Over the next few days, I dealt with each of the remaining major problems, which had rather unintuitive fixes–I was obviously still learning as I went, though. Of course, I also needed a MDL decompiler to get the geometry and animations from the subject models and the Source SDK to compile and view the models (all of which, annoyingly enough, require being logged into Steam to use).
Despite the upgraded engine, the models function roughly the same as they did in the Gold Source engine, merely having more vertices and bones. It turns out, however, that Milkshape3D had been updated for Half-Life 2 and did everything I needed for this conversion so I dropped Mod Tool. Not to mention, it has a horrible installer and installs some files wherever it pleases. Even though I had an idea of what I wanted to do, I had limited success trying to figure out how to do it in Mod Tool. It seemed like XSI Mod Tool was the preferred free modeling solution around the internet, but its interface is very complex and quite overwhelming. Given my experience with Valve’s model format in the past, it was obvious that I’d need to rework the G-Man’s animations to match what Half-Life: Source expected and that this would require the use of a SMD-compatible modeling program. I took another look at the G-Man to see how I might overcome his lack of vanilla Half-Life animations. Greeted with the same low-poly models and low-res textures as last time, I became more stalwart in my longing for high-quality graphics. Recently, I decided to go back through HL: Source again on a whim.
At the time of the aforementioned post, I had even tried to copy the G-Man from Half-Life 2 into HL: Source, but alas the animations didn’t match up. This omission of graphical upgrade really irked me. However, as I detailed in a post almost two years ago, Valve couldn’t even be bothered to do some decent textures or models for the port, despite them having most of the necessary materials already created for HL2.
So, along comes Half-Life: Source, a straight port of Half-Life content into Half-Life 2’s Source Engine. I’ve been looking for an excuse to get into some Source Engine modding ever since Half-Life 2 came out and sure, I’ve wanted to do my own total-conversion mod (who hasn’t?) but knew I lacked the attention span to do so.