point me in the right direction

[Pathogen]

First off, this is my first post! Not that I haven’t read most of the stuff everyone here posts. Now, anyways, I’m an intermediate programmer with a friend who is pretty good with Maya and we thinking about starting out on a half-life 2 mod... Thing is we have no idea where to start (aside from working out a story and getting our idea/vision perfect). A lot of the people here say they have some work done on their mods and I’m curious how you people work on them without the SDK. Is it just level design with the hammer editor? Any insight would be great. We don’t have a lot of skills but we're both dedicated and want to give back to the half-life community as best we can. Thanks

 

[SidewinderX]

well, atm we don't have the hammer editor as well. most mod, such as my own, Cold War: Melting Point, are jsut working on 3d models and designs now.

 

[InsaneFool]

also do concepts or graph-paper layouts of your maps so that when Hammer does come out, you'll be completely prepared.

 

[Dan]

well you can actually map stuff out in hammer 3.5 which is the available mapping program for HL1. Gabe has stated numerous times that all of the brush work from HL1 will be able to be ported into HL2 very easily.

 

[Majestic XII]

First, write a very good and complete design doc. Write about how the mod will work, write about every little feature. You should have it and show the other teamm8s so they know what to work on and how the mod will look/feel like in the end. A design doc is very important.

 

[Hudson]

you could do the basic layout in the current hammer, but if you wanted larger maps, or if your going to be changing the scaling of the world, it could get tricky converting.