Off Camera Secrets | Half-Life 2 - Boundary Break 

9:12 Gordon finally found a way to store his precious crowbar.

"gotta love valve's commitment to the half-life franchise" *hello darkness my old friend* if thats you taking a shot at valve then high-five lol

Can't wait for Boundary Break on Half Life Alyx.

7:45 "The floortiles are very unique to themselves" *shows floor with default placeholder texture*

9:13 "Look how Gordon's character model disappears when entering the hovercraft while I completely forget to mention that he has a crowbar stuck in his butt."

Can confirm the "unique" floor tiles at 7:49 are actually a standard grid-based development texture used by Valve. Walls tend to use an orange one and floors this grey one. There are varieties both with and without measurements written on them, you found the latter type in wall-form later in the video of course for that secret Dr. Kleiner room. Also a small missed opportunity for insight at 4:19! You can see in action there the weirdness of how Valve's skybox "projections" are programmed to ALWAYS display "behind" the playable space, without fail. Normally if you try to fly out into the skybox scenery, it'll disappear once you exit the playable space, but in the rare case that the skybox scenery intersects with the playable space, if you view it from an angle where, realistically, said skybox scenery would be in front of the playable scenery, the playable scenery will still be "on top". Obviously this is made sure to never happen during normal play where you're never allowed to go anywhere near the projected scenery. So, to contextualise that confusion with the example: at 4:19 in particular, you see that the playable street area is "on top", even though from the camera's perspective, the low-detail, "distant" house is right next to the camera and, in the real world, would block our view of the playable street. This is because the distant scenery can never overlap the playable scenery due to the nature of it's programming. The projected background scenery is ALWAYS the background, no matter what.

THIRD PERSON Gordon Freeman is HL1 Gordon but untextured.

10:07 The guy's actual name is "David Blaine" He is a famous street magician and valve confirmed it. You can see him breifly levitate This is his most famous trick.

"Gotta give credit to Valve for showing a ton of commitment to the Half-Life franchise here." Too bad it's not like that anymore!

"Valve are hardly ones to ever waste something." Besides the Half-Life IP

The interesting part is, at 11:18 Alyx isn't projected on to the screen, Her voice is broadcasted, but there are two animated textures on the screen, one for her idle, and one for when she's talking.

Hey Shesez, did you know; During your last goodbye with father Grigori, the man in ravenholm, he steps into a small building and shoots a flammable barrel, causing the whole set to go on fire. I thought that was gonna be in the episode, but let me say what happens. He walks through the fire, and never actually disappears when entering the building. Nor does he stop shooting the zombies following him in. It is a cool thing to his character.

Fun fact: the low-poly peach moment character is referred to as 'Cheaple' in the game files, for cheap people.

"It's not quite horror" **shows the goriest and the scariest part in Half Life 2**

11:12 When you state that G-Man dissapears when going off-screen in that area, You are incorrect; You touched the Void when the G-Man went behind the Train Car which under normal circumstances in any game made in Valve's Game Engines will render any NPC or Animated Models within the map to dissapear until you leave the Void and return to the game map. I took a gander at this exact spot after seeing you do that; The G-Man doesn't dissapear in that area; After he reaches the other end of the Train Car he will stop moving and stay there indefinetely.

11:15 gman disappeared because entities are hidden when you're inside a wall

7:40 "The tiles are unique" It's dev textures.

Can you do HL3 next?

Shesez: welcome to episode 69 Viewers: you have entered the comedy area

8:31 That Combine Soldier probably was used to throw the Manhacks

"This is where I get off." If you change 'where' to 'how,' you get an explanation of G-Man's motivation in the game.

11:16 Dude, no. You went out of the map, and doing that makes NPCs disappear. He does vanish later, but just not at that spot.

11:15 he didn't disappear, you took the camera outside of the map which hides any entities. edit: 2 years later i decide to rewatch this video. 13:16, the 128x128 does not refer to pixels, as pixels don't really exist in 3d games because of perspective. this is actually referring to hammer units! 16 hammer units make up a real life foot

You can't be lazy when making a video on HL2 - too many people go balls deep into the Source engine and into this game in particular and as you already know - they'll call you on it.

4:21 this is how skyboxes work in most games I've seen. Even in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets PC, the skybox works that way, you can even put objects in it and see them projected onto the sky in real time.

"Wake up, Mr.Freemann..." 5 more minutes... please i got 4 hours of sleep.

