Hey everyone! I didn't expect to be back here (and maybe you didn't expect it either), but the 1.3 patch for TBE is now out! The focus of this patch is introducing 11 achievements into the game, rewarding progression and also rewarding finding all instances of the two recurring "hidden object" events in the mod. Other minor fixes and tweaks were made seeing as I had to modify almost every map for the achievement triggers anyway. Without further ado, let's break it down!

Achievements

For another Sourcemod I'm releasing on Steam soon, Goreagulation (which is getting a big overhaul for the occasion), I decided a big opportunity was to learn how to code and integrate achievements. There's a lot that goes into this and it's pretty terribly documented, but I eventually got a set working for that mod. Although there's a lot involved, it's all fairly simple stuff, and I remembered one of the main requests I got for TBE even from the people who enjoyed it as-is was achievements. So, I added three sets of achievements:

• One for each era completed (achieved when hitting the "credits" map for a given chapter)

• One for each boss enemy defeated (achieved when the enemy is either dead or the encounter is finished)

• One for finding all occurrences of the G-Woman and Beloryann (who both appear in every era)

That means 11 achievements all in all! There's not any "kill x enemies with x gun" or other more specific achievements as these are quite a bit more involved on the coding side and I'm only just getting to grips with this system. I'm not against adding additional achievements in future when or if I figure that out, though for now both TBE and Goreagulation will just use stuff like the above. I've tried to test them as best I'm able, but if you run into any issues unlocking an achievement, go ahead and let me know on the Steam discussions.

The bulk of the changes here were focused around rebalancing the Fabreen fight in Noir, which historically gets a bit of flak for the difficulty spike. Fabreen himself had his health reduced by about a quarter whilst the number of health pickups was increased by about 50%. Meanwhile, there was a persistent issue dating back to the 2018 versions of this map that used the "map fade in" feature in HL2; turns out this fade-in fires every time you reload a save (and was responsible for even more deaths from people already struggling), so this has also now been solved.

Two small changes here - again, Fabreen's health was nerfed in the final fight for the same reasons as Noir. I noticed skybox fog was setup but not enabled in t_d4 (the strider map), so I fixed that too; and, lastly, there was a pervasive issue with cubemaps in t_d5b (the final map of the mod) which prevented me from building them without a map corruption. I've since worked out this is because maps with "light giving textures" (e.g. light003) applied to a big brush face seem to freak out cubemap building. I built the cubemaps in a version of the map without this lighting, then baked those cubemaps into the BSP separately. The result is working cubemaps without sacrificing the intent for the under-floor lighting.

The last change worth mentioning is that The Burton Equation is being retroactively folded into KralKom, a name/label I'm using for the Source mods I release on Steam. I'm not generally a fan of mod teams having names because most mod teams fail to make one mod, let alone multiple that are different enough to warrant branding that ties them all together. However, I made The Burton Equation with a group of alumni very similar to who contributed to parts of Goreagulation, and those same folks will also be contributing to my next project. These contributors differ a bit from project to project but there's a lot of similar names involved and I expect there always will be (and a lot of them are from RTBR as well). Rather than continue to only effectively credit myself on the actual Steam page, we agreed on a conglomerate of Kralich & Kompany, shortened to KralKom, to group together all of these disparate projects. Goreagulation's Steam release will also be folded into KralKom retroactively; our next project will be the first original production under the new group. This takes the form of an edit to the Steam page, a new intro graphic (a temp one whilst we conceptualise something more final for the future), and a logo in the ending credits.

And that's all! I had thought about saying, again, that 1.3 was the "final planned updated for TBE", and it is, at least as much as 1.2 was. I do generally believe in moving on to greener pastures and doing something new with what you've learned instead of polishing the same thing, but being on Steam makes it really easy to ship updates like this and I can't guarantee I'll resist the pull to make other edits in future. For now though, that's all she wrote - I hope you enjoy the achievement hunting, and keep an eye on the KralKom page for more mods coming soon!