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Comment by shantly | Hacker News Reader

> • HL1 was an exploration of the possibility-space of having objects interact through emitted “energy” (i.e. by broadcasting messages that get attenuated by distance.)

I played FPS games before HL, and I played all the original HL games including Blue Shift and Opposing Force, plus a bunch of single-player fan-produced games and even Gunman Chronicles, all using the engine, and I don't follow what you mean here.

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Half-Life 1’s “thing” is sort of like Breath of the Wild’s “thing”: every object in the game has physical attributes, and these physical attributes can cause the sim to emit signals from particular objects that interact with other sim objects through general interfaces (rather than only interacting with specific “compatible” objects), with the results differing depending on source attributes, target attributes, and the distance between the source and target; and with the same attribute of the target often taking on a weighted-average of the sum of the input signals it’s been receiving lately.

When an HL1 object is “on fire”, for example, it’s emitting “infrared-radiation particles” as hitscan shots off of a point-source at its center. If these hit something, the physics sim checks the “on fire” object’s “hotness” attribute, and its distance from the target it hit, and from these computes a “heat impulse” that should be given to the target, which may or may not be enough to set the target “on fire.” Different things burn with more or less “hotness”, and for more or less time before burning out, depending on the material they’re made of. Explosive barrels don’t have any special code—they’re just “on fire” for a very hot, very short time (but they’re also “concussive”, which is a separate instantiation of this same logic.) The Crossbow’s alternate fire just slides a physical object that’s intensely “on fire” through the scene at high speed. Etc.

This system continues into HL2 as well. Pheropod/bugbait objects are just a copy of this system, where “on fire” is instead “acts as ally”, and antlions can be temporarily or permanently caught “acts as ally” by getting hit by a strong enough dose of pheropod radiative signalling.

This system is basically why HL1 and HL2 play the way they do: rather than only being able to kill things with weapon-objects programmed to emit “kill” signals toward enemies, you can kill things with pretty much any object, in a variety of ways, as enemies are physical-sim objects that can die for physical-sim reasons. And it’s very easy to make a useful new object in these engines, as you can just model something, give it some interesting physical attributes, and plop it into a level. The sim will then take care of making it useful.

Yeah, I remember being surprised at the interactivity even HL1 had, like that crates were destructible, and not in a super simple, binary [completely intact] vs [completely obliterated] kind of way. You could break them down more gradually with the crowbar.

There is nothing like this in hl1, most of the behavior is hardcoded in the game's SDK and pretty generic. I.e every breakable object has 'health', and the barrels explode when they hit 0, explosion is just an instant calculation of dmg property to distance falloff, and there is very basic "if then" scripting language that you have to configure manually. The engine is not very far from quake1 because technically it is one. Source: a former hl modder.

I think derefr was talking about the underlying implementation, which the SDK sits on top of, acting as an interface for modders like yourself.

Underlying implementation is a pure rendering engine, network and some low level core stuff (which is, as I mentioned a facelifted quake1 engine). All game logic including weapons, enemies, ai, bullet and explosion raytracing and game objects called 'entities' are contained in SDK and being compiled to client.dll and server.dll for server side and client side respectively. What derefr is talking about I have no idea because it has not a slightest relation to the game (no offense)

I get the narrative you're trying to paint here, but it's really just not true. None of what you mention is a focal point of the game. The focal points are its story telling, level design, enemy AI, etc. I think this is reflected well in reviews from when it was released [1] [2].

Whereas Half Life 2 was definitely a big ol tech demo of the source engine.

[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/1998/11/26/half-life-5

[2] https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/half-life-review/1900-25373...

Valve originally was a game engine company just like Epic and Id, and they still are but have broaden into a platform and publisher. All three companies built games to show off the capabilities of their engines. Valve is unique for also caring about storytelling and rich game mechanics compared to Epic and Id, at least at the time. HL1 was as much about being a tech demo as it was about being a great game.

Valve originally was a game engine company just like Epic and Id

Their first product was a game based on technology licensed from Id. It's a fairly different development path from Id and Epic.

Not true. GoldSrc wasn't ever really sold. They just acquired mods built on the engine (which was source available) to sell themselves (like counter strike or team fortress)

There were also third party games such as a 007 game.

The big idea that the first Half Life explored was never breaking from first person. No cutscenes. Sometimes they’d trap you to focus your attention on something but they never took away the player’s control to look at what they wanted to.

And it worked so well for immersion, and is the most natural and comfortable way to tell a story in VR.

Well that and the fact that they had a writer and a story instead of a free for all killing spree like their contemporaries.

There were already a lot of FPS around that era that had a proper story.

Can you provide some examples? I don't remember Turok or Unreal having gripping stories.

Pathways into Darkness (1993), Marathon (1994), Marathon 2: Durandal (1995), and Marathon Infinity (1996) all precede Half-Life (1998).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathways_into_Darkness

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Trilogy

The stories of these games have been the subject of discussions for many years.

http://pid.bungie.org

http://marathon.bungie.org/story/

You may know Bungie as the studio behind Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) and subsequent games.

Marathons are awesome games still. It’s kinda sad that most of the PC players missed them. If my memory serves me right, only Marathon 2 was publishes on Windows quite late and it got bad reviews because of Quake and its 3d graphics. Marathons had bitmapped NPCs instead of 3d models.

Before Microsoft bought Bungie, They open sourced the Marathon code and gave the game data for free. Luckily people have been working on bunch ports for modern OSes:

https://alephone.lhowon.org/

Beside the Bungie games mentioned, there were tons of others. The first two Dark Forces, System Shock, Goldeneye just off the top of my head - all released before HL.

This is what I remember being the most novel thing about Half Life too. It's surprising more games don't do this, even now cut scenes are more common than not.

No audio-logs either. No text. Just experiencing the whole thing first-hand, with set pieces that felt like plausible places and not just "cool geometry."

There's a brief scene where they take away control, when you get knocked unconscious and carried to the trash compactor, but it's arguably not a cut-scene in the original sense (cutting away from the player's POV) because it stays in first person view.

I think a lot of the AI functions like smell, Grunt AI and houndeye group behavior rely on this. A lot of it is easy to miss, like Vortigaunts fleeing, hiding and not attacking below a certain health. Houndeyes for example will react differently to quiet/far away noises than loud startling ones.

https://youtu.be/1tvz0WVaQGg

https://youtu.be/9jO-P3kXlCI?t=105

Yes, and this should be listed as HL1's main advance, its brilliant AI, which at that time of the release was unlike anything else.

https://youtu.be/cOSCBMHGE18

https://youtu.be/GjDY3m1SMpw

Yeah I thought it was about smashing facecrabs with a crowbar.

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