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What a bountiful collection of jargon you have... it's clear that you come from a dogmatic school of 3D modeling. (if any school... and if you are self-taught, I applaud you... even if not for the lack of humility)

Texture deformation happens on the contiguous mesh, (one-piece models) though it is generally a real-time feature of the engine and not the model itself. Part of Valve's innovation was making model-animation specifics part of the engine, rather than relying on design-time parameters. Why did you not make the leap to this conclusion? Are you so steeped in static modeling that you fail to envision the model in action?

As to the idea that I was even referring to consoles in the first place, I didn't. Valves efforts were founded in the PC gaming arena, and eventually tossed a bone to the sixth-gen consoles such as Xbox, GameCube and PS2. For the benefit of my first post, I was only referring to PC game technology and relevant hardware. (3dfx, nVidia, S3 and ATI) If you remember, the consoles of that age aspired to the performance of even a mediocre 3D-accelerated PC back in the day.

For this thoroughly unrelated claim, I have to make a mention of its inaccuracy. Half Life had plenty of UV mapping; it's now an indispensable part of 3D design! Sometimes the interactive objects in HL reassigned texture-maps, sometimes they used a procedural texture, thereby changing the visible surface in real-time. This is a relatively simple technique and is prevalent in many games since HL, Quake II, and even Unreal.

Have you modded or mapped any Valve games? Used Hammer recently? It's a free download. (or you can jump all the way up to the Source SDK) I encourage you to try it out, after all, it beats the $500+ price tags of 3D Studio and the like.

Skeletal Kinetic Animation as a technique is, in fact, a bit after the first Half Life release. It did not really have a name at first, but it came to be known as such. Valve was good enough to help distribute the technique around the 3D community rather than patent and camp on it. (they earn my respect with such gestures) Though Valve did not, themselves, invent or introduce it, they played a significant role.

This is why I've said that the state of modern 3D-dev is thanks in part to the efforts of the Valve team. This, in and of itself, is the only point I wish to make; all other ideas from my initial post seem to have dropped from your radar

I'm not sure of your exact stance in this discussion... frankly, it's a bit troll-ish. (debating irrelevant details and trying to intimidate with barrages of so-called uber-speak) If there is nothing more constructive to add, let's call it a day, shall we? If you feel like debating yourself even more, feel free to do so. I will have moved on.

That always irked me in FPS games. In the real world, bullets aren't instantaneous and travel in an arc. Red Orchestra [clanservers.com] (a UT2k4 mod) does a pretty good job of simulating bullet drop and real life physics.

FPS games are that way on purpose. It reduces the server load by quite a bit and reduces network traffic. Also, it's hard enough to deal with internet latency & client-side prediction of the action without throwing in craploads of flying bullets. (Most FPS games are now built on top of existing network-capable FPS engines).

For example, here is the basic outline of how a modern game server deals with networking for Counter-Strike:Source

The wiki is a good tool for collaboration. It's encouraging to see Valve step in with an official one. The flip side is that maybe they'll be reluctant to share any details that reverse-engineer too deeply.

Here you go, have some Valve-sponsored Half-Life engine hacking - everything from network protocols to making huge changes to the OpenGL rendering.

I imagine that with the new Wiki, so long as content is useful and doesn't have overtly antisocial or illegal implications, it'll be welcomed...

You have to have a Source developer licence, they probably check your registered email address.

The email address does appear to be optional, though - and I didn't get any confirmation email when I signed up.

I've yet to see any vandalism, and it's been public for quite a few days already - but hopefully its mention on Slashdot doesn't change anything... ;-)

It's definitely not the first HL2 Wiki - the HL2World.com Knowledge Base has been around for ages, but really hasn't got that much in the way of useful content. Most of the entity documentation seems to have been nicked from the HL2 FGD entity definitions, for instance, and nobody's added too much to it.

However, this new Valve-sponsored one seems to have got past that problem. There's a lot of Valve-authored content in there already, and the enthusiast-written stuff seems very promising. I learned more about the ai_goal_assault entity from this article than I've done from everywhere else combined, for example.

The site's semi-affiliated with the good old VERC Collective and that's always been very strictly (and fairly) moderated with a good signal-to-noise ratio, so good things may lie ahead...

" Can anyone think of a reason why you need more than one of these cards? Currently my machine runs the most complex game I can think of (HalfLife 2) at 1280x960 at more frames per second than my monitor even scans at."

