's less busy) or some other artist feels like it

I think that's a pretty functional plan to at least start with
Not gonna pull in the RVC models at least yet

[karmic stratus]

is this gonna happen

[plain escarp]

replace gnome with fumo

force him to do the gnome achievement in episode 2

[charred arrow]

@barren agate @analog axle Current ideas (I forgot about this for a bit accidentally, oops)

[barren agate]

I just plan to port my Neuro model into the game, as a replacement for Alyx I guess

Idk

[charred arrow]

That could work
Would kinda make sense to then do something to rewrite some of the lines of the game to reflect that, not sure
And voice lines too, would have to somehow either fiigure out how to use Neuro's actual TTS or rig Neuro V11 RVC to do it

Or just make it a scuffed model replacement for the silly

[barren agate]

I havent done a weapon model cchange before, idk if I can

[charred arrow]

Well, I don't really think I like the idea of replacing the crowbar with a plush anyway, it doesn't quite make sense (and I don't really know if hitting things with a plush is a good idea)
But I liked the headcrab idea

[barren agate]

Where do u think the turtle model could work?
I did try turning the turtle model into a headcrab in a Halflife1 mod/Svencoop for fun

[charred arrow]

It has some potential as a headcrab
Not as good as a fumo as-is probably, not sure
I can't tell
There's a lot of things in the game, it's really large

[delicate spade]

There's a mod that replaces the fast zombies with Xenomorphs

[analog axle]

this seems doable, i could also try to learn the basics of modelling and swapping models to possible make more than retextures

[charred arrow]

Sounds interesting
Just let me know what files and textures you need from the game

I can get them from the VPKs

[analog axle]

what if we just took freeman's suit and made it a turtle outfit

[charred arrow]

That would be very silly

[analog axle]

gimme all that has to do with the gravity gun, i wanna see how the beam works (i already have a guess based on garry's mod but i wanna confirm)

((We may have to go into the code to change beam colour))

[charred arrow]

It's likely that it's just loading a texture

Source games are interesting in many ways

Gonna take a bit to find where that stuff is

Found the gravity gun stuff

[charred arrow]

This is some parts of it
No clue if it's accurate though, I've had issues with exporting as PNG (for some reason JPEG sometimes seems to work better)

I believe these are for when the thing is in the world

Looks very wrong though

This does not look the same as those two

Should I export as JPEG instead? Or should I try the odd TGA format it defaults to?

TGA also does not appear to produce correct looking results

And then somehow JPEG just works

@analog axle There maybe? JPEG because it's the only format that exports something that looks right

[analog axle]

ah, so it's simple textures, good

because gmod had variable colours, leading me to assume that it'd saturate a grayscale texture

[charred arrow]

Note that you probably have to use the JPEG versions because those are the only ones that actually aren't messed up

[analog axle]

also especially with this, can we just take a moment to look at how insane this texturing is

[charred arrow]

Might be a different version of Source then
GMod also supports more complex models and such I think, on a similar level to Portal 2, while Portal 1 does not

[charred arrow]

That one seems to be the only one that is not messed up by exporting as PNG

[analog axle]

it's the same source version afaik

they probably just modded it

[charred arrow]

Maybe
Or maybe they later upgraded to a newer Source version

The history of Source engine is suprisingly complex

[analog axle]

but isn't it both in source 2

anyways sidetracked

[charred arrow]

Source 2 was nowhere near existing back then

Source 2 is extremely recent

HL2 is very early Source

[analog axle]

i think the colour is probably chanagble by just colorizing, give me a second

ah, what i had been scared of is true, they coloursed more

yeah the texturing is great but also makes a recolour of select areas impossible unless i hand draw the boundary boxes (which is annoying and time consuming)

exceptif we want a green gun

[analog axle]

There is one thing we cizld do

Literally retexrure everything to a cartoony neuro aesthetic

[charred arrow]

That would take a while but also would be very silly

[glossy hollow]

reviving this thread, I didn't want to bother as the game jam was on, wondering who is still on board with this project

@analog axle @charred arrow

[charred arrow]

I'm on board if I get assets from somewhere, for now I'll sleep though

[jolly rune]

@tough matrix ?

