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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."
without connecting to a remote server through teh internets yet?
One final interesting detail - they narrowed the field of view from 90 to 75 in Half Life 2, narrowing it even further to around 50 during the final cut-scene with Breen.
Anyone know why this would be? For artistic purposes? I don't play first person shooters, so I don't really understand why someone would want this...
Would I hesitate to kill a combine soldier if the face was too real? Would I develop a pathetic geek crush on Alex? I'm really curious about this. And I want to see this level of realism that they deemed to be too much.
Valve attempted to change things by setting up direct download rather than buying from the shelf. Interesting as it changes delivery, but there was no compelling reason to buy it on-line once it hit the shelves. (Compelling to me would have been a couple bucks savings) Starting to see some of the retail box versions sold off in the bargain bin, but with the expansion set probably getting positioned as a steam delivered game - I may never see it. I'm not holding my breath for a $4.99 version at Office Max in a couple years.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
... state of current Half-Life development?
While Valve has always liked people developing closed source mods for their messy, buggy, and poorly organized SDKs, they've been downright evil with mod-independent development for Half-Life 2. (Note: I'm talking about engine plugins, not entire mods).
With Half-Life 1, the engine was very "open" in terms of API and functionality, and because of this, tons and tons of mini-mods sprung up for popular games like Counter-Strike. In fact, you could attribute the massive success and continuing livlihood of Half-Life 1 to this.
However, Valve's new stance with HL2 is that mods shouldn't be, well, moddable. They've threatened developers and locked out hugely potential functionality. The level of PR Valve does to ease this over makes my blood boil. They've been uncooperative, rarely listen to the community, and let _known bugs_ go unfixed for months and months, even after numerous release cycles. Read the hlcoders mailing list sometime. You'll hear Valve employees like Alfred Reynolds say that mod developers are "hackers holding Valve hostages", with regards to trivial things like printing to the screen. I'm not kidding.
It's not fun. Before Half-Life 2, I was a Valve fanboy. Now I can't stand them. I've had Doom 3 mod developers brag to me about the level of control they have with the Doom 3 SDK. Maybe I'm programming for the wrong game.
Also, with regards to the expansion... they've released one screenshot, and an onlooker realized it was actually a screenshot from HL2 Single Player. Oops. I guess we can file the expansion with VAC2 and DoD:S, which will be released on the Tweltfh of Never.
My name is Bail, and I'm a distressed Half-Life modder. *sits back down*
If you say "here goes my karma" I will bite you!!!
The game [Half Life 2] is not poorly designed, quite the opposite IMHO. It's good, but not my ideal game. I still prefer Quake 3 for shit and giggles for example. But there's nothing to stop you reselling your copy to someone who can play it, so your money hasn't been completely wasted. Head to e-bay and see if you can recoup $20.
I will sympathise with the installation woes. If you don't play Half Life 2 often enough then waiting an hour to load the game because the updates are being downloaded is a royal PITA, but thems the breaks.
I wholeheartedly disagree with the lock-in to 'content providers' (read Steam activation on installation to play the offline 1 player mode, read the glitch that means I can't play the game without it first checking with a server that I am on an authorised pc or have a Steam account or whatever). I recognise software purchases are essentially a figment of a lot of consumers' imaginations, but extending the concept of licensing software instead of buying software to require a greenlight from Valve central for me to blow off some vapour from boiled water is pushing it a bit for my liking.
Such a low /.id and so little luck with a simple gfx driver install/uninstall?
/can not/ take hours) and you'd've had no problems.
:)).
Frankly, I'm stunned. First off, the only reason your install could possibly have taken so long was if you paid Valve on the day of release and tried to autheticate and download whilst half the world was doing the same. A single day of waiting (or buying retail, which meant a disk install which
And for all the idiots shouting 'yeah well, Valve should have expected that! I( had to wait hours on release day!': you should have expected that. Whining about it is like me whouting 'I wanna million dollars'; it just work that way in the real world.
