Some questions about Black Mesa

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Some questions about Black Mesa

Postby TechieUK on Tue Nov 19, 2013 4:23 pm

Not sure where to post this so it's here for now...
I've been playing Black Mesa for a while now and I love it! :[]:
After a while, I decided to take a look at some of the stuff from a different point of view and try to replicate some of the neater effects in the game but there's a few I've got a bit of trouble with. :smt021
I could ask the developers, but I doubt they'd just tell me all their code or whatever.

First, I took one look at their skill.cfg and saw these at the top:
ai_force_serverside_ragdoll "1"
ai_readiness_decay "10"
I assume this is why the ragdolls are always serverside, but what does ai_readiness_decay do?
Is it a Black Mesa only thing?

A few more effects:
1)
When an NPC dies, it they're skin changes, I think. But I don't think it does.
Their body goes all bloody, for instance, here is a living guard, and here he is dead.
It doesn't seem to always happen, for instance, here's a picture of some marines. The one on the left hasn't changed texture, but the two on the right have.
The thing is, he's can't be changing skin, because skins change the head and hands on these models, not the body. As far as I can see, there is no alternative bodygroup to change it, only to add accessories and stuff.
The alternate texture is called marine_body_gibbed, while the normal one is just called marine_body.
The gibbed one is also used on the gib models, but I'm not sure how they did the whole character.
Did they use code to change the material he uses but only when he dies, or...?
If it was skins, I can understand an output fired when he dies that changes his skin, but it's not a skin.
I've managed to do this using a skin for the body that is used when my character dies via hammer, but for every NPC in the map it gets a bit complicated. Also I'd prefer to use skins for other stuff.

2)
When ragdolls hit a surface or get shot, the blood particle comes out instead of just putting a blood decal on the models like in HL2. For instance, if I blew up a marine with a grenade (assuming he doesn't gib) his corpse flies up, and when it hits the floor the blood particle comes out where it hits. From there I can crowbar it or whatever and it'll do particle blood. Also where it hits it puts a decal on the world.
Code, I'm assuming.

3)
When a corpse comes to rest, a pool of blood will start to grow under its corpse.
There's about 2 or 3 different blood textures layered on each other all growing at separate rates from the centre of the body's final position. From here the corpse can be moved, shot, gibbed or whatever, but the pool of blood remains. A new one won't appear, it'll just spray particles and do the decals as mentioned in 2.
I assume this is just a decal, but I don't know, on a sloped surface the blood can be floating and it can go through the slope as if it's a model facing up or it can't be angled or something.
I'm going to assume this is more code.

4)
Muzzle flashes on weapons, both world and view models.
I know this is done in the qc with attachments and all that, but mine either show up at world origin or don't show up, but they're fine if I use an info_particle_system (this is for view models). I've never tried it with world models. Does anyone else know why exactly my muzzle flashes don't show up?

5)
Well, with all my custom characters, I do $includemodel, and never set up a collision mesh or joint settings of my own. This is because my ragdolls never work. Ever. They either stretch everywhere, don't spawn, glitch out, create lag or just crash the game entirely. I'd like to stop making my characters depend on Valve's stuff, but I'm just stumped on this one. Also Black Mesa's marines had an extra bone under each arm or something like that that didn't move on it's own so when they died, their arms shot up in the air and sometimes they'd get stuck on floors and bounce around. I assume this is either a mistake or so you can clearly tell you've killed hard-to-spot ones from a distance when you see flailing hands.

Whew, huge post.
How would anyone here tackle doing this?
I just want to figure out how it's done so I can learn a bit more.
Also know as WILLAM; TechieUK is my old name. If you see WILLAM on Steam or ModDB, it's me.
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