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your evil twin
Aug 23, 2010

"What we're dealing with...
is us! Those things look just like us!"

"Speak for yourself, I couldn't look that bad on a bet."
LATEST UPDATE



Gordon has a flashback to his H.E.V. suit training, at Black Mesa's absurdly dangerous training facility.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Deep in the bowels of the Black Mesa Research Facility, a decommissioned missile base, a top-secret project is underway.

You are Gordon Freeman, a research associate in the Anomalous Materials Laboratory. You have limited security clearance. Each morning you ride the train to work from the employee dorms, put on your environmental protection suit, and run tests on whatever odd objects have been delivered from some other nameless part of the Black Mesa compound.

One morning you are sent alone into the Test Chamber to analyze a strange crystalline specimen. A routine analysis, they tell you. Until something goes wrong, and you're staring into an alien world.

Is it sabotage? An accident? Or is it something you did? All you hear is screaming; all you see is space-time shattering. The next thing you know, the entire Black Mesa Facility is a nightmare zone, with sirens wailing and scientists fleeing in terror from the things their co-workers have become. Hordes of creatures are pouring through rifts in the local fabric of reality. Monsters are everywhere. Madness rules.

You head for the surface, but the usual routes are impassable. You must enlist the help of traumatised scientists and trigger-happy security guards to get through high-security zones, sneaking and fighting your way through ruined missile silos and Cold War cafeterias, through dark air ducts and subterranean railways.

What's more, the inhuman monsters aren't your only enemies. The government has sent in a ruthless and efficient clean-up crew, and their orders seem to be that when it comes to Black Mesa, nothing gets out alive... and especially not you.

RUN. THINK. SHOOT. LIVE.



In 1996, two Microsoft millionaires started their own games company. For their first project, they decided to develop a sci-fi first-person shooter. They met with id Software and licensed their Quake engine. They recruited amateurs who had made impressive Quake maps and mods, as well as one or two professionals who had worked on the PlayStation version of Doom.

No-one expected 'Valve Software' to amount to much. What could a couple of guys used to developing computer operating systems know about making games? But they managed to find a publisher, Sierra, who were best known for adventure games and simulations.

Valve took the basic plot of Doom - an experiment causes monsters to materialise out of thin air - but rather than just using the story as an excuse for shooting things, they created a believable world, with a story and setting that players could immerse themselves in. They took inspiration from Stephen King's The Mist, episodes of The Outer Limits, and the conspiracies of The X-Files. Levels resembled real-world laboratories and offices, rather than shooting arenas. Valve populated the world with characters that had groundbreaking skeletal animations, and performed complex scripted sequences. Despite the emphasis on storytelling, Valve committed to keeping the game entirely in a first-person perspective, with no cinematics or third-person cutscenes, to avoid breaking immersion.

On the 19th of November 1998, Valve released Half-Life, to unprecedented critical acclaim, and over 50 Game of the Year awards from publications worldwide. This led to Half-Life becoming the first game to be re-released in a special 'Game of the Year Edition', an updated version that came with additional multiplayer content, including Team Fortress Classic, a remake of a popular Quake mod.

Half-Life also came with map-making and modding tools, which led to Half-Life dominating the PC gaming scene, as buying Half-Life also gave access to hundreds of fan-made adventures and multiplayer mods. Some amateur projects became so popular that they were published as retail games, such as Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. Half-Life also had two official expansion packs, developed by Gearbox Software, Opposing Force and Blue Shift. Gearbox also developed an excellent PlayStation 2 port of Half-Life that included a 2-player co-op experience called Decay.

For years to come, PC Gamer would call Half-Life 'The Best PC Game Ever' and 'Best Game of All Time', and PC Zone would call it 'Game of the Millennium'. Nothing came close to taking Half-Life's throne... until the 16th of November 2004, when Valve released Half-Life 2. The sequel lived up to its predecessor's reputation, and it received 39 Game of the Year awards, and in 2012 Half-Life 2 won 'Game of the Decade' at the Spike Video Game Awards, eight years after its release.

Like Half-Life before it, Half-Life 2 spawned hundreds of fan-made mods, both singleplayer and multiplayer. This includes Black Mesa, a modern re-imagining of Half-Life built in Half-Life 2's Source engine.

