Half-Life celebrated its twenty fifth anniversary final Sunday, and Valve laid out a buffet of Lambda-shaped treats to mark the event. The corporate added new multiplayer maps to the sport, launched an hour-long documentary delving into its design, and stuck a couple of of its most resilient bugs. However there’s one bug that escaped Valve’s digital butterfly internet, one which, weirdly sufficient, is definitely seen within the twenty fifth anniversary documentary. Now, it has been fastened.
The bug seems within the Half-Life’s “Blast Pit” chapter, which sees Gordon Freeman making an attempt to dislodge a trio of alien tentacles from a rocket-engine testing silo. Through the chapter’s opening, there is a well-known sequence the place a tentacle smashes by the protecting glass of the silo’s management room, slams a scientist towards the again wall, then drags them screaming again by the window to a grisly demise. However as you’ll be able to clearly see within the documentary, the animations do not fairly line up, and the scientist sort-of floats by the window beneath the tentacle.
Hardly an enormous downside, however nonetheless an ugly glitch in considered one of Half-Life’s most iconic scenes, one which’s been current within the sport for 25 years. Since showing within the documentary, nevertheless, the difficulty has been resolved, as proven in this video posted on not-Twitter by consumer Vinícius Medeiros.
Understandably, there was some hypothesis as as to whether there was a causal hyperlink between the bug’s look within the documentary and its decision. Noclip’s Danny o’Dwyer, who labored with Valve to create the doc, quote-tweeted Vinícius saying “me placing the damaged model of this within the doc could also be considerably accountable. Sorry Valve engineers!”
Nevertheless! As famous by o’ Dwyer in a follow-up tweet, it seems that fixing the bug was Valve’s plan all alongside. O’ Dwyer hyperlinks to the Mastodon account of Valve programmer Ben Burbank, who offers an in depth breakdown of each how and why the bug was fastened. “We wished to repair this for the twenty fifth Anniversary Replace however different stuff took precedence pre-ship”, Burbank says. He additionally factors out that “it isn’t a systemic bug and appears largely to be remoted to this cutscene.”
Burbank goes on to clarify that the bug happens as a result of it is the one cutscene in Half Life “that appears to rely closely on syncing a bunch of animations”. In response to Burbank, the three choices for fixing it have been to try a code repair, change the animations that play within the scene, or change the map itself.
Valve opted for the third possibility. “If we fastened the sequence in order that the scientist timing labored out, a participant might nonetheless stand within the doorway and shoot the scientist, interrupting the sequence, after which he would play his animation in an insane means,” Burbank explains. “Therefore, I simply hex edited the map. Triggering the animation on the door opening…as an alternative of when the participant walks by the door ensures the participant cannot shoot the scientist earlier than issues begin “syncing”. The sequence is SLIGHTLY completely different, however performs extra carefully to what the alpha maps ran when this was authored.”
So, now you’ll be able to watch this Black Mesa boffin chew it in the way in which Valve all the time supposed. It isn’t shocking Half-Life has so many eagle-eyes on it proper now. The twenty fifth anniversary replace has induced an enormous surge in its player-count, which additionally means now is a superb time to dive again into chaotic multiplayer.