Running 4 copies of it? Joking, but not entirely. One of these days Valve might wisen up and make their games more competition friendly like QuakeWorld, which has a nice split screen mode that makes spectating matches a lot easier.

That, and of course if videocards were only made to run the games currently out there we'd still be on voodoo's because nobody needs anything better.

Though I do miss the days when ATI wasn't really a competitor. (See a very old valve hardware survey I found.) ATI and Creative are on my list of people I'd never buy from because of the bad driver history.

A lot of modders aren't touching HL2 because they don't want to have to deal with the Steam engine. If I were a modder, I am sure I could find a bunch of different engines more suitable.

I'm a modder, and my experiences with Source so far have been great. See my signature - so far I've built the geometry for a large, complex island map in just a few weeks of free time, starting from no knowledge of HL2 mapping whatsoever. I'm currently populating it with gameplay, and the new Hammer is far, far more streamlined than the old one. The new entity inputs/outputs system is brilliant, for a start, and there are loads of other minor improvements and tweaks that are greatly appreciated.

The Source SDK documentation gives a fairly good description of the basics, but it's a bit lacking in stuff like HL2 entity descriptions. Fortunately, though, there are the sources for quite a few of the single-player maps available, as well as map sources and full DLL code for HL2 Deathmatch, so there are plenty of examples to work from. The entity configuration file (FGD) for HL2 has a lot of useful entity-specific help for use in Hammer - as a result, I'm managing to learn how things work rather nicely.

There are also the VERC forums where a fair number of Valve developers actively contribute, answering coding and mapping questions.

It hasn't all been plain sailing, though - Hammer still has serious issues on non-NT-based Windows, and needs a pretty high-spec machine to work well, for instance - and Steam updates have a tendency to temporarily break SDK stuff (usually easily fixed, though). Plus, some key utilities like GCFScape have had to be written by third-parties - but there's just about everything needed already available, and it's only a few months into the lifetime of the game. Plus, Valve has recently provided source code for many of their content production tools as well...

Compared with some of my experiences with other games, things have been blissful. UnrealEd was just plain rank, Halo was an exercise in frustration and disappointment, and Doom 3 is a bit ... dead.

For multiplayer games, Unreal Tournament 2004 is definitely a good base for mods and a worthy contender against Source, but for lone-mapper, single-player projects like my own, I can't really hope for anything better than Half-Life 2 at the moment. I get some brilliant artwork to play with, a pervasive, realistic universe and back-story to work on, and a quirky but undeniably capable engine. I'm happy, anyway. :-)

Yes.

Q2 or Q1?

It's pretty apparent from a gameplay standpoint. In Quake2 to bunnyhop you had to run forward and strafe sideways. In Quake you could gain speed by just curving in the air-- Exactly the same way HalfLife does it (Except HL unregisters the +jump command if you're in the air, so you have to spam it within a frame or two of hitting the ground, rather than holding it in air like quake)

And as the valve-erc page I linked noted, the mapping tools are identical, and theres the whole timeline thing->
Quake1 : Jun 1996 [28 months from hl]
Quake2 : Dec 1997 [13 months from hl]
Half Life: Oct 1998

Which sounds like enough time to create all of HL?

And the console commands being so similar.

We don't have this. Popularity and engine technology are definitely important reasons, but I think it could also be that it's not as easy to make mods for Free games, because nobody bothered to make good (i.e., easy) tools to do so.

Unless there are good tools, and I just don't know about them, which is another problem in and of itself....

Half Life uses the Quake engine (albeit heavily modified):

1,2.

I presume that at one point the submiter might use XSI. You may not know it, but XSI is included in the HL2 SDK (abeit a limited version of XSI called Experience). Valve used XSI in making HL2 and are including it in the SDK so that gamers can create their own models.

• Check out the Half Life modding forum on xsibase
• Softimage Half-Life 2 page
• SDK Release Announcement
  Valve has released the Source Software Development Kit (SDK) Tools via Steam. A precursor to the release of the full SDK, which will be released shortly after Half-Life 2 is made available, the Source SDK Tools release offers a comprehensive toolset for starting production on Source-based MODs, including Hammer, XSI EXP for Half-Life 2, compiling tools, the Source Model Viewer, documentation on programming, modeling, building materials, and more. For more information, please visit http://www.valve-erc.com/srcsdk/.
• And this is just one of the many users having problems with Ati boards and drivers

I know what I'm talking about

Well, its really hackish, but it sort of works:

Bring up the console
net_start
sv_lan 0
deathmatch 1
maxplayers #
map [mapname]
restart

To connect to the server,
connect ip:port
eg:
connect 111.222.333.444:27015

Note: the models are screwy (there is actually no gordon model that comes with HL2!), and it crashes a lot.

