Hey all!

There's many things to jump into so I'll get straight into it. Over the past year the HDTF team has grown from about 5 people to 20 - including weapon animators, modelers, shader programmers, VFX artists and more. As such we can now afford to become more ambitious with our overhaul of Hunt Down the Freeman! As the team has grown, we’ve also ditched the old name: M3SA Team and the M3SA build are no more - Operation Whisky Freedom is ready to go!

Something to note is that since I am on the art side of the team, this blog post will mainly focus on art/graphics-related content, but there is a ton of mapping and gameplay work being done still

With our sweeping changes to the game, we’re adding a ton of new features we can’t wait to utilize, and for the TL;DR I’ll list them here, but if you want more detail its down below

Physically-Based Rendering
Updated VFX
FMOD Studio for dynamic music
Parallax-Corrected Cubemaps
Depth Of Field
Overhauled weapon animations
Plans for overhauled Black Mesa section
Reworks to Albuquerque
New weapon models and materials
Bullsquid & Houndeye
Workshop support
(note: all content shown may change during development, it's all work-in-progress)

Shaders & visuals

The source engine uses a specular setup for its materials, a method that isn’t often supported by newer software and hasn’t really been used in games for a decade. PBR (physically-based-rendering) is now the industry standard, utilizing metallic, roughness and ambient occlusion maps and gives a different look to metal surfaces compared to the typical specular shading system. PBR also simplifies our workflow and is the main rendering method of modern tools such as Substance - allowing our artists and modders to more-easily create content. Another benefit of PBR is that it only uses greyscale (black = off, white = on) allowing for more compression without drastic changes to visual quality

Subsurface-scattering is also a feature of our PBR shader, allowing us to emulate the way light affects materials such as skin and plastic on NPCs and models.

Along with that, PCC (parallax-corrected cubemaps) is integrated into our shader. Source engine cubemaps often do a good job but break-down in motion, they appear to move with the player and are very inaccurate in most situations. Using parallax-correction, cubemaps are able to take on the shape of a boxy room, allowing cubemaps to warp and distort according to the player’s location. While this system is implemented in the game, it has yet to be used in our maps. Theres also talk of implementing screen-space reflection as well to accommodate realtime effects and non-boxy areas which cannot use PCC - but thats just an idea.

An excellent example of this PCC is showcased by Tripmine Studios and their implementation of it

Something to note with our current PBR+SSS+PCC shader is that it is in the process of being rewritten, as it has some issues. Along with this, it is currently not functioning properly with cubemaps, which results in metallic materials becoming incredibly dark - as can be seen on PBR surfaces across the board such as the Hardballer/1911, AR2, AK, etc.

Another addition in the works is DOF (Depth of Field) which blurs parts of the screen. When aiming down sights in games you may notice the gun is blurred to allow the player to focus on what they’re aiming at, and this is something we’re going to be replicating. Of course this is planned to be an option in the menu you can disable. Only issue is that right now it isn’t functioning on AMD cards, which we’re hoping to resolve but currently has our shader artists very confused.

Animation

Along with me, a new animator - Manimal - has joined the team to work on first-person animation. Currently, the MP7, knife, 1911, AR2, USP, Spas-12, pills and Remington have been reanimated and implemented into the game, and we plan to give all the player’s weapons the same treatment! Camera shake has also been implemented (though currently unused) to complement the new animations - similar to how the feature is utilized in games like Modern Warfare 2019.

Manimal has also posted video of their animations as they are completed, which can be found here on their channel

There are also plans for small first-person animations when interacting with the environment, such as getting off the hospital bed in the Albuquerque hospital.

and as a last-minute addition, we are also working to bring support for staged reloads - so if you reload and switch weapons before it finishes, upon switching back it will continue from there, rather than restarting the whole reload animation from scratch. Its done at the qc level as opposed to game code, so its not a permanent change and those who don't like it can revert it

Weapons

Weapons have been a large focus of our small art team, and as such have of course been receiving new animations. New materials are also in development for our guns and after bringing on Aperture Aerospace to help - some of the more problematic weapons have been getting new models, such as the AR2 and 1911! Our next models include new AK, USP and M16 models as they could do with overhauls, especially the last two.
(Note: as our PBR shader isn’t functioning correctly, these images are rendered using Cycles)

AR2

If you've tried out the AR2 in the past month you might notice that it's been completely remade! With help from myself, our lead M3SA and Gamedev, the AR2 has received a brand new model and materials that better fit the original design, along with new animations by none other than Manimal! Our VFX artist Justyn also has plans for new particle effects to add to the weapon.

