In Black Mesa, the gibbing is pretty much like how it is the original HL or in TF2: Either there's no dismemberment or the body is ripped to shreds. I was wondering if it would be possible to modify the mod to have more localized dismemberment so a magnum shot, really close (like, point-blank) shotgun blast, or charged Tau Cannon shot. etc. could shoot off individual limbs. I know there's hit-detection for limbs and the gib-models are already there, so it's a matter of the coding. Now, I should point out that I have zero clue how this would work. Maybe it's fairly simple, maybe it's ludicrously difficult, or maybe it's not even possible.

I'm not looking for arguments as to why dismemberment like this would "ruin the game" or crap like that or how it's "unrealistic" Frankly, I think the localized dismemberment would be MORE realistic, but honestly, I just want it for shits and giggles.

Hell, if someone gives me a good place to start, I might try making this myself. (But don't count on it; see the "I have zero clue how this would work" note above)

EDIT: This may have some helpful information Black Mesa Wiki: Gib System

This would require extreme amounts of modding to make it like, say, L4D. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying it'd probably be very hard to pull off correctly. And frankly, the gibbings fine in BM, anyway.

That's what I figured

Since you mention L4D, I wonder if there's some way to re-purpose that code? Probably not, but it's a thought. I'm sure there's way more to finding it and then implementing it in BM than I realize.

Or maybe bring the scientist charachter/gib models in to L4D2 to replace the common infected? Fight hordes of angry nerds!

I saw some gmod addon do something like that a few years ago. Of course the name is horribly hard to guess:

Spoiler: show

"Dismemberment Mod"

Of course it is way simpler than what L4D2 does. The addon just scales the limbs down, so you can't see them anymore and adds a blood spray particle effect. That plus spawning gibbs accordingly should do it. Seen as tough it requires modification of the code and BM:S has afaik no scripting system like gmod, it is pretty impossible to implement by yourself (unless you can fluently read and write x86 machine code, or get the devs to give you the source).

According to the Valve presentation Rendering Wounds in Left 4 Dead 2 the more sophisticated approach used in L4D2 clips the model geometry with an elipsoid in the vertex shader and does fine grained clipping by alphatesting against a pre-baked texture in the fragment/pixel shader and then renders internal body parts into the wounds. And again, this needs access to the source.

Sorry that I can't give you any hopes on this end, but at least you now know two possible ways of implementing it.

I myself wouldn't want to attempt anything as sophisticated as Left 4 dead 2 and I doubt anyone else would either. Something similar to the G-mod script seems like a more viable option, if anyone smarter than me can figure out how to implement it.

But in the Black Mesa wiki page about their gib system they said it was like in TF2. If this is the case, it might be easier to do decapitations, which they had in TF2. The TF2 decapitations shrink the head of the model and spawn a head-gib. I think since in BM it would be unnecessary to have a head-gib model since it would be from guns and lasers and not a sword, but it would probably look better to have a neck wound rather than just a pinched-off spot where it gets shrunken. The modeling for this would be easy enough if I could import and export them to and from 3ds MAX. I could definitely do the models for the headless bodies, but IDK if I'd fuck up the textures doing that and I certainly don't know how to get that to work in BM.

But that at least seems a little more doable (but you can correct me if i'm wrong)