Don't worry though, the full SDK is coming out "soon" (heh, somehow that doesn't sound so convincing from Valve), and when the full SDK is out there will be DM mods galore.

A while back, Valve was seriously talking about Steam being a subscription service, allowing you to play any games that get released by Valve while you are subscribed.

I think this was laughed out by gamers, as Valve's games releases haven't exactly been particularly regular (or on time), and there's been no mention of a subscription in the final offers.

Is the EULA out of date in referring to all the subscription stuff? They really ought to update it, what with that Half-Life 2 thing imminent...

A while back, Valve was seriously talking about Steam being a subscription service, allowing you to play any games that get released by Valve while you are subscribed.

I think this was laughed out by gamers, as Valve's games releases haven't exactly been particularly regular (or on time), and there's been no mention of a subscription in the final offers.

Is the EULA out of date in referring to all the subscription stuff? They really ought to update it, what with that Half-Life 2 thing imminent...

OK, let's think about this. Why would a company with the marketshare of Valve ever make a deal with a publisher?

Because they want to sell some games?

Possibly out of date, but here's an overview of the different Half-Life 2 SKUs. Apparently, they expect a very significant proportion of the sales to be the base, single-player-only version, as this will be distributed in Wal-Mart and similar.

Counter-Strike only became particularly popular after it went on sale in shops in a similar manner, despite being a free-to-download modification for years...

Steam is an interesting variation, but I still reckon the majority of sales for HL2 will be in boxed form. There's a huge number of people out there without broadband, or who simply don't follow games sites and similar, who will still purchase the game.

You need a perimeter defense weapon. Remember those autonomous turret guns in Half-Life? Those radar-directed and fully-silenced tripod cannons in Congo? Those robot sentry guns in Aliens? Imagine coupling Reason with an autonomous motion-tracking turret!

With a solution like that, your loved ones can sleep soundly while anything that moves is instantly tracked and ventilated thanks to the wonder of modern computers and depleted-Uranium slugs!

Half-Life 1 back in '99 was doing echoes and reverb based on the size of the room, and even now in 2004, a game like Doom 3 still plays its sounds effects raw, like you're in a closet.

Half-Life's actually a lot simpler than that - in the single-player game, you control the DSP algorithm with the env_sound point entity. There are a bunch of presets, and park 'em either side of an entrance, for instance one with 'Cavern Large' and one with 'Tunnel Small', and as the player walks past their audio changes... There are only two channels processed (left and right) - if a sound plays, it gets shoved out through the DSP. You can't have some sound effects with one effect applied and others with another, it's an all-or-nothing trick.

Having said that, it can be incredibly effective, and since it's completely controlled by the mapper, you can choose effects to maximise the atmospheric effects. Who cares how big the room is, what's the most claustrophobic effect that can be applied for when the player's soemwhere they shouldn't be? And what's a much safer ambience for when they're away from danger?

Highly impressive, especially as it ran without problems in high-quality on my old P166MMX. Interestingly, the guy who wrote the DSP stuff, Kelly Bailey, also did all the music and sound effects for Half-Life. I've always felt that the audio systems in Id games were a bit of an afterthought, but Half-Life's is a major feature in the game, designed in part by the designer of what it would play...

There's also the official Valve FAQ for modders over at the VERC Collective.

One interesting thing is that it uses a lot of similar technology and concepts to the original Half-Life engine, only with another five and a half years of development. It sounds like I'll be right at home. :-)

So they can sell a new game?

Half-Life 2's partly being sold on its ease of modification. Here's the official Source engine modding FAQ - the VERC Collective is a Valve-sponsored site with a very high signal-to-noise ratio, and 'useful' is an understatement.

Try that with a console! :-)

You're part way there if you go with Valve's Half-Life. Full SDK that allows you to create maps, models, etc. and a ton of public domain tools for sprites and textures. Also there are some neat extensions such as the Spirit of Half-Life mod which gives you a ton of nifty extensions.

The main place you have to code to create the game is if you choose to extend the game entities for maps, do new weapons, etc. But since Valve gives you the source for the code that does their standard weapons, it's not unreasonable to take their code and extend it.

