Half Life thread - Discussions about Valve's FPS magnum opus(es) and any related content (spin offs, expansions and etc)

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HL 3...is it still happening?

  • No and anyone that still thinks that it will is delusional

    Votes: 289 45.6%

  • Yes, they just need a few more years to perfect it so it can another game changer in the industry

    Votes: 187 29.5%

  • Shouldnt it be called "Two Lives and a half" instead?

    Votes: 101 15.9%

  • Half life is overrated, you neckbeard homos

    Votes: 57 9.0%
  • Total voters
    634
Dr. Ricearoni said:
Playing half life alyx ruined me for a year because I kept forgetting the grabbity gloves only existed in game and kept doing the gesture like a dumbass irl.
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It took me like 2 minutes to figure out how to actually use them because the game said to hold my palm open and I was holding it up like ✋not looking at the glove itself.
 
Blackstar said:
Just tried HL Alyx for the first time and after picking up and throwing a barrel I tried to kick it, and ending up kicking a table :story:
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I hit my hands, very hard on my desks way too often trying to throw down those wooden crates and break them. My Alyx playthrough was quite something, had wasps flying around my head during the zoo part with the Antlions.
 
So uh, who's gonna tell him?
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Anyone know if the dev for the half life 2 mod, G-String is a tranny or not?

I'm leaning towards no because I don't see any mention of pronouns. It appears to be a normal autistic South Korean woman, but "she" does talk about being depressed and having money problems. It is possible I'm being a sperg.

I really want to know because the mod is 18$.
 
NeonFlux said:

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Anyone know if the dev for the half life 2 mod, G-String is a tranny or not?

I'm leaning towards no because I don't see any mention of pronouns. It appears to be a normal autistic South Korean woman, but "she" does talk about being depressed and having money problems. It is possible I'm being a sperg.

I really want to know because the mod is 18$.
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I'll save you the trouble and just tell you that most of the things you probably like have had a tranny put their hands upon it during its creation at some point.
 
Star Classic said:
I'll save you the trouble and just tell you that most of the things you probably like have had a tranny put their hands upon it during its creation at some point.
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I wouldn't go that far, but you are correct. Every project has had a leftist inside it at some point and I while I should be militant, I should also allow myself to be happy.

If it really is a tranny/leftist, they'll kill themselves eventually, destroy their life completely, age out of the population completely likely, or get replaced by AI without my input even if it does help a bit.

I would still like to know.
 
NeonFlux said:
I would still like to know.
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As for whether it is or not I couldn't say.

If they are one I will say that while Source attracts its fair share of troons they DO somehow manage to keep it in their pants when it comes to messaging inside the games itself. An example being Raising the Bar Redux who have a troon on their team but outside of groomcord and update videos has no imprinted presence or virtue signaling on anything. So that's also food for thought.
 
Star Classic said:
If they are one I will say that while Source attracts its fair share of troons they DO somehow manage to keep it in their pants when it comes to messaging inside the games itself.
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The half life modding community in general is pretty relaxed as well as the L4D2 and Counter Strike community. The TF2 community is full of freaks for some reason.

Anyhow, G-string is getting an ultimate edition upgrade that'll be free for existing owners of the original once it releases. I saw a playthrough a long time along and don't remember any faggot shit so I'll give it a shot when the winter sale or a future sale drops.
 
SIMON THE PIEMAN said:
I don't get why people keep saying that when most HL games aren't revolutionary by any means.
Only one game was impressive on a technical level and that was Half-Life 2. The first Half-Life ran on GoldSrc and didn't really do anything impressive tech wise, in 1998 it already looked worse than Quake II released in 1997 and in 1998 it had to compete with Unreal that was actually praised for its' tech. Half-Life Alyx wasn't revolutionary either because it was released after BONEWORKS which did everything that Alyx did, except 3 months earlier.
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HL1 had skeletal animations, impossible in real time back then. It also had very impressive AI for the time.

Alyx meanwhile overall introduced a lot of ideas of how to actually design a VR game. To cut a long story short VR games before HLA didn’t really offer anything special that really gave them reason to be on VR. Boneworks didn’t really do anything special gameplay wise, it was a game but could be easily ported to flatscreen without much issue and be a mid first person shooter.

