? In chapter 4 - Water Hazard - the player scoots along in a hover craft through a set of canals in a bid to escape from the Combine forces.? At one point, the player comes to a closed gate that prevents further progress.? As you can see in the following screenshot.
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The game’s creators intended ? at this point for the player to be forced to find a way to open the gate by travelling through building complex to the right of that picture - fighting combine soldiers and flying buzz saw machines? (hacks -? I think they are called).? After working your way through the building you come to a balcony on the far side of the gate where you discover that the gate mechanism is busted.? But just to your right there are a bunch of explosive barrells, that when detonated, send a steel girder through the gate, busting it wide open (an impressive display of Valve’s physics engine).
This action triggers the arrival of a combine dropship. It flies overhead and lands just behind the building you’ve just walked through. But of course, you can’t actually see the dropship land, because it does so behind the building.
Now the narratorial purpose of this little scene is to build anticipation in the player for a fight. The player has been introduced to the dropships earlier in the game and knows what they do - so he can assume to expect some resistance on his way back through the building complex. Sure enough, a bunch of combine soldier are waiting with their guns a-ready, waiting to dispatch the player in a hail of bullets. You can see all this in the video I made below.
It’s extremely clever bit of foregrounding as it builds anticipation in the player and encourages greater involvement. They didn’t have to do it this way. The combine soldiers could have arrived in another fashion - unbeknownst to the player. But by limiting the player’s choices, forcing him to be in that spot to open the gate, Valve has the opportunity to foreground the impending conflict in the appropriate way - enhancing the overall experience of play. The trade off is player freedom - about which many have complained with respect to the half life series, and cite Far Cry as the game that is superior in this respect.
As it turns out however, the game’s designers actually built in an option for the player to open the gate in a manner that they didn’t intend. The action ruins the foregrounding effect that they so carefully built in. You can do it by standing near to the gate and lobbing a grenade over it. If you get it right, it will land on the platform where the explosive barrells are on the other side, sending the girder on its way. The gate busts open, and the player is free to continue on his way, without ever having to fight the combine soldiers.
However, the action still triggers the arrival of the combine transport - and it flies overhead, behind the building. But this time you’re free to go watch it. If you do, you’ll see something very interesting. As it flies behind the building, you’d expect to see it land and the soldiers jump out (as you would have in earlier sections of the game with the transports). But this doesn’t happen. As it circles around, a second transport is spawned, and the first dissapears. Since they never intended you to see it from this angle, they never bothered to complete the animation properly. You can see this in the following video I made:
Despite this little hole in the script - it actually serves as a testament to Valve’s skill in constructing player experience. They use techniques of which you are scarcely aware as they guide you through the story - little touches here and there that make it stand above just about everything else in the genre (in this author’s opinion anyway). The challenge for Valve will be in allowing for greater player freedom in future releases such as Episode Two, while still maintaining this sort of narrative subtlety and skill.
It leads one to consider one of the most interesting aspects of game design - the conflict between narrative and player choice. Writing one good story is difficult enough - but how does one write the dozens, if not hundreds of possible stories as determined by a multiplicity of player choice? The difficulty of the task has resulted in either extremely poor stories, or limited player choice. This author in the end prefers good narrative - but I want both. It’ll be interesting to see how game designers meet this challenge in the future.
50 Comments
Just a little thing. The physics engine is by Havok, not Valve. Don’t give Valve all the credit..
Ahh - thanks for pointing that out.
Hiya, thats cool! In the speed-run world, an exploit like that is called a sequence-break, because it allows you to miss out a section of the gameplay. Check this out:
http://speeddemosarchive.com/HalfLife2.html
They also do crazy stuff like flying, and theres loads more sequence breaks, and they complete the entire game in about an hour and a half… :o)
Hi Steve,
I should have know there would be people who had taken this sort of thing to the next level. I’m downloading one of the movies now to take a look.
Vids aren’t showing. Good read, though.