The only down-side to using hammer is that when HL2 comes out no one can garentee it'll use hammer

Good news - it's using Hammer. Okay, so it's been hugely upgraded, but it's still the program we know and love.

Apparently the Half-Life 2 SDK will come with a version of Softimage XSI for modelling purposes, so no more dodgy cracked copies of 3D Studio Max are needed.

I'd have to agree.

To enlighten you further, Valve Hammer Editor a.k.a. Worldcraft is very versatile, and like plams said its backed up a thousand times over, with places like the Valve-ERC Collective. It's a very excellent Valve mapping/editing resource.

The latest version of the Valve Hammer Editor is 3.4 and can be found here.

I'd have to agree.

To enlighten you further, Valve Hammer Editor a.k.a. Worldcraft is very versatile, and like plams said its backed up a thousand times over, with places like the Valve-ERC Collective. It's a very excellent Valve mapping/editing resource.

The latest version of the Valve Hammer Editor is 3.4 and can be found here.

What is your personality like? Do you like all games equally? Is there something you wish to make just floating around in your head?

You should be looking something suitable for you not other people. Everyone likes how things work differently. Also go take a look at Gamasutra for some good reading.

Personally, try out Valve Hammer Editor and QuArK. They are standards that can be used for many games.

True. QuakeI with modified lighting (RGB instead of 8 bit), plus skeletal animation, decals, updated particle effects, and C++ for game code instead of QuakeC...

Half-Life's Code: Quake1 or Quake2?

Hehe, that's funny :) Mozilla mail, thunderturd, owns that though.

It will be interesting to see how they will handle the spam filtering in Half-Life 2.

See this article on the VERC Collective for more information about the spamfiltering that's going to be used for the e-mail client that will be added to Steam by the release of Half-Life 2.

According to Half-Life Source Community
and Half Life 2 Source Code Resource Page, Gabe Newell and Valve Software reported that the source code stolen wasn't enough to compile a complete game and was only a small amount of the source. They said that even though it compiles, it isn't enough to be usable. This goes along with information from those that have tried building it [I'm not saying whether or not I have tried ;-) ]: that most binaries (although some believe all except setup binaries) are built but the game doesn't run beyond the "Loading..." screen. Apparantly, there are no textures, prefabbed models, maps, and game configuration files to put the icing on the cake. These graphical resources alone should probably account for most of the source's size. At least for those lucky enough to get the incomplete source, they can get a good idea how a premier 3d first-person-shooter is written and maybe have a better idea of what is causing errors in the game when they write modifications.
Also, word is that Valve will be making modifications to the game so that binaries built from the stolen code will be inoperable with the releases they have delayed. Word is they are also close to finding the identity of the hackers. I wonder if they will sue Microsoft for the security issue in Outlook Express that allowed the hackers to get in. We can only hope.

I previously used this editor Valve Hammer Editor 3.4.exe for Half life map making, but it works for Quake and other bsp using games. It has what they call 'furniture' items, which are libraries of pre-built meshes. These may be useful to you or may not (many are lab items for half life ect..). Anyway, this is a nice editor and of course any FPS is nice for previewing the house.

Here's a halflife and other fps tools page url: http://www.valve-erc.com/content/?page=utilities, which you are sure to find useful

I previously used this editor Valve Hammer Editor 3.4.exe for Half life map making, but it works for Quake and other bsp using games. It has what they call 'furniture' items, which are libraries of pre-built meshes. These may be useful to you or may not (many are lab items for half life ect..). Anyway, this is a nice editor and of course any FPS is nice for previewing the house.

Here's a halflife and other fps tools page url: http://www.valve-erc.com/content/?page=utilities, which you are sure to find useful

It's interesting to see the changing styles of game companies as they begin to view their community as a resource for continuing the viability of their games. Can you imagine a company creating a computer language and then making themselves the only source of applications written in this language? Possible, but pretty foolish in this day and age.

Valve Software started it early on with Half-Life, creating and releasing editing tools, an SDK, and more importantly a real community for the development of mods and conversions to their game Half-Life. Valve's been by far the most successfull company at leveraging this to their advantage. I dare say they would not be the same company at all if it were not for the popularity of Half-Life mods such as Counter Strike, Team Fortress Classic and Day of Defeat.

It's great to see other companies getting on the ball to continue this trend.

Half-Life was based on the Quake 1 engine.