A big thing and something people will absolutely complain about when the noVR mod becomes popular is that Alyx is designed around these very small, tight levels. In a flat game it would be very annoying navigate, let alone fight in them. The designers talk a lot about it in the dev commentary,

Tech wise it introduced the idea that a modern AAA game can not be a blurry mess running at 12 fps on the most powerful hardware money can buy. Also animations are top notch, there’s some tech where the combine echoes procedurally generate their walk cycle allowing them to navigate difficult terrain without it looking weird.
 
Dead Lion said:
there’s some tech where the combine echoes procedurally generate their walk cycle allowing them to navigate difficult terrain without it looking weird.
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Procedural foot placement isn't a thing Valve invented, all the gigantic AAA games have it, and its now out of the box in UE5 with all their free animation systems. In terms of tech Alyx didn't do anything new, but it used proven techniques in a modern way to their maximum effectiveness. The baked lighting is the best in the industry (partially because every other game just dropped baked lighting entirely because its too much work and they can just offload the cost onto the end user with raytracing now), the actual design tools are the best in the industry, Valve knows that a level designer is not a 3d artist and vice versa, and as a result Hammer 2 has actual tools for level design and quick iteration and turnaround built in, instead of requiring you to do level design in a 3d modelling tool like every other engine (It also popularized trim sheet hotspot texturing, which while not new, was not used for automatic one click whole scene texturing before Alyx).

I think the only new tech that Alyx pushed is the raytraced Steam Audio, with realtime and baked raytraced reverb, pathing, occlusion, and transmission simulation of sound waves based on the game scene. It has existed since around 2016 but for Alyx they battle tested it and added the audio pathing simulation specifically for the Jeff chapter.
 
Blackstar said:
I feel for Gabe. He got stuck with wanting to make something new and innovative, a bit before your timestamp he took the blame for Episode 3 never releasing.


https://youtube.com/watch?v=135aqsBR4uk
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Gabe fails to understand that gaming was reaching a point where it was harder and harder to find that one big "innovation" and it was better to improve what was there, which they were experts at it. Besides, Gabe was doing a disservice to the writers and artists that couldnt progress onwards with their work because the technical side of things kept getting re-started over and over again, as a leader, he really was doing a shitty job there.

I do remember that when L4D2 came out, there were gamers that were unironically saying Valve was "milking" the franchise and releasing entries too fast. Its tragically hilarious that there was a point in history where someone was complaining they were getting Valve games too fast.

Blackstar said:
It took me like 2 minutes to figure out how to actually use them because the game said to hold my palm open and I was holding it up like ✋not looking at the glove itself.
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@Blackstar, probably

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NeonFlux said:
The TF2 community is full of freaks for some reason.
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TF2's fanbase is somehow both pro every liberal cause but also extremely every "ism" on the book.

Its pretty interesting to watch.
 
Picked up Black Mesa to play on my Steam Deck a while ago, but I've been hard stopped by a crash to "desktop" that seems to occur consistently whenever I approach the Vortigaunt vs. marine shootout in On A Rail. Have any other Deck owners encountered this issue? I'd rather not cheat my way past if possible.
 
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News Enjoyer said:
Picked up Black Mesa to play on my Steam Deck a while ago, but I've been hard stopped by a crash to "desktop" that seems to occur consistently whenever I approach the Vortigaunt vs. marine shootout in On A Rail. Have any other Deck owners encountered this issue? I'd rather not cheat my way past if possible.
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I never played BM on my deck so I unfortunately can't help, sorry.
 
News Enjoyer said:
Picked up Black Mesa to play on my Steam Deck a while ago, but I've been hard stopped by a crash to "desktop" that seems to occur consistently whenever I approach the Vortigaunt vs. marine shootout in On A Rail. Have any other Deck owners encountered this issue? I'd rather not cheat my way past if possible.
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do you have any workshop mods installed?
 
SIMON THE PIEMAN said:
Can you elaborate on that, I am certain that skeleton animation was a thing before Half-Life. Virtua Fighter used it for example and that was in 1993.
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It was a thing but it wasn’t possible in real time in video games before half life. Best they could do was animate using skeletons but then export every frame, q2 did that I believe. This would of course result in choppy animation when the game runs at higher framerates.

HL1 meanwhile just uses the skeletons so the game looks smooth no matter the framerate. The animations were in general considered mighty impressive at the time it was something valve showcased constantly at events.
 
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