HALF LIFE BLACK MESA OUT NOW!

OMG OMG OMG: http://www.blackmesasource.com/

It's out soon! YES!

OMG!!! DREAMS BECOME TRUE!!! FINALLY!!!
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Ok, now, I calmed down.

Somehow this reminds me of the (hopefully!!!) upcoming Half-Life 3: Everybody says "Uh, they will never release it, forget this game, blablablub" but after many years of waiting nevertheless it finally is released. ... well, hopefully.

LOL, their forum is overloaded, I can´t access it. XD

So HL1 with fancy graphics... what is so awesome about it? well, apart from the nice graphics

You´re kidding, right?

I'd like to know as well. Maddin, please explain!

One question first: Do you like Half-Life?

Yes, I played HL1 (and both expansions) some years ago and liked it quite much (though I liked Opposing Force better than the main game), but I don't know if I'd want to play it again in the near future (I still haven't touched HL2).

I've never played HL. Heh.

There we got the problem.

No, the problem is that you won't explain why you're excited about this. Maybe you're just faking it

No, the problem is that you won't explain why you're excited about this. Maybe you're just faking it

I for one am excited because it adds all the things that HL2 added to the gameplay (except the gravtiy gun I suppose) , and applies it to the narrative/ level design of HL1.

I suppose a similar comparison could be like taking Quake 1, and then using Darkplaces + ODE physics

Thanks Shadowman for writing my statement.

Oh, that's nifty.

have fun

(I still haven't touched HL2).

Man, you haven't lived! I'd really recommend playing that game. Oh and its many awesome mods!

Yeah, nifty indeed Mr B. Nifty indeed...

(I still haven't touched HL2).

Man, you haven't lived! I'd really recommend playing that game. Oh and its many awesome mods!

Yeah, nifty indeed Mr B. Nifty indeed...

Well, I bought it some time ago (2-3 years? I don't remember even), but I got so many games to play... I also tend to play the games without any plot a lot more. IMHO the ones with a cohesive story require to sit at least a couple of hours on each play session. Hence - more deathmatch, less adventure ;-). But I'll get to HL2 at some point in time sooner or later.

i've only played HL2. when i get to chapter 10/11 (dunno sure) it gets too hard for me

I played all of them starting with the original and I'd have to say that the first one was the best. The second one was put on rails and there wasn't much incentive to use your head (if your good at shooting, you'll complete it on hardest) whereas the first one required it. The first one may look like a shooter, but is more of a puzzle game than anything else really, you have to be able to think your way through in order to complete it. The second game also didn't have any replay value.

The impending release of Black Mesa spurred me on to play through the original, plus the 2 expansion packs: Opposing Force and Blue Shift. It's been at least 6 years since I touched it and 4 years since I last did HL2. I can see why they would not want to make it an exact remake as there are some bad bits of the original. I will get Black Mesa at some point I'm sure just to see what it's like in comparison and I'm interested to see how much of it is different. Aside from some story editing, I would hope that some areas of the artwork and AI work out better. There were some awful textures and although the AI always got bigged up, the enemies do some pretty stupid things like sitting still while you shoot them round corners.

One thing that definitely won't get improved and I'm sure it will be much more pervasive is Steam. I don't like Steam. At least with the original you can play it outside of Steam and the game is always yours to play. With Steam the game isn't really yours, they can take it away from you when they want, like when they removed Windows 98 SE support for HL2. With Black Mesa you'll be stuck with the endless updates. I don't run Windows very often, I run Steam even less so when I do it's very frustrating to find there's 1Gb of downloading to do before I can play a game - normally I give up at this point and play another game.

One area that suprised me in some ways playing through HL again is how dated it seems now relative to other games of the same period. I played through Quake 2 a while back which seems to have aged much better. The areas which are a problem for me is the poor quality of some of the sounds, the small number of really bad textures and the epic levels of z-fighting. Not even GLQuake manages these levels of z-fighting!

Actually the killer feature for me of stores like steam and desura are the auto updates. I got a load of games on cd's and it always bugged me that when I got a game, and I didn't touch it for like 2 years or so, it got an update in the mean time (sometimes fixing critical things like geing able to run the game at all)... But the local distributor doesn't care so they don't localize the patches (and the original ones don't work), or in case they do, they already removed them from their website cause they lost the license to distribute. Or the games developer went bankrupt and their site is down, etc... In effect I was left hunting for those needed patches all over the net on some shady websites.

And with steam/desura? Run the client, the game gets updated by itself, done! No hunting, no need to care, even after 3 years from the games release. So what if the updates are sometimes heavy? That's just a thing with todays games - they got larger.

halflife ... dated? ... i was playing halflife (just got it recently) and was surprised of how well it aged ...

although .. I was running halflife source ... so ... I guess its not quite the original ... quality wise ... (water has reflections and such )

but compared to bots in other games ... I think the ai ... is actually really good ...

Actually the killer feature for me of stores like steam and desura are the auto updates.

I think we have different viewpoints on Steam. It isn't as good as a proper package management system for me and sometimes it is just a big waste of bandwidth with all of the updates when I was doing fine with the game as it was. Bandwidth always costs someone, somewhere money.

although .. I was running halflife source ... so ... I guess its not quite the original ... quality wise ... (water has reflections and such )

That'll also include the updated models taht were optionally available with Blue Shift which were done as part of an aborted Dreamcast port. Anyone else can install the updated models (only) too if you know where to look:
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_arti...-QDVN-1426

but compared to bots in other games ... I think the ai ... is actually really good ...

IIRC Half-Life Source had updated physics and AI so isn't the same gameplay wise.

The problem in Half-Life that I see for AI is that the enemies are good up close but hopeless at long distance. Often they just aren't activated at long distances even if they can see you. HL2 suffers in the same way. So why go up close when you can take them out with a pistol at long range without them fighting back?

The best example is when you are fighting soldiers and you can see an arm or a leg sticking out from around some obstacle. You can see him but he can't see you. So you take out the pistol and shoot them one shot at a time:

bang
"Wounded"
bang
"Is that all you've got?"
bang
"Medic"
bang
[soldier dies]

At no point do they get 'activated' and go for cover or fight back because they can't see you. Do this in Quake and they'd go mental. HL2 has a fairly similar effect and it does make things a bit too easy again when you know where the bad guys are and that you can shoot them without being shot back. In HL2 they prevent it more by adding in scripted sequences but in some ways there is even more of a bias towards close combat for the AI - they'd rather come to 2m away and shoot you rather than fire from a long distance so you ahve to take them out first.

Source AI is actually not that bad when you compare it to other games, you can spawn antlions in gmod and they will flyjump to you position, L4D zombies scan geometry whether they can climb up etc etc. Games like Crysis 2 use dev-placed markers, without them AI would be clueless.
The only game with actually semi-intelligent AI is Arma, but while sometimes they can act smartly, they fail very often at the most basic problems and die.

btw. did you know Xonotic AI can use jetpacks?

I really liked the enemy AI in Unreal 1. You couldn't even shoot a Skaarj in the back cause he'd hear the e.g. rocket, dodge it, jump behind some obstacle and attack you from there (and that was in 1998! :-) ).

IT'S OUT PEOPLE!

http://www.moddb.com/mods/black-mesa/new...0-released