Half-Life 2's story continued in two official expansions, Half-Life 2: Episode One (released 2006), and then Half-Life 2: Episode Two, which was released in 2007 in a package known as The Orange Box alongside spin-off game Portal, and Team Fortress 2.

A continuation - either in the form of Episode Three, or a full-fledged Half-Life 3 - was promised, but since then a decade has passed by with no news. Valve might have lost interest in Half-Life, but the games are still beloved by many. The 19th of November 2018 marks Half-Life's 20th anniversary, so let's go back and play through one of the most significant games franchises of all time.

Who am I?

When I was a young teenager, Half-Life was the game that got me into PC gaming. I played hundreds of Half-Life mods, both singleplayer and multiplayer, as well as doing a little modding of my own. I also created my own website, The Lambda Project, which included an imaginary history of the Black Mesa facility, and a complete timeline of the Black Mesa disaster, integrating all the events of the expansion packs. Despite just being guesswork and fanfiction, much of what I wrote was taken as gospel by other fans, who ended up reproducing my content on Wikipedia and other sites. I was active on several forums, where some members of the Half-Life community nicknamed me "The Half-Life Story Guru".

I eventually became a Staff Writer for Planet Half-Life, the biggest Half-Life community site, where I wrote mod reviews and other articles. I came up with the idea for a 'Planet Half-Life Encyclopedia' - an 'in-universe' guide to every character, creature, location and weapon. This developed into the 'Planet Half-Life Wiki', which anyone could edit. While that old PHL Wiki is now defunct, many of the entries I wrote have been reproduced on the modern Half-Life Wiki, once again copy-pasted by naive fans who took my own theories to be official Half-Life canon.

Ever since I started doing Let's Plays back in 2012, I've been planning on doing a 'Half-Life Megathread'. Now that Half-Life's 20th anniversary is here, it seems as good a time as any.

The LP

We'll be covering the main games, the official expansions, and a number of notable mods.

I'm playing the original retail versions of Half-Life and its expansions, to present the original Half-Life experience. Over the years, Half-Life had many patches to fix/improve things in multiplayer, but which inadvertently broke cool features in singleplayer. Also, old versions of Half-Life supported EAX audio for echo/reverb sound effects, something that's no longer supported on the Steam version. (While EAX supposedly doesn't work on modern versions of Windows, I've been able to get it working using a tool called Creative Alchemy.)

The one downside is that old versions of Half-Life don't support widescreen resolutions. But playing in good old 1024x768 resolution helps give that authentic 1998 experience anyway! I'm upscaling the footage to higher resolutions, to take advantage of YouTube’s higher bitrates for Ultra Definition videos.

The early Half-Life games don't have subtitles, so I am adding my own subtitles for all dialogue.

your evil twin fucked around with this message at 12:43 on Mar 18, 2019

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your evil twin
Aug 23, 2010

"What we're dealing with...
is us! Those things look just like us!"

"Speak for yourself, I couldn't look that bad on a bet."


Standard insertion for a non-standard specimen.

Erwin the German
May 30, 2011

:3
The commentary so far seems really insightful and unobtrusive - you clearly know a lot about the game. I've played the whole series a bunch, so it's interesting to hear what you have to say about the lore and random game info.

ArclightBorealis
May 28, 2014

You are HUGE!
That means you have HUGE ESSENCE!

RIP AND TEAR YOUR ESSENCE!!
I never got into this series until like 2010, so seeing this game in its first retail form is something that fascinated me. I definitely think there's an appeal for showing or LPing games in their most original incarnations to give more context to what it was like at the time, so I'm really digging the approach you got here.

Looking forward to the rest of the playthrough. I've played through Half-Life plenty of times, but I'm liking the extra info here regarding other versions, technical details and other outside materials surrounding the series. Makes me feel like I'm learning something new after so many years.

MEIN RAVEN
Oct 7, 2008

Gutentag Mein Raven

Taking bets as to whether this or the Doom thread finishes first.

double nine
Aug 8, 2013

The menu selection sound is the same sound that is used for steam screenshots and it annoys the hell out of me.

Samovar
Jun 4, 2011

I'm 😤 not a 🦸🏻‍♂️hero...🧜🏻



I believe you mean prepare for full life consequences!

Oh my word, my brother and I played the crap out of this game back in the day. As well as OpFor and Blue Shift. I used to go in Planet HalfLife all the time, but preferred Cutter Bolt to Walter's World.

