Ok, the "Before Barney (alpha Barney Calhoun)" says "FREEZE" when you shoot at him. That explains where that noise "Freeze" came from when i was playing "Best Worst half life mod"
Really interesting to see how many concepts were scrapped or how they looked so early. Also, the animations are really good, i dont remember the final version having so many detailed animations like the monster stepping on something and eating it or how the human npcs die. Maybe they were there but i never saw them becuase as soon you get close to something they are attacking you.
Normally in the final Version from Half-Life 1 i love it messing around with the Secruity Guard but in the Alpha i just cant kill him cuz the Animations shows when falling how he struggles to stand up but fails.
I hope you realize that both Half life 1 and Half life 2 are groundbreaking masterpieces that changed gaming forever. And are both one of the most influential games ever made. And set dozens of standards regardless of genre. And most likely influenced one of your favorite games, one way or another.. And gave birth to the MP mod called Counter strike. Which is also one of the most groundbreaking and influential games ever made. Not bad for 1 guy in his college dorm huh?
Headcrab: allow me to introduce myself I am the alpha headcrab Bullsquid: oh really I am actually you know I am headcrab killing alpha say goodbye adopted. Headcrab:wow
+TheKieranator It's doing the old "ooga chaka" dancing baby animation. The model was imported specifically to try and crash the game. To their surprise it didn't crash the game.
+perplexedmoth I assume it's a cheap DSP (Digital Sound Processing) filter, when certain criteria in a room are met (i.e size, material of room and air pressure) because doing convincing accoustic modeling in real time was impossible in the 90's, even still difficult now.
+Sypadizre It's an entity with a set radius placed at the desired area that changes the room type which sets the effect (which doesn't take any variables in to account).
@Seth Wellington Because I have done-and sometimes still do-level design for GoldSrc-based games and mods. I have extensive knowledge of how the GoldSrc engine works, since I have been using and worked with the engine for other games.
This build is just one year older than the final one!? Holy shit, does Valve have some kind of time machine? How did they polish the game so much in just a year? This alpha build doesn't even look like Half-Life.
Originally it was going to be released a year earlier than it was, but the staff agreed that they had learnt so much new stuff while making the game that they decided to do a complete re-write of the entire thing, adding in much more content and advanced graphics.
To clarify, according to what I've read, the basic flow of all the levels was in place already like the HL2 beta, but it was missing some polish they thought the game needed so they recreated most of the models, voice lines, and sound effects.
television and cheese It was suppossed to test the limits of the engine, they thought it would actually crash the game But as you can see, the engine can handle it without trouble
The two most impressive parts to me were the high-poly robot and it’s auto tracking of the character and the changes in audio based on the location you’re in, those two things bring the most presence to a game imo. Visuals and great audio work are key.
@@zedsdeadbaby The water with waves is actually still in the final build of HL1, but few maps use it. I think it's possible to find some user-made maps that use it but if i remember correctly it is VERY buggy.
I think the original iteration of the game would have been inferior but still fun as a finished product. It's sorta like comparing the Half-Life we know to an exciting big-budget 90s movie filled with explosions and death-defying stunts whereas the alpha/beta is a campy 80s film with exaggerated violence and overacting.
I'm a vet, also was an MP, so I know the importance of caffeine, but seriously, valve? Alpha Barney looks like he's peaking from giving a mountain of blow a moustache ride. Thankfully he was re-rendered for retail release. All seriousness though, Half-life was so far ahead of its time, it's mind blowing. So many ground-breaking features were packed into the game at its time. Half-life is a legend in itself.
Wait a sec so in the alpha, the marines were gonna have m4s while the player would get an mp5? Yet in the official release, everyone would use mp5s? Furthermore, an update was released that converted all the mp5s into m4s?
Yeah I would have loved to have seen the mp5 and m4 as separate weapons. It seemed viable but they felt it was redundant. They did the same thing with hl2, it had a lot more guns and normal human weapons which was actually great for immersion but they cut em because they wanted to focus on building it's own atmosphere. It's classic and iconic but just mixing it up would always be kinda nice.
@@MisterJohnDoe yeah was gunna say the first scientist in that scripted scene looked like his eyes got gouged out lmao, barney just looks like he's scared shitless
The scientist and guard textures are intriguing. I heard a rumor that Valve had trouble creating neutral/friendly units, and didn't intend to include friendlies in the game originally. Was this before or after Valve figured out how to create neutral/friendly characters? To me, it looks like the devs had planned for the scientists and guards to be out of their minds.
The simplistic particle effects at 4:47 is the only reminder that GoldSrc inherited from -idTech2- Quake engine. Everything else seemed new. Good job, Valve.
@@roadent217 The Quake engine _is_ idtech2 - the Quake II engine is just another variant of it, sometimes called 'idtech2.5'. Idtech1 is the Doom Engine, and Idtech0 is the Wolfenstein Engine. It gets confusing, so it's just better to just call the idtech engines by the name of their flagship game until you get to idtech5. Goldsrc does take bits of code from the Quake II and Quakeworld engines as well. It's not all Quake 1.
Can’t be more wrong. The game engine was never scrapped and that’s the majority of the work. The enemy models sounds and textures are also the same in the final. This is a tech demo
@@emptybottle2405 See 3:09, 4:19, 4:40, 5:12, 5:26, 6:02, 6:25, 6:53. The models and textures are absolutely NOT the same. Also, this version isn't JUST a tech demo; there's a whole playable campaign included too, and apart from a few small segments, it's completely different from the final version. In that one year, the entire story and flow of the game were completely reworked, maps were overhauled, many enemies were added, some were removed, assets were replaced... it is very much accurate to say that they started over from the beginning.
Considering this was in 1997, the same year blocky games like Goldeneye and Tomb Raider were being released, the high poly robot thing is really advanced for its time.
I can imagine how people were confused to see all these creatures and all of that tech stuff...little did they know that at one point Half-Life would become the best game of all time!
That's really interesting, since many of those elements appear in the final game, although it seems that almost everything has been modified. The vortigaunt looks more like the one from Half-Life 2!
holy shit, that high-poly model is impressive... edit: i was about to be really fuckin surprised at how clean everything was until the ladder animation in which the climbing breaks all your fuckin bones.
Fried as shit, but that animation of barney and walter simmons made me wonder if animations are real and those two are forever being stuck in a scripted event and Walter is always getting his guts ate for all eternity,
