Half-Life Chat V11 - 20th anniversary edition - Games

Thanks, software mode always crashes and now I can play it the best way it can be played for its anniversary.

I'm in love with software mode after trying it for a bit. A genuine "oh, so that's how it was supposed to look" moment for both the intricate unfiltered textures on the computers and such as well as the general lighting and ambiance. The difference is staggering. The vending machines look like they're actually lit now for example and the contrast between bright and dark spots is much better. The dated character models also fit in nicely with a lower display resolution and unfiltered textures. Now if only I could play this without Valve's various "fixes" including various broken scripted sequences with bodies sticking around when they should be removed or pulled up into an airvent and whatnot. Kind of ruins the tone when that happens. It's still better than my old WON copy which refused to play the music off the CD for whatever reason, though. This is actually my first full playthrough of HL with the soundtrack.

Looks good. I want to know whose soul you sold to the devil to get that rendering shit in source, it looks great.

Are you having issues where the beginning of audio is sometimes cut off in microlag? If so I'd like to know a way too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY2_53oydbM

So, whats the deal with the valve developer wiki? https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/109910/85aa2984-f7f2-46b2-a8ec-513987239da5/image.png (Im talking about this weird thing going on)

Nothing now, but a couple months ago a guy spent his life rewriting the whole wiki and pissing people off. I hope that won't happen again.

Seems like the guy reorganized a bunch of entries and moved some Russian tutorials to the Russian version of the site.

Valve's github moderator once started a shitposting spree on the dev wiki and got banned

No, that was actually a bunch of cheat programmers who apperantly hate the guy for whatever reason; we've had same "kisak-valve" guy vandalize articles on TF2 Wiki, and the guy was banned - only to make an alt later untill a different name, untill whoever it was, was simply banned even where he couldnt make any new accounts

I remember mailing Jeff Lane about that, i don't know what was done about it on the VDC though.

This gave me incredible nostalgia for everything GoldSource, I've watched it like 10 times in the past 24 hours. Marphy, you are truly an artist for creating this.

Nah for me its just slow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkjKOn9Ga74

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 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. 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 have chosen to play Half-Life in Software mode, or would have thought that crisp, clear pixelated textures were desirable. I know that I certainly didn't. It's true that during most of Half-Life's development, Valve were working with just the Software renderer, as evidenced by the pre-release screenshots and trailers having Software mode's pixelated graphics. But by the time the game was completed, all new promotional screenshots were done in OpenGL or Direct3D, including the screenshots on the back of the box. If the pixelated-look of Software mode was how Half-Life was 'supposed' to look, then Valve wouldn't have bothered to include OpenGL and Direct3D, and wouldn't have used those modes for promotional shots. In fact, Quake and Quake 2 were OpenGL only, but Valve actually went to extra effort to support Direct3D as well. 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, as 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, and realised the textures were being re-scaled because they were the wrong size, 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. When it comes to the lighting... 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, 'gl_overbright 1'... if Valve wanted the game to look that way, I figured that surely they'd have it enabled by default. However, I didn't actually realise till Marphy Black's post 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, some surfaces and objects that become blindingly bright or washed out, like a 90s version of bloom or HDR. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/351254/e2b193ea-f8ea-4678-9dd2-bbf66bbbea97/Overbright.jpg https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/351254/505f0fdf-a402-47ef-ba3e-96427bc1584e/Normal.jpg 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. Annoyingly, when playing early versions of Half-Life, Direct3D mode has a bug where houndeyes have invisible shockwave. Bit of a bummer. Still the case even in version 1.0.0.9. Does anyone know which patch fixed that? I'm hoping it is an early patch that didn't also introduce a bunch of unnecessary changes.

Yeah I guess you are right about that. I suppose it just looks weird to me because for 20 years I've been used to the vending machines having a blue rectangular background texture. Also, when I was actually playing the game and took that screenshot, I found it so bright that it made me want to squint. That might be because I had my game's gamma setting - or my monitor's gamma - turned up too high. As I said at the end of the last post, I think the ideal way to play is probably Direct3D with overbright enabled, but the gamma turned down a couple of notches. I just find it strange that Valve didn't have gl_overbright 1 turned on by default in Direct3D. The Quake engine didn't have Direct3D support, so Valve implimented it themselves... so it is Valve who are responsible for creating that gl_overbright 1 command in Direct3D. And yet they chose not to enable it. And Valve they didn't use overbright lighting in any of their promotional screenshots. Weird. As a result, only geeks that knew about overbright lighting in the Quake engine - and knew about the console command - would ever see the game the way it was supposed to look. (Or those that had PCs without graphics cards and so played in Software mode.)

Some features that were added later on broke overbright, like detail textures. The engine actually checks to see if your hardware supports an OpenGL feature to decide if overbright should be supported. An old enough machine may be able to run it properly.

https://youtu.be/5Laftg2pVLs So, The Templin Institute made this video and I can't help but think they got a few things wrong. But then again, materials relating to portal timeline and canon are extremely confusing and full of contradictions, so I wouldn't really blame them. Shame they did not mention the martial arts anti-iranian thing (?) that was present in one "official" timeline, that was pretty funny (does anyone know what the hell Im talking about?).

Someone knows how to fix the bottom of the screen being cutoff in Software mode? https://i.gyazo.com/69344768003bbe9bcc9bb4e48434df5f.png I tried different resolutions, in windowed and fullscreen, and with compatibility options without any sucess, and internet doesn't give me back any results.

Some good info, thanks. I'll make do with playing the game using gl_overbright and gl_nearest_mipmap_linear just because I like how it looks and I'd rather the game run at 144fps at 1080p I also just found this MetaAudio plugin which adds HRTF and sound occlusion with some reverb, might be as close as we'll ever get to A3D without actually having the hardware https://youtu.be/RgNndtga3zY?t=1469

Try using the "sizeup" command a few times.

I tried software mode on WON Half Life, can't get it to display properly on Windows 10. Once the loading image pops up, all I see is a low res desktop and the ingame sound, which seems to work perfectly. I've tried reduced color mode and disabled fullscreen effects. Any clue?

That worked, thanks!! Tried in a non widescreen / windowed resolution? I have no problems in Win10, now that problem is solved ( well maybe the audio being a bit weird sometimes, but is ok ). Might I try this as well.

Tried all the available resolutions, with the same effect, game running, audio running, but instead of displaying the game I get my desktop on low res.

I had lots of problems with fullscreen Software mode, but running in Windowed mode sorted it. Also, do you have two graphics cards in SLI? In old original 1998 WON Half-Life I couldn't get OpenGL to properly work fullscreen either, until I disabled SLI.

I'll try windowed, thank you. As for the SLI, I have a single 550 Ti.

That did it! Thank you dude.

I'm glad! Happy to help.

I know I'm a little late on this, but if I want to play through Half-Life 2 again to celebrate the anniversary, is Half-Life 2: Update a good way of doing it?

it's not bad but most people usually don't have a keen eye for either the broken things or fixed up things. it'll likely be no different to you than steam's HL2. you're better off going true vanilla without dealing with the orangebox mess with this (3rd option)