Nice vids. I guess there are others similar in the game as well. But that’s how Valve created levels - they don’t think that we can play it different way and to say the truth we don’t. You see those bugs when you play it for 5th or 10th time and intentionally you look for them.
[quote]Mystery wrote:
Just a little thing. The physics engine is by Havok, not Valve. Don’t give Valve all the credit..[/quote]
I would have said it if you hadn’t
“The difficulty of the task has resulted in either extremely poor stories, or limited player choice.”
Deus Ex?
How does that spaceship appear 1 second after you blow up the barrels? “Rapid Response” is one thing, this is “Totally Impossible Response”. You praise the authors because they give you a reason for the soldiers you fight on the way out. But that reason is ridiculously fabricated. All they did was stretch “it’s only a game” to one level of abstraction.
Strange, after reading your article, I have this sudden urge to go buy a Carl’s Junior Milkshake…
The Physics engine is a heavily HEAVILY modified version of the Havok 2 engine. You would almost swear it is completely different. Also, Episode 2 is going to bring a new addition to the physics engine adding cinematic physics
Mystery lol Valve deserve all the credit for the game as the actual steam engine in an amalgamation fo three or four systems including havok and the quake engine. Just having havok doesn’t mean a game is good or the effects are good it’s what you do with it that counts. Havok is a physics simulation making good use of it is entirely down to valve. I love HL but far cry manages to pull off a brilliant game with loads of freedom but thats using a different engine. If you know anything about mapping then you’ll know that the very nature of the steam engine and how it works restricts the freedom that can be afforded to players. To improve the game in terms of how the characters can move around the world would require a new engine completely. You never know maybe the next version will be based on cryengine2? I’d love to see what valve could do with that tech.
The vids are working fine
It’s been interesting to see the reaction to this post (on digg and reddit) - some people seeing the narrative techniques as obvious - others not seeing the animation failure as a big deal. Regarding the latter, I would agree. My purpose in showing it was to prove that Valve really didn’t intend for the player to solve the problem in that way. Otherwise they would have completed the animation. My target was to show how they use the set plan structure to enable the various foregrounding narrative techniques. And if that was obvious - fair enough. But thanks anyway for reading!
Perhaps the best response to this article has been to point out the existence of Deux Ex. Lupus on Reddit gave a link to Warren Spector, the creator of the game. I include the link here and also encourage the keen to check it out.
http://reddit.com/info/1875s/comments
I was aware of Deux Ex and thought about mentioning it in the post - but decided to keep it short and sweet.
Not always is DeusEx exception. Even if you know some important lock combinations at the very beginning of the game, you can’t enter locations which lead to the end of the game. Just try to get to Tracer Tong’s hideout right after you arrive in Hong Kong. Even though you enter the right combination, you still can’t go thorough the doors.
Next example. Have a look at this great website http://www.visualwalkthroughs.com/deusex/deusex.htm . It shows that you can tranquilize or stun all opponents, but other consider them killed. Go to Hell’s Kitchen and solve the Renton problems in the ‘ton hotel. Stun Jojo and afaik Sandra will say you killed him.
You have to kill Anna Navarre to get out of UNATCO hq, there is a vid on YouTube which shows how to avoid killing her (that gives total ZERO kills in the game
) and get out of Liberty Island, yet Gunther Hermann will, I suppose, say you kill her.
It’s impossible to predict all moves the player makes, I guess authors just assume we won’t enter some areas and we will just play the game as they tell us to
.
An interesting point/discovery.
Wow, you act like there was going to be some amazing spoiler or some shit, and it was this?! Pathetic.
‘Writing one good story is difficult enough - but how does one write the dozens, if not hundreds of possible stories as determined by a multiplicity of player choice? The difficulty of the task has resulted in either extremely poor stories, or limited player choice. This author in the end prefers good narrative - but I want both. It’ll be interesting to see how game designers meet this challenge in the future.’
