starting point for source modding

Here is the link to the Valve Developer Community:

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page

It has pretty good descriptions of most everything you need to get started. Here's some links to beginning topics:

Downloading the SDK
Setting up a new Mod
Installing and Debugging the Source Code: be sure to follow the directions for your version of Visual Studio, or it won't work right. Also, be sure to do release builds and not debug builds. Steam provides a console for debugging, or there are instructions for how to do it through Visual Studio, but I haven't got them to work correctly yet.
Using Source Control, which I will be setting up today so that we can work on the same project. I'll actually probably follow these directions instead because I am more familiar with Subversion. TortoiseSVN is easy to use and it's probably what I'll be using. If you've never used source control before, I promise it will make all of our lives easier, and if you have any questions about it you can come talk to me. I'll do a later post on how to actually use it.

Here's a good starting place for all the other topics for modding. In particular, this week I'll be looking at modeling so that we can get our virtual people into the project. The Softimage Mod Tool will serve as our bridge between Poser Pro and Face Poser, which is Source's tool for character animation. You'll need to download the Source plugin as well to allow for imports and exports.

Modeling and related tasks always have a steep learning curve, but there is a lot of documentation and tutorials out there. For first steps, we'll be exporting our Poser models into the Collada (.dae) format, and importing into the Mod Tool from that format. There are a couple videos about doing this. After exporting into the correct format, the next step will be getting it into Face Poser and figuring out whether we should make our animation keyframes there, or whether we will have to export keyframes from Poser. I'm hoping we'll be able to make all our animations there because exporting and importing keyframes will get tedious.

Enough writing for now. I'm going to set up source control, and I will make a blog post on how to access that project soon.