Half-Life 2: Started!

[Chris Nahr]

Yeah, I'm late... had I known that the retail version need Steam I wouldn't have bothered with the imported US copy but it was already well underway when the news broke. Oh well.

It did contain a small install & quick reference, sheet, by the way, which is apparently the entire manual available for the game. Steam offers the same thing under "Manual".

Speaking of which, while Steam is an idiotic hassle for a single-player game, at least it installed smoothly on my system. Decrypting took 10 minutes, setting up my account and registering the CD key perhaps another 10 minutes. No problems so far.

Well, except for two oddities which are the reason for this post. If they were mentioned in the previous 5276 HL2 posts I must have missed them, sorry...

For one thing, HL2 claims that my GeForce 5900XT is "DirectX 8.1 hardware". I recall Jakub or one of his buddies writing about HL2's wacky hardware detection, but the game looks fantastic and runs smoothly, so I'm not sure if I'm actually missing out on anything. Is there a problem, and if so how can I fix it?

For another thing, I'm already stuck. :( After much running through sewers (with crates!), I'm now in the two connected rooms, one of which is really high and contains a wheel on a pipe that I turned to let in lots of water. That's nice but what do I do now? There are two small grates that won't open, and I spotted an opening in the ceiling of the first floor but can't reach the ledge below from the pipe that leads to it. Why the hell can't Gordon Freeman mantle up a ledge, anyway? Garrett could do that since... never mind.

Great game otherwise, and the facial animation is absolutely incredible. I've seen people in TV soaps who looked less realistic than those 3d models.

[Foom]

I'm not an expert, but the way I understand it the FX5900 cards don't have "true" DX9 support. You'd need a Radeon or a really new GeForce for that. Not that the game isn't pretty without it.

As for the place where you're stuck, you need to go back to the room that had a bunch of exploding barrels. Dive through a small hole in the floor (right by the pillar with the ladder), swim down and look for a large tube to proceed.

I found a Google cached discussion on the DX9 issue here (http://www.google.ch/search?q=cache:bUunP54xE_MJ:www.hardforum.com/showthread.php%3Ft%3D833866+%22directx9+support%22 +%22geforce+fx%22&hl=en).

[Chris Nahr]

Now that you mention it, I remember something or other about things that the Radeon could do which only the latest NVidia models could match. Didn't realize that it had something to do with DX8.1 vs 9.0 though.

I never would have thought to look at the floor, thanks!

[Foom]

Um, I don't want to spread misinformation.

Apparently the FX5900 is fully DX 9 compatible but has really bad performance if you force HL2 into DX9 mode on it. Or something. There's probably a 20-page Anandtech article with an in-depth discussion of the issue, but frankly I don't really care :wink:

[Quaro]

Yup, that's it. The 5900 supports DX9, but at unplayable framerates. It's something like 1/3 the framerate of a Radeon 9800.

[Jakub]

For one thing, HL2 claims that my GeForce 5900XT is "DirectX 8.1 hardware". I recall Jakub or one of his buddies writing about HL2's wacky hardware detection, but the game looks fantastic and runs smoothly, so I'm not sure if I'm actually missing out on anything. Is there a problem, and if so how can I fix it?
You're not actually missing out on all that much with the DX 8.1 path. Valve did a really good job in getting similar levels of visual quality with the lesser shader code.

If you want, you can force the game to run in DX9 mode, but it'll be god-awful slow. NV3X (that means NVIDIA's 5000 series hardware) simply can't deliver proper shader performance.

This link (http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/geforce_fx_half-life2/) explains.

Apologies for the self-pimpage.

[tronnc]

A coworker got stuck in that same room. He never found the wheel to raise the water and he realized that he needed to get into that pipe to get to the next room. So he spent about 3 hours stacking barrels so he could get into the tube. Which he accomplished then he went into the next room and was stuck because the water had not been raised and he couldn't go back. He had to load a previous save and then he found the water wheel.

