Half-Life 2 Taken Seriously

Gamasutra's coverage of the Serious Games Summit has more to offer. First Person First-Responder Gaming, Inside the Institute fro Creative Technologies, and Riding the Edge of Distributed Intelligence are all quite interesting. Half-Life 2 is seeing use in serious gaming, too, though, and they have it covered in Healthcare and Forestry in Half-Life 2. From the article: "After his overview, Holt went on to talk about the serious game mod projects he'd been working on, starting with a medical simulation game project, Pulse!!!, which is funded by Congress via the Office of Naval Research. The project is an early stage prototype in advance of a larger development system, to test the issues needed to successfully move nurse training into a full scale 3D game-like environment. For the doctors in the similation, he used an ordinary civilian model from Half-Life 2, but worked to give it better posture - the civilians in Half-Life 2 were pretty downtrodden and had a definite slouch. Otherwise, with a bit of cleaning up of the skin and textures, the engine was extremely functional for its task, including careful use of the AI scripting and other behavioral code."

Comments

Death of Doom3

[phorm]

This sounds like a real kick in the pants to the doom3 engine. Previously, there was a good industry in selling the rights to use/modify the game engines from doom/quake in commercial products. Apparently effects is beaten out by physics in this case though, as the HL2 engine seems to be the one now selling for derivative products.

I wonder if HL2's engine will have as many derived projects as doom/quake did.