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Bill Van Buren Talks Half-Life 2
node writes "Pixel Kill has up a summary of the talk Bill Van Buren recently gave in London on the development of Half-Life 2. It's an interesting insight into some of the design decisions that resulted in such a fantastic game, plus there are some bits about the direction they're taking the upcoming expansion."
Half Life: Aftermath is going to be a Steam-online-distribution-exclusive product, so you're going to have to connect to "teh internets" ;-D
The voice of the next generation. "In this tower, in my mind..." Babble - Tower
Is it just me our was that article about as informative as something not very informative?
d ays=0&postorder=asc&start=2385.
More interesting to most slashdoterd would be the recent completion of the Alyx nude skin. You can get that here http://www.hl2world.com/bbs/160-vt16821.html?post
My guess (without having played) is for dramatic impact. A shorter field of view means you are more focused on what is in front of you. You have to turn more often, and you get paranoid about your surroundings.
Take it too far and its just annoying - done right, and its super scary.
The scariest scenes in Alien (and other horror movies) take place in tight narrow hallways and crawlspaces for some of the same reasons.
- sarcasm is just one more service we offer -
The first thing that comes to mind as a graphics programmer is that since there are theoretically fewer polygons/shader effects/character models/etc. onscreen at any time, one can spend more time rendering those things, thus making them look nicer; or render it at the original detail at a higher framerate. As poor as the engine performs in outdoor areas, this might have been a technical decision. What if it wasn't? The wannabe game designer in me puzzles. For one, it allows you to more easily target specific parts of an enemy because the enemy occupies more pixels on the screen... on the other hand, the player has a less complete view of the surroundings vs. a wider view aspect. Players these days, with optical mice and whatnot, do not suffer not being able to aim quickly due to technical reasons (poor framerate, sticky mouse ball) anymore though. The only motive I can puzzle out is that it may make interacting with the NPCs (Alex) more realistic- when we are talking to someone in the real world, eye contact and all, we are truly only looking at the area around their face. Going to a narrower perspective could possibly increase immersion in this way, by providing this focus.
Performing sanity checks on your own beliefs is vital in avoiding poisoned koolaid.
It's little surprise only Valve have really gone down this path properly as it clearly took a lot of work making the "cut-scenes" unbreakable by the player.
Out of interest, is this true? I'm not entirely experienced with such games in particular, but I felt that at least the System Shock series (off the top of my head; I haven't finished the Marathon series yet, so I'm not sure about those) also did it "properly". Is the article-writer exaggerating a mite?
!sig
Have a look at this rather in-depth analysis of the topic you mention. Not certain if the author is a post-grad or not. I'm also fairly certain that this is only one of a growing body of works on the subject.
The game does not require you use the latest drivers.
It is merely recommended you upgrade drivers when you try to play with older ones.
I know this because I've played HL2 with older drivers, seen the warning, and managed to play anyways.
I've never heard any stories of HL2 hosing the system or itself. Odds are something is up with your machine.
A low slashdot id is not a sign of intelligence.
For those that found this interesting, there's actually a good deal of this in the book Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar , including the side-by-side character references.
Umm.
VAC2 was released a few days ago, dude. If you are going to try to straw-man an argument, at least do it with facts, not fiction.
Hmm... I had quite the opposite experience.
I purchased it via steam - entered my credit card number, and the game was streamed to my HD over the course of a few weeks leading-up to release without me having to do anything (except reload the steam client occasionally to trigger a download).
On release day, the game unlocked itself at 12:01am and was ready to play about 10 minutes later. No problem.
I'm quite happy with how it works. I have steam installed on my office computer now too and I can play CS/HL in my office when I get bored and have some time to kill. Fully authorized and patched just by logging-in from another location.
So for me, steam worked just fine. And now that they've started to ban asshat cheaters FOREVER from secure servers using VAC2 (no debates, no account unlocks - if a cheat is detected, you never play a source game on a secure server online again unless you pay for a completely new copy and create a new steam account), it's making things even more desireable for us honest players...
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
I remember reading that they'll also publish it the 'old fashioned' way.
I was disappointed to find that the interview was not present at the link, only a short discussion about the interview. For the actual interview see here: http://www.xsibase.com/articles.php?detail=66