ben burbankwell we updated half life 1!
I got to do a bunch of work specifically for fans of the game like me.
I’ll talk more about it later!!
This is going to be a long story about Half-Life.
24 years ago I was working on a computer science assignment to build a phone book application in desktop Java. It was a pretty decent portion of the grade for the class. I seriously hated working on it, I saw a future of typing up code for phone companies or banks or law offices. I wanted to make video games and it was hard to see how this had even a dotted-line connection to that end goal.
A few nights before the assignment was due, my platter hard-drive started clicking. It was only a few months old, and it just died. I spent a couple hours before realizing, barring any professional help, the drive was toast and my phone book application was cast to hell along with it. I went to a store and bought a replacement drive and got windows 98 reinstalled. Any motivation to work on the phone book application was basically lost.
I thought screw this I’m going to be an art major and installed the copy of Half-Life I’d been meaning to play all year.
Everybody told me it was great, and while it took me the better part of an hour to get used to using a mouse in a first person shooter (!), by the time I hit Office Complex the hook was in deep.
I played the game in one go in my dark dorm room, cutting classes for a couple days. I’d become an art major, I thought. Give up on the CS class. No more phone books.
I ended up failing that CS class. And I did take a bunch of art classes. I learned C++ to make weird graphics stuff. And after bouncing back and forth between art and CS classes I ended up finishing college weirdly prepared to go work on video games, having a mixed bag of skills.
Well I’ve worked in the video game business for almost 20 years now. Through a strange series of events I now work at Valve, the company who made Half-Life. And a few months ago I got it compiling again, and I finally updated it from MSVC6 for Windows 98.
I just wanted to maybe make the crosshair a little bigger at higher resolutions. Maybe get a checkbox in so you could turn off the texture filtering without console commands.
A group within Valve wanted to do something nice for fans today, Half-Life’s 25th Anniversary. Lots of folks helped on this; I think we fixed a bunch of stuff to be the way we saw it in the 90s, but now on modern screens. It was an honor to work on this update, and it’s so exciting to see servers filling up again.
Happy birthday, Half-Life.
UPDATE: my old CS teacher saw this and finally knows part of why I just gave up 24 years ago and I’m NOT crying.
Also this phone book assignment is the kind of programming work I relish when I get to do it these days, a well-defined problem with easily testable requirements!
BTW a huge shoutout to @frog who did a bunch of technically challenging things in the anniversary update. When I started looking at the code history I spotted some periodic tinkering from Joshua that implied a real love and understanding for these old games, and there were already some changes just sitting there basically ready to ship. Glad we got to!
Jake Rodkin
Migrated to @@bburbank :U1f973-partyingFrog: :U1f91d-handshake: Thanks so much for the opportunity to work on it =D
Really a life dream :))
Really a life dream :))
Adolph
Martin Roukala (né Peres)
eukara
Half-Life, and I'm very grateful to see many issues finally addressed after all these years. Thanks for caring, and in some cases even reaching out for input. You know who you are - we appreciate it very much!
Jay Baird@bburbank is there an external changelog that rolls up all of the changes? I’ve been playing and my big one is I don’t remember the subtle lean when turning, for example. Was that always there or new? My memory from 25 years ago is crap so some help would be great 😭
@skatterbean there is a changelog up at the link at the start of this thread, and you’re not wrong:
there hasn’t been view roll in Half-Life for a long time, it broke in a patch some time in the early 2000s and was restored as part of this update.
Luke Kanies@bburbank living the dream!
Phil Nelson@bburbank that’s so fuckin cool, Ben!
Julian H@bburbank Thank you for your work! It was such a pleasant surprise to see so many long-standing issues fixed (and finally a way to officially play uplink!)
I do want to point out that the rapid fire crowbar bug is still there, and as much as I love it I can't imagine it was intended behavior lol https://youtu.be/ff_Nf3S2juk&t=15
Half Life: Crowbar glitch
@julianh why fix perfection
JP@bburbank @julianh for like the past ~20 years i've referred to this glitch as "Aphex Twinning" because of how much it sounds like a snare rush at high framerates, playing the first few milliseconds of a sample several times in quick succession. i personally would have been sad if Aphex Twinning had been patched out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WAa3tY6cfo
4
Derek Correia@bburbank Very cool story, thanks for sharing, and thanks for helping on this anniversary!
Jamie@bburbank I’m playing it again now for the first time since launch. Still a damn good game.
Whitney McNamara@bburbank First: thank you.
Second: it feels weird to talk about "spoilers" for a 25 year old game, but I don't think this is *exactly* one...that moment that I realized that in-game *sound* made a difference was mind-blowing.
By-Tor@bburbank great story, and thanks, man. It is great playing Half-Life again. Still an iconic game.
David@bburbank So cool that a little tinkering snowballed into something to ship!
Congrats on the release!
Congrats on the release!
skaarg@bburbank thank you for this awesome update! Been busy with work/holidays but can’t wait to load it up! Random question not sure if you would know. The credits for this cheesy 2001 movie called Max Knight Ultra Spy say they partnered with Valve for the Half-Life scenes in the movie. Do you know if these map files still exist in Valve or if it was it just with the movie studio?
Glyph@bburbank any chance that a similar group might be motivated to recompile the collection of Source games for apple silicon, for similar reasons? :-)
Francis 🏴☠️ Gulotta
Bryce Mayrose
Chris is.
Steve James
Matt Healey
Matt Maddux@bburbank I’m super excited to dive in with my Steam Deck. Haven’t played it in years. Do the upgrades also apply to Blue Shift?
@matt the engine level fixes are present but some things (specifically updated in-game UI, controller fixes) will require additional work to be a great experience on steam deck.
Ed Ross
Janne Ojaniemi@bburbank I remember when I got the game. I started playing and was simply blown away by it. After playing for some time I reached the surface and started thinking “I guess I’m close to the end now. This game was awesome!”. But the game kept on going! When I finally finished the game, I actually emailed Valve and told them I love the game. Some dude called Gabe Newell mailed me back and said “I’m glad you like the game, we worked really hard on it”