Black Mesa (HL1 in HL2 engine)

There's no radioactive sludge around either, apparently

With each section being lead/designed by different people is the whole game going to maintain the same 'feel' and look throughout?

Not enough screenies of Surface Tension Yet, that was probably my fav section of HL
 
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:lol: at the graphics comments some people are making in this thread.
HL2 has it's own feel to it, the post-apocalyptic feel works well not other game really has for me, though immersion could be a little better with other characters.

It's certainly not dated, it more clearer, sharp, detailed then other games out there that like to hide behind gratuitous amounts of blurring and hdr.
 
Seems to have got along quite far from when i last saw it. Id rather they didn't bother with the multiplayer maps and just concentrated on single player first though.
 
I am willing to bet that just as it gets finished valve will buy them up it'll take a further 3-4months to finish (valve will lend them voice actors and what not) and it'll be on the steam store as an exclusive, and after that in retail.

No matter what happens if this is released it'll be getting installed on my system.
 
Taken from the blog, I found it very interesting:

2007 Retrospective
Posted on 31 Dec 2007 by cman2k
Hello there, I'm Carlos, Project lead

What I would like to do is explain some things about our development over the last year. We've made some big changes to how we've been working, all for the better. Unfortunately this stuff is often invisible to you guys, and what I would like to do is give you a sneak peek into what it is we've been doing exactly.


We implemented milestones.
We are no longer working on the whole game at once. We focus on small milestones that are major accomplishments in and of themselves, before moving onto the next milestone. This has included a change in development where multiple level designers, modelers, and texture artists will tackle a chapter together to push it forward to completion on a much smaller timescale than in the past. In actuality this has been a huge boon our development, and I've never been more proud of our developers for banding together to get stuff done when it needs to be, as much as in recent months.


We've implemented a wiki and have become extremely organized.
This may seem like a small step but something like this is a great help to development and in general can make everything run much smoother. it's much easier for us to share and iterate upon our plans, scripts, and various documentation.


We orange-mapped the whole damn game.
This is important because you can go from level-to-level through our game, even if sections are barely blocked out. This is like laying down a rough draft that you iterate and improve upon over time. This was a big deal, and took some work for us to get done, but it was worth it and has proven to be a positive additon to development. Being able to play and walk through chapter, to chapter, to chapter, is an amazing thing.


We've been scripting and recording
lots and lots of stuff for various chapters, as well as just for NPCs, and working with faceposer to get all that in-game. This was something we hadn't even touched until last year, but it has proven to be a challenging (and often humourous) endeavor. Unfortunately, this is another one of those areas where tons of work can't really be shown to you guys, and won't really be able to be appreciated until we have a final product.


We've been finishing entire chapters
The screenshots that we showed last year were of sections of chapters that were shiny at the time. Most of those chapters that you've seen updated now are essentially DONE. When we showed them to you last year, we picked a pretty part of one level out of the chapter. Now we have entire chapters that are COMPLETE, checked off the list. Again, this is the kind of major accomplishment that is really hard to relay to you guys, without ruining things for you, or having 20+ screenshots of all the levels that make up an individual chapter.


We have a lot we haven't shown you, on purpose.
We have modeled, textured, animated, in-game NPCs with AI that we haven't shown you. We have weapons with awesome effects that we haven't shown you. We have lots of stuff that we haven't shown you, on purpose. We can't really show you the weapons / enemies / environments from the end of the game, without ruining things for you. We also have an internal media blackout list of items/environments/npcs that we cannot and will not show media of, until after release. This was something we discussed at length internally and decided would be best quite some time ago. Sticking to our guns with this means we have done a lot of work that we simply can't show off.

There is a large volume of material completed now that the entire team is so proud of. Everyone involved wants to show their work off to the public. It drives us crazy not to be able to share it, but when it's all said and done we want this material to be as fresh and exciting as possible when the mod is released. We carefully pick the things that can be shown for each media release, and only show those things. This is in direct contrast to what most of you seem to think, which is that what we have shown is everything we have done. That is simply not true.



For those of you that frequent the forums, I'd hope that what you have noticed around the forums in the last year is that we have changed our tone a bit. No longer do we say things like "we are considering that" or "we may do that in the future". Much more often do you hear things like "If we have time we may do that", or "Due to time constraints that will probrably never happen". This is due to a large shift in our mentality over the last year, folks. We don't just have milestones, we have dates. deadlines. TIMES. We are actually looking to finish the game at the time we mean to, and we have long been cutting corners and pushing ourselves to meet these goals.

When you have goals like this, interacting with the public starts to seem a whole lot less important. You realize that you could do that, or you could keep working because you need to hit this deadline. Because if we don't hit our deadlines and we don't stick to our schedules, we'll never release. That is our mentality now, and we can only ask that you guys understand that. We have some lofty goals here, and while we have never conceded to sacrificing our standards, we have conceded to sticking to our guns, locking down our vision, and focusing on achieving our goals.

Ask anyone here on the team and they'll know what i'm talking about.

-Carlos
Click to expand...
 
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