Other Resources

If the articles here at Tweezer's Half-Life Health Club haven't answer your questions try some of the many other excellent Half-Life resources on the net.

General

Planet Half-Life

Excellent site, with links to everything under the sun.

HalfLife.net

Another outstanding site for general Half-Life information. Includes many hosted sites for Half-Life mods

Apprehension

Visit RideFlame's cool and eclectic Half-Life site. If you like to browse, and revel in Half-Life rumors, lore and legend, this is one of the most fun places to visit.

I.Am/Half-Life | Everything for Half-Life

Site sponsored by PCGame.com, it modestly claims to be the "biggest and best Half-Life site on the Web." Well, it does have a lot of info.

The Half-Life Beginners Guide

Name says it all.

 

File Planet

A major source for all sorts of downloads, including game mods and editing tools.

Official Sierra Half-Life site

Not as useful as you might think, but there is some support available, news and links.

Valveworld

Official Valve Software site, great source for accurate news about what's going in new game development.  But not much help for current issues in playing HL or designing maps/levels/mods for it.

GamesCrawler.com

Index site consisting solely of links to game sites. Their Half-Life section is a good place to look for new links.

Server Administration

Command Center

Best general resource for server administration.  This is where I learned how to do it. See especially:

• Command Center's "How-To Run a Server"
• Command Center's "Commands and Cvars Reference"

 

UnitedAdmins.com Newsgroups

Game server admins maintain a number of valuable Half-Life related newsgroups.

Counter-Strike Server Admin Resources

Most CS admin tools are useful for Half-Life servers as well. This site is a good source after you've already been running a server for a while.

Half-Life Admin Mod

A "mod" for HL which supports more sophisticated server administrationNot for beginning server administrators.

Pigstats

Logfile analyzer for Half-Life and mods.  Provides detailed statistics on how each player has fared. It's GPL'ed.

Log_Anal

Another logfile analyzer for Half-Life and mods. Log_Anal requires Java, produces HTML pages.

Map/Level Editing

Interested in creating your own maps? It's fun but time consuming. Here are a set of resources that will not only get you started but will actually get you well on your way. The ERC is the place to start.

Half-Life Editing Resource Center (ERC)

Of all the sites for editing, this one has far and away the best tutorials and references.  The entity reference is essential.

Planet Half-Life Editing Resource Page

Gateway page to lots of different editing resources, all hosted on Planet Half-Life.

Half-Life Programming Planet

This is Valve's own resource for level editing.

Half-Life Model Viewer (hlmv)

hlmv is an indispensible tool for not only rendering models but also viewing and unpacking .pak files.

Rust - Gamedesign.net

Parent location of the ERC and other hosted sites.

Gladiator Bot and...

Winbspc decompiler

MrElusive wrote winbspc to help his Gladiator bot.  I haven't used Gladiator, but winbspc is great.  Among other things, it decompiles .bsp files into .map files.  I used this to figure out how to trigger the fireplace in El Cabrito.

Gensurf

David Hyde's tool for generating terrain surfaces. Very useful if you want a natural-looking landscape in your map.

Map Format

This ERC-hosted document by mapping wizard autolycus describes the content of .map files.

Other Resources

For Maps, Models and Crosshairs ...

For On-line Player Stats

The CLQ (Champions League for Quake) collects limited player stats from Quake and Half-Life servers all over the net.  You should be able to find your own player name here.

"Top 100" Half-Life Web Sites

Gamelists.net counts hits and collects comments on many Half-Life and Counter-Strike sites. Unfortunately, some of the sites appear to spend all day recording bogus hits in order to cheat the statistics. Shills make many bogus evaluations in order to inflate their own ratings or tear down someone else's. Well, we are gamers after all... Nevertheless, this is still a good way to find some sites that might otherwise remain undiscovered.