I'm starting on a couple of Natural Selection maps, one ns, and one co. I want to create two linear maps that will be fun for my clan to play. I think that the lack of official linear game play maps is probably the single biggest weakness in Natural Selection.

Anyway, I'm just starting out, I'm following the tutorials, I've created my first little box room with a player start entity and a light. It compiled just fine, but when I try to start Natural Selection with it, I get a "can't find ha.wad" error, and the game shuts down. There is no such "ha.wad" file that I know of, and I certainly didn't configure any into Hammer, in fact, I haven't used any textures in the map yet, I just wanted to see if I was on the right track, which, apparrently, I am not. Is there something other than a player start entity that is required before a Natural Selection map will start up properly?

I did call this map, "ns_mine" because that will be what the map will be named when it is finished (if the name isn't already taken ). Anyway, for now that is the name. Do I require three hives and a comm chair before Natural Selection will load an NS map? For testing purposes should I just give it a name without the co or ns prefix?

The map should load no matter how many entities. If you're *sure* you haven't used ha.wad anywhere in your map, try compiling with the -wadautodetect switch for CSG. If it still says you need ha.wad, then you have actually used this wad in your map. Also, this post belongs in Mapping Help and Troubleshooting.

I've no idea, but you should take a look at this. (Section 12 is most applicable to you.)

If you're using HLFix to export from RMF to MAP, make sure that you've run makewad.exe (I think that's what it's called) and that you've referenced the file that makewad generates when you run HLFix.

That's all that I can think of; hopefully someone more knowledgable than myself will come around here soon.

EDIT: Someone more knowledgable than myself got here before me

Lol, you have the same problem I did a while back... which caused me to stop mapping for almost 4 months or more...

best thing I can say is this:

Uninstall Batch Compiler, Valve Hammer Editor, and Natural Selection, AND STEAM, AND half life

Then, re-install it all

I didn't do all that to try and fix that problem, but I did all that at one point after the problem arose and then, when I decided to give it a go just to see if it would work... it worked!

I never did find out what caused it!

EDIT- BTW- Try ANYTHING else first... this is LAST DITCH! All I know is nothing else worked for me, so... yeah... try other ideas first, they might work for you

Just thought I'd add the conclusion of my problem here, so maybe it will help others. The problem was that I selected too many wad files when I configured Hammer. I think I probably had as many as a dozen wad files selected and the maximum suggested is 8. nOOb mistake number #312...