We've spent the last week making jokes about barrel stacking.

[Derek Meister]

Ugh. For some reason my HL2 experience was plagued by that sort of thing, where I'd easily dispatch any and all threat in a level and then spend 3x the amount of time looking for some door, window or trigger that for some dumb reason I would keep missing because it was just around a corner I had stupidly thought I had checked before.

[RepoMan]

Ya, I've had the same experience multiple times. Worst was [SPOILER]





at the entrance to Ravenholm, where there's the ladder with the cage over it. I stacked boxes to climb up over the cage, and I made it! And then I COULDN'T CLIMB THE LADDER. Had to post here to get someone to point me at the totally obvious padlock that only had to be shot away with the gravity gun... too bad Valve took the cheap way out when coding that puzzle (obviously they set the "no-climb bit" on the ladder rather than actually having the cage be an object that blocked ladder climbing physically).

Since then I've gotten a bit better about looking around. Sometimes I think that the problem is really that we are playing in increasingly realistic virtual worlds that we basically see through a peephole -- I mean, the viewing angle (FOV) we get on our monitors is, what? 60 degrees? So you have to kind of keep spinning around to see things. So when you enter an area and there are monsters, you whip around so fast that you barely can see things, and then you miss things and get blind spots because you think you saw everything.

I'm trying to cultivate my slow-and-steady SEEING (as per Sherlock Holmes -- "Watson, you look but you do not see"). Gotten better at finding things myself that way. But you definitely have to slooooow down and pan around evenly and just kind of let the scene fill out in your mind. I guess it's like what life would be if you lacked all peripheral vision and wore blinders all the time.

Makes me want this (http://www.mvis.com/) even more -- or a widescreen (full-FOV) version of it....

Cheers!
Rob

[Jonathan Blow]

The traditional FPS camera is around 90 degrees (sometimes a little bit less). But yeah, it's a problem...

[Sean Hargraves]

For one thing, HL2 claims that my GeForce 5900XT is "DirectX 8.1 hardware". I recall Jakub or one of his buddies writing about HL2's wacky hardware detection, but the game looks fantastic and runs smoothly, so I'm not sure if I'm actually missing out on anything. Is there a problem, and if so how can I fix it?
You're not actually missing out on all that much with the DX 8.1 path. Valve did a really good job in getting similar levels of visual quality with the lesser shader code.

If you want, you can force the game to run in DX9 mode, but it'll be god-awful slow. NV3X (that means NVIDIA's 5000 series hardware) simply can't deliver proper shader performance.

This link (http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/geforce_fx_half-life2/) explains.

Apologies for the self-pimpage.

I'd be interested to see the results for the FX series with 53.03 drivers. I had to roll back the drivers to that version to get my father's computer (it has a 5200FX) to render water correctly (wouldn't render at all, just like your DX9 water tests) for Far Cry and I'm wondering if something similar is happening here.

[scharmers]

Latest drivers on an 5600 FX here, forced to DX8.1 with no problems. Frame rate remains decent on my rig at 800x600, 2xAA/AF. I already know better than to try to go to DX9 from the initial HL2 demo, as if Far Cry's use of shaders didn't already tell me that shader performance sucked on the FX card. (As in "wow, Far Cry looks marginally better on my FX than it did on my Ti4200, but at 1/4 the frame rate.")

Valve did an outstanding job on coding for less than bleeding-edge machines.

--scharmers

[Chris Nahr]

Jakub, thanks for the explanation & link. I'll not try to fiddle around with the video settings then, I'm already running at 1280x1024 with nearly maxed settings (except reflections) and the game looks absolutely gorgeous, so I figure Valve has done a good job at supporting my card!

Far better than Doom 3, by the way. Even disregarding gameplay, if Doom 3 had come out after HL2 everyone would just laugh at it. The difference is that huge. And Doom 3 had been the best-looking game I'd played thus far! Texture quality, models, animations, view distance, rendering speed -- there's simply no comparison. Only three months later but a world of difference. Maybe I have a freak system but from what I'm seeing John Carmack has just been pwned.

