[archived]

How to improve the City Scanners in Half-Life 2

A large, lightly armored drone, with a top mounted searchlight shining towards the viewer. Its faceplates and central red light makes it resemble a mechanical eye.
  • Spawn more of them.
  • Have them not just fly towards the player, but also circle around from a distance.
  • In addition to their behavior of using their camera flash to blind the player at point-blank, make their flash trigger any time in random intervals.
  • Each time they flash, save a photo from their perspective in the game's screenshot folder.
#half-life 2#modding#video game photography
[archived]

one thing most players don't know about the scanners in half-life 2 is

You can let a scanner serve as a "strider scanner" which occasionally happens not very noticeably in HL2. What this does is, if a strider doesn't know where you are and is patrolling, and the scanner scans you, suddenly the strider gives a big scary "whoop" and comes running over because the scanner told it where you are.

In final HL2 striders are mostly super scripted, to the point where you wouldn't think they even had AI (and they need a pretty specific node setup to walk around so they'll just stand there if you spawn one, too) so this barely gets to happen. I did once make a map where you had to stealth around amoung the rubble avoiding scanners because the strider would come a-runnin but didn't release it or anything and it's long gone now. Some of the coolest gameplay not quite delivered by HL2 tho imo.