Flames?

Im just wondering how you make those nify flames that looks like fire. I see them in a lot of maps, but i cant figure out how to make them. I think there used to be a tut on it...Thanks guys!

Well, the traditional method is to use a normal old fire sprite. sprites/fire.spr is a good example.

The trouble with this is that the sprite will always face the player - by default sprites are NOT axis locked.

The first response to this was to create an animating texture out of the sprite and place it on brushes. This looks pretty good, but it can hurt the framerate a bit if used excessively.

More recently, however, some mappers discovered that if you hex-edit the sprite, you can make it axis locked either on the up-down axis (so it won't "tilt" when you are above the fire), or completely locked in place (it acts like a polygon facing the direction specified in the "angles" key). There is a tutorial on hex-editing sprites here:

http://collective.valve-erc.com/index.php?doc=1063191790-06027400

Of note is that there is a bug in half-life so if you make the sprite completely locked, none of the angles can be 0 or you will get weird results. To fix just make any angle you want to be 0 into 0.1.

Some people have written programs to do this hex editing for you, spritemage (german):

http://www.slackiller.com/hlprograms/spritemage.zip

spritefixer (english):

http://www.slackiller.com/hlprograms/spritefixer.zip

The best method for fire is usually to make your fire sprite z-axis locked (faces the palyer horizontally but not vertically).

There are many sprites out there both axis locked and not, one of my personal favorites is the following one (origionally by meat, I have converted it to a spr and axis locked it):

use an env_sprite.

rendermode - additive

fx amount - 120 (give or take)

sprite name - sprites/fire.spr (probably the one you mean)

you might want to experiment with the scale and framerate settings. to keep it more natural looking, the bigger the scale, the lower the framerate should be.

Awsome, thanks a lot guys, I really appreciate it! My only question is, if its bad that the flame does not axis lock. Is it going to hurt anything, (besides looks) if i dont make it axis lock?

Basically, no its all astetic, but it only takes 5 seconds of your time with the spritefixer program. Just open the file, select the option, and click the button to fix it. If you fix a default sprite be sure to rename it by the way.

Awsome, it works, thanks again guys...i have just one last question....is there any good website to get ambient_generic sounds from like...a fire crackle?

I think there are some good fire sounds that are default to half-life.

ambience/burning1.wav

ambience/burning2.wav

ambience/burning3.wav

One thing about the spritefixer tho (I've heard this, but haven't seen it, personally) is that in Overview mode, the sprite takes over the whole map.

A guy who makes models for me sometimes said that. In the map, the sprite was scaled to 1. But he said that in the overview, the whole map was covered by the one sprite...and this sprite had been made with the spritefixer program.

I'll do a little more checking into this and get back to you about it.

I think thats only if you choose the "weird scaling mode" in spritefixer which i dont know why you would do.

Thanks Doc, i will keep that in mind....but i cant find those ambiance sounds...i dont have any sounds under Half-Life/sounds, or in Valve/sounds or Gearbox/sounds. So i assumed that you had to download them

i think, mazemasters answer was just as correct, someone needs to set it to blue

Yes - Mazey's answer contains a s**tload of relevant information that is not well-known.

Thanks Doc, i will keep that in mind....but i cant find those ambiance sounds...i dont have any sounds under Half-Life/sounds, or in Valve/sounds or Gearbox/sounds. So i assumed that you had to download them

All the sounds are contained in the pak0.pak file in your halflife directory. Get a program called pak explorer and you'll be able to browse through it.

I have several nice alternative fire sounds in the sound pack here. And there are some better sized versions of that fire sprite maze showed in the new sprites folder I think, the full-sized one is a bit big for Half-Life.

http://www.cryotank.net/maps/textures/index.html