I was recently shooting the shit with Jeep Barnett, one of the Portal developers. He said some things that I want to pass on to the community.

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[. . .] I do have a general complaint for all the community sites I've seen. It seems that very few map creators are using the BMZ system that I set up ( http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Bonus_maps ). It was intended to making playing custom maps MUCH easier for non-technical people. Though it's our fault for not giving the details on how to create BMZs until long after the flood of custom maps had started, I wish that the community portals themselves would automate a system for packaging them this way.

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Thanks for the Community Spotlight link. I've passed all the Portal peoples so they can take a look. Thanks for trying to pimp the BMZ stuff. I have seen it used a few times, I'm just saying as a whole I think it's been ignored. The bugs with custom content does sound pretty bad though.

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I had hoped to do more post lauch support for the Portal community, but instead chose to work on other non-Portal projects such as Left 4 Dead almost immediately after Orange Box came out. But a lot of the original Portal team is still working on some cool new stuff for you guys and I'll be sure to point them to these bugs.

Here's hoping for a Portal update that fixes the problem with BMZ!

BMZs are bad for people like me who create multiple maps though. It automatically creates a sub-folder inside the /maps/ directory with the name of the BMZ. This prevents us from making a folderinfo.bns for the main directory. For instance, if I had a BMZ named "remmizchamber3.bmz" which contained:

RemmizChambers/remmizchamber3.bsp

When I imported it into the game, the folder setup would look like:

remmizchamber3/RemmizChambers/remmizchamber3.bsp

Now if the .BMZ would just directly import into the /maps/ directory instead of creating a new top-level one, I would be able to use it because I could then create a folderinfo.bns for the top-level folder.

Let me add that I addressed these issues, as well as the problems with custom textures, models, and other content. His "The bugs with custom content does sound pretty bad though." response was in regards to that comment.

msleeper wrote:
Let me add that I addressed these issues, as well as the problems with custom textures, models, and other content. His "The bugs with custom content does sound pretty bad though." response was in regards to that comment.

what are the issues with custom textures and models?

Because the BMZ extracts the map into it's own subdirectory, the paths for materials is destroyed and does not work properly. Anything custom shows up as errored (ERROR model or pink/black checkerboard).

BMZ is a very cool idea on its own, and I think it might be better used by current mappers. From what I've seen, packing up maps into map packs, BMZs are feasible for packing your own map together, but almost un-usable for packing together things that weren't BMZs to start with (as all the map packs were).

Obviously, generous PakRatting would be required, but I get the feeling I'm missing something.

That said, I think the whole thing was a little too ambitious. A simple function that would look in a zip (compressed or uncompressed), determine where it goes in the Portal directory and automatically insert it in the right place, just unzipping and copying, with directory structure in place.

On the other hand, perhaps it was not ambitious enough. In the beginning, we all thought that a BMZ was something that you could just drop in and it would be as simple an installation as just dropping a VMF (which is to say, just one file, no directory structures).

Either way, "good hustle" to Jeep, but it doesn't look like the idea worked out, which he already knows.

Jeep is a great guy, he helped me with the the Flash Version mappack and actually sent me a demo file of him playing the whole thing, it was more then 2 hours, it's really funny to watch him take advantage of engine bugs.
Then he asked me if I can release the pack as a BMZ file but I couldn't understand how to create it, even with tutorials.

I think they should make similar system for custom maps for Half-life 2 too.