Just Fight mod for Half-Life

Hello and welcome to the third Just Fight article! In this article, I want to share what I am working on right now, and pardon the smell, cause the current topic is Sewer Levels!

I must state that for some time I was not sure if making the sewers was worth it. My initial plan for player progression was something like this: train levels -> cargo bay -> unfinished tunnels -> natural caves -> surface -> the modern parts of the facility. Now., my new plan is this: train levels (done) -> cargo bay (reduced in size, but finished too) -> canalization and water treatment facilities (currently on this) -> natural caves (canalization would lead to this) -> surface (with some ruins) -> modern parts of the facility (with quite ambitious idea of multiple entrances, I"m not sure if I can do this). Why I chose that? Dunno probably watched Civvie11 too much. Plus, I wanted to put some ichthyosaurs and big rusty rollers that crush you if you are too reckless. What you can expect? A bunch of dark, rusty and of course flooded tunnels, watergates, mixers, ichthyosaurs and of course leeches.

For now, I finally finished the player"s "flushing" down the sewers. To my embarrassment, it took me multiple tries to finalize it. It originally looked like this:

In this attempt, the player needed to turn the momentary_rot_button to open the linked drainage gate and quickly swim inside. I didn"t like how it played out, it felt, well, not right. The only thing that I liked in this version is a small upper section from which players can have some sniping fun. My second attempt was rather short-lived:

It was some weird inbreed child of the Blast Pit and Residue Processing chapters, without any significant gameplay strength on its own. I quickly discarded it in favour of the next version:

The third attempt was promising, a big sinkhole in which the player should descend. Initially with some sort of "gate" that would cover that hole and to lift it player should press a button on a balcony.

But after some initial testing, it felt too... epic for humble sewers. Almost like it is some sort of vault full of wonder. No, the true and humble sewer level can"t start like this. So with a heavy heart, and disappointment that I needed so much time to finally make this simple thing:

Simple hatch in a rusty pipe with disgusting greenish water inside that flushes the player into depths of waterworks, the only way it could be better is if the floor under the player suddenly breaks and they land in a stream of faeces full of hungry leeches and ichthyosaurs. But the current variant works too, finally.

On other things and news, I have a new computer (in fact I got it in March, but didn"t want to post just that) that runs Windows 11. Sadly, good old Worldcraft won"t cooperate with the new system and now I use J.A.C.K.; It was a good run, but sometimes old Worldcraft made my existence miserable, especially when it forgets some entity"s parameters. Now, at least, trigger texture not obscuring everything in 3d view.

Also, while I was in a clinic, waiting in queue (of course it was very boring) I noticed this:

A firehose, in a rather perfect box, which immediately reminded me about some of Half-Life textures so I decided to try and convert it to a Half-Life texture:

I am kinda bad at creating textures, but I think it looks alright in the game, at least I like it.

That"s all for now, wish everyone a wonderful winter and the end of the year!