hl2

[Pete]

just wanted to ask some questions about hl2 i dont expect anyone to answer them...
When is the ACTUAL release date latest i heard was august 2004 (www.half-life2news.8m.com) is it going to be released?
Does anyone think they will include most of the stuff they had in the video in the actual release it has been what a year since the leak...?
Are they going to update the graphics a bit more for the release as some of the surfaces looked just like the same ones from the original such as when the person in the video hits a zombie with a crowbar the same blood splatter comes out as in hl1, whats that about?! also some of the sounds are exactly the same as hl1
and what sort of pc do you think they were running the video on to get the performance tehy did out of it?
Pete

[directhex]

nothing absolutely concrete for the moment, and games can slip at the last minute quite easily (half-life for dreamcast was canned 1 week before launch, when players guides were already on the shelves).

basically just sit tight until you notice a "pre-order hl2 now" icon in Steam.

as for the content of the game, who knows.

[unrealrocks]

I'm sure I saw HL1 being sold for dreamcast ... anyways.

I heard November 2004 - but as DirectHex said, it'll change before then

I don't know about the texturing but I wouldn't have thought they'd be real time processing those videos, chances are they'd have a sequence mapped out then they'd have a PC render them so there wasn't any slowdown - the frame rate didn't change between any of them etc.

[directhex]

it was slated for release, players guides were out, some stores had empty pre-order promotional boxes out, but the plug was pulled slightly before the release date. beta ISOs hound their way onto the net, and judging by them it's a shame the game was canned, it was a brilliant port.

Half Life Blue Shift was originally a dreamcast-only mission included with the DC version as motivation to buy the DC rather than PC version.

[Bungle]

amazon.co.uk has the release date as November 12, 2004 and Doom 3 as December 1, 2004... I find amazon the best for release dates as they are updated reguarly

[Pete]

does anyone think seriously that hl2 will run comfortable on a 700mhz and geforce 2? thats what valave are saying i guess that will be in lowest everything tho?
valve said to run it at 30-40 frames in top everything all u would need is a geforce 4 ad 2ghz surely these two statements must be a lie?
i think hl2 is proly gonna be the best of the upcoming fps so long as the story line is as good as the hl1 one
Pete

[directhex]

ever pc game has to be made to take into consideration the pc hardware which is wild at the time - perhaps people on here have radeon 9800's, but the average joe is lucky to have a geforce 2 mx rather than sis630

if you make a game only a tiny portion of people can play, then it won't sell.

[Pete]

yeh that is a bit annoying this is also the reason for developers choosing to publish games on consoles first i guess? that is a bit of a bugger but we do definitly know that hl2 is out on pc first right? and so is doom3 which is cool indeed
halo was a victim of console first im jsut glad hl2 wont be that would be very annoying
Pete

[Devilbod]

I don't know about HL2, I holding Judgement until I play a demo.

The Physics for a start, while accturate physics are great they were introduced to reduce the feeling that the set peices arn't appart from the flow of the game (i.e. shoot the chain make the girder swing, or shoot a pillar make the box water tank fall). But while we've seen some nice shots of a cup bouncing off a table, a car blowing up and a couple of objects accuratly falling, we haven't seen anything that really interacts with the game play. Does the burning tyres knock guys flying? If you drop a barrel on some ones head will they colapse convincingly?

To me it looks like they have done a great job of showing might be predefined physics and letting every think what might be in the game. It could be the whole world won't be affected by the physics and you'll still see set up peices where bloke A has been delibrately placed under Barrel B, in which case we've seen it all before. I personaly would like to dispatching of baddies in a way that the programmers didn't intend for you to do.

Also all these physics are going to be processor heavy, nothing to do with the graphics cards. I use 3D max alot - partical systems and physics cause a lot of slow down and if you factor in AI and game Engine running as well as running your OS in the background....
Everyone will probably be able to play this game it, how much of the physics you can turn on before your machine starts to smoke is another question.

Graphics wise I'm not impressed, Final Fantasy X-2 in game character graphics and character animation are on the same par, and the world graphics look too much like a slightly higher res HL, haven't seen much of dynamic lighting, realtime shadows or shading.

[Pete]

I don't know about HL2, I holding Judgement until I play a demo.

there isnt going to be an official demo for hl2 it says on the news site i posted when i started this thread. (unless you mean the leaked thing)
the only thing they are bringing out before the game release is a mod maker pack which sounds pretty shoddy
if you are going by the e3 video for the thing you said about it having hl1 textures i dont think that it will have them when it is finally released hopefully august/november time? because the main guy at valve said they have changed the game alot since the video i dont know if this is straight from his mouth as i got it of a russian site i found on google, and russia is where the stolen version was official released playably on shop shelves so that probably isnt reliable
so hl2 is most definitly shrouded in mystery!?
Pete

[streetster]

nice use of punctuation there mr pete... as for HL2, who knows when its gonna come out, i think we'll be having doom3 scaring the crap out of us first, then we can sit back, relax and shoot some zombies, headcrabs, and other half-life baddies in the year 2008 or whenever its released

[Pete]

yeh sos bout the punctuation streetster.
im sure valve are releasing hl2 this year otherwise theyll prolly go broke or sumthing.
unless someone nics something else of theres a programmer this time maby?
Pete

[Rythmic]

TBH I doubt that HL2 will run fine on a 700MHz Celeron and a GF2. The gfx seem to be the same level as farcry - and thats targetted at directx 9.0 cards.

If anyone doubts that we can have perfectly respectable physics engines in games as devilbod describes - try downloading the painkiller demo. If you can play the last level of this, and fail to be impressed by the amout of modelled objects, I'll be surprised. We're not at the stage where the entire level can be blown up as you please, but it's getting very close!

[directhex]

We're not at the stage where the entire level can be blown up as you please, but it's getting very close!

Red Faction, Plystation 2, 2001.

[Korky]

you could blow most of the lvl up in red faction as long as it was made of rock nothing else seemed to be destroyable

[Steve]

TBH I doubt that HL2 will run fine on a 700MHz Celeron and a GF2. The gfx seem to be the same level as farcry - and thats targetted at directx 9.0 cards.

The source game engine, AFAIK, supports various DX generations. Furthermore I bet they'll include a simpler AI model for the older computers, and probably do the same for the physics. To sum up: it'll probably run on a low-end system, but you won't get the full game experience.