A compilation of clips throughout Half-Life 2 and it's episodes showing what the NPCs looks like outside the cameras point of view. #halflife2 #sourceengine #halflife
Valve understood that prerendered scenes for digital displays would not scale with bigger resolutions so they went out of their ways to make a realtime stream with models
Ah so that's why Breen in randomly there when Alyx watches the screen. It's also really neat how Alyx's dad does a typing motion you don't get to see sense his hands are never really visible.
Probably so the map makers knew how to adjust mossman in the scene That or (honestly more likely) the original idea would be that Alex would switch through the cameras at different angles and was there just as a place holder and decided to just stick it to one camera angle and didn't bother delete the photo.
It's not "wasted" animation in the sense that 99% of HL2 scenes are using a library of gestures and poses that they can composite on top of any human character. It probably only took a couple minutes to add existing gestures to Kleiner there
Interestingly, when you talk to Alyx in the rebel outpost just before Highway 17, the monitor is actually an animated texture and not a real time camera
I think this is probably a remnant of how they did it in the beta before they came up with the real time streaming. Because the feed visually cuts out constantly it still looks pretty fine.
Though Alyx is still in the map in a hidden room. I wonder if that's to get it so that she speaks her lines and then they're played at the monitor with the radio filter.
@@racer927 Voices in the source engine MUST come from somewhere. In Portal 1 GLaDoS is a red storage cube in a room out of bounds, in Half-Life 2 they tended to use the actual models for the voices. Even in the beta this was something that had to occur.
Discovered this while playing with Half-Life in Gmod. Immediately amused myself by spawning in various props where Breen stands and watching them render in real time on the viewscreen.
Id always kill, replace, or retexture breen like some dumb ARG. One time I replaced him with a ragdoll of him staring at the screen with a silent, wide eyed smile.
To clarify for others, I don't think you mean depth of Breen vs his background. Rather how his video feed is hovering in front of the actual screen. A ton of games have this problem, especially with decals. On flatscreen, you don't notice it. But with VR's depth perception it's very obvious (I remember seeing it with Alien Isolation's blood decals for example)
@@awsomebot1 however this is an intended feature in this case. The monitor. The combine use doesn't have screens. You can see the cool layering effect in the non vr game as well actually. It's just a very cool hologram effect.
@@awsomebot1 Isn't the feeling be more like how the portals in (hum) Portal look? Like, if you tilt your head you start to see what's supposed to be behind it, something that's just not a thing on a screen of any kind. Like a non-Euclidean optical illusion: the wolrd of the TV is bigger inside than the TV's screen
*Lord of the Rings Trilogy* : "We will intensely detail this entire city, even the things the viewers will never see on screen." *Half-Life 2* : "We are not going to animate a single limb that doesn't appear on screen."
Great video! But you missed out one very small screen which shows Gman on a boat in the ocean with some crows. It appears in Anticitizen One just after DOG kills the combine with the APC in a destroyed building on a TV, the same TV that emits the creepy radio.mp3 sound
I know every game has constantly tried to capture the cinematic, seamless feel of half life 2 since it came out, but not a single other game has really captured my heart, no other game has the perfect sci fi action campyness, no other game has genuinely convincing acting, good and funny lines, and a world i genuinely can see past the borders of. Someone needs to make another game that feels like half life. someone give me more protagonists to actually give a fuck about, and moment to moment gameplay thats interesting and constantly changes it up
I never gave a f about Alyx, I couldn't stand her, especially the way she kept following me and backchatting me. And she was useless at shooting monsters.
Funny to see these video's being remade after two decades, as a kid playing this game back in the days (I was 11 back then) RU-vid was full with the same kind of (lowtech 240P Fraps) videos explaining the same stuff, even I myself made one of those videos back then. It was a real game changer once I found out how to use the console commands and look at these places myself! Edit: People like you really keep this game alive, thanks for that!
whenever i see Dr. Mosman"s capture, i always think about that Entropy zero 2 scene, where they go after Mosman, and it just maches perfectly with the one in episode 1
almost every modern engine has that feature, its archaic engines from decades ago that don't have features like that. most fps games NEED this technology to prevent viewmodels from clipping into walls.
Flashing the screen-static cards in front of the camera is hilarious. One of those, “This stupid idea will never work, but it’s easy, so I might as well try it…” moments for sure.
This sort of tech has existed for a long time in 3D game engines. id Tech 4 had such a "virtual camera" ability as well, it was most likely an offshoot of the "mirror" technology they used in Quake 3 Arena. GoldSrc (Half-Life) also had a virtual camera, and I've seen it in Build (Duke Nukem 3D) too.
One other one you missed was the TV showing Dr. Magnusson, that then gets interrupted by a Combine Advisor. And there's the TV showing footage of the Borealis after Mossman's message is played.
The most insane part for me was that the static was a model physically placed in front of the camera, rather than a texture applied to the screen. Laziest hack in history.
One of the most well done in game screens in any game... such a brilliant idea to just add another camera, be able to add filter effects to the screens. I really didn't seen many other games do it well in that era of games.
I always thought it was creepy when the G-man was in Breen's "studio" in one instance, and they modeled his torso too short. It appears when a vortigaunt is powering a TV in Route Kanal
0:35 Забавный факт, Брина можно грохнуть. Оказавшись тут, навестись на Брина и написать команду на поджог. Брин погорит, затем исчезнет и вроде бы даже его речь пропадет 🎉
SO if you were going to properly provide a raytraced version, you'd have to flesh out the virtual camera environments to correctly portray light emissions and occlusions in the off-screen environments. Something the existing raytracers miss.
There something spooky and depressing about this music, I remember we hear it when enter in the citadel core It really makes me feel uncomfortable, tell me if you feel the same, I'm curious
