Half-Life is Great... Don't Play it 

It's not necessary in creating a mod, but for a full game it will have to.

Black Mesa has a license to Source proper, so they use the Havok logo as required by the original agreement from Havok/Intel now Microsoft at the time.

Currently if you wanna sell a Source mod as it's own game, you yave to get the Havok license from Microsoft. Valve is in the process of trying to get Microsoft to allow it for free.

i was about to comment this, thank you

one thing I always wondered is where is the havok api implemented like what dll is it stored within? Because it sure isnt embeded in the client/server dlls that source mods use. I remember it being somewhere possibly in a subdirectly of the game/steam installation whose path was possibly extracted from the steam client install location in the early days before all the steampipe updates. I think I also remember trying to replace it with another physics engine but the way valve chose to initalize its engine dll makes this extremely tough even if you embed the code into the server/client code.

I did.

@@revolutionstudios5052 that's sad

Well there are 7 downvotes as of right now....

@@HadesforSanatan There are zero

@@slickcalf985 Alexa, play Half-Life OST 23. Military Precision.

It still isnt the same, HL1 still has its own type of gameplay that BM changes so even with the same controls it still doesnt hit the same.

@@zebitus5731 Well, it allowed me to dodge most enemie attacks and shoot at the same time, aswel as never needing to bother using the stupid sprint button ever again and allow the slide bunnyhop to be more concistent. So all things considered, I think the gameplay is quite similar enought.

@@lynxovski I have played HL way too much so im gonna go on but in Black Mesa having the original movement doesnt help due to the almost full rework of each enemy, even with similar movement it isnt on par with what HL did and makes NPC's not work well with that old movement style, hope that makes sense.

@@zebitus5731 Them not being able to attack and move at the same time? Because if thats the thing, Im glad they can do it now. I always ended up cheesing them out of that quirk, so Im glad for the challenge.

@@lynxovski Being able to attack and move isnt the issue, they (mainly marines) react entirely differently most of the time and the first few arenas goes against how you could handle it in the original, instead you have to hide behind cover far away so they cant throw grenades at you and the combat doesnt let you be as free.

looking at the floating scientist bug seems like it was a precision mistake. Something like changing from x86 to x64 or single to double floating point

True, when half life source was first released it was a lot more polished and there were hardly any bugs, however the source engine just kept getting updated with the time, and half life source didn't, which created more and more bugs that valve simply didn't bother to fix because people simply weren't caring about that game anymore, and all of that resulted in this giant mess called "Half Life Source" we have today

@@NoahGooder pretty much every source game from that era has been 32 bit, I don’t see how that can be a floating point precision error, and it’s also known that it started happening with the steampipe update

Yeah the day 1 version is actually somewhat good

@@DeepfriedChips well it was purely a guess based on how it how it seems like the math changed

decided to get it ive died to elevators soo many times im going insane

@@matthewmawson3009 skill issue

@@rainyxdays497 :(

You absolutely should

i just replayed black mesa /w new xen. i honestly think half life is the better game. black mesa looks awesome, but did a few gameplay changes hat contradict each other + new xen just sucks. dont get me wrong. old xen sucked equally, but it took only a fraction of the time.

It feels terrible when I see a 12 year old with a nasa pc and here I am with something that struggles to play Mario 64

@@Duckbusinessman my computer crashes

Black Mesa isn’t well optimized. Where Valve takes great care in culling out geometry that the player can’t see, Black Mesa has MOST of the level being rendered the entire time, even where you can’t see. It’s a shame.

And here I'm like 4K120 maxed out on a 3 year old PC, lol.

@@killcount6534 I mean, it's running the best it can given the team structure and budget. Xen is brutally heavy vs the Earth parts tho, hardware wise.

@The Stealthy Nut Thanks for correcting me, even it wasn’t the intent. Changed extended to uncut, I knew the name wasn’t right just couldn’t remember the correct title.

