Totally forgot about it, until I found a photo of it on an old hard drive.

Don't know if anyone cares, but I thought it might be of minor interest to someone!

Former Half Life: Alyx Mod from solo dev ANB_Seth turned all new full game, Gunman Contracts, is launching next week on Steam, Steam Deck and SteamVR!

So I picked up an abandoned Wii port of Xash3D FWGS (the open source GoldSrc engine reimplementation) and got it to the point where it actually plays Half-Life. Figured people here might find it interesting.

Where it's at right now:

* boots to the menu with the proper background and music

* plays from Black Mesa Inbound through We've Got Hostiles

* locked 30fps at 320x240, the Wii's video hardware scales that up to the TV

* Wii remote pointer aiming. Point near the middle of the screen and it aims without dragging the camera around, push toward the edges and the view turns. Nunchuk stick to move. The gun leans toward wherever you're pointing which looks quite nice in motion

* sound works, GameCube pad and Wiimote plus Nunchuk both detected

Being upfront about this: every screenshot here is from Dolphin. I have not put it on a real Wii yet, that is literally the next thing I'm doing. So treat it as "this exists and runs" rather than "this is finished".

What doesn't work yet:

* only the opening chapters are verified. Everything from Blast Pit onward is untested, which is most of the game

* saves and level transitions are untested

* software rendering only. There is a hardware renderer that uses the Wii's actual GPU, which would look a lot better and let me push the resolution up, but it hangs during map load and I haven't cracked it yet

* one map (c1a3c) refuses to load and I have no idea why

A few of the more annoying things I hit, in case anyone likes this sort of thing:

* the engine was being compiled unoptimised the entire time. The devkitPro toolchain puts -O2 on every target, then the engine target appended -Og, and later flags win in GCC. Took me a while to spot that one

* the heap was living in MEM1 alongside the executable, so maps ran out of memory partway through loading and hung in a different place on every build. Moving it to MEM2, the Wii's other 64MB that was just sitting unused, fixed an entire family of weird bugs

* logging to a USB Gecko debug cable stalled the game if you didn't have one plugged in. Every test I'd run had one configured, so I never noticed that on an actual Wii it couldn't even reach a single frame

Repo and a setup guide are here: (https://github.com/twixerisss/xash3d-fwgs)

You need your own copy of Half-Life, no game data included obviously.

WARNING: AI has been a big help in this project. I have used and have had a lot of help from AI. I'm an experienced developer but I am nowhere near capable enough to work on this architecture comfortably XD

I really really love the idea of stand-in uncle Barney and niece Alyx. It’s criminally cute

Pictured here:

1. Box cover

   1. Storefront logo
   2. Storefront cover art + console menu background
   3. Console menu logo

The collection includes:

• Half-Life (+ O.f./B.s./Decay/Deathmatch)

• Half-Life 2 (+ episodes)

• Half-Life: Alyx

It also features:

• Steam Workshop support

• Game soundtracks

• Concept art and illustrations

• Trailers

• Trivia/Fun facts

• DualSense support

According to the development commentary they put more interesting things in the elevator ride so that people would ignore Mossman's explanation and focus on the cool stuff, to try and sorta distance her from Gordon and have the player like Alyx more.

But when I replayed the game again I listened to the monologue because it actually sounded fairly interesting? Am I the only one who actually bothered to hear her talk and thought "huh. Neat."?

About 5 years back, the Half-Life 2 Remastered Collection got announced, made by the same guy who made Half-Life 2: Update and using the CS:GO branch of Source.

Any news on that? Anyone know if it's still being worked on?

Source is PC Accelerator magazine.

hello guys im about to play through the first half life game which i bought over 3 years ago on steam while it was on sale. wish me luck and give me some advice if youve got any. ill keep you guys updated

It's been over 6 years since the game was released, and I finally had the opportunity to play the game and beat it.

I've never had a VR setup, but was able to play at my friends house who has a decent PC and a meta quest 3. I know there is a mod that lets you play the game without VR. I never bothered with it.

Some background. I've been a fan of Half Life ever since the Orange Box was released (I was a senior in high school). I bought the Orange Box specifically for Portal because I had seen gameplay of it and thought it was so cool and would be amazing to play(it was).

After I beat portal, I figured "Why not check out these other games? I might as well, since I bought them all." The rest is history. I've been captivated by the games and the story ever since.

