Prepare For Unforeseen Consequences: Let's Play 20 Years Of Half-Life

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Prepare For Unforeseen Consequences: Let's Play 20 Years Of Half-Life

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

# ¿ Nov 20, 2018 13:13

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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.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2018 20:03

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

# ¿ Nov 21, 2018 16:13

Ruflux: Jun 16, 2012

I'm looking forward to learning more obscure trivia because despite playing way too much Half-Life and reading about Half-Life and watching videos about Half-Life, there were still things I learned from the first episode already, which is just amazing.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2018 10:34