Hello again,

Due to inactivity of the forums and blog, it’s been assumed we died. We’re not dead, just in a state of limbo. While the project isn’t being actively worked on, it hasn’t been forgotten. After a break of several weeks we looked at our current revision of TAP and saw it is considerably superior to our last release 13 months ago. Seeing this, there’s now a greater push to get R2.1 out the door.

Since R2, not much has been done in terms of content. The code however, has been given a huge overhaul. Many of the issues that plagued R2 are now fixed, along with some little optimizations here and there.

The focus feature of our next release is tonemapping. Our tonemapping solution is very similar to what Valve implemented into Source 2007. Their released publications have been an invaluable resource in developing this feature.

Here’s a little sneak peak of bloom and tonemapping in action…

Stay tuned…

Hey everyone, I’m lucas93. I’ve been part of TAP for 15 months now and haven’t written a single update. While I joined the team as a mapper, I now contribute code fixes and new features to the engine.

For those who have mapped with the stock 2003 Hammer, you all know of it’s many issues and list of features (or lack of features when compared with retail Hammer). It’s because of this that we’ve decided to update Hammer for our next release.

The first of the new features implemented into Hammer was the ability to load portal files in the same way as retail. This means we don’t have to use glview or the retail SDK to optimize our portals.

Some of you may have also noticed that a few faces in maps were too bright. While this isn’t really a new feature, it makes the 3D view look much nicer…

Any entity with a sound field (eg: ambient_generic) now has an option to preview the sound that is currently selected. This supports both direct WAV files and script sounds.

We have also added a sound script browser dialog. This is currently the biggest feature that was added to our Hammer. It even allows us to filter sounds making choosing sounds even easier!

There are also a few random features\fixes that are worth mentioning. These are:

• A ‘Go To Coordinate’ dialog box
• The loading progress bar has been modified to work when loading VMFs
• Multiple items can be selected and fixed in the ‘Check for Problems’ dialog
• The size of a selected object now appears in the 2D views

These features may not seem like much, but they have made a huge difference internally. They allow us to spend more time inside our own tools instead of switching back and forth between TAP and retail.

These updates will be made available with our next release. We hope they’ll help the community as much as they’ve helped us!

Hey everybody, just checking in here, no we have not died or thrown in the towel just yet.

We have been extremely busy in wrapping up our suite of E3 2003 maps, and unfortunately the remaining bugs which keep creeping up. That being said, I am pleased to announce that we have already hit internal release candidates 1 and 2 and are currently preparing to release our second patch real soon, with a major list of changes to really stabilize the engine, toolset, and game modules.

In the time since our last update back in October, we have gained a new mapper, Gethyn Q, who has reinvigorated our motivation to get this bad boy out to you guys. He is also the guy solely responsible for our wicked new trailer, something myself wouldn’t have thought about doing (I would be kicking my pants right now, recording demos and doing circular mouse movements…). Here is the said trailer, although it is somewhat dated now… :p

So, in short, it’s coming sooner than you think.

Hello everyone,

If you follow this blog at all, you’d notice that our last post promised a September release date. As you can see however, we’re in October.

While fixing up the remaining issues we had on our plate, we hit some serious technical glitches. One of these issues was tone mapping which we’ve consequently cut from this release after spending more time than we wanted attempting to fix the issue. Another more important issue however, was terrain mod (which has been fixed in our engine). A feature which is broken within retail source (removed in orangebox as far as I know).

In short: We hope to release this month, and we apologize for keeping everyone waiting.

On another note, we have changed hosts and upgraded our forums . Do not hesitate to post questions about us, thoughts on the HL2 leak, or whatever else comes to mind. We encourage discussion.

ynh

Hi all,

Denis covered all of the major features we’ve been working on recently in his last post a couple of days back, but only now have I gone through the hundreds of SVN and mercurial revisions and compiled a rough changelog (note; this is not complete and new features such as adaptive tonemapping and other features/fixes will be added before final release).