I appreciate the Crystal Maze music during the map overlook.

Fwoderwick
Jul 14, 2004

If the rest of this LP is anywhere near this first episode then this is going to be amazing. Honestly I'd vote this thread 5 for the crystal maze theme alone.

Half Life is pretty much tattooed on my soul given the amount of time I sunk in to HL itself, HLDM, making crappy multiplayer maps, playing all the big multiplayer mods and the amazing single player mods like They Hunger. Then every Sunday for like 3 years i was playing league matches on defunct UK online hub wireplay. I would love to know how many hours...

I must have read some of your stuff at the time as i'm pretty certain I used to visit the lamda project and I definitely spent a lot of time on PHL.

Goddamn YET, you're excavating my youth here, please look after it.

Carbon dioxide
Oct 9, 2012

A YET LP? I don't even care what game it's about, it's gonna be good.

Seriously folks, if you came in for the Half-Life, stay and also check out YET's other LPs (playlists on his channel or archived threads), they're all great.

Kibayasu
Mar 28, 2010

Half-Life plays can be a dime for a dozen but I can see this will be something to keep watching.

nine-gear crow
Aug 10, 2013
Good timing on this one because it looks like the guys behind Black Mesa are finally, maybe, almost, possibly getting around to releasing the Xen part of that mod like 6 years too late as well.

Psychotic Weasel
Jun 24, 2004

Bang! You're dead.
I remember playing the Black Mesa mod back when it was free, haven't looked at it since they started charging money though. It seemed like they were putting effort into it as the new textures and models were a considerable improvement but the difficulty curve was schizophrenic in the way it bounced around through each level, hopefully they fixed that before asking people to cough up cash.

Anyway - looking forward to this LP, very well done first episode. I've loved this series since first playing Uplink (Even got one of these for my car way back when.), which I think was the specially made episode to demo the game. The environment and character design was a massive departure from DOOM and Quake in the way it tried to portray a more realistic world. Don't remember too much about the demo at this point but I remember sinking many, many hours into HL itself and picking through just about everything possible. I had a lot more time as a teenager though.

Radio Free Kobold
Aug 11, 2012

"Federal regulations mandate that at least 30% of our content must promote Reptilian or Draconic culture. This is DJ Scratch N' Sniff with the latest mermaid screeching on KBLD..."




It's good.

Ruflux
Jun 16, 2012

I'm so glad somebody's finally doing this. While the LP Archive contains the best Half-Life LP ever made, having the whole series presented in high quality in LP format is definitely something I've long wanted to be done.

A couple of things to note: technically, software mode is actually the most accurate representation of the game in its originally intended format. OpenGL forces texture filtering and scaling, making all the textures look far blurrier than they were meant to be. Marphy Black, the guy who seems to know everything about Half-Life, made a pretty big post detailing how big the difference is over on Facepunch, but the gist of it is that

Marphy Black posted:

The software renderer is the only way the game can be viewed with the textures displaying in their proper and intended resolutions. It's obvious that the almost all of the game's art was designed with the software renderer in mind as they use arbitrary dimensions. The OpenGL renderer can only handle power-of-two dimensions, so it has to rescale the textures at runtime, resulting in artificial blurring and loss of detail.

Software:


OpenGL (texture filtering enabled):


In addition, OpenGL mode messes with the color balance of the lighting, making the game look much colder, dimmer and sterile compared to software mode or Direct3D. Unfortunately, Valve removed Direct3D support from the Steam version of Half-Life in 2013, so the only way to get correct lighting is by using software mode, given the OpenGL renderer's lack of overbrightening. But yeah, this is just some trivia that I'm not sure you're aware of, I'm not asking you to go do it all over again or anything!

The second note I had was on something I'm not sure you know of based on your comments about the Half-Life Wiki. The current and only worthwhile wiki for Half-Life is the Combine OverWiki which is up-to-date, contains far less stolen text and original research and strives to continually improve. If you ever need to look something up I'd recommend going there instead of other sites, as it's probably the best resource on the internet for Half-Life (and Portal) related stuff.

Ruflux fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Nov 20, 2018

DO IT TO IT
Mar 3, 2008

I know "mon" means man, but I don't think "Och" means anything.