I Iiked the hazard course remake

What about the hazardous course mod

@The Stealthy Nut I love on a rail, it's incredibly underrated and honestly among my fav Half Life chapters

There's even an achievement for not killing any vortigaunts in interloper, you just gotta kill the controllers and the vortigaunts stop attacking you

Wait did you attack all of them?!

@@cyberman7348 Interloper was always bad.

@@TylertheCC1010fan not even BM could fix it.

@@whoisanarnb I honestly think Interloper should've been rebuilt from the ground up, I like what they did with the Garguanta chase and the vort village, the platforming at the start can go away, at least 3/4 of the controllers can be removed, the factory section needs to be drastically trimmed down, the plug puzzles really overstay their welcome and really should be placed with over puzzle concepts like perhaps barnacle climbing and tossing snarks into super small spaces to blow up parts of machinery inside walls and having puzzles requiring the hivehand's ability to shoot around corners, and the major change, a bossfight with the Kingpin in the area with the final elevator, instead of having to attack the generators, you have to trick the Kingpin into deflecting rockets into them, as well being limited to the tau cannon and gluon gun due to conventional weapons not being able to get past it's psionic defenses, and instead of the elevator stopping and falling halfway up for no reason it is instead forced back down by the Kingpin's psychic abilities, the first phase of the fight is just defending against it while getting a few hits in with the tau cannon due to it's ability to shoot through walls, which the Kingpin's force fields would act as, and the second phase being it forcing the elevator back down which brings drown energy crystals from the ceiling allowing you to recharge your energy weapons to actually fight it, once it's dead the elevator starts again, and for pacing bringing back the short platforming to the portal to Nihilanth's chamber with no combat from the Kingpin's death to the start of the Nihilanth fight.

@@whoisanarnb the point is that it is actually kinda good, but lasts way too long

Coincidentally I watched a video the other day where this was described as an issue with Binary Space Partitioning, a concept in games which dates back to Doom when John Carmack read about it in a white paper.

well yeah, havok isnt owned by valve, if it was im sure they would allow people to use it freely since they are quite nice with such

Actually if you can rip the Havok engine out, and make your mod entirely with the old Quake physics that are still in the code (Half-Life 1 physics), you don't pay for it. Also someone recently ported a sick open source Havok killer physics engine for the Source engine, so hey.

As of now, you no longer need to buy a Havok license either for third-party source mods. Valve will cover the 25,000$ fee, and will still allow you to put it on steam within reason.

@@BSPNode oh shit

@@BSPNode wait what?

@Coração Acidental Yeah, i dislike that people just see it as a replacement even though it's basically a different game with the same story beats. I never got the argument that HL1 would be too old and clunky for first impressions, I first played it in 2020 and it felt completely natural because like every other game since was built on top of it.

@@daph__ some people are just turned off by old graphics. simple as that. Original Half-Life is probably my favorite first person shooter. i played back in 2000 and loved it. But lots of young people won't play a game with 1990 graphics. Hoplefully BL will get young people to get invested in the Half-Life series and incentivize Valve to make HL3.

Seriously. Unforeseen Consequences is so much more intense in BM than it is in the original game. The lasers blowing the machinery up scared the crap out of me. The contrast between Gordon suiting up and making his way through Anomalous Materials to the test chamber, to seeing the immediate aftermath of the resonance cascade is incredible, they absolutely nailed it.

I'll still never forget the whole feeling that this game even gives. It really does hit your soul😮

I respectfully agree with that. Though I didn't say it's a replacement, I said at the end "you should still play the OG. I was more pointing out the compelling changes in Black Mesa I liked. But still yes.

@@LamWarp ​ your video is titled "Half-Life is Great... Don't play it"

@@42kitter 1:19

@@LamWarp that doesn't excuse the title, c'mon man

Now you gotta play Portal 1 and 2, their story lore is connected 👀

@@t77snapshot Already played those many years ago, love them too! Replaying them again recently was what got me to try getting into Half-Life.

You played Black Mesa but not Half-Life 1?

