The Half-Life Story
The majority of Half-Life's storyline was written by Marc Laidlaw, Valve Software's resident wordsmith and author of novels such as Dad's Nuke, Kalifornia, and The 37th Mandala.
Deep in the bowels of the Black Mesa Research Labs, a decommisioned missile base, a top secret project is underway. Information about the project is strictly on a "need-to-know" basis, and as a low level research associate you (Gordon Freeman) "need to know" very little. Each morning you ride the train to work from the employee dorms, you put on your environmental protection suit, you enter the test chamber, and you run stress tests on whatever odd devices have been delivered from some other nameless part of the Black Mesa compound.
But this morning is different. This morning, your test lab is suddenly the most important place on Earth-because something is going seriously wrong. Maybe it's sabotage-maybe it's an accident. Whatever the reason, reality is getting all bent out of shape. One minute you're doing your job, pressing buttons. The next thing you know, you're staring into an alien world. Something huge with too many arms is taking a bite out of your partner's face. An explosion of unearthly light....then darkness.
Disaster. Sirens wailing. People screaming. And everywhere you turn, people are dying--being eaten. Monsters are everywhere. Monsters--there's no better word for them. You head fro the surface, to get the hell away from ground zero, but the usual routes are unpassable--damaged by the disaster, infested with headcrabs and houndeyes and increasingly larger and hungrier creatures. Madness is the order of the day. You enlist the help of traumatized scientists and trigger-happy guards to get through high security zones, sneaking and fighting your way through riuned missle silos and Cold War cafeterias, through darkened air ducts and subterranean railways where you must ride a missle transport sled straight into the jaws of slavering nightmare. When you finally come in sight of the surface, you realize the aliens aren't your only enemies--for now the government forces have arrived with heavy-weapons goons, squadrons of ruthless containment troops, and stealthy assassin gals. Their orders seem to be that when it comes to Black Mesa labs, nothing must get out alive....and especially not you, the guy who made it all go bad. So much for the cavalry.
When your own species turns against you, where do you turn? You've uprooted a bunch of nasty government secrets. You've found a portal to another world, and an alien light comes shining through. Can it get any worse over there? Some things you just have to see for yourself.
Gordon Freeman
In Half-Life, you play Gordon Freeman. A native of Seattle, Washington, Gordon Freeman showed high interest and aptitude in the areas of quantum physics and relativity at an extremely young age. His earliest heroes were Einstein, Hawking and Feynman.
While a visiting student at the University of Innsbruck in the late 1990's, Gordon Freeman observed a series of seminal teleportation experiments conducted by the Institute for Experimental Physics (see Bowemeester, Pan, Mattle, Eibl, Weinfurter, Zeilinger, "Experimental Quantum Teleportation," Nature, 11 December 1997) (see also http://www.sciam.com/explorations/122297teleport). Practical applications for teleportation became his obsession. In 1999, Freeman received his doctorate from M.I.T. with a thesis paper entitled: "Observation of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Entanglement on Supraquantum Structures By Induction through Nonlinear Transuranic Crystal of Extremely Long Wavelength (ELW) Pulse from Mode-Locked Source Array."
Disappointed with the slow pace and poor funding of academic research, and with tenure a distant dream, Gordon cast about for a job in private industry. As fortune would have it, his mentor at M.I.T., Professor Alex Kleiner, had taken charge of a research project being conducted at a decommissioned missile base in Black Mesa, New Mexico. Kleiner was looking for a few bright associates, and Gordon was his first choice. Considering the source and amount of funds available to the Black Mesa Labs, Gordon suspected that he would be involved in some sort of weapons research; but in the hopes that practical civilian applications would arise (in areas of quantum computing and astrophysics), he accepted Kleiner's offer. Apart from a butane-powered tennis ball cannon he constructed at age 6, Gordon had never handled a weapon of any sort-or needed to... until now.
The Half-Life Technology
Half-Life is based on the Quake(tm) engine by ID Software, with Valve's own enhancements to the engine, such as 16-bit and 24-bit color and MMX support, as well as being developed to take full advantage of 3dfx's Voodoo2. Half-Life is based on a whole new level of proprietary technology creating a extremely rich and original gaming experience.
Rendering
So you don't want to have to buy a special hardware accelerator just to get 16-bit color, colored lighting, blurring, translucency or other cool visual effects? Then don't. Half-Life has developed all these features in software so now they're an integral part of the game play, not just eye-candy. Of course, if you do have Open-GL, Direct 3D or MMX hardware, things will look mind-bogglingly cool.
Skeletal Animation System
Hand-in-glove with a demand for realistic lighting and color effects is a desire for monsters that look and move as realistically as possible. To accomplish this goal, the engineers at Valve have created a skeletal animation system for monsters. Rather than store a discrete set of polygonal meshes for each key frame of animation, as traditional action games do, the skeletal system moves the "bones" within a monster and deforms a mesh and texture map around them. There are a number of advantages this gives Half-Life animators as they build more compelling and complex monsters: Smoother and richer animation Half-Life players will see much smoother animation than in typical action games. While both sprite- and mesh-based animation systems are based on a fixed keyframe animation rate, which is typically targeted at the lowest common denominator system, Half-Life's skeletal animation system does not limit the number of frames in an animation. For instance, a typical walk cycle may have as many as 80 frames in Half-Life, as compared to only 4 in some sprite-based games.
Monster AI
Half-Life's monsters and life-forms are also remarkably--even terrifyingly--intelligent. Valve has created a technology that imbues Half-Life monsters with tactical intelligence, multi-character cooperation, and a supreme will to live. The result is a menagerie of new creatures whose intelligence and unpredictability make them truly formidable adversaries. Traditionally, game AI is a set of hard-coded if-then decisions for every possible situation that could confront a monster, such as, "If there is a bad guy in this room then shoot at him." Valve took another tack, designing a module-based AI system that provides practically infinite flexibility and monster growth potential.
Decal System
With Dynamically changing surfaces/Decals Surfaces in Half-Life are dynamic. They can change over time or as the player interacts with them. Damp walls may grow mossy, water will ripple as the player moves through it and, through the use of "decal" technology, hard surfaces will retain the scars of a previous firefight. Decals--spot painting effects over existing textures--also make it possible for opponents to leave threatening graffiti on walls, or for blood, water and smoke to leave their marks on both surfaces and characters in the game.
Real-Time DSP
The sound in Half-Life is astounding due to DSP sound which calculates the direction of a sound and the size and material a room is made of to alter that sound accordingly to fit the area, a gunshot outside will sound different than a gunshot in a metal room or underwater. This also saves disk space since the sound is being altered over and over instead of many sounds that hardly get used. This is sure to make your ears smile.
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