Obsidian Conflict News

New Decade, New Article

After the summer media update, we kept working on the internals of the mod and at this point, almost all the big bugs like game crashes are gone. With the only remaining bugs being some smaller ones, we are once again able to focus on improvements and new features.

For those who haven't seen the news on our Discord back in the day, we began beta testing on Steam directly in late October 2019. This is a small but important step for us, as we have finally surpassed all the progress we did since back in 2013. This event is another milestone of our work and further proof we are drawing close to the release.

You might remember that in our last media update, we announced the collaboration between Obsidian Conflict and Half-Life: Co-op.

[h2]It's time to reveal some of the fruits from it:[/h2]

Originally made by Mr. Lazy for Half-Life: Co-op, the maps are undergoing extensive overhaul by our teams, notably solving some long-standing HL:S and HL1 problems, restoring the original GoldSrc lighting, optimizing the maps, porting and fixing the correct textures and much more, with the planned addition of the PS2 map improvements.

Thanks to Slartibarty's compile tools, there are several new VRAD options that allow us to produce results closer to their original appearance in the GoldSrc engine, such as issues with Software rendering overbright lighting.

Right now, adapting the PS2 Half-Life maps is planned, but not in progress. The PS2 maps provide a few improvements, such as improved brushwork or using models instead of BSP. Those specific improvements may come post release for the time being, while we finish other more pressing tasks.

These enhanced maps, together with their VMFs and the special lights.rad files will be released once completed and made available both for Half-Life: Co-op, Obsidian Conflict and Half-Life: Source itself.

For those curious about how different the maps are in comparison to the Half-Life and vanilla HL:S maps, we have created an album comparing them.

As our current efforts are focused on polishing the code and on the HL:S maps, we are looking for mappers to aid us in updating and improving our remaining official maps that still require improvement.

To help us coordinate work on pending tasks we've made a Trello board available. Now people who want to help us can easily pick, request and check tasks that best suit their skill set. As they say - divide and conquer!

And before you ask - you don't have to jump through the hoops of joining the team to help us out. Just contact us on Discord - every last bit of help is appreciated!

Even if you don't see a certain task listed, feel free to ask, as there are always different ways to help!

[h2]Here are some of the most recent community additions that made it into the mod:[/h2]

TOZ-34 Annabelle replacement, by AsG_Alligator and Nicole Vlodhammer

Compact loading bar config, by D4 / Jai the (Perth) Fox

New “HL2 Houndeye” skin, by Shift and Cvoxalury

HD HL1 Crosshairs, by MrFloyd

Improved character models, by Jesse "V92" Vanover

Conclusion

As a final note, this time there isn't a new DevBlog video. A lot of changes can only be appreciated while playing, and it didn't feel right to record only new / improved models and animations.

Thank you once again for your support, we will see you soon!

Obsidian Conflict Fall 2018 media update

Kept you waiting, huh?

It has been five months since we announced our comeback, and the response was impressive: not only have the people continued to remember us, but also flocked en masse to our Discord and Steam group to thank us for our efforts. Even PC Gamer has dedicated some words to us. That was incredible!!

So you are probably thinking “Ok, what has been going on after all these months?”:

To start with, we got a new team member, Troop as our animator. He did the animations of the new Sniper Rifle and the Ion cannon, and reanimated the OICW. But he went further than that, as he also made a whole new model for the Alyxgun, as well as some light fixes for other viewmodels.

News of our resurrection reached the ears of an ex team member, who has since then rejoined us: KittopiaCreator. He’s responsible for programming the Ion cannon as well as assisting us on internal fixups and improvements. He’s also an expert with particles, as one can appreciate them on the Ion cannon.

https://obsidianconflict.net/ocscreenshots/fall18media/oc_seamus.jpg

https://obsidianconflict.net/ocscreenshots/fall18media/oc_starlight.jpg

Then came the contributions from the community. From mere fixes on certain models, to new textures, to even fixing and remastering maps! All of them have been greatly appreciated as it helped us to focus on other tasks. We can never be too thankful of your contributions. Here comes some examples of such dedication:

https://obsidianconflict.net/ocscreenshots/fall18media/oc_zelda.jpg
Zelda, remastered by Spartykins

https://obsidianconflict.net/ocscreenshots/fall18media/oc_courier.jpg
Courier, remastered by AsG_Alligator

https://obsidianconflict.net/ocscreenshots/fall18media/oc_harvest.jpg
Harvest, fixed by Sherlock

During this time we have re-established contact with other mod teams in order to strengthen our capacity of solving problems with Source, which among other things it lead to solve some long time bugs of Source SDK Base 2013, like the playermodels and NPCs no longer being able to blink, or even the dreaded playermodel twitch and invisible bug that plagues all Source multiplayer mods and games on pre-L4D branches.

https://obsidianconflict.net/ocscreenshots/fall18media/oc_stroopers.jpg

As if all of the above weren’t enough, almost a month ago, it came to our knowledge that some legendary GoldSrc modders like Besli, RavenGT or Ambient.Impact were still active, so we contacted them in order to know their opinions as former members of H.I.T. about our old accord of using their content for our mod.

