Overview - The Half-Life plug-in is a great idea, allowing mappers who use (and who doesn't?) QERadiant to create maps, to start making their own Half-Life creations. So how well does it work?

Info - Well, the biggest critisism of this plugin isn't really the plugin's fault, and that is the sheer number of textures in Half-Life requires a huge amount of RAM, and if you haven't got that, plenty of hard drive space for swap files. I've got 128 MB, so I didn't have any problems (other than the wait for all the textures to load. then again, it gives you time to go make yourself some coffee for the creative process..) this problem is addressed with an included file, breakwad.exe. this handy little executable breaks down the Half-Life .wad into as many different .wad files as you like. only want to load a tenth of the .wad at a time? easy.. just run 'breakwad /breaks 10 halflife.wad'. very useful. and if only have 32MB RAM and STILL want to load all the textures, (argh!) the next release of QERadiant has a little texture detail slider which allows you to load textures at lower detail, to take less memory. Wolfin was kind enough to give me a look at the Beta, and it works really well.

So what does the plugin actually DO? well, it's pretty simple, it just lets you load .wad files as well as .pak files, which is how Half-Life stores its Textures.

The great thing about Half-Life is that you can have 256 colors for EVERY texture. yep, every single texture has it's own pallate. which means no more brown, no more grey.. any color you want you may have. let your creative urges go wild, create any atmosphere you like.. fantastic :) the other cool thing is the scripting.. you can make a good plot with scientists giving you clues, and guards to give you a hand (or to distract monsters long enough for you to get away..:) ) you can even script monsters to stuff for you.

Problems - Most of these were pretty minor, the most major one being a GPF if you don't load the Half-Life project file before you try loading the plugin. You HAVE to have set up the dirs before loading the plugin, the readme does sort of mention this, but it zip automatically puts the plugin .dll in the plugin's dir so if you just try and start QERadiant after unzipiing, it'll crash. you just have to move the .dll out of the plugin's dir, load the project, make sure the directorys are correct, then move the plugin back into the plugins directory then refresh plugins. and make sure you have 'load last project on startup' or you'll be doing this every time you start QERadiant.

other than that, the only problems were all entitys being displayed as a small box, which made it impossible to check the height of ceilings etc. useing the info_player_start entity, which was kinda annoying. still, I suppose this is a problem with QERadiant not recognising the model format for Half-Life models. I also noticed some minor pallate problems in the texture view window, the blue used to represent transparent parts of the texture also seems to be present in a few places it shouldn't have, but nothing major. and of course, the memory problems I discussed above.

The halflife.def file that comes with the plugin is also pretty lame, Wolfin again kindly gave me this version which is much better. (note, I just mirrored this file on my own webspace, hopfully he'll be updating it on this site soon. To save it, right click and select 'Save As..' don't just click on the link, cause it'll just display it as text)

Summery - Cool plugin that lets you edit Half-Life in the best editor there is, QERadiant. other than the minor issues I discussed above, I havn't found any major bugs. (any you do find, you can probably get help in the forums) It fits in seamlessly with the QERadiant environment, making it easy as to start using. Great plugin :)