I have just one thing to say…
Chrono Trigger
…that is all…
I’d be curious to see what happens when you come in behind the combine that were “dropped off”. Would they all be hunkered and waiting or not be there at all as you are coming at their location from the other side?
Pat is right - you could have condensed all that nonsense into a couple of sentences explaining what the bug was.
I love that you made videos of it all. Very well written piece.
Thanks for that Mo - it’s nice to have some positive feedback.
Pat and Daz - I happy to accept your criticism, but would ask that you at least try to be constructive. The aim of my piece was not simply to point out a bug, but to demonstrate the tension between player freedom in gaming and narrative techniques. If this is not of interest to you - then that’s fine.
It is of interest to me, however, and that’s why I wrote about it. Essentially it comes down to our wish for games to be open ended and yet have great stories. Yet the two aims in many respects are mutually exclusive. This piece was to show some of the simpler reasons why they are. No doubt a professional game designer could tell you more. But you’re not interested anyway - so it doesn’t matter.
Great article. It was very interesting. Thanks!
Neat article. As mentioned already I saw it happen in the speed runs at the speed demo’s archive (along with other exploits), and it is interesting to see how crafted some parts of the game are that only work in a linear fashion. At least the game doesn’t break, as so many others might, when things are done out of order.
The speed demo’s are very interesting in that regard. You can see when games keep the player stuck, provide only one path or can be exploited to get around designer-made restrictions.
Problem I think comes down to complexity of newer games. You have to script the soldiers coming in at a certain point (here: the door being blown up), else either the player will be lead to believe there is intelligence behind it (and must be shown this is the case, and that case must be the norm - such as an alarm system, or calling for backup, and it be timed as such and be able to react to unexpected player movement (like where you threw the grenade from) - in a FPS this is very hard) or that it is scripted and happens the same every time (important for saved games and replaying the same part you die at, as well as being much easier to test and hold together a cohesive story and level design).
I like exceptions to the norm like Deus Ex (which I have not finished, despite playing quite a bit) and other RPG’s which give some limited choice. For most first person shooters you get given a task, get told to hop to it and the main choice is how to get through each linear level rather then where to go and what to do. Perhaps its the nature of the game, being more action-orientated, although Half Life has puzzles more then others so perhaps has a touch of puzzle solving as well as combat.
Good writeup though.
Great comment Andrew,
I checked out one of the speed run videos - it’s kinda like watching a gymnast perform her art - so incredibly exacting. I even tried out the flying technique myself. It’s quite hard, but it works. But alas (perhaps thankfully) I don’t have the time to master it to that degree.
I also played around with noclipping - and its very interesting to see the level construction from a bird’s eye view.
I might take the opportunity now to respond to a common response I’m seeing on varying websites that are picking up on this post - some seem baffled that I would comment on something so ‘obvious’.
So let me just clarify - I’m not trying to point out a flaw in the construction of the game, quite the opposite. I’m not making fun of valve for failing to animate a section of the game that they thought the player would never see. I’m just using that scene to highlight the natural tension between player choice and good narrative structure.
There is nothing at all obvious about the solution to this problem - because it’s perhaps the most difficult problem of game design right now and it won’t be solved for some time. Open ended games are great - but people want great stories too. How do we do both?
The point of this piece was to highlight a point where this tension becomes prominent. Perhaps people are being thrown by the title - which emphasises the animation error as being the point of the story. But as is my style - I like to make a promise with my titles that I do indeed keep, while serving up, in the end - something of a slightly deeper nature.
(See my post: http://danielhaggard.com/29/the-secret-to-writing-fantastic-copy/ )
This is, after all - a blog for those who like to think….
I’m surprised you’ve not written more game-related posts myself (I have never visited here before). Good counterpoints to the detractors saying this isn’t what they thought it’d be
An interesting discussion.