Those puzzles are definitely getting aggravating, though. I wished they had put in Navi the Zelda fairy that told you where to go...

[Chris Nahr]

Oh, by the way, Valve put up a regularly updated survey (www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html) of its users' systems. Highlights: almost everyone's running XP, most people already have a DVD drive, ATI vs Nvidia is an even split, NVidia is slightly ahead of ATI.

[GuildBoss]

Speaking of which, while Steam is an idiotic hassle for a single-player game, at least it installed smoothly on my system. Decrypting took 10 minutes, setting up my account and registering the CD key perhaps another 10 minutes. No problems so far.

Same here. I was late for the party but had everything up and running quickly (relatively speaking) and smoothly. A little patience has its advantages. 8)

[Quaro]

Ugh. For some reason my HL2 experience was plagued by that sort of thing, where I'd easily dispatch any and all threat in a level and then spend 3x the amount of time looking for some door, window or trigger that for some dumb reason I would keep missing because it was just around a corner I had stupidly thought I had checked before.

Yeah, this keeps HL2 out of the stratosphere of gaming for me. It breaks the immersion when you spend all your time looking for that one vent that you are inevitably directed towards. I also never really get a sense of exploring like that of games that aren't on rails so much.

[Atman Binstock]

I stacked boxes to climb up over the cage, and I made it! And then I COULDN'T CLIMB THE LADDER

Yeah, I had the exact same experience. The worst thing is that they had just given you the gravity gun and trained you to stack boxes to jump over obstacles.

Is it just me, or almost all the physics puzzles really lame? Most are really obvious, and worse - very boring to perform. I think the first one I've enjoyed at all is the mag crane, just because it is fun to mess with.

[Tom Chick]

I pretty much agree with you, Atman. The physics puzzles are just a bit too contrived for my taste. Thankfully, I don't think they overdo them. You pretty much get one see-saw puzzle, one bouyancy puzzle, one counterweight pulley puzzle, one swinging heavy beam puzzle, and so forth. If they'd pushed it any further, I would have cried 'foul'.

I didn't realize this until my second play-through, but the mag crane can pick up those cargo containers! And then you can swing them around to wreak havoc on the troops below you. Very cool!

-Tom

[Sean Tudor]

I am surprised so many people had trouble with the puzzles. I wouldn't have even called them puzzles. I breezed through the game to the end and didn't find any one section frustratingly difficult.

I think the key to progressing in HL2 is to slow down and have a good look around. Most of the puzzle stuff is very obvious.

[Derek Meister]

I don't believe the puzzles really presented that much of a challenge to most people. Personally, all the physics puzzles were pretty obvious and easy to accomplish. It was just finding the damn doors out of the level that would open or be exposed after you had essentially cleared out the level. For some dumb reason that was always the hardest bit for me.

[Mattc0m]

I don't believe the puzzles really presented that much of a challenge to most people. Personally, all the physics puzzles were pretty obvious and easy to accomplish. It was just finding the damn doors out of the level that would open or be exposed after you had essentially cleared out the level. For some dumb reason that was always the hardest bit for me.

Yeah, same here. Sometimes I had to look for a puzzle to CONTIUNE, but really once I figured out it was a "puzzle" I was up against it was pretty straight-foward.

[krayzkrok]

I finally managed to play HL2 about an hour ago myself. Early days yet, but looks like it will be worth the hassle.

Just!

To play it, I needed to network my games PC (using Wireless, which only took 3 days of screwing around), transfer the CD drive from my old PC to the new one because the DVD drive didn't recognise the fact I'd inserted a disk in the drive, and then install both Steam and the game. While I really don't like the whole process, I must admit it was relatively painless - took me (on dialup across the WiFi network) about an hour to go from inserting the disk (with no Steam account) to looking at the HL2 menu... not taking into account the hardware hassles. I was expecting it to be worse, but I'm glad that I waited a week.

