This week I spent more time preparing Super Secret Easter Eggs™, but I also changed the letter field in HQA.

For a few years now, every time I saw the letter field in the game, I knew it was too blurry. Even too blurry for HQA. :D So, despite being afraid of starting something I'm going to regret in the future, I just went ahead and drew the letters.

Here's one more reason why I always wanted to replace the texture: It was written using a little-known font called Comic Sans! ... No hate against Comic Sans, of course. It's just...

You know? :P

So anyway, I redrew all letters and the evil smiley, scanned it in and inverted the colors (as usual). I thought about whipping up a little Javascript code to generate a completely new random letter map (like I did for the textures in the text adventure of HQS), but then I remembered that I had already carefully placed the letters back in 2001. So I simply dragged in letter by letter on top of the old ones (you can see me working on this in the image at the top).

A texture in HL has a certain limit (I think it's 512x512, but correct me if I'm wrong), and the old texture, which included the whole field, was about 320x352. It was plastered on a brush with a size of 1472x1424, so blown up by a factor of 4.20, which causes the blurry mess.

Now, back in the day, if you wanted to have huge areas, this was the way to keep r_speeds down to achieve good performance. But we are more or less done caring about that, since even smart phones can run Half-Life nowadays. So, I split up the field into four 320x320 textures (or similar size) and created the required brushes.

Repeating textures in HL have this annoying side effect that you can see the edges (1 pixel) of the next texture cycle bleeding through. So I had to mask that with several in-between textures.

My goal was that it was less blurry (especially the green evil smiley that carries the player to the top), but still not "HD" enough to make it stand out from the rest of the game. I think I've achieved that, it should look similar to the title/logo texture right at the beginning.

I won't "remaster" anything else though, this was just really something I thought I could improve, especially since it's right at the beginning of HQA.

Fun fact: Did you know the evil smiley on the doors in HQ1 was also created using Comic Sans? I definitely won't change that, so there's some additional sadism for you whenever you see it now. :D

On another note, I also began collecting all walkthroughs. HQA already had one in the mod folder ("walkthrough.hqa"). Toyoch wrote one for HQS, which I'm going to use because the tone of it is excellent. And for HQ, I'll have to turn the one I had on my website into a text file, but that shouldn't be too much work.

All readme files are also in one place now.

And finally, Khimitsu pointed out that I should add auto-saves after several speeches, i.e. the camera sequences where you hear people talking. That's what I'm going to do next.

And who knows? There might be a release date announcement around the corner.

To be continued... (<