[WMCoolmon]

*Gets urge to play HL2*

*Remembers loading times*

[Fineus]

Meh... it's a poorly lit guard and something else thats name escapes me. Hardly has me champing at the bit...

[Grug]

Aye what a crap shot.

Only good thing is that maybe you get a chance to kill those unarmed naked alien freaks.

[aldo_14]

Of the 3 (!) shots they released for the expansion, all of them could pretty much have been made & taken from the original.  'tis entirely pointless; you have to wonder if they're bothering with new content or just going to recycle the old levels and enemies.

[redmenace]

what you see in the background is a slave basically. They are humans that are incapable of fighting so they are altered at Nova Prospect to be some hideous thing that hardly could pass for human.

[vyper]

Tis called a Stalker - essentially a captured civvy who's been modified by combine technology (like the soldiers, only for different functions).

Note, the name Stalker comes from the SDK and may not be the actual name in-game.

[Stealth]

Originally posted by Unknown Target
I think Half Life 2 was a pile of ****. The game would have been good, if it didn't have a five minute load time for thirty seconds of gameplay.

what are you playing it on?  a 386?

I played HL2 on a barton 2500+ XP, 512 MB RAM, a radeon 9200 (128MB, piece of crap), on xp professional... and while the graphics weren't THAT good, (i had them on medium), the in-game load times only took 10-15 seconds at best.

[Stealth]

and in response to the "load the next part of the level while you're playing"... i'd rather have the game pause for a few seconds while it loads, than be playing, and suddenly the game's choppy, and slow, and i know "oh yeah. it's loading the next part of the level"

Half Life 2 simply did NOT require load times like it did. I've seen other games with HUGE levels that would load almost split-second, or even games JUST as detailed as Half Life 2, (maybe with less physics), with levels about the same size, that loaded in maybe thirty seconds. Half Life 2 is bloatware.

yeah, that's it.  They put those load times in various places just to piss us off... they're completely unnecessary.  during those 'load' times the processor's just running a looped script, so it LOOKS like it's working, but in reality, it's doing absolutely nothing

HL2 had graphics and physics like no other game up till its time.  the details were amazing.  don't say there are other games that had the same physics, graphic, and player engine that HL2 had, because i've played most major games, and nothing was as intricate as Hl2

[Mystical]

http://pc.ign.com/articles/605/605014p1.html

However, perhaps the most exciting tidbit to come out of tonight's update is the very first screenshot from the upcoming HL2 expansion pack: Aftermath. Although rather dark, the screenshot features an imposing Combine soldier guarding a span within what we assume is one of the Combine citadels. There's a figure in the background that appears to be a "stalker" from the original game - a sort of cybernetic zombie wearing a diaper with mechanical lower legs, a visor, creepy chicken-wing arms and one incredibly long left nipple.

We can't make this stuff up, folks

Doom 3's graphics easily rivaled HL2's graphics... however HL2 was set, for the most part, on wide landscapes, open terrain, where you could explore in any direction... that took large maps and objects to load up.  Doom 3, however, you could usually only go one way, through a passage here, or there, and the levels were a lot smaller.

From the Doom 3 expansion:

Wish i could get graphics like that

[Flipside]

It's a bridge, a silhouette and a barely visible thingy. It could just as easily have been a screenshot from Jedi Academy...

That Doom3 shot looks rather tasty, though I expect it would find my framerate rather edible too

[aldo_14]

Doom 3 strikes me as being the more visually impressive one (as does Far Cry); on the other hand, the last time I was London (on a train from Stanstead to Liverpool St), I found myselft looking at the tower blocks and thinking 'hmm, Half Life 2 looked quite real'.

[redsniper]

The buildings in HL2 look OK if you're far away, but up close they're just sad.

[Ford Prefect]

What I loved about HL2 was the dystopian ambiance. The graphics were put to good use to convey a general feeling of decay, lifelessness, and oppression. It basically felt like Massachusetts in the winter.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by redsniper
The buildings in HL2 look OK if you're far away, but up close they're just sad.

I felt they were fine, myself.  Particularly the smaller houses in Highway 17.

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by Stealth


what are you playing it on?  a 386?

I played HL2 on a barton 2500+ XP, 512 MB RAM, a radeon 9200 (128MB, piece of crap), on xp professional... and while the graphics weren't THAT good, (i had them on medium), the in-game load times only took 10-15 seconds at best.

AMD64 2800+, 512 MB RAM, GF6600GT (128MB) and load times on High are horrible. We're talking minutes here.


It's a little more bearable in Counter-strike, because it doesn't interrupt the story.

It tends to run fine after loading, but it's sort of silly for something that's graphically just a step beyond Halo.

And Halo has always had THE fastest loading times of any modern game.

[Ransom]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
And Halo has always had THE fastest loading times of any modern game.

What about one of the new Prince of Persia games which do that dynamic loading thing? Which incidentally, is proof that it can be done without making the game go all twitchy. You can go through the whole game without pausing to load once.

[WMCoolmon]

Haven't played them.

So revise that: "And Halo has always had THE fastest loading times of any modern game that I've played."

[redmenace]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22880

Footage has been "leaked."

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by redmenace
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22880

Footage has been "leaked."

Albeit that's not footage of the expansion pack, but of a single addon level (which has already had screens and video released).

[Fineus]

In all honesty I think the Doom 3 engine is a pretty powerful one, but the actual content of Doom 3 rather spoils showing it off. The level designs are pretty similar and so - where HL2 ranges from decaying Eastern towns to the Citidal to coastal areas... Doom 3 only has metallic military corridors and curious glowing research / power devices to choose from (and Hell of course) but that's only two locations generally. Neither are likely to look incredibly different given the military complex was all built by the same humans and Hell of course looks fairly uniform.

Not that I'm saying Doom3 is better than HL2. But it's certainly capable of some pretty excellent stuff itself. It's just a shame that none of that was shown off. As for HL2... I fear they went a tad overboard with their locational atmosphere. One of the joys (for me at least) in HL was that you went through all kinds of things... destroyed complex's to deserts to warehouses and goodness knows what else. Lots of intricate little areas that all felt quite different to eachother. If HL was made with the HL2 engine it'd be spectacular. Unfortunately... it's not.

Roll on Battlefield 2, which looks like HL2 but features f-ing vast outdoor areas.