The "placeholder" textures are Dev textures they don't represent the height of "Pixels" but the heights of Units in the game 128 is the common height for 1 floor. including ceiling and floor. there are many other dev textures like this that can be found, you shown one that is a Grid in grey. the same exist in Orange as well. Also, If I remember right, part of the lights bounce textures and change the reflection on characters and the environment so it may explain why some of the boxes are textured and the odd choice of textures a Black box may have made the lighting darker, while a brick wall could have helped out I know it does it in the later build of the engine, notably CS Go, Portal 2, etc.. but I don't know if that was implemented in the early builds aka HL2

the placeholder texture is not measured in pixels, I believe the 128x128 represents the Hammer Units, the most common unit of measurement in Valve Games.

69. Nice.

"placeholder textures" (unit measures) have to be loaded to ram, so its better to use a texture already used in the map

at 11:06 the gman only dissapeared because you noclipped into the wall

9:14 Hey concrete Gordon, you've got a little something up your ... up your .... Just don't sit down, ok?

5:08 Wait.... can't you jump over that trigger?

Ah yes the good old noclip

Fun Fact: It's possible to see Lamarr disappear into that vent in normal gameplay. You can do some surprisingly simple jumps to get up there.

I believe they texture the inside of the projected boxes because the previz lighting pass runs over them, thus giving the projected characters the environmentally correct shading. For the doctor, it's not necessary since you only hear his voice, so he can be inside of an unlit measure texture box.

i like how he has the crowbar sticking out of his ass at 9:12

It's still insane they made a game this elaborate in 2004!!!

2:07 that one texture is what gman stands on

8:37 ain't he the one supposed to launch that Man hunter ?

That armoured guard at 8:30 was taking a break. x'D He probably thought to himself "No one'll ever find me all the way up here." Wonder if his boss will have already seen this episode by the time Half-Life 3 comes out.

"The developers @ Valve are HARDLY ones to waste something..." ....oh, you mean like the Half-Life franchise itself? SICK BURN VALVE.

just found this channel recently and its really amazing and creative content -> love it! Keep up the good work my dude

“G-man introduces you to Episodes 1 and 2, as well as... never mind”. HE KNEW

Those with a keen eye may notice that the model for Gordon is just his Half Life 1 model in his default pose.

I enjoy using noclip to explore outside the map. Half-Life 2 is filled with out of bounds stuff, go to settings - advanced - enable developer console - press ` ingame - type "noclip" and you can explore out of bounds.

Those "leeches" look like the little worms from the first Half Life that bite you when you go into the water. When you drain the water in the room the worms are helpless and you can just step on them

1:42 "Gotta give credit to Valve for showing a ton of commitment to the Half Life franchise here" Yeah, those were the good ol' days.

My first thoughts were "if he doesn't open this video with wake up Mr Freeman, I swear to god!"

11:11 While you are correct the gman is simply deleted from the environment when no longer needed, this particular instance was not what happened. You noclipped inside of a solid brush, causing the 2d skybox backdrop texture to go black, and all entities (including npcs) to immediately unrender even if they were still there, as the game becomes completely confused on what should or should not be rendered based on player location. When the player leaves the boundaries of the map, various fundamental elements of the map are unrendered, such as all entities, and the skybox texture no long understands how to be displayed. 13:15 Incorrect. The numbers are not measuring the pixels, they are actually a reference for height in-game via hammer units. Maps in the source engine are built in the program Hammer.exe. In Hammer, you have a grid which can be expanded or contracted based on how much you zoom in-out in its display which allows for very fine-tuning of geometry or placement of entities in the environment on 3 separate displays (one for each of the 3 axes) of a 2d representation of the map. This grid is made up of what is known as hammer units, and each unit represents one inch in real-world measurement seen in-game. 128x128 for a 2d texture means 128 inches by 128 inches (or hammer units) makes up a single square on that texture (assuming that texture has not been resized when applied to its surface, which would render the reference useless) While map devs likely didn't actually need the inch measurements, all place-holder textures double as hammer-unit measurement references. There's even a texture with an outline of a player body to make size-reference easier and faster during map construction.

I loved playing in Gmod and placing things around in the skybox when I was a kid. It was really fun to see a scene you made so huge above you.

I know this is late, but as an FYI, the textures determine how much light (and what color) bounces off of them back up into the scene. This could be why they didn't use the placeholder/dev textures in scenes where the actors had a camera pointed at them. They were using the textures to tweak the lighting on the character's face.

11:14 you noclip through an area there where usually all npcs/ props will disappear from your vision u can see that also the sky turns black. u went further in the wall behind of you

Something interesting you didn't mention is that Gordon's "concrete" playermodel is actually his Half Life 1 playermodel, albeit proper textures.