Alpha 2 (September 2010)
========================

Nutshell
--------

* Updater water shader
    o Fixed blackness
    o Improved refraction
* Fixed several engine exploits
* Improved rendering performance
* Updated VGUI (transition effects and improved stability)
* Added FP16 HDR
    o With luminance-based bloom
    o Controllable via ConVars
* Fixed terrain morphing
* Added background map support
* Updated post processing shaders
* Fixed all reproducible bug reports from Alpha 1
* Fixed BSP V19 and V20 loading algorithm
* Improved overall security of engine and closed several exploits

Common
------

* [Engine] Fixed server crash exploit
* [Engine] Fixed model jitter when game is paused
* [Engine] Added background map support
* [Material System] Fixed “fullbright bug”
* [Material System] Improved rendering performance
* [Engine] Fixed dynamic lights rebuilding every frame
* [GameUI] Fixed loading dialog presuming singleplayer when starting a multiplayer server
* [GameUI] Fixed many KeyValues errors in Options dialog
* [GameUI] Updated multiplayer dialog layout
* [VGUI] Fixed ImagePanel crash
* [VGUI] Updated file open dialog
    o New icons
    o Completely fixed
* [Engine] Fixed “startmovie” saving corrupt TGA files
* [Engine] Fixed loading screen not rendering
* [VGUI] Added transition effects to all VGUI panels (fade in/fade out)
* [Material System] Added luminance-based bloom
* [GameUI] Fixed advanced video dialog title
* [VGUI] Added maximize/restore to native VGUI apps
    o Also features drag-to-restore (like Windows 7 Aero)
* [Material System] Added FP16 HDR
    o Can be disabled via –ldr command-line option
    o Added mat_bloom_vignette to control vignette
    o Added mat_bloom_multiplier to control bloom amount that is multiplied with framebuffer
* [Engine] Updated IP ban system
    o Clients are now informed of their remaining ban time
* [Engine] Minidumps now contain vital information such as modified ConVars and console log (see dumpinspect tool)
* [Engine] Greatly optimized code with industry-standard static code analyzers
* [Material System] Added vignette effect to create an awesome show of HDR+ToneMapping within the bloom shader
* [Material System] Added color correction
* [Engine] Nearly fully fixed terrain morphing
    o Physics objects now collide with the morphed terrain vertices
* [Engine] Flagged “host_timescale”, “host_framerate” and “host_speeds” as cheat ConVars
* [Engine] Fixed BSP V19 and V20 loading algorithm
* [Engine] Fixed “buildcubemaps”
* [GameUI] Fixed several leaks due to file contents being loaded into memory but not later being freed
* [Engine] Fixed ClientPrintf using an out-dated protocol
* [VGUI] Ctrl-A now selects all text in the text entry
* [VGUI] Fixed stack corruption when adding wide-char strings in AddItem

Game
----

* Added red trail and glow to grenade
* Fixed shotgun shoot time
* Added cl_enable_player_sprays to enable/display player sprays
* Added “giveammo” and “giveammo_all” ConCommands
* Updated weapon icons for all retail weapons
* Updated post-processing shaders
    o Enable via pp_sobel, pp_monochrome, pp_grayscale
    o Also try pp_grayscale_fade to slowly fade from colour to grayscale
* Fixed water blackness as a result of a bad clipping plane
* Fixed flames not being removed when a player dies
* Updated rain precipitation
    o Updated rain tracer texture (now refracts)
    o Added rain splashes
* Fixed Kill entity I/O input on players resulting in a crash
* Fixed physics object crash on some maps
* Fixed AI follower crashes
* Bullets now have the same force on physics objects as retail
* Fixed weapon_sniperrifle taking a long time to autoreload
* Fixed bots not being kicked to make room for new bots in bot_create
* Optimized fire for lower end machines
* Fixed crash upon destroying client flame entities
* Fixed AR1 fire modes
* Added text to show AR1 fire mode switch
* HMG1 now does a 3 round burst when using secondary attack instead of switching between firemodes
* Fixed several leaks due to file contents being loaded into memory but not later being freed
* Increased damage for 357 weapon ammotype to 75
* New grenade model
* New 357 model
* Added reload function to HMG1
* Fixed AR2 fire animation

