Nightwatch Textures: Released!

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The following post was originally posted in November 2009 on my ill-fated Blogger page. I’ve brought it over here for archival purposes.

A few weeks back, I received an unexpected e-mail from a fan of an old Half-Life mod by the name of Nightwatch. This was a single player mod I started way back in 2002, a few months before I would strike my largest amateur success with Natural Selection’s ns_eclipse.

I’ve been meaning to partner this release with a postmortem of sorts on the mod’s successes and failures as well as as thorough a “where are they now?” list I can manage, but even after all this time I have a lot to say and this has been held back long enough. So, for anyone out there who might still be fighting the good fight with old Half-Life 1 content, or for anyone who wants to see what we were working with, please enjoy this:

The Nightwatch textures are… finally… released.

These files are the most recent I have, dating to November 2004 (a few months after my departure – there are some textures in here I hadn’t even seen before). It is possible that other former team members may have newer versions – if this is the case, please contact me and I’ll update accordingly.

Without further ado (links updated 01/2012):

From the readme:


Half-Life: Nightwatch - Textures
--------------------------------
nw.wad nw_xeno.wad

Textures by:
Adam Foster, Henning Horstmann, Mohammad Alavi, Tomislav Spejic,
and Tom DiLazaro. One additional texture by Cayle George.

Includes additional textures created from bases by and/or
originally authored by Randy Reddig and Kevin Roberts.

All textures are the property of their authors.

You may use and re-distribute these textures for any non-commercial
purpose, provided you include credit to the original authors
(please copy from the list above) and the Nightwatch team.

Special thanks to everyone who ever worked on Nightwatch, and
everyone who supported it. Please forgive me for not seeing to it
that these were released sooner.

—-
Here’s a small sampling of what you’ll receive:

 I don’t expect there will be much demand for these in 2009+, but I’m glad to finally make them available. I plan to see about a future .rmf release of some of our level source files.

I’ll be back later with a look back at the project and team that in a large part launched my career… despite also being my biggest failure.

5 thoughts on “Nightwatch Textures: Released!”

  1. Erlend

    Blast from the past! I remember being very excited about Nightwatch when it was active. I guess what really doomed Nightwatch was the talent of the team – so talented that the core members got jobs in the industry!

    Reply ↓
  2. ElectricGoblin

    I think it is very honorable of you to release the textures to the community. I remember being very excited about the mod back in my early teens when the mod was still in development, and it’s a shame it never got to see a release, I can’t imagine what you and the team must have felt when the final decision to cancel it was made.

    I’m planning to start my own Half-Life mod sometime in the not too distant future and was initially going to make a new set of textures myself, but now that these fantastic ones are available that isn’t really necessary. Having something so professional and substantial to work with at the very start really helps for motivation, and I have to thank you for this.

    Thanks!

    Reply ↓
  3. Andrew Weldon Post author

    Thanks, guys. It feels awful to have never finished it, but it’s kind of amazing how many people still remember it after all this time. Every so often there’s still a debate over what killed it on the ModDB page, haha. Just think if we had finished it!

    ElectricGoblin: Good luck with your project! I’d love to see what you (or anyone else reading this, for that matter) comes up with using the textures.

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  4. ElectricGoblin

    Cheers. I really admire how you and the team managed to work together on what would become such a polished product. While I have worked with mapping and modding for years, it has more or less been by myself. The project I currently have in mind will need work of a broader profession than just mapping and texture work for the concept to work out, which is why I’ll have to try and gain interest from other modding branches to join the project.

    I don’t know if it’s rude to ask this here, forgive me if it is, but do you have any personal tips from your experience in working with mod teams or from professional work? How to gain interest in the mod, and when there is a team assembled, how to get the members to work most efficiently with each other towards the common goal of realising the project. How did you present the concept to team members when Nightwatch started out, for instance?
    Before I even try to recruit anyone though, I will make sure to have a design document which covers every aspect of the mod, so that nothing is left to chance, as well as clear goals and tasks for each member branch such as modellers or coders. I also will need some actual media and previous efforts to present, which is why I have at least one other project I want to finish first…

    Thanks a lot in advance!

    Reply ↓

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