As for Doom 3, I didn't realise view distance had much to do with an engine's technical merit. Doom 3 was clearly designed for claustrophic environments, whereas HL2 was designed for open spaces. Doom 3 looks better indoors than HL2 does, if you ask me - higher resolution textures, more environmental detail. It's like comparing apples and oranges though. While I don't doubt that HL2 is a better game, and Source may have greater flexibility, Doom 3 is still exactly what I expected (and wanted) - Doom done on modern hardware, with a technically brilliant engine, and an emphasis on making me scared shitless.

[Wobbo]

Yeah, this keeps HL2 out of the stratosphere of gaming for me. It breaks the immersion when you spend all your time looking for that one vent that you are inevitably directed towards. I also never really get a sense of exploring like that of games that aren't on rails so much.
I agree

I played on a friends machine (he claims to have had a LOT of trouble installing steam and hates it) and didnt like the game at all - it was very similar to doom3 and call of duty in that your on a 100% pre-defined path... at least in call of duty there was the occaisional chance to sneak and use tactics... from what ive seen of hl2 there was none of this.

In a good game (and a realistic game) the concept of getting 'stuck' should be rare, because there should be more than one way to tackle a problem

like the original half life the designers treated the levels like movie sets, and not game spaces

but i can't reallly call it yet, Im either gonna buy it for myself to finish it or see the rest of it some other way... i dont steal games so its full steam ahead

[Sean Tudor]

I suspect the way Half-Life 2 (and 1) was designed is to cater more to the mainstream public. All the biggest AAA FPS's have had set piece scripting to move the player along.

Maybe S.T.A.L.K.E.R. will give us a far more free-form environment. Something to look forward to I guess.

[Chris Nahr]

As for Doom 3, I didn't realise view distance had much to do with an engine's technical merit. Doom 3 was clearly designed for claustrophic environments, whereas HL2 was designed for open spaces.

Big spaces include small spaces, by definition. An engine that can do big spaces can also do monster closets, but not necessarily vice versa. And Doom 3's far inferior performance on my system leads me to suspect that the mostly cramped environments were not just a design choice.

Regarding the level of detail, that's also influenced by engine performance. I had to run Doom 3 at a lower resolution and turn down some details to get it running smoothly. I can run HL2 at max resolution for my LCD monitor and with nearly maximum details. So yeah, Doom 3 might be capable of the same level of detail -- but not on my system.

That aside, I do think Doom 3 had a "plastic" look like any shooter before it, while HL2 looks much more "realistic" in a hard-to-define way. Part of that is probably the work of the artists, though.

[Derek Meister]

I suspect the way Half-Life 2 (and 1) was designed is to cater more to the mainstream public. All the biggest AAA FPS's have had set piece scripting to move the player along.

Hey now, you can't blame it on the "mainstream public". More of them bought Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas than they did Half Life 2 and seemed to have little problem with the idea of a game with open-ended gameplay.

[ChrisGrenard]

Well, all I can say is that for me, personally, I really enjoy playing a "Movie star" of sorts. Cinematic games (or on a rail games, like HL2) are very fun to me, even without the open endedness. Sure, I also look foward to new Morrowinds and Stalkers, but I really and truly do enjoy being pushed along this cinematic path.

And yes, I even enjoy Metal Gear Solid. (Even the second one! Well... up till the last 20 minutes...)

[RepoMan]

Big spaces include small spaces, by definition. An engine that can do big spaces can also do monster closets, but not necessarily vice versa.

Actually, only kind of. Half-Life 2 is pretty clearly using different techniques for its indoor and outdoor rendering. In other words, Half-Life 2 (and other indoor/outdoor games) are really multiple engines, with rendering being done in some cases by multiple engines in a single scene.

