@blazehedgehog asked:
You touched Valve’s 25th Anniversary update for Half-Life yet? Does it meet your standards?
My standards for Half-Life 1 Anniversary Updates are “absolutely nothing for 24 years” so yeah I’m blown away!
They’ve been making the occasional obscure fix for years – a lot was broken, but a surprising amount was added or still functional too – they added AA, high refresh rate support, fixes to texture filtering, all in the last few years. But this update fixed way more stuff and I’m really happy with it, especially the fixes to brightness/contrast defaults so it’s no longer washed out for everyone playing it for the first time. The most amazing thing is it includes actual new maps, official ones, from Valve level designers. There have been Valve level designers fucking around in Worldcraft this year, making really cool shit. What a gift.
I’m especially happy that HL1 now includes Uplink, the standalone HL1 demo that Valve made after HL1 was complete; the only chunk of Half-Life content made by a Valve who now 100% knew how to make Half-Life. Someone who was there at the time once told me that after HL1’s success, a lot of them just wanted to roll straight on and put out a sequel on the same tech; but an instruction came down from somewhere that they had to have amazing new tech or something, which wound up taking years. I feel like an HL2 that came out a year or two later from such an energised Valve could have really been something.
Every now and then I think about what I would want to do if I worked at Valve (and also I consider applying sometimes), and always I’ve thought I would want to try to make an update like this happen – everything they did was on my list, it was like it was targeted specifically at me. In my imagining, I wanted a menu revamp on the level of what they recently did with HL2 on the Steam Deck, modernising it totally while being extremely faithful to the original menu. We didn’t get that, but we got part of the way there! It’ll do fine, and I’m happy that there turned out to be enough folks like me still over there that this all happened.
HOWEVER, I am unreasonably annoyed that the Hazard Course is still called “Training Room” in the menu. The reason for this is absurd: it was always Hazard Course until Valve brought HL1 to Steam many years ago. HL1’s Sierra-era menu was a weird multimedia app thing with a UI made out of avis and bmps, so they ported Half-Life 2’s menu system to HL1. Half-Life 2 was years from release, and at this point, it had a Training Room. HL1’s Hazard Course accidentally got renamed Training Room. It stuck for what, 15 years? Now for the anniversary update, they decided to keep “Training Room” because that’s more clearly the name of a tutorial, and HL1 doesn’t teach itself very well and you can get stuck if you don’t play the Hazard Course. I think this is bad and they should have just done what HL1 did: put explanatory “Learn to play Half-Life” text next to “Hazard Course”. This is what I will die screaming.
But yeah, I love it. I’m really pleased that it happened. It was a lovely thing to do, and could only have been done by lovely people.
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
There is one minor thing, testing it out now for myself, that I don’t like: Fast weapon switching appears to be gone? Turning it on let you scroll wheel through all your guns like it was Quake, now they make you pick them from the menu. I tried hud_fastswitch 1 but that doesn’t seem to be doing anything.
Ah, I’m sure that’ll get fixed. Glad I never got in the habit though – I am a number key smasher
Is it just me (or maybe a Linux thing) or did the sound mixing get worse?
Specifically, it seemed to me like talking NPCs are too silent, compared to environment sounds and guns and stuff.
(I only played Uplink, as I’ve never played that before, so maybe it’s even Uplink-specific)
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