I think Deus Ex was superb at giving you the impression of having total freedom over your choices. Of course the freedom was great but not total - but I got the distinct impression of having almost complete freedom of choice while playing (just as in HL2 you have the impression that the world is working beyond your field of view, while, as the bug you pointed out shows, it’s just a trick).
A solution to the storytelling/freedom dilemma could be that employed in some old games, for example in First Encounters, the sequel to Frontier, or in Darklands. Random generated missions (that gave you the possibility to grow financially and in reputation) interwoven with one or more “hard-coded” storylines. In today’s terms, it could be implemented by strong use of AI and procedural content in some parts of the game while some other part would be tightly scripted. Success would be granted by rendering the line that divides these two worlds as blurred as possibile to the player’s perception, so that he constantly wonder if the world is “behaving intelligently” on its own or is in reality following previously laid tracks. Of course, a sufficient number of replays would dispell any illusion, no matter how well crafted, but if the first two or three times that you play it you are tricked in believing that what’s happening is a genuinely simulated result of your action, then the game would have succeeded.
Half life will always be an amazing series. Hopefully it doesn’t deteriorate like quake and doom have.
What I’d like to see is a nice breakdown of the changes between the leaked build and the commercial release.
Firstly I’d like to say great article it was very well written and presented. Anyway to the point I too would like games where I have total freedom and a compelling story. Although building a game world with total freedom is almost impossible. In our lives we have infinite choice for us to simulate this in a game we would need to develop a sophisticated AI. This AI would need to be able to react to the infinite choices we have at our disposal. Therefore I suggest that games develops concentrate their efforts on an alternative approach to the problem. One possible idea would be to give the player the illusion of choice, would this illusion of choice not be gratifying enough? In some ways Dues Ex is a pioneer of this ideology. The game does offer the player choice and this gives the impression that you’re creating the destiny of the character. In reality the choice is limited, although because the player is given more than one option the player can be fooled into thinking (s)he is not following a linear path, where in reality they are just following another preset path.
I do believe that game designers will spend time creating extra scenarios where players will have multiple options to solve a particular situation.
Some Games are designed for you to simply follow a story, as with books and movies some games have a message.
If games designers were to increase our choices and paths through a storyline the cost of developing a game like this would not be economically viable. Designers would have to build new maps, areas, scripted sequences and more. Games designers and publishers are building games for profit.
I like the questions have you put forth although I have spent far too much time pondering them; let’s hope some genius finds an answer to these difficult problems.
Hi Aaron,
You may be right that for some time we’ll have to settle for the illusion of choice.
Although I like to hope that the AI will get there eventually. For instance, instead of writing this comment, I should be doing my research. I’m currently looking into Davidsonian theories of compositional semantics. The idea is that we want a theory which explains how we can understand sentences that are constructed out of smaller parts - on the basis of understanding the parts only, and their method of construction. Coming up with this would mean we’d be able to show how it is we can understand an infinitude of new sentences.
We’re a long way off from coming up with a decent theory. But I don’t see why game designers could start thinking along the same lines. Speaking in a very abstract and general sense - the game design could be modular - bits and pieces which correspond loosely to the way we break the world down into components. Objects in this game world would have various kinds of potential relationships defined into them. Given the definition of these relationships - interactions between elements will have a cause and effect and create all sorts of different scenarios. Every single scenario would not have be programmed individually as they could be constructed out of a finite set of simples which can combined in a multiplicity of ways.
That’s a very general and vague idea of how it might go - but that’s the sort of approach I think they should be pursuing.
This was a very verbose and dramatic read for something very mundane. The title of this article made me believe there was some kind of hidden scene involving the plot. All you did was reveal a tiny performance/scripting trick… I mean it’s a little interesting, but you set it up like it was some kind of “hot coffee”.
Hi Pegleg,
I can understand given what people are used to that the title may seem to give false expectations. But I make no apologies for that. I actually find these sorts of considerations above to be far more interesting, substantive and important than any kind of hot coffee incident.