VFX

Thanks to another member of the team, Justyn, particles have been improved for Hunt Down The Freeman. Expect smoke to come from the barrels of guns after firing along with smoking empty shells to come flying out and hit the ground!

(note: this is old footage and as such doesn't include the custom smoke particle we've made, you can see it in-game now!)

FMOD

You might’ve seen FMOD on the splash screens of many modern games, and now we have it too! FMOD is a Third Party Audio Middleware that allows us to play a range of audio files, while also allowing us to make dynamic music or sounds that can be affected by the game’s code with the use of FMOD Studio.

We have currently implemented the entire API and have it working in-game, but have yet to implement it into any of our maps for the time being. We hope that in the future mappers and modders will be able to utilize it to make more engaging maps with dynamic music and even more

(note: FMOD .bank files are map based and should be stored inside “sound/fmod/desktop/” plus FMOD Studio bank files can be stored inside VPKs)

Workshop

Workshop support has been in the works for some months now, and is still chugging along somewhat. While our current dev responsible for its implementation has been interrupted by other things (living in Russia), it is coming along nicely. It currently supports the usual, such as material, sound, particle and model replacements along with being able to add new weapons.

NPCs

While NPCs have not received many visual changes (outside of Physically-Based materials for Combine and rebels), new dialogue has been in the works for quite some time. Our current Combine dialogue is voiced by our team lead M3SA, but the new voice we've been working on is voiced by one of our mappers - Mr KalcifeR!

More work is also being done on rebels and their models, but for starters, clothing is now randomized

It is also with a heavy heart, that I am informing you all of our choice to replace the rebel and crewmate voice lines. Pyrocynical’s old lines will be replaced with more fitting lines of dialogue and a new voice. Along with this, we do have plans to update the faces of rebels and crewmates, and we’re looking to do so using Character Creator 3/4 as it is leagues ahead Fuse which was originally used.

(For the record, as we do not have the source files for the cutscenes, Pyrocynical's voice can only be removed from gameplay, not cutscenes)

Multiplayer

While we would like to allow people to experience the emotional masterpiece that is HDtF’s campaign together - it's been very low on the priority list. While we have moved over to the multiplayer branch of the source engine, we haven’t worked on getting multiplayer up and running at all as of late, as there are bigger things that require our attention at the moment. One benefit of moving to that branch however, is we have access to map compression tools so we can reduce the size maps take up!

Black Mesa

Black Mesa (formally Black Messa) is the first area of the game, and as such sets the tone. The idea of overhauling the Black Mesa levels has been in the background for quite some time as we focus on more pressing issues, but it's still in some level of planning! We're thinking of extending the section along with adding classic enemies like the Houndeye and Bullsquid (done by yours truly) which are coming along quite nicely!


Some ideas include the addition of Xen plants and puzzles, though creating Xen models will likely take quite some time to create. As an example of what one of our main mappers, Kalcifer, can create - heres an example of what an expanded Black Mesa could be like

Commentary update

The main focus for our next major update is the addition of developer commentary from our team, featuring voices ranging from lead developers to mappers, animators and technical artists working on our shaders. The bulk of that work is script writing and recording, but heres a snippet of what has been done so far. Of course, that commentary update will also bring further changes such as the ones currently in the beta build (new weapons, animations, map changes, etc)

Patreon

It is probably well-known that the team has not received any payment from Berkan, nor do we receive any money from Steam sales. I have attempted to reach out to Berkan on that front but have gotten no response. In the meantime, we recommend holding off on anyone buying the game unless a sale or discount is going on, as unfortunately we cannot even generate keys for Patreon supporters.

Speaking of Patreon, you can help fund the team here if you want!

Conclusion

Overall, progress is chugging along and a large amount of work is being done! We're determined to keep working and adding new features to improve Hunt Down the Freeman more and more. Another aspect we're hoping to focus on is sound design, though we don't have a dedicated team member for that role and many of us are already taking on enough jobs as-is.

If you want to check out content as its added, it can be found in the Operation Whisky Freedom build, accessible by right clicking the game in your library and going into properties > betas

Also, expect combine soldiers and other NPCs to look more festive up until Jan 1st, so have fun!


and a new crystal model is in the works for the Albuquerque section



You can also interact with the team and our community via the Discord server
See our occasional updates, but mostly memes, on the official Twitter
Or track our to-do list in real-time on our trello board

Hope you all have a happy new year, and we look forward to continuing in 2023!

Operation Whisky Freedom