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First Person Shooters (Games) PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Half-Life 2 Mod Creation FAQ Released 33

Posted by simoniker from the heady-hopper-and-crabby-winchell dept.
blue2k writes "The VERC website has released a new official FAQ containing plenty of new information pertaining to the forthcoming, eagerly awaited Half-Life 2 SDK, and development with the Source engine." The FAQ answers such questions as how to get lip-syncing working in your mod ("To start with, you'll need to author keyshapes, or morph targets for each of your characters. Our facial animation system uses 34 keyshapes, 14 of which are required for proper lip-sync animation."), and co-operative gameplay in Half-Life 2 ("..we aren't doing a co-operative mode, but the mod community.. [particularly] Sven Co-op has expressed great interest in this.")
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Half-Life 2 Mod Creation FAQ Released More

Half-Life 2 Mod Creation FAQ Released

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  • Counter-strike (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One has to ask, is there a definitive answer from the CS team as to them porting that mod to the new HL2 engine?

  • Player's body (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by Kizzle ( 555439 )
    This isn't a HL2 question specifically, but I'll post it here since there is bound to be someone here that knows. Why has there never been a first person shooter where you can look down and see the rest of your body? Is there something in the bible about your character needing to be a floating head with an arm attached? When a game such as half life 2 is so incredibly realistic, it seems that being a floating head that can climb ladders while reloading would take away from it slightly. Is there some sort
    • I was thinking the same thing today... I think it might have something to do with having to constantly do calculations for the legs and such to walk across varying elevations, and since youd be seeing it so closeup, it would have to be more precise than other npcs. Not to mention thats just more polys that have to be on the screen ALL THE TIME (well, when you look down moreso), and again, it being closeup means youd need more polys. If I made a game I'd definitely want to implement legs.
    • The problem comes down to the hit on preformance that would occur from implementing that minor feature. If i remember right, the game that came closest to that was unreal, or maybe it was that dinosuar game... anyways you could look down and see your character's chest.

      • Re:Player's body (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The game was Trespasser. The Jurassic Park game that ran best with Pentium II systems when most people had regular Pentiums.

    • Tribes 2. (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Tribes 2 had this, it worked great. It was a real anchor into the sensation of "being there", I was overjoyed when I first discovered that they'd done this, look down, see your legs & torso. It was especially cool when you landed after a jump / firing the jetpack.

      A visible legs & torso were just one of the many things that made Tribes 2 one of the greatest multiplayer games ever. Now I'm playing Planetside regularly I miss that feature. :(

      I think the very first instance of this was the game "Tresp
    • There've been a number of games that had this, apart from the two mentioned above. Personally, I don't think it's a big deal. You don't look down very often, so it doesn't make any difference most of the time. And it's really just part of the bigger complex of stuff that's normal in real life while not being properly implemented in shooters.
      For instance, I think Raven Shield's been the first shooter to at least start to implement something like a fluid stance, ie more than stand, crouch or prone (even prone

  • Shame they're not using a scripting language. I'm no stranger to C++, but it's a hell of a lot easier to mod a game with scripts. The best, IMO, was Jedi Knight's COG language.

    Still, looks great! Can't wait to play with the SDK!

  • the half life2 left me wondering (Score:3, Interesting)

    by imr ( 106517 ) on Saturday July 05, 2003 @08:16AM (#6372003)
    here are a few things that stayed on my mind after watching the 650 megs video, which i found incredible at the moment:

    -it will work on a pIII800.
    ok, this one didnt leave me wondering. I just laughed. I have a pIII600 and the radar map in ennemy territory makes my computer crawls, just because there is a lot of grass. Can you imagine the same on a pIII800 with LOTS of shaders, physics and ai as they showed in the video? That is a joke.

    -the physics system:
    look closely at the video.
    In the physics part of the video, the melon breaks some time after having been shot.
    In the gameplay part (with the booby traps), when the player destroys the wooden logs barring a door, they break before he actually hits them.
    In the same part, look at the huge swinging iron bar, it stays swinging and it's in no way slowed down by hitting things or just by time. It looked like a scripted event in fact.
    I have some doubts that the explosion which hurls the car is also scripted and not a "physics" event.

    -multiplayer aspect of the game:
    Watching the video made me shivers at the thought of the multiplayer games that can be made. But then, what can of connection can handle this.
    Look at the "physics" scene, when the barrels come down and the wooden logs are being shot, now imagine 32 players doing the same, throwing fumes and hurling objects at the same time. What can of connection can handle this amount of datas flow? internet2?
    If we're talking about degrading the size of the data flow, then we're talking about "killing" the physics system, then we come back to the regular old type of game.

    -the mod scene:
    If all i wonder above is in fact true, and they found a way to actually make all this work on a pIII800 and on regular dsl connection. Who is going to be able to actually make mods? Apart from a few really big and very well organised pro-like mod teams?
    The models look like killers to do. And the map will need a terrible amount of work. Right now, some quake3 maps, which are quite simpler to do in terms of textures or modelling, take one year of work to their authors.
    Look at the people who did q3f (and some of them did ennemy territory afterwards, if i'm not mistaken), they could do wonders with such an engine. But look at the time between the releases and now imagine that with an engine such as what they showed in the video. Can you say a lot of years between releases?
    (*cough* team fortress2 *cough* has probably been in development for years and they are the authors of the engine)
    Or maybe we're talking about mods not using this engine in its entire scope? Which would be a change since mods usually go beyong the engines they are built upon.
    • Regarding physics in the multiplayer, this is in the FAQ: How do physics behaviors work in multiplayer? The simple answer is that there are client-side and server-side physics behaviors. You use client-side when maintaining cross-client coherence isn't important. This cuts down the network traffic while maintaining the appearance of physical simulation throughout the world. It's definable per-object, so exactly what is client-side and what is server-side is tunable by the designer.
      • yes, i read that.
        It is different from the way they presented it through the video. They presented it like a "real" physics system, tied to the material, now we have a bunch of behavior wich are either server side or client side and tied to the object.
        It doesnt change much my wonderings:

        If the gameplay in multiplayer is changed by the "physics" system, it means a lot of it will go in the server side. So we go down to the connection problem.
        If a lot of it goes into client side, it means it wont affect that m
    • it will work on a pIII800
      I think they meant, it will work on a pIII 800, for extremely high values of 800
    • "It will work" doesn't mean "It will look exactly like you see here". Quake 3 works on a range of systems, but it doesn't look the same across all those systems.
  • The Wavelength [thewavelength.net]. Been arround since the beginning of half-life 1 and lead the community in modding! No doubt they will continue the tradition with HL2.
  • Although it seems very unlikely to happen, a petition [plus.com] to get Half-Life2 ported to linux has been started. Please sign it!

    The creator wants to reach 5000 signatures before he sends it off to Valve.

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