12:29 Wait! You can k... *immediatly launches HL2*

6:56 H E R N A M E I S L A M A R R

7:42 "The floor tiles are unique" Those are developer textures

The floor tiles at 7:49 are default source dev textures, used when blocking out a level

9:12 - is the weapon in his... bottom ? :O

4:25 the skybox is the same with unreal tournament 3, they also had skybox rooms in distant places that are projected

The "floor tiles" at 7:46 are dev textures.

I have seen 2 flaws on this video atm. 1. At 11:13 the G-Man disappears because you went out of the maps bounder. (It still would have disappeared but the timing was off because of that.) 2. At 13:11 you say that the 128 is represented by pixels. That is wrong. The numbers represent hammer units which is a height measurement used to make these maps in hammer. (Also the texture is called a Dev Texture :P .) Also some of the random hallways like in 13:28 are just valves laziness. Otherwise good job!

0:15 Nice.

I think for a lot of people Valve games are where they were first introduced to the idea of breaking out of the boundaries of the map. It was just made so easy and there was such a draw to do it too, due to how much stuff people wanted to see more of but couldn't normally.

if you'd like to be more precise with noclip, just use the sv_noclipspeed command and set it to lower than default

After over a year of watching boundary break I only just saw the animation with the top contributor at the very end

0:41 the barrels rhymed with the music, thats some perfect timing

Dude, seriously great episode. I love all the detail they added to the game

9:17 that's not how a crowbar works

11:15 Just so you know, he didn't really "disappear" that time, it's just noclipping through walls SOMETIMES causes models to disappear.

1:54 I think I can confirm that this is where the G-Man and the particle effects are stored. I used commands to spawn some headcrabs and some zombies next to G-Man, flew to the room using noclip and everything I spawned was there.

2:14 "Developers at Valve are hardly ones to ever waste something" haha "At least in this particular game" HAHA

I just realised that you sound A LOT like "Oliver Age 24"....and that is something good! Love your videos!

I could be remembering wrong but I'm pretty sure the 128 on the placeholder wall texture isn't to do with pixels, it's a measurement of distance units that the source engine uses.

And who would've thought that about two and a half years later, one of this franchise's most important voice actors would make a guest appearance in a video.

This video is over a year old, but I still feel inclined to say, I think the reason they have actual textures in the boxes that hold NPC's for broadcast, is so they are properly lighted by the bounce lighting. My idea is further reinforced by the fact that when they only needed Kleiner's voice, they put him in a box with dev textures.

Episode 69.

It would be more awesome If you showed that lake monster scene...

1:12 - BTW, this train cart isn't the one you appear in when game gives you control, it also floats outside of the map like test chamber and prison.

15:05 Wait, that logo! The 2 on the end is actually a 3! Half Life 3 confirmed!

"Gotta give valve credit for showing a ton of commitment to the half life series" and then they don't make the third one

The floor tiles in the unused room are actually dev textures, just like the orange dev textures used for Kleiner. You should mess around in SDK Hammer if you ever do another source game, you can find out a lot.

F-16: you no longer have a wing A-10: you no longer have a tank Mantis: you no longer fucking exist

As a developer none of these boundary breaks really surprise me, I know all the tricks, but sometimes I do see one little thing that even I didn't know. I like watching these just on the off-chance I see one of those things.

13:15 I think the 128x128 actually means hammer units if I'm correct

I boundary broke this game myself too

Very good use of no clip there mate. Love this video. 💜

11:18 Thats actually just a animated texture for that specific part (other parts involving monitors almost always involve cameras, though) 12:19 if be elongated you mean the section with the combine walls and monitors, thats because this area pulls double duty; that section is used for the camera showing the elites running down a hallway

"This is where I get off..." BOOM kickass music!

Just found you. Glad I did, I like your work.

Excellent work. Thank you for showing this.

Your content is 11/10. Please don't stop.

"What valve did for their skybox is highly unusual:" *explains how all skyboxes work*

try alien isolation

At 11:18 the GMan disappears a little bit after when you show. You actually fly into the wall which makes the background and models disappear. Just had to point that out, great video though! What a cool concept looking though the game like this! Keep it up man

You might think GMAN is teleporting away to save on resources but actually he is using his powers because hes a man of mystery

2:56 lol did he just stand up and thrust his "crotch" into the camera?? hahaha

Funny thing, i kinda explore the hl2 maps when I'm playing gmod

The tile texture used in rooms not acessable to the player can be explained easily. If I remember correctly it was the default texture in Worldcraft at the time.

10:14 another fun fact about the low poly cheaple is his facial features what little of them was based on the magician David Blaine