Just last night I was [SPOILER]








crawling around on the top floor of one of the Highway 17 beach houses, and I happened to turn my flashlight on, and the frame rate must have halved. It's clear that the HL2 rendering system isn't built for doing both indoor (flashlight / light-sourcing) and outdoor (uniform lighting, huge horizon distance) rendering simultaneously.

Doom III does much more sophisticated things with indoor light than Half-Life 2. There's nothing in Half-Life 2 (well, OK, I'm not all the way through yet) to compare with, e.g., the rotating emergency sirens casting moving shadows onto barred walls, which cast further shadows onto the rooms behind them. They are functionally pretty close, but Doom III really allows cinematic lighting at all levels and uses that in the art (includig the focus on light-reflecting, shiny surfaces), whereas Half-Life 2 is much more about genius texture work and gritty hyper-realism.

Personally I thought Doom III was scarier than Half-Life 2. Saw someone in some HL2 forum commenting that they thought Doom III was scary until they played Ravenholm. Well, I played Doom III, and you, Ravenholm, are no Doom III. Ravenholm had its moments, but Doom III had more moments where I just plain wasn't sure I WANTED to keep going down that hallway..... Something about the claustrophobia and the panicked feeling of seeing a flashlit glimpse of something new and horrible (trites??? UGH!) simply got to me. So I guess I'd have to say that they hit the mark they were aiming for, as far as I'm concerned.

Half-Life 2, however, has a vastly wider spectrum of gameplay and the characters are the next level in simulated acting. HL2 is definitely the far better game, but in some ways Doom III is the better experience. Damn glad I got a new PC in time for both, though :D -- D3 in particular really makes the most of every single CPU cycle you can throw at it....

Cheers!
Rob

[Quaro]

I never found the zombies in Half Life 2 the least bit scary. Ravenholm was fun with the traps, but it was never even remotely creepy. I was playing Vampire at the same time, which had a few genuinely creepy scenes. Hearing the audio logs of the crazed psychologist while witnessing the remains of his work was kinda freaky. I love the 'trigger the audiolog and then walk around doing your thing while listening' style of gameplay.

[Kryten]

I didn't realize this until my second play-through, but the mag crane can pick up those cargo containers! And then you can swing them around to wreak havoc on the troops below you. Very cool!

-Tom

Mine was the otherway around - First I picked up the containers (two at once! woo!) and swung them around, taking out troops and barrels, then it took me awhile to work out what you have to do with the buggy....

[RightWrong]

Those cargo containers are fun. At first I was just gonna try to squish the troopers with the magnet, but crushing them beneath another hunk of metal was fun too.

[christopher]

This may have been posted already, but did anyone notice that Half Life 2 has it's own bizzaro world versions of some of the set pieces in recent World War 2 shooters? Storming the beach against machine gun encampments with your antlion troops felt a lot like Omaha Beach in Medal of Honor. The city fighting looked and felt like Call of Duty sometimes. There was even a mini version of Sniper Town, although this time it wasn't incredibly frustrating.

[Chris Nahr]

Half-Life 2 is pretty clearly using different techniques for its indoor and outdoor rendering. In other words, Half-Life 2 (and other indoor/outdoor games) are really multiple engines, with rendering being done in some cases by multiple engines in a single scene.

If that is true, they certainly did a great job of integrating those different engines. You say "clearly" but I haven't noticed any seams or transitions yet, not even in the long canal rides where you gradually close on huge buildings in the distance until you stand next to them.


It's clear that the HL2 rendering system isn't built for doing both indoor (flashlight / light-sourcing) and outdoor (uniform lighting, huge horizon distance) rendering simultaneously.

Interesting... now that you mention it, I do recall the flashlight in HL2 not working as smoothly as in Doom 3. Then again, you don't need it as much. :P

Seriously, I agree that Doom 3 had more sophisticated lighting than HL2. But if monster closets and plastic look were the price for realistic lights and reflections, I think it was a poor trade-off overall.