@@wio1 there isn't any problem with that tbh. i can totaly see how half-life 1 got absolutely no appeal to people that just never played half-life. so black mesa is just a perfect entry point into the series for anyone who, for what ever reason, never played the original Half-Life. it's like saying "you played the steam version half-life 1 (NOT Source) but not the WON version?". don't gate-keep because someone didn't start the series with the OG version. that just hurts the fanbase.

@@Buttersaemmel No, it's not like saying "you played the Steam version of Half-Life but not the WON version?" at all. Those two games have very small differences. Black Mesa and Half-Life's differences are pretty obvious, and I'm not saying Black Mesa's differences are better.

There are two mods being made that aim to recreate Opposing Force and Blue Shift, 'Operation: Black Mesa' and 'Black Mesa: Blue Shift'

Tripmine Studios seem to have a greater grasp on HL1's visual direction than Crowbar Collective ever did.

i liked hl1 soundtrack, BUT... - questionable ethics 1 - we've got hostiles

Kelly's ost just hits the spot, black mesa tries to be cinematic with the music and sort of fails imo

action sequences sound tracks are great with BM but HL sound track has more "wonder" i remember getting outside midway through the campaign and seeing the tentacle monster while the alien sounding music kicked in. 100% half-life.

*which LamWarp made a video on*

Whos LamWarp

​​@@najaklar6737 ⚫ ⚫ __

Broken?

@@madmonty4761 I guess that’s just a wrong autocomplete, I suppose it was meant to be born, not broken

@@ej22_gc86 i thought your comment was about how half life saved your life

bind pressing play to one somehow to have it start with one

hi noclick

i agree

Indeed

thing and i dont know why

HL1 gameplay is, for lack of a better word, "crunchy." I just don't get quite the same level of satisfaction in a BM shootout.

@@Crazy_Diamond_75 That makes sense, imo HL1 gameplay is good but there are few good shootouts

But not HL1?

@@wio1 yeah me too

These are absolutely my favorite PC games of all time

''black mess'' I know that was an unintentional typo but it's funny to read contextually

Funny how you say you hated fighting the marines in black mesa while thats easily my favorite parts of the game I definetly get how one can dislike them though especially when compared to the original

@@sergeantheavyass3471 did you play the original? The marines were better there not that black mesa one was bad

@@sergeantheavyass3471 fighting in black mesa is more serious than the original , as lamwarp said we used to b-hop and shoot all of them and having a god feeling

@@IAm-zo1bo oh i played the original many times I just prefer them in black mesa Forces me to actually use cover and use any change i get to return fire You gotta really be smart about whqt you fo or youll be turned into swiss cheese by them Hl HECU and bm HECU just require very different playstyles and some people are gonna prefer one over the other

Ive found that it helps to play it a lot more like half life 2. Not a lot of people know this, but there's a suppression mechanic in these games. If you put rounds into an enemy, it hampers their ability to shoot back or act. So when you're fighting military, run around the map behind cover and only try to keep one enemy in your line of sight, put rounds into that enemy as you move through the map, and weaponswap when necessary

graphics should be the last thing that matter when it comes to a video game but that doesn't mean you should intentionally make one look bad plus, half life probably looked like real life when it released

i cant get it :(

@@slickcalf985 I can assure you it didn't look like real life, it definitely looked good but real life was not blocky

And yet those same kids are fine with playing roblox and minecraft

@Coração Acidental What do you mean by such people not "deserving" to get recommended black mesa. If they dislike Half-Life 1 for its graphics, that doesn't imply that they won't end up liking Black Mesa for its gameplay. Do you believe there is something wrong in disliking a game because of its visuals?

This ^ Is the correct answer

Yep but the xen part was epitome of bad game design, other than that really good.

@@urveeshdadhich9003 Bad game design + severe lore mismatch, since vortigaunta didn't have a language prior to HL2 since they're a hive mind and only invented one to fit in with the humans. Their silly little villages made me laugh, the writer clearly never played a half-life game.

@@lemonov3031 true lol

@@urveeshdadhich9003 agree, i easily get lost in Xen, i mean in the Black Mesa Xen, the original Xen is short