Half-Life
What is it?
Black Mesa research facility, an ultra-secret laboratory under government contract, conducting top-secret and extremely volatile experiments with stuff you're not supposed to know about. You are Gordon Freeman, a Black Mesa employee. And this morning, as usual, you pit your way to the research facility for a run-of-the-mill experiment.Only this morning's experiment is not quite as ordinary as you thought. Odd things begin to happen as you make your way to one of the Black Mesa test chambers. Even weirder things happen when you start to move the Test Sample towards the antimass-spectrometer.
And you ain't seen nothing yet.
Yes indeed, the experiment went wrong. And more importantly, someone wants to keep this hush-hush operation a secret. And you know what that means, you'll have to fight your way through to the top of the Black Mesa complex. Bizarre, alien lifeforms will make your life harder. Trained marine squad will make it even harder. And when you face your ultimate challenge, you'll see just how much being a government employee really does suck.
Released shortly before the end of the year 5 A.D. (after DOOM), this game set a clear sign that the DOOM era was coming to an end. RPG elements had stolen into the FPS genre before, now storyline and interaction with NPCs form a vital element of gameplay, and the world becomes more relaistic. As one reviewer on MobyGames writes:
Gone are power-ups that spin around in mid-air. If you find weapons there is a reason why that weapon is there, as in being in a weapon lock up or near the body of a fallen soldier.
While not exactly post-apocalyptic, Half-Life has appealed to the same crowd and shares some of the ideology of this genre, be it the evil government or the experiment gone wrong instead of the FPS-typical alien invasion from the outside. For years fans were working on a mod set in the Fallout universe, the Wasteland Half-Life Mod. I'm not sure what became of it, the website is gone.
Valve extended their scripting to more than just enemy ambushes; instead of pouring new monsters into the game world, their scripts more often reshaped the world itself. As in Doom, Gordon Freeman would often provoke a monster to leap from the shadows at him by walking over specific points. But just as often, a platform would collapse, friendly characters would open fire on foes in the distance, a massive tentacle would reach from the depths to devour a hapless scientist, a jet would fly overhead and pound the area with bombs, an elevator would activate. The overall effect was to give the game world a sense of uncanny reality and interactivity and to make the player feel like a part of a much bigger story.
With its compelling, tension-filled and constantly-unfolding story, it fulfills the single-player story-based action game promise of System Shock and expands it, bringing the technology up-to-date, adding multiplayer and generally being the most consistent, sophisticated, and polished first-person action game currently on the market. While powered by the same 3D technology that brought you the Quake games, Half-Life features bright, vivid colors and large, complex environments that'll make you forget the browner shade of brown and cramped areas of id's games.
Half-Life is often listed as being based on the Quake II engine. This is simply not true. It iis based on the engine of the original Quake, albeit a heavily modified one. Chris Bokitch explained it back in 2002 in a post on VERC:
What came first, the chicken or the egg? What is Half-Life built on, Quake 1 or Quake 2? These questions pop up pretty frequently, and neither seems to have an accepted answer. In an effort to extinguish the argument, I've asked the people who know best. About Half-Life, that is. We're not touching the question about the chicken.
Ken Birdwell explains it like this:
"It is fundamentally just a heavily modified Quake 1 engine. There are about 50 lines of code from the Quake 2 engine, mostly bugs fixes to hard problems that Carmack found and fixed before we ran into them."
At its core, it's a Quake 1 engine. You can tell this by comparing Half-life's map compiling tools with those shipped with Quake1. You'll find very minor differences—none of them are fundamental. The core rendering is architecturally identical to Quake1, the only "significant" change is removing the fixed palette, making map lighting RGB instead of 8 bit, and converting software rendering to be 16 bit color instead of 8 bit color, which was pretty easy and only required minor code changes. Our skeletal animation system is new, though it was heavily influenced by the existing model rendering code, as were a lot of our updated particle effects, though less so with our beam system. Decals are totally new, our audio system has some major additions to what already existed, and at ship time our networking was almost totally Quake1 / QuakeWorld networking but about a year later Yahn rewrote most of all of it to be very different in design. The most highly changed sections are the game logic; ours being written in C++ and Quake's being in written interpreted "Quake C". Our AI system is very very different from anything in Quake, and there's a lot of other significant architectural changes in the whole server and client implementations, though if you look hard enough you can find a few remnants of some nearly unmodified Quake1 era entities buried in places.
Jay Stelly adds, "We also took PAS from QW and/or Q2 and a couple of other minor routines I can remember (no more than 100-200 lines of code there). There was some feature overlap (as Ken mentions) like game code DLLs and colored lighting, but we developed our own solutions to those independent of Q2."
So there it is. This should put some arguments to rest. Half-Life is based on Quake 1, although it has a very small amount of Quake 2 code. Yahn notes that "we did use some of the winsock functions from Q2, that's about it. Probably more than 50 lines, but nothing too interesting."
As mentioned before, the engine was heavily modified, adding skeletal animation and Direct3D support. In the end, about 70% of the engine code was Valve's own.
