T w e n t y S i d e d

And so it ends.

For the record, I actually like all the constant encouragement and praise from Alyx. Although maybe I’m just unskilled and emotionally needy. It is a little jarring when you hear the comments close together, but during the course of a normal game (as opposed to sprinting through the content the way we do) they feel more like a pat on the head from the game designer and less like Alyx going all fangirl on you.

I really wish we’d get more shooters like this.

I played Wolfenstein: The New Order last year. It felt like they were aiming for Half-Life 2 in terms of gameplay, but didn’t quite nail it. It’s got quiet. It’s got combat. It’s got areas where you can wander around and listen to people talk, or get on with your job. It’s got a novelty weapon that works as either weapon or tool. It has run-and-run style combat instead of stop-and-pop. You gun down fascist humanoids in prisons, ruins, and bases. It’s not Half-Life, but I think it tried.

Josh just finished the game and was somewhat less delighted. I haven’t got the whole story from him. (It might end up as a segment on next week’s Diecast. It’s also on the short list of consideration for Spoiler Warning. We’ll see.)

Still, there’s nothing quite like Half-Life, and nobody seems to be making more. Sadface.

EDIT via Josh: So no, despite how funny it turned out, the episode was NOT supposed to end with Rutskarn singing out the apocalypse. There was actually another five minutes that were cut off in the initial video because of an encoding error that someoneI won’t name any names, but it begins with J and ends with “Why are my pants on fire?” didn’t check for before falling asleep in a drunken stupor.

The embedded video has been updated with the fixed and complete version of the episode. Sorry about that.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

At the two minute mark Josh says, “What’s up with the lighting on this thing?” He’s looking at a closed door that mysteriously has bright light flowing through it. The image doesn’t make sense until the zombie breaks the door. I know Chris already explained it a bit, but let me go over it in more detail:

This is a side-effect of the old 1990’s style baked-in lightmaps. Computers weren’t fast enough to recalculate lights on the fly, so the shadows are calculated by the artist before the game ships. This means the shadows can’t move. The shadows that do move – the shadows cast by the NPCs and objects in the scene – use a completely different technology. As Alyx walks around, the game picks the nearest light source and creates a silhouette of her from the viewpoint of that light. It then projects that silhouette onto the groundIt might do this for the nearest two or three light sources, depending on the game and your graphics settings.. The drawback is that these shadows don’t really match the baked-in shadows. They’re crisper, and so the shadows cast by the level geometry (walls and floors and such) look blurry by comparison.

Also, the two different lighting systems don’t react to each other properly. If I’m standing under the midday sun, then I’ll have a shadow at my feet. If I step under an umbrella, then my shadow will vanish behind the shadow on the umbrella. But Alyx’s shadow doesn’t work that way. It’s always there, regardless of where she’s standing in relation to the light.

This was why Carmack was so excited about the idea of “unified lighting” in Doom 3. There was no longer one system of lighting for the level and another for all the characters and props. There was one lighting system shared by everything, and it all worked together.

Half-Life 2 has aged really well, but I guess there’s limits on everything. It was 2006 when this game came out, and its lighting model was already pretty far out of date. Valve wouldn’t really solve this issue for good until Portal 2, five years later.

Also, while Valve does seem to love their seesaw puzzles a little too much, I just can’t bring myself to get mad about them in a world where Ubisoft makes me climb a hundred and fifty identical towers in every stupid game.

The next episode is the end of Episode One.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.