[tough matrix]

ill take a look tomorrow, i did do something similar to what crimon was asking with portal, so i should know my way around half life too since its the same engine

[charred arrow]

Yeah, HL2 and Portal should be fairly similar with modding since Portal is basically a mod of HL2

[last beacon]

portal, csgo, l4d1/2, HL2 and tf2 are all extremely similar for engine related things, i think portal 2 has a bit different branch of the source engine for it.

[charred arrow]

Yeah, Portal 2 requires making VPK files to be modded, Portal 1 at least doesn't require that

[last beacon]

I have done hammer editing in tf2 before, so i have some experience with the source engine. I have also dug through vpk shit in dota but thats a whole separate mess of source engine 2

[charred arrow]

Well, I know something about replacing assets and audio codec stuff with Source engine, sometimes it's a bit of a mess

[last beacon]

lighting can be annoying sometimes

[charred arrow]

Another annoying thing is when the file extension on the audio files the game uses is .wav but it's encoded as mp3 so that took ages to figure out

Using the wrong codec throws very odd and random errors because the game still seems to try to parse the data as mp3

[last beacon]

never did much with sounds but yea that checks out

[glossy hollow]

I don't know much about this stuff, but if you require assets, let me know which assets you're searching for exactly and I'll try to get them

[last beacon]

im new to this thread, what are we all looking to do for mods?

[charred arrow]

I would say mainly new textures/models (with models they kinda need to be rigged and compiled for Source engine and have the required sets of animations for whatever they're replacing available in some form) to replace things with Neuro themed versions
One example would be redrawn textures of all the weapons or something but with a Neuro themed skin

Stuff like that I guess

[last beacon]

oh shit, reskin the crossbow to be metal pipes and have the appropriate sound effect when shot would be a good idea

[charred arrow]

Could be silly if we got someone to remodel it

[last beacon]

someone already made the metal pipe as a replacement for the crowbar, might be able to reuse parts of that

[karmic stratus]

[ebon silo]

[karmic stratus]

im not sure what all of this entails

do the textures have to be done a certain way

dont suppose we can get just any artist to do it

[charred arrow]

Theey need to match the way the models are mapped to the textures

[karmic stratus]

right

[charred arrow]

Let me get some example

[karmic stratus]

prob easiest to edit the existing textures then

i get what you mean, the UVs are mapped onto the model right

[charred arrow]

There

[karmic stratus]

probably want an artist familiar with making game assets then

[charred arrow]

That's the gravity gun textures

[karmic stratus]

someone who's done something like a minecraft texture pack

is there a convenient software for editing that? i imagine its annoying to preview your work otherwise

[charred arrow]

A Minecraft texture pack is definitely not as complex as a texture swap for a game like HL2

[charred arrow]

If you can get the model itself from Source engine to Blender, I think there might be tools for that

[karmic stratus]

might be good to know if there is

probably a lot more people familiar with doing this in blender than doing it by hand

[charred arrow]

I don't know much about Blender, but there are almost certainly Source engine tools for it

[karmic stratus]

im just trying to figure out how specialized of an artist we need to find for this

[charred arrow]

Well, someone who can use Blender or visualize 3D models in their head from the textures

That should probably work

[gritty mango]

im late to the party but hello i ported that to hl2, unfortunately I don't do modeling and it's a horrific model on the backend. the person who ported it originally to the source engine did a really .... bizarre job with many things and it crashes crowbar if you try to recompile it for anything

originally I wanted to make it so that Neuro replaced Alyx and Evil Neuro replaced Mossman, just because those two characters bicker and I think that's funny, but the model is a mess on the back end

I actually want to find the original model (I think it was for VRChat?) and commission someone to port it over to source engine properly so I can do those mods and allow others to do whatever they want with the models

yes yes neuro i am mucho texto neuroBlankies

oh and uh , I also have that ported to entropy zero 2 which makes a lot of combat funny since the neuros are on your team:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3422780577