But it’s very interesting how that hot coffee incident has shaped people’s expectations of what to expect from that sort of headline. Literally the headline is fine. I did show something that valve didn’t want you to see. But even still this doesn’t fulfill the promise of the title for many people.
I’ve done this with some degree of deliberateness. Part of what I’m trying to do with this blog is to in some small way at least shape what people consider mundane or not. I want people to start thinking about why such things as hot coffee is not considered mundane (especially in the context of content the simulates mass murder). To me the hot coffee incident was about as mundane and uninteresting as it gets (the existence of the mod, not the reaction). While narrative structure and technique is much more interesting.
I have no qualms about using people’s expectations against them in this end. See my post:
http://danielhaggard.com/29/the-secret-to-writing-fantastic-copy/
In response to above:
Let me be clear that I did appreciate your article and found it very interesting. In addition, after reading the post you linked, I can understand your intentions. I found this page via StumbleUpon, so the content was of interest to me from the get-go. I’m all for game design theory, to the point where I believe the best feature of HL2: Episode 1 was the developer commentary, which falls under the same umbrella as your article here.
At the risk of repetition, I suppose my main point is that I felt a little let down after being so craftily drawn into the article (kudos to you) since the HL series has such an intriguing plot which tends to leave the player with more questions than answers. You are one cheeky monkey.
I’ll admit that I didn’t read any of the comments before making my post, and I now realize several others share my dissatisfaction. I do however appreciate your response, If I were inclined to read blogs regularly I would definitely keep an eye on yours
Finally I’d like to add that I only referenced “hot coffee” because it was the first topical reference that popped into my head at the time before I headed out for the night. I didn’t really mean to infer the lewd attraction was my point, but instead that it was a scene that “they didn’t intend for you to see”.
I could probably add more but I think you have the gist of what I’m trying to say, all points considered.
PS
I hope you sleep well at night, knowing that you are on par with the writers/editors of Cosmo
Good response PegLeg,
Cheeky Monkey - yeah I’ll wear that
- Cosmo - I’ll wear that too. On the basis of your comment I realise I need a bit of an adjustment of my views as represented in the copywriting post. There I admonished people not to use copywriting techniques at all - but I think the point should be rather that you should not let the copywriting and marketing techniques determine your content.
Any institutionalised fact about meaning should be up for grabs and exploitable by the writer.
You’ve inspired my next post… cheers!
It is, indeed, painfully obvious - including the point about narrative. I think what various people find annoying (including myself) is that your title and description misleads - it seems to promise something unexpected but what we find is something completely expected. Only someone who has never thought very much about games would be at all intrigued by the observation here about narrative and player autonomy. You claim that your prose is for ‘people who think’ but you need to employ some of that ‘thinking’ beyond the scope of the topic of your article (being that you are clearly an intelligent person). With all due respect, it seems that you’ve gotten a bit smug about the whole ‘for thinking people’ angle and lost sight of the fact that the breadth of one’s thought needs to include such obvious things as the fact that anyone with a passing interest in games has probably thought about this for longer and in more detail than you have.
To explain the affront that many people have over your article - ‘what they didn’t intend you to see’ turns out to be so much an integral and well known part of the process of making games that it would be akin to writing an article about set building in films and making a big point out of the fact that the buildings you see aren’t always a complete building. i.e. yes, you are correct that SOME people may not be aware of set building but the process is so well known that these days one would mention it as a passing side point in an article that presents a fresh perspective on the topic in general.
I followed the link to the “secret to writing fantastic copy” which explains a lot. In this article you’ve made a title but failed to deliver on it in the sense that the title implies something unique is forthcoming but, whilst you may have delivered on it TECHNICALLY, you haven’t delivered on the promise of something especially worth reading…
Sorry for the negative comment - I tried to be constructive. I hope there was something useful to gain from it.
