New Half-Life 2 development lore drop!
It’s a wild ride to read. It’s about a very niche bug that softlocks the game but somehow the bug can travel back in time and even affect the original retail version of Half-Life 2.
TLDR: the bug
The softlock happens because an NPC is standing in the way of a door. This didn’t happen in the original because it was compiled using the old-school Intel x87 floating point handling and not the (relatively) more modern SSE behaviour, which does cause the softlock. The bug managed to time travel to the retail build because modern compilers use SSE instead of x87.
I had a similar softlock in Skyrim at release that wasn’t fixed until the toolset came out and I was able to go in and see that the script that was meant to fire was never actually added to the trigger. So a dude is supposed to come up to a door and open a little window to talk to you, but he would just stay sitting down in the room since the script telling him to go to the door and begin the dialogue that leads to the trigger that opens the door was written and available, but wasn’t tied to the trigger of activating the door. I just put the script into the trigger and Bam! finally was able to get through the MQ.
Ever since, I have been salty AF about Bethesda’s ability to build games. This was such a stupidly simple mistske and it persisted for months only to be fixed by modders with a simple 5 second change.
That piece of shit, Esbern! I had the same glitch, thankfully there was a mod that fixed it pretty quickly.
At one point, Valve accidentally broke blinking in HL2 era versions of the Source engine.
Like uh, there was originally, for all humanoid NPCs with visible eyes, some kind of timer and functionality that would cause NPCs to blink, at semi-random, semi-regular intervals.
Somewhere around approximately 2010-12, I think?.. they broke this, and no NPCs would or could blink anymore, outside of totally scripted sequences involving blinking as or eye movement as a deliberate part of some fully blocked out, pre-scripted skit.
… Last I checked, roughly a decade later… they appear to have fixed it.
But I remember this being broken for like, years.
Floating point values: making your software misbehave out of nowhere since the year
NaN.I like this one:
Also, whacking the manhacks with your crowbar goes from being a panicked flailing in flatscreen, to being an elegant one-swing home-run hit in VR.
It makes me like the fact that there are no melee weapons in Half Life: Alyx even less, though.
I’m watching a playthrough of HL: Alyx right now and I’m about two hours in, and it’s really disappointing that there’s no crowbar. Or similar. What a staple to miss in such a game.
Apparently Valve experimented with melee weapons early in development, but intentionally decided to cut them because of the perceived lack of impact and weightlessness of held items, but the main thing was that playtesters kept getting their long melee weapons snagged on stuff. Alyx notably does not allow your hands or held items to intersect with other objects, nor does it let your hands get too far away from your body’s position to prevent shenanigans. If you unexpectedly hook your crowbar on a door frame or a table or something you’ll find yourself inexplicably leashed to it after walking a couple of feet and then not be able to find your hands.
This article goes into some detail. Apparently the crowbar specifically was removed to prevent players from assuming they were Gordon Freeman, despite the constant stream of evidence to the contrary. But it doesn’t seem like too much of a leap to replace that with Alyx grabbing a random length of pipe or chunk of rebar or something from the multitudes of trashed urban environments she traverses throughout the game.
Anyway, as soon as modding support was opened up for HL:A the first things that inevitably appeared were about 4,987 mods that added the crowbar back in. So it’s an easy enough wish to fulfill, if that’s what you want.
it’s been a minute since i played, but i remember pistol whipping enemies
You can deflect leaping headcrabs this way (or block them with a held object, although this causes you to automatically drop it afterwards) but as far as I know it deals no damage to enemies.
I believe that’s correct, you can… VR melee enemies, it will cause some kind of animated response, but it doesn’t do any actual damage to them.
Very cool.
Also Valve is legitimately one of the only devs who kept original source code from 2004.
Even Blizzard lost the original World of Warcraft code.
Sadly it was said that valve lost the source code to Prospero, the other game they were working on alongside Half-Life.
I also think they had vaporized Gunman Chronicles because they don’t have the source code.
i wonder if this vr code was used for the hl2 vr mod, or those guys re-created it
This is actually an incredible coincidence; I love reading these stories but it’s usually in the context of a speedrunner exploiting them rather than a poor dev asking “how did this ever work!?”
The Bill’s Big Thrill glitch in Half-Life 2 is especially bizarre.
That was a fun read, thanks for sharing!
That was a pretty neat and fun story :) Thanks for sharing it. I never new that hw is also active on mastodon :)