Thanks for doing this! That first video was super interesting, great job. It's been so long since I've seen that original installer and menu screen for HL1. This thread feels timed kinda perfectly because they just announced that Xen is almost done for Black Mesa, so Half-Life was already on my mind.

Megillah Gorilla
Sep 22, 2003

If only all of life's problems could be solved by smoking a professor of ancient evil texts.



Bread Liar

Carbon dioxide posted:

A YET LP? I don't even care what game it's about, it's gonna be good.

Seriously folks, if you came in for the Half-Life, stay and also check out YET's other LPs (playlists on his channel or archived threads), they're all great.

This man speaks truth.


Also, I thought I knew this game inside out, but I never knew about the email button in the corner you can press when you first arrive at Anomalous Materials :psyduck:

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
Another YET LP and it's of a game I spent so many hours on as a kid? Yay!

I don't think it can be overstated how great the tram ride intro is for establishing the atmosphere.

Xander77
Apr 6, 2009

Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.



Ruflux posted:

Marphy Black, the guy who seems to know everything about Half-Life
He's pretty great:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDmcwfn8y0lMtlqcpUhggk0FB1EC2i3iB

Xander77 fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Nov 20, 2018

MA-Horus
Dec 3, 2006

I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.

Cythereal posted:

Another YET LP and it's of a game I spent so many hours on as a kid? Yay!

I don't think it can be overstated how great the tram ride intro is for establishing the atmosphere.

Agreed. The whole game is so well planned out. They even made the rail-shooter sections interesting and new compared to previous games.

Kibayasu
Mar 28, 2010

Though the best rail shooter sequence is still the one from Metro Last Light where you drive a rail cart to get to shooter sequences.

Xander77
Apr 6, 2009

Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.



Kibayasu posted:

Though the best rail shooter sequence in a Half Life game is still the one from Half Life 3 where you drive a rail cart to get to shooter sequences.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

MA-Horus posted:

Agreed. The whole game is so well planned out. They even made the rail-shooter sections interesting and new compared to previous games.

Well, kinda. There's one level that almost always kills my runs, late in the game. There has never been a game with a fun teleporter maze.

Kibayasu
Mar 28, 2010


Just let it go, man.

Psychotic Weasel
Jun 24, 2004

Bang! You're dead.

Cythereal posted:

Well, kinda. There's one level that almost always kills my runs, late in the game. There has never been a game with a fun teleporter maze.

To be perfectly honest I've loved this game since I first played it but I have always hated Xen. There is no other point in the game - or dare I say series - that I like less. The end of the Lambda Labs is where my enthusiasm for the game kinda tanks.

But that's a long way off. And maybe it'll be made interesting once YET gets through with it.

GunnerJ
Aug 1, 2005

Do you think this is funny?
I liked the design and the idea of Xen, but the execution was really, really lacking from a gameplay perspective.

Ruflux
Jun 16, 2012

I sort of like Xen. It's a bit too barren from a design standpoint and a bit incoherent at times, but you have to remember Valve scrambled to finish the game to get it out on time and I think all of two months was the time allotted to creating Xen start to finish, while the rest of the game was still underway too. It definitely shows.

Xander77
Apr 6, 2009

Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.



Kibayasu posted:

Just let it go, man.
...

I'm saying it came out and was even better than expected. Looking forward to Half Life 4: Stalker

SardonicTyrant
Feb 26, 2016

BTICH IM A NEWT
熱くなれ夢みた明日を
必ずいつかつかまえる
走り出せ振り向くことなく
&



For some reason, when I first played this game, the music was muted, except for the end credits. It wasn't until I replayed it on Steam that I realized there was any music.

Kibayasu
Mar 28, 2010

Xander77 posted:

...

I'm saying it came out and was even better than expected. Looking forward to Half Life 4: Stalker

I know, I just meant HL3 :v:

your evil twin
Aug 23, 2010

"What we're dealing with...
is us! Those things look just like us!"

"Speak for yourself, I couldn't look that bad on a bet."

Ruflux posted:


A couple of things to note: technically, software mode is actually the most accurate representation of the game in its originally intended format. OpenGL forces texture filtering and scaling, making all the textures look far blurrier than they were meant to be. Marphy Black, the guy who seems to know everything about Half-Life, made a pretty big post detailing how big the difference is over on Facepunch, but the gist of it is that...

