Hey everyone! You may not remember me as I joined back in 2011, and have only recently come back to the game with a friend of mine (truthfully, I played the mod much earlier than this, but only joined the forums relatively recently). During this 4 year absence, I've learned quite a bit in terms of art, particles, modeling, mapping, texturing (UV unwrapping, etc.) [but unfortunately, not animation or coding]. I've been lurking the forums every now and then for any updates to MS:S, and I've seen some progress on ModDB, which is great. You can probably guess where this is going (I'd be happy to contribute to MS:S!)
Anyways, recently Valve has announced the Source 2 engine publicly, and has also announced that they will be giving it out for free (without licensing, so you could potentially make some money off of it if you release it without any copyrighted material!). I've also seen talk of putting Master Sword onto Greenlight, which is a fantastic idea. People would jump at the chance to get it if they knew about it. This would also allow you to create a workshop for the game/mod, possibly allowing users to submit their own weapons and/or models/maps/etc. A great opportunity indeed! Especially since Valve is planning to make workshops an income source for games that are willing to go through with it.
I was thinking it would be an interesting endeavor to try porting MS:S into Source 2 (MS:S2? ) and see how you guys like the workflow and pipeline. I've been using the Dota 2 version of the Source 2 workshop tools since its release early this year and it's been a blast, as it's very convenient and efficient to work with. The tools are great, and makes it easy to port stuff and manage your assets. There is also much better material support, with a lot of nice features and shader support (no more .vmt/.vtf files! Use the source .psd/.tgas straight from Photoshop!). Lua is also the scripting language used, which is quite robust for modding (at least, for the Dota 2 version)!
With that said, I don't see Valve continuing support (updates) for Source just as they have stopped updating GldSrc, although I could be wrong. But take from that what you will. I'm not suggesting to drop everything and port straight to Source 2, but I think it would be beneficial to "test the waters", so to speak, with Source 2 to see if it's worth doing (and I'm going to bet that it is ). Mapping is especially affected (in a good way) as the new Hammer editor is MUCH more robust than the Source 1 equivalent. No more displacement maps; full on terrain sculpting! You can make models inside hammer, both convex and concave. The list goes on and on, and I highly recommend getting Dota 2 just to install the workshop tools and play around with it (if you haven't already). It's that good.
ANWYAYS (again!), one final thing I wanted to get off my chest; Art direction. From the screenshots for MS:S, it seems there is no concrete art direction (it's mostly sticking to the Half-Life universe, thematicly/texture-wise [perhaps these are placeholders?]). I think it would serve well to find central thematic ground for what the game will look like in it's final state. Whether that be cartoony or otherwise. I know this is probably a lot to ask, since the team behind the port is likely composed of different skill variations, but it would help to ground the ideal look of the game so people aren't creating art assets that will seem out of place.
I just wanted to get this out into the open, so feel free to discuss this!
Anyways, recently Valve has announced the Source 2 engine publicly, and has also announced that they will be giving it out for free (without licensing, so you could potentially make some money off of it if you release it without any copyrighted material!). I've also seen talk of putting Master Sword onto Greenlight, which is a fantastic idea. People would jump at the chance to get it if they knew about it. This would also allow you to create a workshop for the game/mod, possibly allowing users to submit their own weapons and/or models/maps/etc. A great opportunity indeed! Especially since Valve is planning to make workshops an income source for games that are willing to go through with it.
I was thinking it would be an interesting endeavor to try porting MS:S into Source 2 (MS:S2? ) and see how you guys like the workflow and pipeline. I've been using the Dota 2 version of the Source 2 workshop tools since its release early this year and it's been a blast, as it's very convenient and efficient to work with. The tools are great, and makes it easy to port stuff and manage your assets. There is also much better material support, with a lot of nice features and shader support (no more .vmt/.vtf files! Use the source .psd/.tgas straight from Photoshop!). Lua is also the scripting language used, which is quite robust for modding (at least, for the Dota 2 version)!
With that said, I don't see Valve continuing support (updates) for Source just as they have stopped updating GldSrc, although I could be wrong. But take from that what you will. I'm not suggesting to drop everything and port straight to Source 2, but I think it would be beneficial to "test the waters", so to speak, with Source 2 to see if it's worth doing (and I'm going to bet that it is ). Mapping is especially affected (in a good way) as the new Hammer editor is MUCH more robust than the Source 1 equivalent. No more displacement maps; full on terrain sculpting! You can make models inside hammer, both convex and concave. The list goes on and on, and I highly recommend getting Dota 2 just to install the workshop tools and play around with it (if you haven't already). It's that good.
ANWYAYS (again!), one final thing I wanted to get off my chest; Art direction. From the screenshots for MS:S, it seems there is no concrete art direction (it's mostly sticking to the Half-Life universe, thematicly/texture-wise [perhaps these are placeholders?]). I think it would serve well to find central thematic ground for what the game will look like in it's final state. Whether that be cartoony or otherwise. I know this is probably a lot to ask, since the team behind the port is likely composed of different skill variations, but it would help to ground the ideal look of the game so people aren't creating art assets that will seem out of place.
I just wanted to get this out into the open, so feel free to discuss this!