Project-Timeless Models

Okay I cheated once again a little bit time wise "Project-Timeless" actually got released half a year after Red-Orchestra but it has an substantially older engine and my involvement in the development predates the release by many years. Project-Timeless was the first and only Half-Life mod I was ever involved with. I got to know many great people on the team that I would collaborate with later on in my career. The weird thing about this team is it got started by a group of people who laid down the name and the basic idea but who didn't know how to make a mod (or a game for that matter) at all. They than recruited a bunch of people who also all had no idea what goes into the creation of a game but were willing to learn and put a lot of blood and sweat into this mod. Step by step it became more and more apparent who was really doing the heavy lifting. Inevitably this lead to a mutiny where all the new recruits took over the mod and kicked all the founders out. I made many things for this mod weapon models/textures, character models/textures, levels with textures, I even learned how to do 3D skeletal animation just for the mod because no one else knew how to do it. We used Milkshape for all the 3D models and animation that was definitely a big mistake as it is unreliable, has a slow work flow and is not perfectly cross compatible with "3D Studio Max" that some few people on the team were using. Among all the things that I learned the most important thing was that you absolutely need art-direction/concept-art everyone working on the mod had a different idea of what they wanted the mod to look like most of us came from Counter-Strike mapping so most stuff looked bright and sort of present day realism based even though all design docs clearly stated that the game is a futuristic post apocalyptic sci-fi game. Even though my maps had a darker color pallet and an all around grittier looks than most of the brightly colored terrain based maps (that the game dominantly featured) I was by no means consequential enough with the look either. Another mistake was that we tried to have one big final release that we would never have to update rather than iterating often with community input which is what all the actually successful mods like DoD and CS where doing. I am very glad this mod made it to the release state because as I so often declare I am very proud of my finishing ability. I had to cut my ties to this mod when I started working paid full time in the game industry and knew that I wouldn't have time for this kind of intensive modding anymore. I was afraid that me leaving the mod would probably kill it since I always felt that I was one of the main driving forces behind it. But luckily the other guys managed to pull of a proper release.