Current mood:	frustrated
Current music:	Wave In Head - With You
Entry tags:	geek

Half-Life withdrawal symptoms
In my typical fashion of being late to the party for this sort of thing, I first encountered Half-Life in about 2001/2002, by finding the Half-Life: Platinum Pack (or something very similar; it came with the t-shirt in this userpic) in a game shop bargain bin. This looks worth a try, I thought. Impressed would be one word for my reaction on playing it. Addicted would be another; after finishing everything in the box I was somewhat left hanging. More recently, I've had much the same experience with The Orange Box: having grudgingly ignored Half-Life 2 when it came out (for want of sufficiently powerful hardware) and subsequently mostly ignored Windows games more generally by eschewing a native Windows install when building apollo (my current machine), I didn't notice when Wine became able to run Source/Steam. Hearing people raving ecstatically about Portal and the rest of the orange bargain, I discovered that by then it was able and gleefully set out to acquire a copy. (Another pleasant surprise was that just entering the CD key for my previous purchase into Steam gave me the Steam equivalents plus Blue Shift and Day of Defeat, saving me trying to get the original CD to play nicely with Wine.)

So here I am again, having charged headlong through HL2 and the rest of its runty children so far and, effectively, run smack into an Under Construction sign. Half-Life 2, Episode 3, Millwall 1 isn't expected to be released for some time. Woe. However, help is at hand: my aforementioned lateness means there's been time for a good few third-party mods to appear as well. HL1 mods abound; I can particularly recommend Poke646 and its sequel, Vendetta (amusingly, the protagonist of these has, modulo spelling, the same name as my employer's former CTO). I can also recommend Someplace Else, but, most of all, its HL2 sequel, MINERVA: Metastasis. Just… wow. The author, being a one-man band, seemingly hasn't the time/resources to put in voice acting or friendly NPCs like Alyx, but the level design is every bit as good as Valve's (better, in places) and if they haven't offered him a job yet, they're missing out.

Another current source of HL-related fun for me is level editing. As of my last (fairly recent) check, I can't get recent versions of Valve Hammer Editor to run in Wine (Hammer draws its views of the map using strange DirectX hackery that shows up in Wine as a mostly-black window). Happily, there is QuArK, which, as well as being more Wine-friendly, has some improvements over Hammer (e.g. negative polys, duplicators (think staircases), other pseudo-preprocessor-macros, groups). Unfortunately it lacks model/lighting previews, but it's under active development. What am I doing with all this? Well, as an initial learning project, Normality (home) and the surrounding area. I tried this using Hammer (which may still have been called WorldCraft) some years ago with my parents' house, but ran out of patience and, in places, hit limits of the HL1 engine (e.g. number of switchable lights). Unfortunately I don't have the file to compare progress, but with the better editor and more powerful game engine / machine, it's much more fun this time around. As a template for the surrounding area, I've placed the whole thing on some Google Maps aerial photos. For that reason and others, I don't intend to release this map, but it'll be an entertaining way to try out what-ifs of furniture/redecoration/extension. HL2 players out there, who among you hasn't ever wanted to rearrange your house with a Gravity Gun, or race the HL2 vehicles on the nearby roads? :-)