[scalar]

I'd like to try Cinematic mod v10 and play through HL2 + ep's with my wife. Curious if anyone has tried it?

Also what is the status of Synergy with the current HL2 codebase (I see HL2 is on Mac now...)? Ie, which version of Source SDK do I need installed for current HL2 + Synergy, and if I require something else for Cinematic mod (I think they just want Ep2) then I assume I'll need *both* combined installed...but am not clear on which current source codebase applies to Synergy+Hl2&ep1/2. (I did read the documentation etc but it's not clear how actively things are maintained.)

Thanks for any replies, we're limited to playing a few hours a week so I need to be efficient to be able to achieve this. (ie, it'd be nice to draw off your experiences instead of just plowing through this myself..)

[CMaster]

Synergy won't work with Cinematic Mod.
Reason being, that Cinematic mod's huge, huge textures crash HL2, so the Cinematic mod uses some customized DLLs. Synergy doesn't feature these tweaks (no need of them), so attempting to use Cinematic mod textures/models will probably crash Synergy.

Personally, I don't think you're missing out on anything, but I guess there is no accounting for taste.

[ultradude25]

The CM vehicle textures look pretty good. Don't know about the rest as I don't have the bandwidth to actually download CM, I just got these from GameBanana.

[CMaster]

I dare say there are some good bits and pieces in there.
Here are some examples (from the CM site, no less) of why I feel that generally you're probably better off without:





Although the last one would probably be fine, as Synergy (probably) can't mount all those extra effects.

[ultradude25]

Oh god so much HDR! D:

[scalar]

Yea not a fan of the overblown bloom/hdr and half dozen alex models that are used across that project, but I just figured I'd combine my wife's run with me and a cinematic mod so that I could have something different for my Nth run that didn't cause me to go OCD for weeks on 'tuning' things to my preference. I would most likely still tweak the HDR/Bloom but just by dialing things to my liking in console as we go. I'll drop the idea for now (fwiw my primary machine is a dual 2008 xeon with 16GB ram & Win7-64bit...but I get that synergy isn't on the latest codebase from my reading through the forum.)

[CMaster]

Yea not a fan of the overblown bloom/hdr and half dozen alex models that are used across that project, but I just figured I'd combine my wife's run with me and a cinematic mod so that I could have something different for my Nth run that didn't cause me to go OCD for weeks on 'tuning' things to my preference. I would most likely still tweak the HDR/Bloom but just by dialing things to my liking in console as we go. I'll drop the idea for now (fwiw my primary machine is a dual 2008 xeon with 16GB ram & Win7-64bit...but I get that synergy isn't on the latest codebase from my reading through the forum.)

It's not that - Synergy is on the most recent modding codebase available. It's just that there's A: no way of incorporating additional code (the new effects etc) from a mod mounted in Synergy and B: Because the Cinematic mod uses such huge, huge files, it needs a hacked up version of HL2 to support it. If you try and use them in any other mod, it will probably crash.

There's nothing to stop you making a few model or texture replacements of your choice however - just install them into either the Synergy folder (if you only want them in Syn) or the HL2 folder as you would normally.

[ultradude25]

There's nothing to stop you making a few model or texture replacements of your choice however - just install them into either the Synergy folder (if you only want them in Syn) or the HL2 folder as you would normally.

I wish someone would make a mod of the Cinematic mod that takes all the textures (and any higher detail models if there are any) that are appropriate and fit into the HL world (they'd be mostly high res versions of the original texture, nothing should've actually been changed visually), and allows them to easily be put into any Source game without overloading it.

[scalar]

It's not that - Synergy is on the most recent modding codebase available. It's just that there's A: no way of incorporating additional code (the new effects etc) from a mod mounted in Synergy and B: Because the Cinematic mod uses such huge, huge files, it needs a hacked up version of HL2 to support it. If you try and use them in any other mod, it will probably crash.

There's nothing to stop you making a few model or texture replacements of your choice however - just install them into either the Synergy folder (if you only want them in Syn) or the HL2 folder as you would normally.

Well that was the point of my question actually, whether the content would load under synergy. The light version of CM says 32bit works so I wasn't sure if cinematic mod still used hacked binaries in that case. It might be that the post I was thinking of was on the CM discussion forum though and related to CM being out of date code, or I was just misunderstanding.

It's been a few years since I had time to keep track of Hammer (&UDK etc) so I can see where I might be mistaken on that. In any case I'm not sure I have time to make a port of CM to synergy myself but the wife did start exploring HL2 with me yesterday and I'm going to get her down here in a minute to do some more...so thanks for the responses! I'll just play CM on my own in parallel if I want to check out their work...

[CMaster]

Feel free to try the light one and see how it pans out. You know how to do mod mounting? I'm not entirley convinced that just because it works in 32bit OSes means that it will work with a normal source SDK base mind.

[scalar]

I don't know either, if they're patching the binary to enable 3GB ram support (which imo takes the OS flag anyway?) then probably not.

In any case the biggest issue I'm having atm is the runabout vehicle (buggy) in HL2 is too slow compared to single player (so are the water boats but it's manageable.) We simply can't make the jumps and I clear them by at least twice the distance of my failed jumps when I use HL2 binaries directly... any ideas?

[CMaster]

Try this

[scalar]

Thanks! I tried search & google and was finding *way* too much source/hl2 related content to filter out what I needed.

On a related note, I ready somewhere on these forums that synergy no longer supports models outside of the ones in the mod itself? Or am I mistaken? There was a model pack on page 2 or 3 of general discussion that I already tried and realized it has entirely too much old content, but the default models are rather lo-fi.

Also discovered that leaving 'allow server to download' content in settings was causing my wife to crash (we have vanilla synergy installs atm) and setting it to deny any server content seems to have fixed that for the most part. She still crashes every 3-4 maps (especially if ending with a vehicle) but so far she's having fun so I feel like this is working out. Thanks for the help so far!