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
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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The native Linux port of Black Mesa is fairly jank, if you force the Windows version by enabling "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" and setting it to Proton it'll fetch the Windows version which might fix your problem
 
Half-Life 3 will come out but I won't be able to play it because I don't have a VR headset I can hook up to the fancy new "neuro-kinetic" movement system the game is designed around. Besides I can't be the only one trying to figure out where i'm going to set up the steam machine's zero point energy field. Not all of us have a large living room on our mega yachts, Gaben. Some of us invested all our money into the CS skin market. What am I supposed to do with all these things now?
Guess I'll just have to...wait for GTAVI, or Sin Episodes: 2, or the Payday 3 remake or something I don't know.

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the Half-life life 1 mod Diffusion has released, the author states that the mod offers around 8-12 hours of original content, its completely stand alone as it uses xash-3D a source port of the gold source engine. I've played for a bit and it seems pretty good so far.
 
They were once men said:
do you have any workshop mods installed?
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No, vanilla game.
babaisyou said:
The native Linux port of Black Mesa is fairly jank, if you force the Windows version by enabling "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" and setting it to Proton it'll fetch the Windows version which might fix your problem
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Thanks, that seems to have done the job.
 
Coolio55 said:
What do you think the Half-Life 3 equivalent of gmod porn will be?
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You mean, what, SFM2 porn? Besides, the low quality SFM porn ship has long sailed and today if you're not getting the hang of Blender you're SOL. The average quality standard for smut is much higher than a decade ago.
 
Everybody stand back, Tyler McVicker is about to disappoint everyone and give out a giant reminder that he's a massive flaming faggot again.
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The Backwards Man said:
Everybody stand back, Tyler McVicker is about to disappoint everyone and give out a giant reminder that he's a massive flaming faggot again.
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Tyler isn't the only one reporting it'll be announced this year, Mike Straw of Insider Gaming has said similar things. So has gabefollower.
(The video is time stamped so you can find the part where the talk about it.)
The window seems to have shifted to include early December, but that's the most that's happened.
 
Soggy Floppa said:
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.
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so from what i'm reading on hotspot texturing it automatically tries to apply a texture based on the dimensions of the brush from the predefined area?
 
sodaboard said:
so from what i'm reading on hotspot texturing it automatically tries to apply a texture based on the dimensions of the brush from the predefined area?
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Yes, and the texture has premade wear patterns based on the segments. The hotspot automatically picks the closest matching segment on the texture and as a result you get one click texturing with wear and everything, and if you make any changes it's just another click to update it, vs regenerating wear in something like substance, baking that out to a texture, redoing the UV map, etc, and it saves storage space because you can reuse textures a lot.

Because source 2 treats meshes and brushes as the same thing (its not BSP anymore so they aren't actually brushes), you can import a mesh and hotspot it, edit it with the brush tools, etc, or do vice versa with brushes to meshes. Some halo modders took note of this and how the maps created are perfectly sealed and realized you can export them and compile then into halo, as opposed to having to do all level design in a 3d modelling tool like blender or 3ds max. There was even some drama about this because it lowered the bar to entry and that bothered the ego of one modder.

I believe later source 1 engines had a material type that would automatically layer a wear trim over top the base texture, but from what I recall it's a bit involved to do, the hotspotting is the evolution of that. I remember as soon as the mod tools came out people were going crazy over hotspotting and the tile meshes and now hotspotting is a feature of a lot of level design tools.
 
Soggy Floppa said:
I believe later source 1 engines had a material type that would automatically layer a wear trim over top the base texture, but from what I recall it's a bit involved to do, the hotspotting is the evolution of that. I remember as soon as the mod tools came out people were going crazy over hotspotting and the tile meshes and now hotspotting is a feature of a lot of level design tools.
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you mean decals? i haven't touched sauce 2 but can you be more dynamic when handling these hotspots with variables? kind of similar to what UE5 lets you do with some stuff like effect intensity over a model.
 
StacticShock said:
you mean decals? i haven't touched sauce 2 but can you be more dynamic when handling these hotspots with variables? kind of similar to what UE5 lets you do with some stuff like effect intensity over a model.
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I think I confused a mod feature with something in the engine, I cant find the video I saw about that now.

Here are some quick videos to show how nice Hammer 2 is to use. I really need to find the time to actually do some level design in it, maybe after HLX comes out.
 
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