Not only were they honoring our prior agreement, but also to our surprise, they gave us a pack with HD models that have originally been done for HL1 - some of which were either a rare sight on the Internet or outright unseen by the common user!

We have ported and adapted them for our HL:S campaign and they have certainly helped to raise the quality, while not looking out of place by maintaining visual themes.

https://obsidianconflict.net/ocscreenshots/fall18media/c4a2.jpg

Even as just a mere anecdote, we were present at the GSH LAN party in Hannover this month. The preparation for this event has pushed our limits to the point where we had to work against the clock, but ultimately an ( almost ) bug free “demo” was shown at the event. We learned important lessons due this and enriched our experience.

We know that at this point you are all waiting to watch our third Devblog video. While most of our work can’t be truly appreciated through this, we have some new stuff to show, so here it is:

( Don’t forget to turn on captions )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_yYf3n67gw

We would like to remind our fans that we are still looking for programmers and mappers, so if you think you can give us a hand, come to our Discord and talk to us.

And finally, we are sorry to say that unless a miracle happens, the chances of releasing on Steam before the year ends are very, very slim. But, as most of you might know, game or mod development is rarely easy under a crunch - especially when dealing with Source!

Thank you again for your support, and see you soon!

Unofficial mountfix

Hello everyone, we’d just like to inform you that our community member jfm created an automatic mountfix installer, big thanks to him!

Please note that it is not created by the OC team and we do not take responsibility for any damage it might do to your system.

It comes in 2 versions, one with a full OC installer included and one with just the mountfix.
Please make sure .NET Framework 4.5 is installed and you're running at least Windows Vista, XP is not supported.

Downloads:

Zipped versions, for those that want them:

So how does it work and what does it do?

Before installing, make sure you have SDK Base 2007 and all the games you want to mount installed and fully working in Steam.
Now, you either just run the full installer, which will execute the mountfix.exe once it’s done installing OC, or
place the mountfix. exe in your existing Steamapps/Sourcemods/Obsidian folder, run it, either type "client" or "server" and hit enter.

The server part installs and configures a basic server config setup for first time server admins and requires a login.
The login is required for SteamCMD and is NEVER stored.

For more information and credits, check this Readme.

Please note that the mountfix can take a long time to complete and it may seem like nothing is happening at all. Don’t close the window, this is normal! The window will close once it’s done.

What the mountfix does is it first scans for your installed games, extracts the content from their depositories and then creates symlinks in your steamapps\common\Source SDK Base 2007 folder.
This process is very hard disk-heavy and thus can take a long time to complete.

This also doubles the disk space taken for each installed, mountable game since the files now exist twice; once in the normal Steam depositories and once as unpacked files which OC can read.

We are still working on a proper hotfix, but until then, this is a good stop-gap measure if you or your friends want to get into some OC action right now.

Unofficial mountfix

Zipped versions, for those that want them:

So how does it work and what does it do?

Before installing, make sure you have SDK Base 2007 and all the games you want to mount installed and fully working in Steam.
Now, you either just run the full installer, which will execute the mountfix.exe once it’s done installing OC, or
place the mountfix. exe in your existing Steamapps/Sourcemods/Obsidian folder, run it, either type "client" or "server" and hit enter.

Happy new year!

We wish everyone a happy new year and hope you had great holidays!

This was initially meant to be a Christmas post, but Christmas preparations and celebrations kept me a bit busy, so please excuse the slight delay. :)

We've got good news for you!

We would like to welcome KittopiaCreator aboard the OC team, where he will be assisting us in programming! In addition, we have an additional member whom we will be announcing soon, so stay tuned.
So things are definitely looking better as we can actually make some progress now.

Sadly that's all we can tell you right now. We're still in the process of porting OC over to the 2013 SDK, so there's nothing really "new" until that's done.

See you in 2015!