Like everyone else, I feel like I've been waiting a lifetime for HL3.

I somehow managed to never have HL:Alyx spoiled for me despite 6 years of being released. I'm marking the rest of this post as a spoiler just in case someone is in the same boat I used to be in, and comes across this post.

The VR was pretty good. I enjoy VR. I have PSVR2. I would rank HL:Alyx the same as resident evil 4 remake VR when it comes to how much I enjoyed the experience.

The story was incredible. I had known for sometime that the game was set between HL and HL2 while Gordon was awaiting G-man's next assignment. When I got to the part of the game where Eli (I think) says the vault it holding Gordon I was like 🫪 but I was also a little puzzled because I had always assumed Gordon was in some other dimension. The idea that maybe some part of him, or his body was somewhere on earth seemed weird to me, but not out of the question.

The game writers succeeded in getting me hyped to see what was in the vault. I've seen enough plot twists to know Gordon probably wasn't there. I especially felt this way when Eli's final transmission was attempting to stop Alyx from entering the vault.

When I made it to the center, and I saw the silhouette of a man standing there, I immediately knew who it was. My jaw was on the floor. How did the combine trap him? Wild.

I was captivated for the entire sequence because I had no idea where the story was going from the moment I saw his silhouette. I had no idea that the G-man would take Alex into the future as a "thank you for releasing me" and allow you to save Eli.

I remember playing Episode 2 multiple times and watching Eli die, wishing that I could somehow save him. It was such a cool moment when I got to use my own hands (in VR) to do just that 😭❤️

Sorry for the long post about my personal experience that I'm sure many people have had themselves, or read about it over the last 6 years. Like the subject of this post says, I have no one to discuss this with because all of my friends are either not into Half Life, or they have never beaten Alyx.

Thanks for Reading!

If not, someone should make one. It seems like a pretty obvious idea.

Hey everyone,

I was installing SDK Base 2013 Singleplayer, and when I checked the properties, I noticed this.

Does anyone know what it is, or am I just seeing things?

hi^^ i got stuck in these sewers in half life 2; does anybody know how to get out of them? thanks in advance and have a good day

Could CP Commandos exist in Half-Life 2? [Theory]

#theory

I have a theory that the Combine could have a special type of Civil Protection called CP Commandos.

They would be CP officers who are highly conditioned, physically enhanced, specially trained, and given better equipment.

They would operate at the highest-security level of the Civil Protection structure.

They could be used for:

• High-risk raids
• Hunting Resistance members
• Protecting important Combine locations
• Special missions
• Supporting or commanding regular CP units

They would be more advanced than regular CP, but still separate from the Combine Overwatch.

a visual reference for what a modified CP Commando could look like. It is not proof that CP Commandos are canon.

What do you think? Could a highly modified CP Commando unit realistically exist in the Half-Life 2 universe?

so i made an obviously bad drawing of what was supposed to be a metro cop and i constantly looked at like referance images but it turned out i made him massively out of proportions and certian elements on his head dont make him look like the milk carton headed man we all know and love and more like a combine soldier yet still kinda looking like the cop , should i make like a custom unit , some sort of middle ground beetween them , a swatter unit that would be for raiding rebel bases and not just apartments , being only midly augmented and usaly having a shotgun or an smg + a pistol with rounds for paralyzing and later imprisoning people and he would carry around slams for breaking walls and his trusty old legs for breaching doors , what you guys think ?

We still don't know what's going to happen in Half-Life 3, but if we look at what the games have been about so far, it's basically the same goal: Gordon Freeman and his friends trying to fight back against the forces invading Earth.

And I don't think Half-Life 3 is going to change that. Gordon still has to get the Combine out of Earth, while also dealing with Alyx's situation and whatever G-Man has planned for her.

Now, I think Gordon's struggle might actually be successful, and Portal 2 could potentially give us a hint about that.

Portal and Half-Life take place in the same universe. So even though we never see the Combine in the Portal games, that doesn't mean they're not out there. The Combine are still occupying Earth and draining its resources while the events of Portal are happening.

But then we get the ending of Portal 2.

After Chell finally escapes the Aperture facility, she reaches the surface and we see a huge wheat field, a blue sky, and a completely peaceful environment. That's something we almost never see in Half-Life 2, where the Combine have heavily occupied Earth and are exploiting its resources.

So it makes me wonder: could this be showing us what Earth looks like after the Combine are eventually defeated?

