They are nowhere in HL2 because Gearbox had nothing to do with it.
i know it's a lame answer but that is the reason.
Perhaps both Race X and the Combine saw the portal storms and both wanted to take a stab at Earth ("great minds think alike" and all that).
If there are an infinite number of universes in the Half-Life multiverse then there's a universe where Earth was overrun by dozens of universes thinking exactly the same thing.
Yeah, but it's the only way you can look at Race X canon-wise. Well okay, the other way is to regard HL2 as non-canon.
@Gamer#1 yeah Race X found themselves on Earth because of the Black Mesa Incident, but what happened to them is the next concern.
My impression is that they either went "NOPE" and pulled out quickly from Earth after facing resistance by the human forces on Black Mesa, and/or they got hunt down and annihilated by the Combine soon later.
Whatever the case, Race X disappeared, and may as well be a mysterious alien race that made their sudden and mysterious appearance in the midst of Resonance Cascade/Black Mesa Incident, which their race's name would support at least.
Race X is actually in HL2. Father Grigori is actually a pit drone in disguise, which is why he's considered an animal rather than a character. The end of Ravenholme was supposed to be the final send of for Race X, when the last member of their society is killed by Xenian fauna.
I thought Gearbox introduced Race X in an ingenious way. The first we see is one lone Shock Trooper - an advance scout - that appears, kills a security guard, then grabs a scientist and teleports away with him. Collecting a human as a specimen for study, the same thing we had been doing to Xen creatures.
When Shephard jumps in the portal in Lambda Core and visits Xen, we see a strange purple portal, which is emitting glowing sprites that are floating up to a typical portal back to Earth. This demonstrates that Race X come from another alien universe, and their teleports are going through Xen and then to Earth. This was Gearbox showing that they are from a world beyond Xen, without the use of any dialogue.
At the end, we encounter a giant organic purple portal that Race X has built to allow easy teleportation directly from their world to our world. And a giant monster - the Geneworm boss - comes through, which itself has a living purple teleport portal in its chest, and the ability to teleport in Race X troopers.
Presumably Race X expected the dimensional breach between Earth and Xen to be a temporary state of affairs, so Race X were taking measures that would mean they'd be able to reach Earth even if the rift was sealed.
Hmm, I dunno about the Tyranid thing. The Race X Shock Troopers seem to be an intelligent race. (Indeed, Gearbox re-used the human grunt AI for them.)
They work together in squads, throw grenades, take cover, they communicate with each other in sentences made up of alien words. The Race X Shock Troopers are a species just like us... perhaps with a similar level of technological advancement. (No more, and no less.) Our species has spent millenia conquering and enslaving and exterminating, they are just like us. But instead of using electronics or mechanical engineering to build tanks and ships and guns and teleporter machines, they have living weapons that they grow. (Which I guess is a bit like the Tyranids.) Humans built teleportation tech, Race X grew teleportation bio-tech. The Pit Worm boss and Gene Worm boss are like biological machines, bio-engineered to perform certain functions. While the swarms of pit drones are just like dumb attack dogs that they use; the huge Voltigores are like elephants or something that they have enslaved to be their heavy artillery.
As for the final impression we get of Race X...
You kill the Geneworm, it starts to explode - sending out loads of portals as it does so, similar to Nihilanth's death - and then suddenly you are in an Osprey heliplane, like the start of the game, but with G-Man talking to you. And then there's a white flash to indicate that Black Mesa has been nuked. (Towards the end of the game you encounter Black Ops arming a nuclear warhead.)
So that might mean that Shephard killing the Geneworm was irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, as both the Geneworm and the giant purple portal would have been nuked anyway. Then again, if it hadn't been delayed by Shephard, maybe the Geneworm - or the Shock Troopers it spawned - would have smashed the nuke or defused it or teleported it somewhere else.
The dimensional rift was centred on Black Mesa, and all the aliens - both Xen and Race X - were materialising in (or near) the facility. So the nuke probably eliminated every Xen or Race X creature on Earth.
Of course from Half-Life 2 we know that actually the rift between Earth and Xen lasted for years, and it didn't just stay centred on the ruins of Black Mesa. Portal storms drifted across the world, populating the entire planet with more Xen creatures.
So presumably Race X could have tried to invade again, if they wanted to. But the fact that their first invasion attempt was thoroughly defeated - including the destruction of a gigantic Geneworm by a single human being - might have been enough to put them off and make them reconsider. (And they certainly wouldn't want to give it another try once the Combine arrived...)
Ooh, nice grim realisation there. I was project leader for a (failed) Opposing Force sequel called Critical Mass and that was one of the options we considered for the ending; you'd 'win' a huge battle but then it would turn out that there were similar battles happening simultaneously all over the world, you'd won a single battle but the human race as a whole had lost the war.
Regarding Race X being Combine... in early alpha/beta screenshots of Race X pit drones, they have grey device behind the forehead, which was to be used by Shock Troopers to control their minds and use them as scouts or slaves. Gearbox got rid of that when they decided to go full biotech for Race X, with no electronics.
http://combineoverwiki.net/images/d/d7/Of15.JPG
It would be very easy to make Race X look like a part of the Combine by restorting stuff like the Pit Drone mind devices. Technology could also be added to the Shock Troopers to make them cyborgs. They could be a branch of the Combine Overwatch from another world. The Voltigores could be a type of Synth.
