Half life 2 Tools?

Showster

Hi guys does anyone know of a tool that could package and distribute mods? i.e. a form of pak file distributer. I know hl2 works with gcf's but is there anyway to distribute a mod / map easily?

Oh and if anyone has any Character Studio + HL 2 experience shout!

adam

Zip everything up and send it out - thats the easiest way.

Custom animations are a BEOTCH for HL2.

Richard Kain

XSI Mod Tool is your friend. It is the officially supported tool for Half Life 2 models and animations. I'm honestly not sure if anything else will work. (although Maya might have an exporter that will get the job done) As for packaging your model, just zip it up. Winzip will do it, although these days you can just use Windows XP to compress it into a zip file.

Half Life 2 might be a bit difficult for getting custom animations in. But it is the best engine in the industry for that sweet, sweet lip-syncing. Everytime I play around with the SDK I squeal with glee to see my voice coming out of Dr. Breen's mouth.

Showster

http://www.3dshowreel.com/photo/view.php?img=e0258b73ca234958887c0f68527d81d7

I got my stuff into model viewer, I have some custom animations made.

Can anyone shed any light on how I could get these ingame without coding?

I've done some hacks here and there with the QC file.

Campaignjunkie

Follow this Your First Map tutorial - you will need to use Hammer. Once you have that base, put a prop_dynamic_override in your level, and set it to use your model. Edit the prop's properties (select it and press alt+enter) and set "Default Animation" to the name of the animation you want. You might have to make your room bigger to accomodate your model, or perhaps adjust the lighting too.

But really, I would recommend just using the model viewer. It's easier and practically mimics in-game results.

Showster

Cheers that helped alot.

I also put him in gmod, if you guys want the files / source shout. Unfortunately I don't have webspace atm for files or proper picture links

http://www.3dshowreel.com/photo/view.php?img=727c2212d9e1acf71bd8f9fd18445c2e

Josh Winn

What exactly makes it difficult to import in custom animations ? Is it a problem with things not working right, and how time consuming is it? I'm wondering because in a few months I will be working on a project that is thinking of using source, and there are a lot of animated creatures involved

Showster

Well the only way I've managed to get to do it is, use alyx and replace her sequences with my own. Its a hack of some sorts, obviously with a coder it should be pretty easy to add your own in .

You can use animations that are already in the engine, but you need a pretty decent skeleton which can be motion mapped / you'll have to code and animate a whole new character set yourself.

The engine isn't so plug and plag like ut2004 / q3, the old days were easy street compared to source.