Newest Half-Life 2 Movies Impress

Thanks to several readers for pointing to the release of a second trailer ('The Docks') from Half-Life 2, via Valve's Steam content delivery system, as well as via GamersHell, IGN, 3D Gamers, and the obligatory BitTorrent link, courtesy GameTab. This follows the first movie, named 'G-Man,' that was posted a couple of days back -- all of these new Bink-encoded executable movies are direct-feed parts of the large shakycam E3 movie we mentioned a few weeks back.

Comments

id

[miruku]

id software are not doing themselves any good by not releasing doom 3 teaser vids like this. bad marketing tactics imo..

Re:id

[PyroMosh]

They have. And it looks awesome. It's just that, frankly. The Half-Life 2 stuff looks MORE awesome, and is overshadowing it.

Interesting if true...

[CaptSisko]

I must say I'm extremely impressed with the graphics so far. However, these are movie files and it remains to be seen how playable the actual game will be on my P4 3.2 with GF4 Ti4600. I haven't heard any comments from Valve on the minimum system requirements other than the usual game-developer cliché "the game will require a medium-end PC ...", and they haven't said if they meant a moderate PC at the time of the statement or at the time of the game's release :-)

Re:Interesting if true...

[enigmatichmachine]

actually, i was talking to the game programmers at e3, and watching the game run on a system similar to your's. pretty much what he said was that the textures etc that they had were ridiculusly high res, and that the whole game was desigened to scale down graphicly to whatever you have, it just won't be as pretty on a GF 1 as on a new high end pc. and seeing it RUN on a plasma monitor, I can tell you, it's worth the upgrade!

Re:Interesting if true...

[Mascot]

Valve have stated them many times, just do a search for it. I did and the first site I found was an interview with Gabe Newell (Managing Director for Half-Life 2) where he states the min specs are a P3 800 and a DX6 (e.g. TNT) graphics card. I've seen 733 mentioned elsewhere but the difference isn't exactly a huge one.

The Source engine's been feature complete since Q4 last year so they should have a pretty good idea of its performance by now.

Re:Interesting if true...

[DavidLeblond]

In the most recent issue of the magazine MaximumPC, they go in depth to show you exactly what to expect based on what video card you have. I don't have it with me right now, but its worth looking at.

Yeah great movies

[NewsWare]

Yeah great movies but there are some DIVX movies out there.

You could check this 160MEG Divx movie over here:
Half-Life 2 Gameplay Video - Registration Required!
(It includes all the Valves Bink movies!)

Re:Yeah great movies

[Zathrus]

Yes, but they're much lower quality -- they were grabbed via a steadycam, while these are direct screen captures. People who have watched them frame-by-frame (not me, I'm not insane) have noticed some irregularities like things breaking before they're hit -- apparantly caused by the hyper compression done on the steadycam shots and multiple re-encodings.

The downside to the Bink movies is that you don't get the commentary given at E3. This is pretty valuable (and humorous) stuff at points, since it's exposition for what's being shown.

If you have bandwidth to burn, get both... the video quality of the Bink videos puts the DivX to shame.

Stupid

[grimani]

This is the exact same footage of one 30 second segment from the E3 demo.

And a stupid, boring segment of the demo at that. There were so many other parts that were much more interesting.

Gordon controlling alien spiders against soldiers for one.

The Godzilla-like battle between human resistance and alien behemoths.

Why anyone would waste time watching a crowbar swing a few times is beyond me. And even if someone would, the physics of crowbar impact don't even look right.

What a waste of time.

Valve, E3 was great. Now please continue to surprise me.

Re:Stupid

[Mascot]

Seems people are missing the point indeed. One is to get some stress testing of Steam going. Another is to give people high resolution videos to really be able to appreciate the graphics. I've seen the 600MB QT a ton of times, and these new clips is like another world when it comes to seeing just what the engine's capable of.

For the whiners, Valve are going to keep releasing clips until they've run out of E3 footage. They'll then start releasing previously unseen footage. They posted this promise in the Steam forums.

Great marketing there Valve

[__aafkqj3628]

Valve sure knows how to publicise this product well.
Releasing heaps of high-quality video every so often and using their Steam service to distribute it (which gets a heck of a lot of CS beta players (and people who were too cheap to buy HL 5 years ago)).

Valve have stolen the spotlight from Doom3 and will impress everybody, no matter what id software pulls from it's magical hat.

I just hope that id isn't dumb enough to release D3 at the same time that Valve releases HL2 (which they hinted at last yeat). In a 1v1, there is no competition.

The real question..

[JavaLord]

Is there going to be a counter strike 2 with the half life 2 engine? Will it come with a built in wallhack?

Re:The real question..

[awakened tech]

In one of the interviews they said they would be releasing the tools early to the CS team so that it would be available as soon as possible, possibly before xmas

Works with WINE

[The Iowan]

Hey, and this .exe file works with WINE, too! No problems. Stock Mandrake 9.1 with nvidia card. Cool!

Too bad my computer is such a dog. :(