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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 2 = 1 whole life
Listening to Bill Van Buren talk about Half Life 2 I realised a key reason for its excellence - it shows you the story rather than telling you, just like a good author showing you rather than telling you scene details. it doesn't parade the story in a cut-scene but rather puts you right in the middle of it.
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. The powerful scripting system did often allow the designers to create scenes without the assistance of animators or story boards - they just threw together a rough cut with existing animations and rough voice over files (apparently Marc Laidlaw created some great ones, so much so they were tempted to leave in his Father Grigory).
As you may be aware they spent a lot of time getting eyes right - how they focus and even how your eyelids dip when looking down. They also used real people as character references (I wish I had a photo of the slide, it was really interesting to see the comparisons), though they ended up stylising them somewhat as having them too realistic was "just creepy" as Bill put it. They're continuing to move forward in the area of facial animation and have even hired Bay Raitt who worked on Gollum's facial animation.
Their character animation system is particularly impressive too - at one point Eli Vance was running, looking to the side and typing (!), all blended in real time. To create a scripted scene you kind of layer things (an eyebrow movement here, a wave there and so on) and adjust line graphs to alter movement intensity. It's all extremely intuitive looking stuff so the designers can more easily get on with making the game.
One thing I didn't realise was that Half life 2 rewarded the inquisitive - players who looked around not only saw newspaper clippings and photos but in doing so triggered revealing comments from other characters.
Someone pointed out how much time was spent alone in Half Life 2. Bill replied that they were aware of this and were working on keeping NPCs with you for more of the time in Aftermath. This brings with it the problem of ever-present characters becoming irritating, but they're aware of that and working to address it so they're helpful rather than annoying.
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.
It's pretty evident just how much attention Valve pay to details and how eager they are to keep moving forward with new ideas. Aftermath can't come soon enough.
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
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.
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
... 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!!!
My big beef with Half Life is the restrictive level of its liscence. I realize its just game, but I hate the dangerous precident it states in showing how easily the entertainment industry can control us. They can actually convince us to pay money to take our digital rights away from us, and the population will not resist.
At a time when we are facing an orwellian future of DRM, the cost of our digital civil rights is: Playing a game.
This is tragic in nature. Its a betrayal of free thinking principals by the population itself. The popuation of people who were willing to - without a second thought, buy this game when the full knowlege of what buying and installing this game meant as far as DRM goes is an unpardonable crime.
Half Life 2 proved that the public was willing to suffer major digital freedom loss to play a game. The evidence was right in front of the viewing public and the consumer ego mass still made the bad choice anyway.
I didn't buy HL2. (Don't Run Windows) but the fact that I made the choice not to really doesn't matter. It was the fact that the majority of computer using consumers who will buy freedom destroying software did so.
The choice that the consuming public makes affects everyone by what is availible in the future. I'm sure HL2 is an excellent quality game, but the terms of the game are simply cruel and malicious.
Again, its not about whether or not *I* choose to buy the game or not, its about what the majority of the consuming public was willing to do, and it is with the consuming public the fault lies.
There was a choice. They made the wrong choice and we will all pay for that choice years down the road.
From the article:
"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." Rather, they just ignore you and run through the script regardless (even if you shoot them, drop heavy objects that should kill them onto them or block their path with items they should not be able to move).
For example, if you block a path the game doesn't want you to (including dynamically 'in game', not just 'in cutscenes') the game would completly disregard the usual rules of physics and simply walk through pushing aisde any and all obstacles like they were made of cardboard (making setting interesting traps impossible in some area's, it's clear your supposed to 'stick to the rails' - like so many games thinking outside the box is not encoraged).
Of course playing with things like grary's modshows this isn't a limiation of the HAVOK physics engine - the best thing about Half Life 2 IMO, and which is entirely 3rd party - it's just the way Valve implimented it.
Half Life 2 is nowhere near as impressive as the origional was for the time IMO. Admittedly the origional had lots of distinctly tedious jump puzzles towards the end, but in the first half it had far more atmosphere and felt much more immersive to me. This is not just a case of seeing it through rose-tinted glasses either, I've played it through again recently and it's still head and shoulders above HL2 IMO.
To me, it just seems like Half Life 2 is riding entirely on it's use of the HAVOK physics engine, which of course lots of other titles have used (Halo 2, Ghost Recon, Max Pane 2, Full Spectrum Warrior, and many more) it's just that Half Life 2 use it _so_ extensively and happen to give the player a really fun toy to use to manipulate objects.
Sure I think the artwork in HL2 was okay, but the underlying engine quality was poor IMO - with kludges like the use of 2 sprites and careful map design used to try to cover up problems with a lack of proper LOD handling (with large objects like whole ships just appearing and disappearing at random in front of you on the beach, and things like tree's being redered as 2D sprites - Yuck!). The lack of a decent lighting model was pretty prevolent in some areas (something well discussed), though I was equally urged by dodgy map design featuring such delights as points where enemies could infinately spawn from points apparently in mid air (the sort of crap Doom 3 pulled and that is a big no-no in my view).
I found it particularly disappointing because we know they are capeable of better.
Why yes it's true... even geeks can kick ass in the video games and movies created by geeks. Why just the other day I imagined I took out an entire cell of terrorist ninjas who had formed an alliance w/ alien invaders.
W. Mitty
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
"The first several hours of game play are incredibly lame. First you have the 5 Cd's you have to put in your computer."
This is why god invented the DVD, which fixes this problem.
"Then when you START the game you have to wait an hour for it to do something. What, no one knows, but you just get to watch dialogue box after dialogue box."
Your hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
"Then of course there is the TSR they put on your system that is always connected, whether you are playing or not. If MS did this, there's be lawsuits!!"
I stopped starting Steam, until the game is started. Works fine for me.
"And then, when you finally get past all that crap, the game tells you to download the latest Nvidia driver, WHICH DOESN'T SUPPORT THE GAME AND CAUSES IT TO CRASH INSTANTLY!"
That would be an NVIDIA problem, wouldn't it, not a Half-Life 2 problem?
I've installed the game, I played it happily, and it's a fantastic game. You have posted no problems with the game.