Ha, yep I was already planning on showing that in the next video! There are a couple of moments that are perfect for showing off the differences, after we've experienced a bit of action.

All three rendering methods have their little quirks. For instance, in Direct3D mode, the houndeyes have invisible shockwaves. (Which was fixed in a later patch.) And in Software mode, you get a special blur effect when underwater.

It is unfortunate that textures get re-scaled in OpenGL / Direct3D, so stuff like the green bar graphs on computers smear together. (Another obvious place is the First Aid stations on the walls, there are details lost in the 3D rendering modes.)

On the other hand, on Marphy Black's screenshots you can see how in Software mode all the 'round' buttons and dials and gauges are obviously made up of several square pixels. That applies to everything in the whole world, everything is pixelated, as if Half-Life was a really sophisticated map pack for original Doom or System Shock or Duke Nukem 3D.

Nowadays, retro-style pixel art games are quite trendy, they evoke nostalgia, but in 1998 and 1999, games that looked pixelated were considered dated. While the re-scaling and smearing-together of Half-Life's textures is an unfortunate accident, the texture filtering/blurring is not, blurring textures so you couldn't see the pixels was intentional and desirable. It wasn't a bug, it was a feature. It's just that the accidental re-scaling of textures (due to the power-of-two texture size limitation) makes them even more blurred.

It's true that during most of Half-Life's development, Valve were working with just the Software renderer, as evidenced by most of the pre-release screenshots and trailers having the pixelated graphics of Software mode. But by the time the game was completed, all the promotional screenshots were done with the 3D renderers, and the screenshots on the back of the box were all 3D-rendered, as were all promotional materials after Half-Life's release.

So it's not as if Software mode is the 'true' way to play Half-Life, or the way the game was 'meant' to look. It's just the case that nobody told the texture artist that textures should fit power-of-two dimensions.

It was probably Yatsze Mark, you can see that exact computer texture on her website. If she - or her colleagues - were testing the game in 1997 in Software mode, they'd have seen no problems. And if later on someone else tested the game in OpenGL or Direct3D, they probably wouldn't have noticed that the textures were re-scaled, because they wouldn't have been familiar with every tiny detail of Yatsze's textures. (Or if someone did notice, it probably wasn't considered worth it to ask her to re-draw hundreds of textures to make them a few pixels wider or taller.)

So while some people reckon that the only way to get an authentic 1998 Half-Life experience is to play in Software mode, the fact is that back in 1998 there wouldn't have been many hardcore PC gamers - who had a 3D graphics card and who had played Quake 2 - who would then choose to play Half-Life in Software mode, or find crisp, clear pixelated textures to be desirable. I know that I certainly didn't.

If the pixelated-look of Software mode was how Half-Life was 'supposed' to look, then Valve would never have bothered to include both OpenGL and Direct3D, and wouldn't have used those modes for promotional shots. In fact, Quake and Quake 2 were OpenGL only, Valve actually went to extra effort to support Direct3D as well.

Plus, Software mode has terrible-looking pixelated explosion sprites. I can live with the pixelated textures and characters, but the explosions... urgh.

Ruflux posted:

In addition, OpenGL mode messes with the color balance of the lighting, making the game look much colder, dimmer and sterile compared to software mode or Direct3D. Unfortunately, Valve removed Direct3D support from the Steam version of Half-Life in 2013, so the only way to get correct lighting is by using software mode, given the OpenGL renderer's lack of overbrightening. But yeah, this is just some trivia that I'm not sure you're aware of, I'm not asking you to go do it all over again or anything!

I've always been in two minds of whether enabling the overbright setting in Direct3D mode is the 'correct' lighting. It's an optional console command; if Valve wanted the game to look that way, surely they'd have it enabled by default.

However, I didn't actually realise till now that overbright lighting works automatically in Software mode. That certainly does help the argument that the maps were designed and lit in a way that was supposed to make use of overbright lighting.

When playing in Software - or Direct3D with gl_overbright 1 - there are definitely areas where the overbrights make things look better, improving the dynamic range of the lighting. On the other hand, it tends to make two thirds of the game brighter in general, as if you've simply boosted the gamma. And there are areas that look a bit wrong, surfaces and objects that become so bright they become washed out, like a 90s version of bloom or HDR. Vending machines can be so bright you can barely read the writing on them.