Maybe Gordon and the resistance actually succeed at Half-Life 3, and by the time the events of Portal 2 take place, Earth has already recovered.

Obviously, this doesn't prove that Gordon wins. Portal 2 never explicitly says that the Combine have been defeated. But considering that Portal and Half-Life share the same universe, I think the peaceful wheat field is at least an interesting hint that humanity might eventually win.

Not sure if it's real leak, but it's look interesting.

https://x.com/huevosenlatados/status/2094454859751690744

Something about the Combine occupation has always felt deliberately strange to me.

The Combine conquered Earth in only seven hours. They have interdimensional technology, biological engineering, Synths, Striders, Gunships, suppression fields and the ability to physically reshape humans into obedient soldiers.

Yet the actual human forces enforcing their rule are often carrying equipment that wouldn’t look completely out of place in a modern military.

Civil Protection uses pistols and SMGs. Overwatch soldiers use shotguns, grenades and rifle-shaped weapons. Even the AR2, despite clearly being more advanced, is still designed around the basic idea of a human holding a rifle, aiming it and pulling a trigger.

But these soldiers aren’t really an alien Combine army. They’re humans that the Combine has taken, conditioned and eventually modified into transhuman troops.

Which makes the weapons much more interesting.

The Combine could presumably replace human infantry entirely with exotic machinery, yet instead they keep the human body, modify it just enough for obedience and combat, and give it weapons that remain compatible with human instincts and training.

Maybe that tells us something about how the Combine conquers worlds.

Rather than completely replacing a conquered civilization’s military system, they might repurpose it. Keep the local species, keep whatever technology is cheap and already understood, introduce only as much Combine technology as necessary, and turn the conquered population into its own occupation force.

There could even be practical reasons for deliberately not giving human soldiers the Combine’s best technology: these troops are expendable, advanced equipment may be difficult to manufacture locally, and giving conquered species access to truly high-level Combine technology could become dangerous if they rebel.

It makes the Overwatch feel less like “the Combine army” and more like a deliberately cheap colonial military built specifically for Earth.

So after searching this subreddit I realize there's a whole ass meme surrounding the error message in the title here... but I've been having a hard time finding any examples that match mine or offer a solution.

Most people who run into this appear to be able to actually load into the game just fine, albeit with some performance issues. In my case the game just crashes after a brief pause on "Node Graphs out of date. Rebuilding..."

Here are my system specs:

Operating System: CachyOS Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 6.7.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.29.0
Qt Version: 6.11.2
Kernel Version: 7.2.2-1-cachyos (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i5-8350U CPU @ 1.70GHz
Memory: 8 GiB of RAM (7.5 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: Intel® UHD Graphics 620
Manufacturer: LENOVO
Product Name: 20L8S4C000
System Version: ThinkPad T480s

Before I kick this one over to the CachyOS official forums I figured I'd give it a go here. Thank you for reading and offering any help you can think of.

Here is a more detailed description of the problem, as well as some troubleshooting steps I've already taken:

• The "Node Graphs out of date. Rebuilding..." message stopped appearing after I removed Workshop mods, but the game still freezes and crashes. No error message; the game just freezes and shuts down, returning me to the Steam library.
• Crashes occur whenever I try to start a new game. So far it seems to happen any time I try to load into Point Insertion or "A Red Letter Day," with the game freezing on the first frame and crashing shortly thereafter.
• If I load into a saved game or start other missions (so far I've tested Route Kanal, Water Hazard, and Black Mesa East), the game loads as expected... and if I then return to the main menu and try to start Point Insertion or "A Red Letter Day," the game loads as expected.
• I have verified integrity of game files twice. Both times I got a message telling me "62 files failed to validate and will be reacquired," which left me wondering, "What do you mean WILL be reacquired?" HAVE these files been reacquired? How would I find out? If they haven't been reacquired, how can I reacquire them?
• Unable to answer any of the above, I uninstalled and reinstalled the game. Problem persists.
• I verified the files once more and got the same "62 files" message. Problem persists.
• I ran system updates for CachyOS, then rebooted my laptop and repeated the above troubleshooting steps... Problem persists.

I'm kind of at my wit's end here lol

If anyone here has any suggestions -- preferably without the typically snarky, sarcastic, miserable attitude I've been seeing more often from Reddit lately -- please let me know, and I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks again for reading.