I can see your point Michael - about whether this is a really new and insightful view on computer game design or not - but these things are relative. There have been as many positive as negative comments - some get something out of it - some find it obvious.
I’m experimenting with the level at which I pitch my posts - and for now I’m opting for variety. Some of the posts on this blog are very technical and virtually unreadable because of it. Some are a bit more fluff - like this one. It should be no surprise then that this post made it to the front page of both digg and reddit - and is getting a healthy traffic stream from stumbleupon as well. If the title was THAT misleading then I doubt it would have gotten a sufficient percentage of votes.
As for the copy writing post - surely you recognise the use of irony there? That I don’t give them exactly what the reader wants is exactly the point. I’m arguing against a formulaic blogging style that reduces the whole blogosphere to marketing jizz… and I tried to do so in a relatively creative way. I’m trying to reach people that wouldn’t already agree with my point of view - hence my choice of title. I know full well many won’t be happy with the prosletyzing… but this is something of which I’m fully aware. If that’s not something that interests you - I can only say I’m sorry to lose your attention. I hope you find something else here that you like
Yeah the game is good. And its fun … also for the PC you can create modifications like (for example) Garry’s Mod, this mod allows you to spawn NPCs and mess with the physics of the game. Also in the way of mods, a group of people are re-creating Half-Life 1 with the Half-life 2 engine. Also Valve is working on many different games.
There was recently a similar discussion on the SPUF boards. Someone basically said that HL2 would be a better game if you could see Gordon’s body, hands, legs etc, if there was voice acting for Gordon and that there were about 30 guns in the game.
Most people tried to shoot him down and the discussion quickly (within 10 posts) turned to name calling and abuse hurling.
I thought my post was quite good ;P
Yarnold http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=6413274#post6413274
I couldn’t help thinking and analyzing all of this, the answers, the comments, the videos. If you allow me, I have some things myself to say about. With all my respect, of course! =D All of this is very interesting, and I am a great fan of the HL series, and I cannot wait untill I put my clutches over Episode 2 and 3. =P
Hehehe. Here I come.
Thought this could be considered as a “bug”, it is not. Have you ever played “Neverwinter Nights”? As you know, there are boxes or chests that you cannot open with your rogue skills, or maybe you don’t have the key, or maybe they’re far beyond your ordinary skills. So, another option, instead of opening them, is to destroy them. Once you attack the chest, this will be receive damage untill it gets destroyed; when this happens, the chest will dissapear, and only some pieces of wood will be cast around the room. So far, this is completely normal and expected.
But.
There is an underground passage somewhere in the game, when you are in the prisson mission, and you have to walk to the guard’s office from the cousin’s house (I don’t remember exactly the names and the characters, my apologies, but it doesn’t really matter, because there is no other similar mission in all the game). I will shortly say that she’s found dead with a hole in her head because a brain-sucker has sucked her brain. XD Pretty obvious.
Ok, my point is. There is a bridge somewhere in this underground passage, and there is a chest over this bridge. I think actually there are a lot of bridges with chests but I’m referring to this one in particular. You can open this chest, or you can try to destroy it. What happen is this:
You start attaking the chest; when this one is destroyed, you will notice that the chest never is “transformed” into wooden pieces, or similar; it doesn’t dissapear neither. The chest is placed, at the exact moment of being destroyed, below the bridge. Because there is no floor under the bridge, but only an empty, dark space that leads into an abyss, you are able to see the chest suspended in the air, stading still, while the wooden pieces are spread near your position. All of this happens in less of a second; then, you will see the floating chest dissapearing, slowly, fading untill it is gone.
Is this a bug?
In my opinion, no; this is not a bug. Is a proof, what lead us to think that sometimes there are the best way to do something, the easy way to do something, and the fast way to do something. It’s not the same “easier” than “faster”, do not misunderstand this: The programmers rather to write a second material script for the wooden pieces, instead of “transform” a chest into wooden pieces. Why? and I mean, why to transform the chest? The player understand the point; the chest is not there anymore, and we infer that it has destroyed. My point is, that there is no reason to write or create new things, or codes, or scripts, when we could solve this matters faster, allowing us to have more time to take care of some others aspects that could take more hard work to do.