Of course your own brightness and gamma settings can make a big difference. Perhaps the ideal way to play is with overbrights turned on, but gamma turned down a couple of notches.

I'd consider playing the rest of the game in Direct3D mode with overbright lighting... if not for the fact that in Direct3D mode houndeyes have invisible shockwave attacks.

Ruflux posted:

The second note I had was on something I'm not sure you know of based on your comments about the Half-Life Wiki. The current and only worthwhile wiki for Half-Life is the Combine OverWiki which is up-to-date, contains far less stolen text and original research and strives to continually improve. If you ever need to look something up I'd recommend going there instead of other sites, as it's probably the best resource on the internet for Half-Life (and Portal) related stuff.

Funnily enough, I think it was originally the Combine Overwiki where I first stumbled upon duplicates of my PHL Wiki articles. And then someone on the Half-Life Wiki copied articles from Combine Overwiki... and then Combine Overwiki cleaned up the offending articles, while Half-Life Wiki didn't.

On the rare occasions I need to research something (I am a living Half-Life encyclopedia, heh), I check both Combine Overwiki AND the Half-Life Wiki. Usually one will have an interesting tidbit of information that the other doesn't, so you lean the most by checking both. And on the Half-Life Wiki there's a 5% chance of stumbling upon some old text of mine from a dozen years ago! Which always gives me a chuckle.

your evil twin fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Nov 20, 2018

SardonicTyrant
Feb 26, 2016

BTICH IM A NEWT
熱くなれ夢みた明日を
必ずいつかつかまえる
走り出せ振り向くことなく
&



YET, are you going to play the demo, Uplink, and HL2's Lost Coast?

your evil twin
Aug 23, 2010

"What we're dealing with...
is us! Those things look just like us!"

"Speak for yourself, I couldn't look that bad on a bet."

SardonicTyrant posted:

YET, are you going to play the demo, Uplink, and HL2's Lost Coast?

Most definitely! Going to play Uplink after finishing Half-Life, as it was released a few months after the main game's release. Same goes for Lost Coast.

Ruflux
Jun 16, 2012

your evil twin posted:

Ha, yep I was already planning on showing that in the next video! There are a couple of moments that are perfect for showing off the differences, after we've experienced a bit of action.

All three rendering methods have their little quirks. For instance, in Direct3D mode, the houndeyes have invisible shockwaves. (Which was fixed in a later patch.) And in Software mode, you get a special blur effect when underwater.

...

Funnily enough, I think it was originally the Combine Overwiki where I first stumbled upon duplicates of my PHL Wiki articles. And then someone on the Half-Life Wiki copied articles from Combine Overwiki... and then Combine Overwiki cleaned up the offending articles, while Half-Life Wiki didn't.

On the rare occasions I need to research something (I am a living Half-Life encyclopedia, heh), I check both Combine Overwiki AND the Half-Life Wiki. Usually one will have an interesting tidbit of information that the other doesn't, so you lean the most by checking both. And on the Half-Life Wiki there's a 5% chance of stumbling upon some old text of mine from a dozen years ago! Which always gives me a chuckle.

Hmm, I can definitely see your point with that. I would argue overbright lighting was entirely intentional and how the game was meant to be presented, since it would've been something that was set manually when the maps were originally lit. On pixellated textures though - I suppose the truth might be somewhere in the middle. While the texture artists at Valve probably weren't exactly planning for every texture to be seen unfiltered, I do think many textures in the game were worked on without filtering in mind. A larger theory I have is that all the older textures from the earlier Half-Life builds were designed with software mode in mind, while newer ones with more detail like the vending machines were probably always meant to be filtered, since the logos on those look a bit wonky without filtering. I have literally no evidence, just a hunch. But it would make sense since during Half-Life's development, 3D accelerators weren't quite the de facto standard. By 1998 they definitely were, but in 1996-97 somewhat less so.

That said, I don't think the inclusion of OpenGL and D3D modes is evidence of anything necessarily. 3D accelerators were the latest craze and shipping a game without support for them in 1998 would've been crazy, especially since OGL support comes with the engine. Valve was rushing to get the game out anyway, so they probably couldn't do anything about the textures which could never be scaled correctly outside of software mode.

