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Comment by reubenmorais | Hacker News Reader

> And then there are an awful lot of jumping puzzles, shoehorned into a game engine that has way more slop in it than is ideal for such things.

I was taken aback by this comment. The original Half Life engine has super tight and responsive movement, to the point where the average "tryhard" in a server would be executing all kinds of movement tricks that require frame-perfect inputs or very close to it. Watch some speedruns or HL:DS games and you can easily find examples of gameplay involving super precise movement. In CS there was a huge scene of movement based maps like surf_, bh_, and deathrun_.

Makes me think of something in the reviewers setup while playing Half-Life was introducing extra input latency and creating this feel of sloppiness.

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Super tight and responsive movement wouldn't necessarily mean jumping puzzles make sense in a 90s single player FPS. Would also say what a tryhard is attempting on a server playing every day is going to be a fair bit off from the bulk of people who played through the main game.

My memory is that it wasn't the controls but the sizes of the spaces you had to jump to and the clarity of where they were so you could adequately position yourself that were the issue. The latter of which is probably more down to texture usage than the engine itself.

> Would also say what a tryhard is attempting on a server playing every day is going to be a fair bit off from the bulk of people who played through the main game.

Fair, my point is more that in order for it to be possible for mere 12 year old mortals to learn to casually execute these tricks, the game has to have predictable, responsive and reproducible movement. In other words, the opposite of slop.

Slop is an unfair word to use, agreed.

I suppose it's possible that they're viewing those factors as being inherent in the original Quake engine rather than something Valve should be credited for and relying on them in their fork so heavily when it didn't suit the overall game was a bad mishmash.

It's more likely they're just conflating how ugly a lot of those later levels are with the engine.

Turok on the n64 had way more instances of jumping puzzles while controlling like a boat and having a nauseating FOV by even today's console standards. Yet the game was praised and well liked back in the day. Half-Life on a 90s PC in comparison is a much better playing game.

All that said, I still enjoy both. Maybe I've got enough muscle memory to plow trough the BS and enjoy the level design and challenge, specially regarding Turok on original hardware lol. Meanwhile people who didn't grow up with those games are off put whenever a hard jumping puzzle appears or the lack of direction gets them stuck.

My favorite pasttime in HL/CS back in the day was bhopping and kz_. To some degree I think it has too responsive movement. I recently went back to play HL and I fell down so many crates due to the instant movement, having been used to some inertia in games since.

I remember never quite getting into Counter-Strike: Source because of the difference in inertia. I had friends who were masters of movement there so I know it wasn't a sloppy game, but my muscle memory from 1.6 just made it feel... uncanny :)

Well it was responsive but it wasn't physically accurate at all, which makes it non-intuitive. The whole reason side-games like KZ and surf could exist was due to the bad physics. I competed in local IRC KZ tourneys and also surfed a lot in 1.6. The fact that you gained speed by moving left and right repeatedly doesn't make any intuitive sense. The surf scene was also heavily infected with frame-rate tricks (hotkeys to increase fps-limit in the air, and then lowering it on the ramps) since you floated more in the air the higher your FPS was. In the beginning you needed to have a PC that could support 250+ FPS to be a high-end surfer. This was fixed later with server-set fps limits etc. though.

It created an entire universe of movement based mini-games that I treasured more than the base-game, but it was mostly based on unintuitive physics and engine bugs.

I do agree that the modern game's "inertia" and slow heavy movement feels bad though. Last modern game that I remember had really fast and rapid movement was The Talos Principle.

> Makes me think of something in the reviewers setup while playing Half-Life was introducing extra input latency and creating this feel of sloppiness.

I distinctly remember a noticeable delay between moving the mouse and the view turning, even when the frame rate was high. I think the fix was switching from DirectX to OpenGL.

I assumed it was a general complaint about Xen.

I liked Xen when I played it. I thought the boss fights were terrible, but I think most FPS boss fights are terrible. The other complaint is that the healing pools were too slow. The navigation and obscure puzzles were great, though. They scratched an exploration itch I didn't know I had.

I also found it very weird back then.

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