So, Half-Life 2 turned 20
Hello Internet! It's been a while for sure. Tonight I'm gonna briefly write about this website and some project-related stuff, and of course, HL2's 20th birthday.
The website
You know, this website used to be just a few Markdown files hosted on GitHub Pages. Since then, I've used Docusaurus to organise stuff a little bit better and improve the navigation. I also got a domain for it. But there's still a lot of stuff to be done.
I'm not entirely happy with the way Docusaurus organises blogs. I'd like some sort of hierarchy like with the "documentation" pages, but with tags nonetheless. I guess it's fine for now, but my brain is not too happy.
Projects
Recently, someone asked me about my software water mod for Half-Life, and I realised it would be very neat to have a centralised place to just track the progress of projects and link them to blog posts.
I envision a page that briefly lists all projects like so:
- Project title, image, brief description, standard stuff
- One or more date ranges (some projects may have been revived several times)
Each project would then take you to a docs page dedicated to it, as well as linking all blog posts related to it. There is already a list of projects on my homepage, but those are featured projects and other people's projects I've contributed to. This would, instead, be a more dedicated project tracker. I think it could work.
Half-Life 2 and its 20th anniversary
When I was 7 or so, I got access to the Internet. It was 2009, possibly one of the peak Internet years for many. I remember discovering Garry's Mod machinimas, and discovering Half-Life 2 through it. Oh yes. I eventually ended up discovering Steam and downloading the Half-Life 2 demo, which only had the first chapter of the game + most of Ravenholm.
Lemme tell ya, Ravenholm was scary as hell. I then discovered mods, later got into making maps for Counter-Strike 1.6, then got into modding Half-Life 1, and I eventually became what I am today. Yeah, I did kinda go from Source to GoldSRC, but it doesn't matter, since Half-Life 2 was the one that started it for me.
I find it hard to believe it's been 20 years since it was released. I find it even harder to believe the SIGGRAPH 2000 demo was a thing. That is quite possibly the most attractive iteration of GoldSRC I've ever seen. It's still far more GoldSRC than Source at that stage. It's basically GoldSRC with basic physics, a more improved (still basic) particle system, an early iteration of the facial animation system, an early iteration of displacements, and specular & environment mapping without shaders!
How could I tell it's without shaders? I don't know, but I'm certain they did it with a fixed graphics pipeline just like Quake 3 did specular mapping back in 1999. There are various tricks you can use to achieve that look, and the lack of normal mapping is also a bit of a sign. In fact I guessed the same thing for the 2002 demo. By 2003 though, they 100% were using shaders. It's just fascinating to me how Valve's technology evolved in that relatively short time period. Even weirder is seeing all those recognisable textures early on.
I definitely wanna make a video analysing the 2000 and 2002 demos, comparing all the minute details and guessing which part of the engine was more GoldSRC or Source-leaning, but also the game code! It's a comparison I'd totally love to make, picking apart each little thing and putting my imagination to work.
This is about it for tonight, I'm a little short on time, but I just felt like writing about it. See ya some other time, traveller of online spaces.