Tools
-----

* [mdldecompile] Added model decompiler which decompiles V37 models to SMD
* [mdlconverter] Added model converter to convert models from V36 to V37
* [studiomdl] Fixed studiomdl to write proper V37 models (with shared animation support)
* [WC] Fixed memory leak when using error.mdl
* [WC] Prevented infinite loop when unable to load error.mdl
* [dumpinspect] Added a little utility that reads the ASCII comment userstream of a minidump and prints it to console

Just so you know we have been working our asses off for the past few months! More news to come shortly (hopefully videos and screenshots).

On a side note, the rain update video was never publically posted on the blog, so here it is:

Peace out.

Update (16/08/10, 19:34 GMT): added approximately 15-20 more changes to the log.

Hey all,

It’s August! With that said, I’d like to give everyone an update on the state of R2.

One of our goals in R2 was to learn from our mistakes in R1. We dropped the ball there and we apologize :^).  That’s why we dedicated large blocks of time to playtesting and code reviews. Our focus in this release was to make the tech base as stable as we could, while carefully adding additional features and not introducing new regressions (though some may slip through testing).

With this in mind, we are probably going to end up pushing the final release date into September. We’d rather sacrifice time over quality .

We wishfully hope that with R2′s release, we can spark some more interest into the HL2 beta.

Here are some highlights of the technical goodies we’ve included into this release:

• 16-bit Floating Point bloom.
• Various fixes to the rendering system.
• Major stability enhancements.
• Performance boosts.
• Console variables to fine tune multiple aspects of rendering.

Content-wise, we’ve polished and fixed the following maps:

• e3_c17_01, e3_c17_02
• e3_techdemo’s 1-6
• e3_start, e3_end
• e3_lab
• e3_bugbait

Other maps in the leak should still be playable (v18 and above) but their stability is not guaranteed. Our plan is to have R3 include some of the HL2 story maps.

On a final note, I’ll just leave this here:

Looking forward to comments and questions!

/ynh

Hi there everyone, it’s been a long month since we’ve all been busy with school/work etc. I will probably be repeating myself with a few of these updates, since we had some issues with the database and whatnot.

GameUI Animations:

Saul added support for retail-like GameUI animations in the menu in March, making the UI a lot sexier. You can view a video of it in action here:

Model Converter & Decompiler:

Recently ynh and Saul managed to get the decompiler to decompile animations properly, the mesh is still somewhat broken, hopefully I will have something more to post on this in the next update. Our model converter is also progressing well, we’re planning to add a GUI and generally finish it off in the coming weeks. Not sure if we’ll release this publicly but it is possible!

Status and future plans:

It seems that some people out there think that the project is dead (you know who you are), this is completely false. Although progress has been slow recently, we are still on track for a summer release of our second patch, which should fix a lot of the issues in the first patch.

Around a month ago, ben5015se left the team due to some internal conflicts that couldn’t be resolved. In his anger, he apparently decided to leak the R1 code. This has not affected our progress, and the current code we have is a lot better than what has been leaked. We would also like to wish Ben luck with his future “project”.

We’re planning to have a few preview maps for you guys to play around with by the time R2 comes around, Pat has been working on something special I’ll reveal next time

Yes, we have finally released our binaries to the general public! They are available from this link.

There was a lot more that we wanted to ship in this release. But seeing as we’ve had various problems to deal with over the past month, we would never have been able to release. The maps that I was planning to ship will most likely be released in a later update to the bins.

In the meantime, have fun with these bins. They should help hugely with stability and various other bugs that were problems in anon.

And lastly, I’d like to thank the team for their dedication and hard work this past year. None of this could have been done without you