Old News
16.06.2003: The fvest map has finally outgrown its resources, so it had to be split. There are added two new areas. Firstly, it is a transition from fmid to fvest at the basement level, with part of the cantine in place in fmid. Secondly, it is the basement intersection between fvest and the new funder map. Funder will after a while again feature the "long warm corridor", which was previously taken out due to scaling errors.
The development effort will be greatly reduced during the summer holidays. The next update will probably come in the end of July.
Version 47 features several cosmetical modifications, such as fixing architectural bugs and adding lights. One of the rooms has been furnished to give a preview of how the building will be in the final version. Furnishing gave also an indication of the real limits of the Half-Life engine as the details consumed ca. 500 BSP leaves out of a total of 8192 leaves (look up the fvest map the statistics sections). The only hope for the completion of the project lies with Half-Life2!
The work commenced in the basement. The general arcitecture of a part of the upper basement belonging to the west wing is complete.I will continue adding features to the west wing map until the map runs out of leaves, at which point the basement part will be detached and moved to a separate map. The connection points are already marked with semi-transparent illusionary walls.
An extensive work has been done to implement the intricate mazes of rooms on the fourth floor of the West Wing. In addition, all the window frames in the middle map were converted to textures, thus improving the performance in the Greater Physical Auditorium.
In the patch to version 44 all the windows in the West Wing are now texture-based. The Spiral Staircase is made of the world-brushes, allowing for better VIS-deremination - it was a set of func_wall's before. In addition, the cieling height in the corridors in the 2nd and 3rd floors has been ajusted.
After a longer period of silence - but not inactivity - a new release is published. The main attraction is the completed geometry of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd floors of the West Wing. To bring the poly count down and to conserve such resources as leaves and planes, the windows are now gradually being converted from the brush-based to the texture-based appearance. The distribution form itself has been greatly changed. By a popular demand, the files needed to run the mod are now distributed in a single self-extractor RAR archive. The source RMF files, the (yet) unsupported deathmatch extention and the Spirit source are still published in separate archives.
I have also been busy in evaluating, giving feedback on and making use of several new tools. The Tools and Resources has been updated to denote this.
I have written a tutorial for implementing a multifloor elevator based on the Spirit of Half-Life platform. The tutorial is based on the logic used for the elevator in the West Wing og the building, but is reduced to run across 4 floors.
The main feature of the 42 release is of course its version number! Otherwise, the minor additions to the West Wing include a fully-functional elevator and all the windows in the yard aquiring their frames. The main page of the project (as you probably noticed) has been beefed up...
West Wing has now the sceleton of floors 1 through 4 with some detail of the central yard. The library detail has been extended a bit. I have a bad feeiling that the level overshoots the software mode requirements... Hmm, and the architect simply loved spiral staircases...
West Wing has been expanded and now includes the sceleton of the first floor as well as the library. Much work has been done to improve fmid and fvest performance (especially in software mode). Map funder has been temporarily removed from the distribution.
Spirit of Half-Life basecode has been modified to reduce the player cross-section in the world (clipping hulls are now set to 18 inches), as well as a general reduction in movement speed to reflect the real life physics. The spiral staicase in the tower and the reading hall got some overhauling. The technique of prism splitting was used to give the best effect on the sloping surfaces. Windows in the towers are now texture-based to save on leaf-count.
The project has now a dedicated forum, where suggestions, bug reports, new and just general discussions can be posted by anyone.