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."

Comments

Field of view

[The Amazing Fish Boy]

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...

Too Much Realism?

[Lemurmania]

In the article, they recound how they had to tone down some of the facial tech since too much realism was "just creepy." I would be fascinated to see it in action. How, exactly, does it creep the gamer out?

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.

Re:Too Much Realism?

[aliens]

I think people had the same reaction to such animated movies as Polar Express. The animation was very close to looking real, but there is always something lacking in the models.

I've heard multiple people complain/mention this, best way I've heard it described is that they seemed like zombies.

I guess there is something in the mind that no matter how realistic something looks the fact that you know there isn't a heart inside the thing invokes something of a disgust. Making it harder to form attachments to the character and ruiing the story.

It should be an interesting study for some post-grad.

Oh, and I am sure there are plenty of geeks with a
crush on Alex regardless.

Re:Too Much Realism?

[markh1967]

This is a problem in robotics known as the uncanny valley.

Basically, people have no problems with robots that are reasonably similar to real people but tend to react negatively to robots that are very realistic but subtly wrong.

Re:Too Much Realism?

[Smiffa2001]

I've often pondered this one too, and noticed from friends and relatives watching characters like Gollum from LOTR, there's more of an 'impressed' reaction. It's something I think I've noticed in most CG-based non-human characters, the less human they look, the more 'accepted' they seem to be. With all the sub-surface scattering and all that Weta used, Gollum's relative different to 'human standard' meant that they probably got the balance right there. After all, objects like vehicles, landscapes and stuff seem easy to be able to pull the wool over peoples eyes. Other little effects I've seen are the CG characters affecting the 'camera' more, with the best example recently in War of the Worlds where at some point a tripod's gushing fluid everywhere and it splatters the 'camera'. Nice touch I thought.

Oh, and I am sure there are plenty of geeks with a crush on Alex regardless.

Sorry about that...

How about the...

[BAILOPAN]

... 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*

Re:In case of Slashdotting

[Mac Degger]

Such a low /.id and so little luck with a simple gfx driver install/uninstall?

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 /can not/ take hours) and you'd've had no problems.
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 :)).