As for the reformat...I've gone through a couple of vidcards and numerous drivers...never have I had to re-format and I've never heard of anyone who had to do that for gfx drivers (well, maybe in winME, but that's winME
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Well, I *loved* HL1. Played it a lot, spend (much too much too much) time designing maps and generally having fun with it. Played it through several times since then, too.
HL2 blew me away. I was amazed, loved it. Played all the way through it slowly, enjoying each place.
Steam irritated me, though. And then, when I was through and wanted to play with maps and the like, it became a Major Hassle. Every time I loaded up a map, I got into trouble. I couldn't simply apply a crack and play and edit and design away. I couldn't design on my laptop, sitting outside somewhere (no WiFi). It was never a 'just fire it up quickly and do something for a few minutes'.
And so... I just stopped. Lost my interest. Haven't played it again. Haven't designed any maps. Haven't even looked at it for a long time, and am probably not going to.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
Actually, I found the storytelling perhaps the least impressive and immersive aspect of Half-Life 2. As far as I'm concerned, you can spend all the time you want building detailed character models and animating them, but it doesn't matter at all when pretty much every event in the game completely breaks immersion. How does this happen? Simple... for some idiot reason, we're still stuck with a mute main character.
Now, in the original Half-Life, set in a secret installation in the hours after a major disaster, this was just about acceptable. Yes, it was silly at times, but the strength of the game was such that it could be over-looked. Now, in Half-Life 2, you have a game which is set largely in an "urban warzone" setting. Gordon Freeman is apparently now not just a research scientist, but also a charismatic resistance leader (which in itself seems a little implausible). Now, neither of those roles would traditionally imply a silent kind of guy, let alone a complete mute.
Come on, Valve, don't give us that "Gordon Freeman *is* the player" line. We know what he looks like, he has a face, now give him a voice as well. Or continue having completely ridiculous dialogue scenes that resemble a particularly bad specimen of avant garde theatre.
Oddly enough, I solved that "set up the little tripod turrets and try not to get overrun" in a different way, that shows some interesting details.
In that scene, you trigger the Combine attack by jumping down off a balcony. I did 2 things very different from the designers' expectations: 1) I laboriously dragged the first two tame tripods I got with me through many rooms, all the way to that balcony (there are some FUN things you can do with the tripods, even before Alex hacks them, such as pointing one at the king ant-lion in the big shower room and letting the tripod take him out, or hiding safely behind a crate while the tripod I'm holding shoots the attacking mob of Combine toughs). 2) I then set up a tripod-crossfire trap at the top of the stairs leading up to the balcony with my "extra" tripods, remotely built the stack of boxes-to-climb using the gravity gun (before jumping off the balcony), and finally threw a tripod up onto the balcony as the attack started and climbed up after it (with no invisible barrier - different balcony than the one you were trying for, I think.)
The *really weird* thing was that, now being in a hallway with *one* very defensible entrance (especially with two extra tripods for crossfire), Combine soldiers kept spawning out of thin air in a dead-end dark corner behind me. (Stand a tripod in that corner and they're hosed, as they can no longer knock it down before it whacks them). Spawning baddies outta thin air in a cul-de-sac kinda breaks the illusion, methinks, so I was clearly supposed to be downstairs getting hammered.
Further proof that I was not supposed to solve the scene like this came when I whacked the last Combine soldier -- the Alex NPC appeared out of thin air in the upstairs hall I was in, right before my eyes, and failed to "see" me until I jumped down and away onto the first floor, at which time the scripted sequence continued.
Overall, I noticed several places throughout the game where I outwitted the scripting and went "behind the scenes", as evidenced by walkways with no top textures, round tanks with no back sides, and Combine soldiers I could see and shoot (at) but could not damage until I passed a certain point and they activated.
I found these interesting rather than annoying for the most part, and unlike some posters, I think I definitely got my money's worth out of the game.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."