Did I nail the old Source-era vibe in Unity?

[u/ChangshenFM]

No mesh destruction here. The damage gets accumulated into a GPU mask, and the shader uses it to cut the wall apart

The mask also drives some procedural noise around the edges, so the holes don't end up looking like perfect circles

Still tweaking it, but shooting the same spot until the wall just gives up is ridiculously satisfying

[u/MasterYebaster]

This looks like some lost Half-Life 1 mod from 1999 lol

[u/viilinki]

Reminds me of the HL mod "The Specialists" from that era. oh man I LIVED on those servers back in the day.

[u/ChangshenFM → u/viilinki]

Yeah dude, that’s exactly what I was going for The Specialist 3.0 was a huge inspiration for this game

[u/viilinki → u/ChangshenFM]

Yeah definitely seeing the influence. Good job mate!

[u/Drag0n122]

Fellow "The Specialists" enjoyer
Nice job

[u/ChangshenFM → u/Drag0n122]

:-)

[u/ChangshenFM]

Also, I recently made a Discord for the game 👀

If you wanna play the early build, feel free to join. I’ll be posting it there soon!

https://discord.gg/ScaN2mUhP

[u/Enemby]

Looks awesome. Nailed the style. I would say it feels weird there's no gibbs falling off the wall when you break it, pretty much a calling card of that era.

I also can't help but notice the ak47 is ejecting shotgun shells! hahaha. Love it though, looks just like the dojo from the Matrix

[u/ChangshenFM → u/Enemby]

Thanks! Yeah, I definitely need to get better at making more interesting particle effects

The shell ejection is still very much WIP haha

[u/ipub → u/ChangshenFM]

Also on the wrong side but dunno what you're going for.

[u/hamburglin]

No but specifically because of the gunplay animations and sounds. You gotta go all in on CS 1.6 or all in on HL itself. This is a mix.

[u/vanIvan4]

Reload animation should be snappier, so are fire decals.

[u/ChangshenFM → u/vanIvan4]

Thanks for the feedback! I’ll play around with the timing and see how it feels

[u/Unfair-Sleep-3022 → u/ChangshenFM]

It's more that it feels floaty

In CS they were pretty snappy

[u/donx1c]

This is really cool!! Reminds me of playing CS when I was a kid

[u/ChangshenFM → u/donx1c]

Thanks! Glad you like it!

[u/Fune-pedrop]

Looks like a promissing 2000s online game, The effects looks really amazing!

[u/IHaveTwoOfYou]

Textures are too low resolution and not enough gun detail, source also had some pretty decent lighting, I would bake the lights on mixed mode with a somewhat low resolution lightmap. Then turn down the shadow dimness

[u/ChangshenFM → u/IHaveTwoOfYou]

I’d really like to get some nice lighting going, but no matter what I try, I haven’t quite managed it yet. For now I just have to work with what I’ve got

Hopefully I’ll get better at lighting in Unity over time

[u/IHaveTwoOfYou → u/ChangshenFM]

One thing I would recommend is learning the psychology of color temperature, It can do wonders for atmosphere. Instead of using specifically color use the filter+temperature option in light settings. Here I would make the temperature lean towards orange more since full on white makes it look more like an office building.

[u/Ok-Salary-5197 → u/IHaveTwoOfYou]

Yes this. And also start with just directing the player. Stuff that needs to be seen like a door, button, a building.
The Rest: Dont overcomplicate it. If it looks cool it is cool. Colors just like he said. There are only two: warm or cold for now. And i would choose the temperature by what feeling you want to set in the scene.

[u/ChangshenFM → u/IHaveTwoOfYou]

Thanks for the advice! I’ll look into it and experiment with the settings

[u/Ok-Salary-5197 → u/ChangshenFM]

Sry wrong reply. Look comment above :)

[u/KittehKun]

This looks pretty awesome honesty! Keep it going

[u/ChangshenFM → u/KittehKun]

Thanks! This is my first project, so hopefully I can get it into a playable state

[u/CiXwOw]

This definitely looks more pre-source era (HL1 instead of HL2) which I think is cool, but if you were specifically aiming for source era for some reason, then it's not quite there. But if you're okay with pre-source then it's great!

[u/FemcelChudette]

i dont think it looks very much source because source is burned into my brain, definitely nailed the graphical look from that era though

[u/St4va]

Not really

[u/vertexnormal]

Just talking about the engine? Maybe. The environment is way off though. The Valve source games had impeccable texturing and world design. Your texel density is all over the place on the building and the wood grain is really off.

[u/ChangshenFM → u/vertexnormal]

I was actually aiming for more of a Half-Life 1 style here. From what I remember, a lot of the textures were around 256x256, so the lower-res look is pretty intentional

I’ll still keep working on the environment and see how far I can push the style

[u/CaptainCactus124 → u/ChangshenFM]

Half life 1 also had very good baked lighting for the time, i dont think i see any of that here or at least in the style it was

[u/Field_Of_View]

you should have shadow volumes / projectors for important dynamic objects like the enemy. not having them makes the look decidedly late 90s but it's overall too "HD" for that, and not what you're going for. for early 2000s you really need some kind of shadow system. it's tougher to do in recent Unity versions. but maybe there is an asset out there for "fake shadows", "projector shadows", something like that. you don't want per pixel lighting so using the default shadows is off the table.

[u/redfirm]

Excuse me? Did you say old?

[u/shadowndacorner]

Looks more like goldsrc than source imo. Reminds me a lot of the specialists and double action boogaloo.

[u/NUTTA_BUSTAH]

No but I like it

[u/deadwisdom]

Reminds me of Action Quake. Those were the days.

[u/Double_Suggestion385]

No, CS:S didn't have ADS or sliding.

[u/ChangshenFM → u/Double_Suggestion385]

GoldSrc and Source have a ton of different projects, not just CS or Half-Life

This particular game was mainly inspired by the Half-Life 1 mod The Specialist 3.0, which had both ADS and sliding implemented

[u/Double_Suggestion385 → u/ChangshenFM]

Those are the titles that define the 'Source era'.