Introduction. Development difficulties.

Hey, everyone. It's been a while. We usually do devlogs nearly every month, but this time I expected to make a devlog at the end of summer showcasing lots of progress that would've been made.
But unfortunately the promised complete "lock-in" in development wasn't as successful as I wished. Everyone is human, that includes me, and I've been having issues with concentrating on the mod's development. I guess I got slightly burned out on the way. So, even though there was no promise of getting major development progress done this summer, I'm still sorry for lack of it.
I can only warn the rest of you that there might be more slow-downs in the development coming shortly after this devlog's publication. I don't know when I'm gonna be able to fully concentrate on development and be able to pull off tons of progress on my own again, but as of right now, I should get busy with some other stuff outside of modding and do my best at keeping my mental state well, or I risk losing myself in development process which would negatively impact the mod. I definitely don't want poor mental state affecting any of my projects again.

That being said, I believe it's only fair to also point out that we might not meet the promised 2027-Q1 release date either. I know it takes a lot of time, just keep in mind that majority of development is handled by just me, whereas my few remaining friends do contributions to the project and help me hold myself together, spiritually and mentally, so I don't get submerged in lonely thoughts.

The Progress

Here I'm gonna list most notable additions and changes in the mod along with some commentary whenever it's applicable.

Jack's Phone mechanic is still unfinished, but there's a new wallpaper. There's gonna be multiple backgrounds available for the phone, eventually.

One of the major things that was worked on was the improved system for bossfights. They will now have proper animated intros, boss healthbar got some design changes too. Upon defeating a boss player now sees a stylish deathcam.
Some "bosses", like the one shown above are just training bosses. Player will be able to acquire some abilities by defeating characters in their training fights. Player obviously doesn't die in those. In some instances you just "fail" the fight without actually dying and having to reload last save. Some bossfight sequences might feature QTE scenes in the future.
My goal here was to make them feel cinematic.

SourceWorld now has its own "story intro" that delivers necessary information about the world and sets the mood. You see it whenever you start a new game. So get used to thirdperson cutscenes if you haven't yet.
Whole starting portion of the game will be remade almost fully from scratch, although the core idea will stay the same plot-wise.

Now let's do a quick showcase of new weapons:

AWP - Not much different from its original source, aside from custom scope texture.

Sniper weapons now use newly added .308 ammo, modelled and textured by GreggHayes.

AR1 and AR2.

AR2 works similarly to its vanilla counterpart, although in SourceWorld its way deadlier, has bigger ammo clip and faster firerate to work as a light machinegun. On the downside it's the only unrepairable weapon in the game, due to its alien origin, so you won't find a usable one until final portions of the game. Alternative fire still shoots the familiar energy ball, but consumes your entire ammo clip instead of dedicated altfire ammo.

AR1, however, is a humanmade replica of AR2, powered by Xen crystals. It's much weaker, but at same time is repairable and cheaper. It's alternative fire mode shoots a slowly moving energy sphere that damages everything around it.

Even though it might not look like something entirely new to you, I had quite some fun making those. Afterall, I had to create mechanics for them fully from scratch. Working with glowing animated textures was also fun.

Energy weapons like these two now use a new shared ammo item - Energy Ammo. Once again modelled and textured by GreggHayes.
For its design we tried to combine HL1's gauss ammo and Doom's cell ammunition.

Combine Riflemen received some visual changes, based on TheGuardianTM's design. And they carry F2000 rifles now.

Item crates now come in 3 texture variation depending on their contents. Weapon/Ammo, Medical and General categories. First two should be obvious and third type will be used for anything that doesn't fit in other categories, like repair kits or wine. Previously all loot was just placed around like it is, but now we're returning classic supply crates.
In future, there are also gonna be searchable loot containers like various openable lockers and such.

Explosive barrels feel too repetitive, so we got HL1-inspired explosive crates too. Modelled and textured by... you guessed it, our great and reliable BroncoDev named GreggHayes.

Player's flashlight was remade from scratch. Now it matches viewbobbing, somewhat follows movements of player's currently held weapon and has sway. (Viewmodels now have sway added too, so they no longer stay nearly static when you look around fast).
Just wanted to make flashlight look beautiful and as immersive as I can get it to be. But without unnecessary gameplay complications - it still recharges on its own, albeit not as fast as episodic flashlight

You might remember an underused "item quick-use" mechanic that allowed you to assign up to 4 consumable items to specific slots which would allow you to instantly use them without opening inventory.
Well, this mechanic proved to be useless, as pretty much every player never bothered assigning medkits to these slots and then using them midcombat with quick-slot buttons. I can't blame them, because I barely used it myself.

So I thought I had to do something about it. Completely cutting the whole mechanic would be too harsh, so instead I recycled it to work as special inventory for "quest items" like keys.
Quest items don't require inventory space. In fact, they're so small that instead of a worldmodel they use spinning sprites. I added some extra animations to the "hotbar", made keypads work with keycard items and now we got a pretty version of your average door-key puzzle.
There will be no instances in SourceWorld where you'll have to physically carry small prop items around the map to plug them somewhere in order to progress, this special inventory will be used instead.

Mission Level Design Workflows.

Been working on mechanics related to missions and some randomisation.
For example, keypads used in mission maps will have randomised codes. Codes themselves will have random placement as well, preconfigured by the mapper.
By using classic maplogic trickery we're also adding slight randomisation to other puzzles on the map.
Some puzzles require player to shoot something. So, to prevent softlocks from not having enough ammo I've came up with "mercy item" mechanic, which will spawn a loaded pistol or ammo items in predefined spots in case player doesn't have anything to shoot with. This mechanic was made smartly, so you can't fool it by dropping items and expect to get infinite ammo.

In conclusion, that's all progress I wanted to show you for today. Let's hope that following months will turn out good.