half life 1 black mesa research facility voice soundboard

#Half life 1 black mesa research facility voice soundboard code#

It took me a long time to figure out what made Half-Life stand out to me, and to figure out what made it one of my favorite games. How did your perception of Half-Life change when you started poking under its hood as a developer? Graduating from being a Half-Life fan to actually working on the franchise. It must have been quite a journey for you. The positive comments really helped us put the metaphorical pen to paper. It’s pretty easy to look at the mountain of work it takes to complete any project and get overwhelming anxiety, but comments like that really help quell that fear. A lot of the comments we received were along the lines of: “Take your time, make it right,” which is what converted the pressure into motivation. We knew we could not charge money for something, then not finish it, and we really wanted to finish the game regardless. The pressure can inspire you, and with inspiration came the pressure to make the game live up to the series. I wouldn’t really say there was more of one than the other.

What about the work with the community? Was there more pressure or more inspiration in it? We could get a lot more features and performance, but we are locked to a very old version of DirectX, and porting would be a huge amount of work. We are also running into some real issues with being on DirectX 9. Getting art assets into the game is a nightmare, and if you want to see ANY lighting change, it takes a multi hour compile of the level. Things that take months to implement in the Source engine, only take weeks (or less) in a modern engine.

It is definitely a house of cards though after years of updates and improvements. It really lets people focus on their ideas and designs rather than having to block out the base engine first. That may sound like a backhanded compliment, but just look at the projects that have come out of Source. If you want to build a shooter in an urban or interior environment, it is perfect. Speaking of Source, what was your experience with the tech? Our insights into the original intent is only what we can glean from articles, and books like Raising the Bar.Ĭrowbar Collective visiting Valve headquarters in 2015 We worked with Valve to set up the company and the game on Steam, but other than that we have not utilized their expertise at all.

#Half life 1 black mesa research facility voice soundboard code#

With the Source licence, you get access to source files so that you can build code (or things like animation libraries). When Valve allowed you to start selling the game in 2013, did they make any expertise available to you? Coders were hard to get as the engine became more and more dated, and we did put out a couple of job ads later in the project, but for the most part we were able to get people by them coming to us, or by word of mouth. We were really lucky and had enough reach to get new people fairly easily. How did you go about acquiring new talent? Knowing other people are in the trenches with you is one of the keys to staying motivated on a decentralized project.Īs we progressed, we got more and more organized, and now are using a three part system of Discord, Google Docs, and Trello. It makes it really important to talk to other developers and post your work. Our communication is one of the big successes of the team. Forums were a bit dated, even back when we released the Earthbound chapters in 2012, but they gave us a good way to pool our information and work across the world in multiple different time zones. For most of development we relied on a dev forum where we communicated, organized tasks, and posted works in progress for feedback. Over the years we had about 50 volunteer developers. We are currently at about 20 part time and per contract developers. Oleg Nesterenko, managing editor at GWO: Adam, all these years, you’ve been a virtual distributed studio with lots of people on board from every part of the world. As Crowbar Collective, the team behind the project, is recovering from the shock of the release, we catch up with Black Mesa project lead Adam Engel s.