Someone earlier mentioned that they couldn't be Combine because Race X have mastery of local teleport technology, while it is an important plot point that the Combine can only tunnel between worlds, not teleport from place to place within a world... I think I recall exactly ONE occasion in Opposing Force where a Shock Trooper teleports from place to place on Earth, in the hydrofauna labs. You see a Shock Trooper, it vanishes, and then appears closer or behind you or something.
That's the only instance of Race X having teleportation abilities beyond what the Combine are supposed to have... and of course that's because this was years before Valve came up with the Combine and that teleportation limitation.
(And of course there's the bit where a Shock Trooper grabs a scientist and then teleports away, but that is it returning to its own world rather than teleportation from place to place within the same world.)
Gearbox did the same thing with Xen aliens too - there's a couple of occasions in Opposing Force where Vortigaunts vanish and then reappear a few metres away. I think Gearbox was just being a bit experimental with the fact that Half-Life has teleporting enemies, and wanted to have them teleport from place to place rather than just having teleportation be a justification for aliens spawning. (Some of Gearbox Software had worked on Duke Nukem 3D, which featured enemies teleporting behind you.)
Given the huge number of contradictions and continuity snarls between Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 1, I think "We once saw a Shock Trooper teleport 10 feet across a room" shouldn't be used to dismiss the possibility of Race X being Combine. I'm happy with Race X being a totally separate alien race, but I'm also happy with Race X being considered part of the Combine. Both work fine plot-wise.
I think it makes sense that the nuke that was dropped on Black Mesa wiped any remaining Race X out (or forced them back to their world).
Don't forget that OF also had an experimental teleportation gun that basically did the same thing as the shock troopers. It allowed you to teleport to other places within the facility.
Is anybody willing to try neural network upscaling for HL2?
Well yea but humans perfected that tech in two different ways so thats not really surprising
The world textures already have 'grain' from the detail texture setup used, but honestly with all of our HD texture and model replacement mods, it'd probably be better to try neural upscaling for world textures, decals and props rather than NPC and Weapon stuff.
Reposting from LAMO pics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o01tyIRX_Po
Neural Network Scaled textures can look really good, but they require a lot of tweaking.
An example of upscaling without any tweaking.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/203954406662602762/525798282543235083/hd_scientist.PNG
But after some tweaks it looks really good.
Restored NPCs 2.0
Exactly my thoughts!
Nice post all in all, I like how open-minded you are when considering the options of who the Race X are AND what happened to them. Because the Race X clearly happened and made their seemingly short-lasting visit on Earth.
God it feels good to be reading and discussing HL lore after a while. I can't get enough of it.
walter needs some fucking chapstick
I'm getting "node graph out of date" when playing MMod with HL2 Update - is there a way to fix it? Nothing about it in the readmes
Put +ai_norebuildgraph 1 in your launch options. That way you don't need to put it in console every level change.
All this Op4 talk has given me a hankering to play it.
Thanks, it worked!
I've been playing it a bit using homebew port of Xash3D for Switch. It's early code, but very much playable if you're familiar with the game
I like Op4's blipping into and out of Xen. I generally liked the Xen areas in all the games. The skyboxes are always very neat to look at. Excited to see Black Mesa's rendition but I would like to have seen the direction Valve was going for in the Ep3 concepts.
Anyone seen if there's any replacers yet for the MMod Pistol? I always preferred the pistol be a Glock instead of the USP Match.
Does Mmod work for HL2 mods or can it be made to work for HL2 mods by changing files?
Found this
https://preview.redd.it/amhuwoagfoa21.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=eb48153734b86baec2b98ad778543b8790e9f294
Source
Should just be able to use any HL2 pistol mod. Source is myself, who left a pistol mod in my pack by accident and it worked flawlessly.
If mod doesn't use custom binaries, it would be easy to adapt
I was going to consider trying to get Dangerous World, Precursor, and some others to work. I don't know if I can do that just by copying files from Minerva and changing words or filepaths around though.
What was better, Gordon with or without the ponytail?
So I forgot I set up recording on my PC and didn't save a playback of it, but earlier in Mmod Minerva during the first level I was fighting a Combine Soldier in the upper warehouse while I was in the 'alley', and since I had an SMG and limited ammo and spamming bullets at his head in the window wasn't ammo efficient, I decided to throw a grenade into the window. So I come around the corner and throw a grenade, and he also throws a grenade at the same time, and they hit each other in mid-air and fall to the ground. What are the fucking odds?
With ponytail.
So satisfying to take a broken mod and get it working. I got Strelok's Liberator to work in Mmod, pretty imbalanced though because it's a Crossbow but the reload is half a second
The reason it was broken was because it supplied it's own game_sounds_manifest which not overrode Mmod's and broke several weapon sounds like Pistol and SMG reload.
The loss of the pony tail can be seen as a pivotal moment in character development. Since gman is not a hairdresser by trade (as the cowlick attests) we must assume that the ponytail was lost before he entered stasis. Most likely, it was lost after entering the portal (opforce shows him entering the portal with the ponytail). A pony tail symbolizes a youthful and carefree lifestyle, but as Gordon experiences this alien hellscape and has no guarantee of his ever returning to earth, this way of being is lost. Gordon has been chiefly looking out for himself throughout the game, taking whatever action is most likely to help escape black mesa. But as far as Gordon knows he's going to spend the rest of his life in xen. A selfish perspective like he has had throughout the game would tell him to not bother killing nihilanth, but when he loses the ponytail, through combat in xen or perhaps by cutting it off himself, we see a symbolic change in his character to a more mature and selfless version of himself. Gordon enters city 17 as this changed man, which sets the stage for the rich development of his character throughout half life 2.
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