I think it’s the same with HL2. I understand, this is something that is not expected to happen; a Combine Ship being cloned in the air, and dissapearing after the clone ship starts to fly. But we understand that we are not supposed to be there at that moment, allowing us to see what happen if we take different choices. Choices are a very human characteristics; even when we are shown the way to solve a puzzle, or to deal with a problem, we must try to find a different ways. Of course we do; is the way we react to our tribulations and cotidian mazes. Otherwise, we would stuck everywhere, not only in videogames.
Finally, I think videos like this, or analyzis like the different ones I saw in this page, help me to understand how a game works, and how a programmer deals with a problem of logistic cathegory. This doesn’t not rest quality to his works, indeed… but opens our mind to different levels of comprehension and make us more critics at the moment of studying different aspects of a problem or doubt.
Half Life 2 is one of the best games I have ever played, and I’m proud to see that a game could bring discussions and detabes like this. I’ve always been a gamer, and probably I will be for much more years.
Sorry for this long, long opinion; I just wanted to see that sometimes, a mastermind doesn’t need to face all the angles of a problem like in this case; sometimes, we find the best way to do it, but faster, and, afterall, we do things like this thinking on how to please our fans or public. Don’t be to rough with this “bugs” or something; I have found by myself another very curious things in HL2 that are too far of being bugs (like the G-Man walking in a train station, after getting out of Ravenholm; yes, the G-Man walking around). A game with those kind of details are far beyond of being badly criticized because of it’s bugs.
Respectfully:
- Dark Söul -
you made me laugh… seriously
I’ve played Half Life 2 over 10 times, and water hazard over 20 and…. I never saw that Dropships (okay, maybe I saw them when I played half life 2 a few times to discovered the bugs it had and it had a LOT!)!!!!
I’ve always played that part by shooting with at the barrels and then I would just go straight forward, I never worried myself with the combine dropships….
but yeah, Valve made a terrific jomb on it, even thought sometimes it’s possible to see the scene from an angle which allows you to see how it actually works.
Honestly, I’ve never thought about getting through that section without going through the building and mowing down several Combine in the process. But it is interesting to think about some of the other ways certain tasks can be done, intentional or otherwise.
One of Valve’s better skills is getting the player to play along with what they have in mind. Play a certain way, pay attention to certain details, go here instead of there. I take it as a sign of good game making. It it makes sense and plays out well, it works. Some games are able to do this, while others make it feel like more of a chore.
That not to say HL2 is the “perfect” game, but you have to dig deep and yank hard to find anything seriously wrong with the game. Truth be told, there’s a couple things I don’t like about HL2, but they don’t make the game a bad game or one that’s not worth playing.
Most of what HL2/EP1 have to offer I don’t bother to think ‘well, what if I did it this way instead?’ or ‘it would’ve been better if they did this’. I usually play along, although there are times when I have myself in a spot I shouldn’t be in.
I occasionally make use of noclipping (and sometimes even disable the AI temporarily) to see how things have been put together - both in Valve’s offerings and in some of the mods. But really, I’m not interested in every little detail or where a dropship is really coming from or what I might be able to exploit.
It’s nice to see some of the inner workings, but I’d rather just play the game.
Nice to see someone putting some effort into an online article! The internet is such a great opportunity for people to write extremely specific articles, yet sadly, anyone who writes anything that remotely requires thought/debate gets dogged on the internet. Hopefully one day!
Actually… I’m stuck at this exact part (I waited a looong time to buy HL2) and my savegame has me AND my waterboat sitting on the dock exactly where the barrels are… hmm.
I just got HL2 playing again (it won’t launch unless it starts in a window, but my mods and Episode One work; don’t have Orange Box yet) and I’m at Water Hazard now.