"At its core, it's a Quake 1 engine. You can tell this by comparing Half-life's map compiling tools with those shipped with Quake1. You'll find very minor differences -- none of them are fundamental. The core rendering is architecturally identical to Quake1, the only "significant" change is removing the fixed palette, making map lighting RGB instead of 8 bit, and converting software rendering to be 16 bit color instead of 8 bit color, which was pretty easy and only required minor code changes. Our skeletal animation system is new, though it was heavily influenced by the existing model rendering code, as were a lot of our updated particle effects, though less so with our beam system. Decals are totally new, our audio system has some major additions to what already existed, and at ship time our networking was almost totally Quake1 / QuakeWorld networking but about a year later Yahn rewrote most of all of it to be very different in design. The most highly changed sections are the game logic; ours being written in C++ and Quake's being in written interpreted "Quake C". Our AI system is very very different from anything in Quake, and there's a lot of other significant architectural changes in the whole server and client implementations, though if you look hard enough you can find a few remnants of some nearly unmodified Quake1 era entities buried in places."

More details over here.

So if they can do that with the Quake 1 engine, imagine what they should be able to do now.

Thats unlikely to be the "engine" code, its most likely the "game logic" portion of the game excactly like Half-Life 1....

If you really really want to have a native half-life for your OS flavour, I suggest taking one of the improved quake 1 engines, and make them run HL bsp,`s (including the scripted seqences) wad`s, pak`s and models. The original quake engine was valve`s starting point, with its source under GPL and many incredible improvements already there I see no reason why it can`t be yours. If you would want half-life compatible multiplayer you would need to do some serious reverse engineering though, the netcode is all new.

On the game design front you would be in heaven! No chance of getting the counterstrike source (valve would be crazy, it would make CS free as in beer) but the source code to many other community mods might be available. Game dll`s are there and the server side is always ported to linux for the dedicated server. I would say if succesfull this project would give linux users instantanious acces to the work of *huge* community of mappers, mod-ers and other artists. It would add about anything fps players can wish for in linux gaming, just pick a mod in your style and port it!

Nice as this dream may be, I also used to dream about half-life 2 being stricly realistic (including the alien part, no more 2 legs 2 arms big green head asking to be taken to our leader!). I dream on about it being powered by a doom 3 engine that had the same work on it as the quake 1 engine for HL1. I wanted to feel the fear of headcrabs again while walking down a narrow coridor next to a huge particle accelerator, with the incredible lighting seen in doom3 (sorry JC, I just HAD to peek). Also I would not be able to get out without knowing how to operate that very particle accelarator, no more jumping puzzeles, real SCI in SF! And this time the non player character actually could fight, but ddn`t for reasons fluiently woven into the story line so you can still have the chilling lonly feeling when entering a big room, knowing its filled with hidden creatures with their own tactiv for survival, their own tactic for killing you! Just think back to the first time you encountered female assasins... and think realistic shadows and bumpmaps... Hey I can always dream, the engine doesn`t look "doom3" and the heads of the human models are mounted awkward, sugesting skeletons/animations bellow the UT2003 quality... but hey how can a game live up the the legacy of Half-life?

You are wrong.

Quake 2 beat the game out, but it's well documented that Half-Life is based on a massively-modified Quake 1 engine. It's not the same as the engine used in the release of Quake 1, in that it was a "point" release.

See here for the most definitive account.

Please don't speak about that which you obviously know nothing about in future.

But is halflife the game to thank when it comes down to who made it possible? Nope, we still have doom in my book, the game that made everything possible. What made first person shooters and mulitlevel games the best thing since sliced bread? Doom. What gave everyone who had enough time and patience the ability to create their own game inside a game (know known as modding, back then known as wadding)? Doom again. What game set the presidence of how first person shooters would work? Doom.

Basically what I'm getting at is all these gamemakers made enough money off of their games that they wanted to help make it possible for those who had the time and dedication to elaborate on their work. I think everyone who codes, and especially open source, gets the greatest high when the work they've been working on is not only accepted in the OSS community, but when someone takes it and is so amazed with it that they want to take the time to learn it so that they can use it.

Does anyone else realize that halflife being as old as it is can still bring a top of the line machine to it's knees? This game was designed to be able to run on a p133 with 4 megs of video ram and 32 megs of system ram. I know that the mods have since made the game a little bit more in depth than the original, but I still find it funny.

I believe you're asking about Worlcraft.

Back in the day, though, I spent so much time with the Pinball Construction Set I grew flippers.