In any case, it does come down to preference. The pixellated retro look can be seen as appealing from today's perspective, but I like no doubt most others have always played Half-Life with filtered textures. In a way the noisy unfiltered versions seem almost "wrong" now. In that regard I disagree with Marphy Black's assessment of software mode being the only way to play, blurry textures are basically a feature of older games and the lack of overbright aside, it's not like OpenGL is completely worthless. The Steam version even allows for high resolutions and easily adjustable FOV under OGL, at the cost of HUD size.

But I mean, Marphy Black is Marphy Black. :v: He's very particular about the most minor of things when it comes to Half-Life. Ask him why HL: Source is terrible and he'll link you to one of his many detailed posts on the subject, and while I don't disagree with him on that, I do think that from the average Joe's perspective, the messed-up lighting is the smallest problem in Half-Life Source.


And yeah the Combine Overwiki can be funky here and there. Comes with the territory of running a fan wiki I suppose. Particularly anything related to Half-Life 2 in its various pre-release forms is worthless since there's plenty of unsourced theories mixed in with actual facts. In many cases, stuff that's been revealed since the articles were originally written is nowhere to be found (like details on one of the original HL2 storyline pitches with Gordon as a sort of an agent and globetrotting story) and the stuff that is there is super spotty.

Anyway, I'm glad you're the one doing this LP since basically the most obscure questions I could think of were already addressed before I even asked them!

Ruflux fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Nov 21, 2018

Aces High
Mar 26, 2010

Nah! A little chocolate will do




hey I remember you mentioning wanting to do this LP years ago, like before your Mortal Kombat LP. Glad to see you're finally doing it!

Since you said you're going to cover the official expansions, does that mean you're going to cover Decay as well?

your evil twin
Aug 23, 2010

"What we're dealing with...
is us! Those things look just like us!"

"Speak for yourself, I couldn't look that bad on a bet."

Aces High posted:

hey I remember you mentioning wanting to do this LP years ago, like before your Mortal Kombat LP. Glad to see you're finally doing it!

Since you said you're going to cover the official expansions, does that mean you're going to cover Decay as well?

Most definitely! I haven't decided yet whether to play using the unofficial PC port of Decay (which is probably the easier way to do it), or go for full authenticity by playing it using a PlayStation 2 emulator in split-screen.

There are two small downsides to PS2 Half-Life's split-screen:

1) You don't see your weapon on screen, just a crosshair and your gunshots come out of nothing. (I guess to avoid your weapon model obscuring too much of the screen, or perhaps because displaying two lots of the PS2 version's high definition weapon models would be too many polys in split-screen mode.)

2) Half-Life is one of the few PS2 games to support keyboard and mouse controls - and that works on an emulator as well - but in 2-player mode it isn't possible for both players to use a keyboard and mouse, so at least one of us would have to use a controller. (Probably me, because subjecting my girlfriend to playing Half-Life with PS2 controls would be cruel.)

There are two small downsides to using the PC port:

1) It doesn't have the mission briefing screens (although I can always use video editing to splice them in from the PS2 version), and the score screen at the end is pretty crude.

2) You'll only see the game from the perspective of one of us, because I only have one PC capable of capturing gameplay footage.

I'll probably end up going with the PC port, but splicing in clips of the PS2 version to show off the bits that aren't in the PC version. Just because that's the most amount of work, and you know me, I'm all about maximum effort!

Sally
Jan 9, 2007


Don't post Small Dash!
This looks awesome! I am pumped to see how this plays out.

AllisonByProxy
Feb 24, 2006

FUCK TERFS/BLM/ACAB
Just finished the first episode and this is exactly the type of LPs I live for, exhaustively informative. Looking forward to the rest.

nevermind

AllisonByProxy fucked around with this message at 11:30 on Nov 22, 2018

Angry Lobster
May 16, 2011

Served with honor
and some clarified butter.
A Your Evil Twin LP is a quality guarantee. Looking forward for what's to come.

AllisonByProxy
Feb 24, 2006

FUCK TERFS/BLM/ACAB

Angry Lobster posted:

A Your Evil Twin LP is a quality guarantee. Looking forward for what's to come.

Edit: Yeah, nevermind.

AllisonByProxy fucked around with this message at 11:29 on Nov 22, 2018

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VKing
Apr 22, 2008
Cool first episode. I've played Half-Life a fair share of times, but I'm going to be following this for sure.

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