The dropship seems to disappear right after rockets are fired from the bridge further along. Is this how it went for the rest of you too?
Thanks fto being bored and not wanting to get anything else done, I decided to do some snooping/noclipping and found Dr. Breen in the level over the water on the other side of where you come to when you pass through the gate. Now, I know HL1 made use of spawning items/enemies in another location of the map and moving them to where you are (something used more frequently when you reached Xen), and I’m pretty sure HL2 uses separate areas for some functions (when Eli and Alyx are on the monitor earlier in the game comes to mind), but what’s Breen doing over the lake? He’s not in a room, but in front of a a section of wall floating in mid air, sitting in front of some panel.
Okay, it’s not quite the same thing, but it did strike me as a bit odd. I’m sure that if I went noclipping through every area, I might find some more oddities. Heck, I might have to do that anyway, just because I don’t have anything better to do.
I think it’s because they use that modeling for when he appears on the video screens. i don’t really understand why this is so - but to get him to appear on the screens they seem to need to have a real (so to speak) version of him somewhere on the map (that the player can’t get to without noclipping). You can even shoot him while he does one of his broadcasts… but of course you can never do that and watch him being blown away on the monitor screen.
That hadn’t crossed my mind, but it makes sense, since the other video transmissions take place elsewhere. Why it didn’t occur to me that Breen’s would be the same, I don’t know. Just for shiggles, I loaded my game and decided to go thump him with my crowbar. The location’s a bit hard to spot if you haven’t found it already and it’s easy to to lose yourself once you get there. First time I found it, I couldn’t make my way back to any spot on the map where I could see things, so I had to reload.
I did find it odd that they had Breen’s voice playing where he actually was in the game too; maybe it’s something that couldn’t be turned off, or they didn’t bother in the first place, since you’re not supposed to be able to get there (or even know that it’s there).
In response to Dark Söul D’ Fenrir’s comment, I had noticed that too while playing NWN. Making an exploding chest is probably harder than making it so that the chest disappears and drops at the same time pieces of wood are spawned. Sometimes you go with what works. It doesn’t always have to be realistic as long as it’s believable.
Episode One uses something similar, where you meet up with Barney at the bridge and you get your crowbar back. There’s three of them there, and the game switches between them, first when Barney pulls it out, allowing the bridge to lower to the other side, then again when he gives it to you. I think HL2 does the same with two crowbars when you first get the crowbar, turning off the one in Barney’s hand and releasing the second one to drop to you. The other weapons simply disappear when you grab them, so there’s no real need for a second one after it’s in your inventory, which has its own model.
I would think it’s easier to simply use the three models, each with a single purpose, rather trying to make a single model that can be used in every way the developers need it to.
Maybe I’ll go back, give myself the crossbow and try to pin Breen to the wall so I can see it on the monitor back by the gate. I’m feeling a bit evil this morning.
I disagree
Can you give more info?
Hello.
“an impressive display of Valve’s physics engine” is debatable, i suspect there is nothing special happening there.
Either the whole thing is just animated, and the animation is triggered when a specific barrel explodes, or in case there actually is physics attached to the girder and the gates, they just remove the movement constraints in a scripted manner. Explosion of the barrel would then be scripted to remove the constraint of a girder near it, and girder coming in proximity of the gates triggers the removal of constraints on gates’ hinges and between the gates, and a bit later the smoke.
People who have been actually involved in HL2 modding might know more, but those are just compromises between being simple and being robust i would do if i was designing it, anything more general would just risk to fail in some manner.
As to Breen speaking in some location on the same map, it was probably the simplest way. The engine allows for portals/monitors anyway, and this was probably used. I suspect also that HL(2) can only keep one map/bsp loaded at a time, otherwise the loading screens would be absolutely unnecessary as they would be able to preload the data for 2 adjacent maps, and perhaps make the maps themselves smaller pieces of the world.
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