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Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

code.idtech.space

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Re: Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

#41

Post by keyringlight »

homebrewer wrote: post #28
amlib wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Viktor Antonov (rip) art style. edit: there is also the fact that map compilers for gold source games have advanced far beyond what they could do back in 1999. The lightmaps and light sources alone can be far more intricate nowadays than what you would get from the official valve ones in 1999.

I used to do a bit of mapping back then (nothing that survived to this day, thankfully); as I recall, practically nobody used official map compilers. As it often happens, the community wrote replacements that were much faster for debug "-O0" builds, and generated lightmaps of a significantly higher quality for the release "-O2" builds. It was either ZHLT or VLHT, or something like that; looks like more alternatives h…

There was a similar path with Unreal3. The early games (2006) lighting looks quite harsh by modern standards, one of the highlights of Mirror's Edge (2008) was DICE using third party Illuminate's "beast" lighting, then Epic moved to "lightmass" around 2009 with the public UDK toolset.

Re: Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

#42

Post by Der_Einzige »

its_magic wrote: post #35
sho_hn wrote: post #27

Super interesting! I'm curious what the purpose is, though? Edit to answer myself: Looks like this is more of an offshoot of the FreeHL projects by the same author, which rewrite GoldSrc game logic to QuakeC to get those games to run on open source engine stacks, where the utility is more obvious. I guess it was just fun to see how hard it'd be to get HL2 content running. A bit similar to the OpenMW project working o…

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Re: Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

#43

Post by amlib »

account42 wrote: post #33
amlib wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the litmus test is weather they are backwards compatible with old maps/campaigns from the original engine/game. Half-Life 2 sure won't play quake maps nor will it play hl1 maps.

> Half-Life 2 sure won't play quake maps nor will it play hl1 maps. Not without modifications but Half-Life: Source is essentially a tech demo to show that they can be ported easily (if you are OK with dropping some pesky features like randomized wall textures).

AFAIK hl1 maps needs to be open in hammer, tweaked a bit and then recompiled to function in hl2. You also better have those originals .rmfs rather than a .map or a even worse, a .bsp :)

Re: Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

#46

Post by plorkyeran »

tsunamifury wrote: post #29

De-makes are interesting because they continuously seem to show what may have been possible long ago in ancient engines if teams pushed them even further. Then again maybe that level of detail even in idtech1 would have required more computing than was available for many years.

I do suspect this would not run well on a 75 Mhz Pentium 1. It would be very surprising if Quake 1 was actually the pinnacle of what as possible on the hardware of the time, though. id made exactly one game targeting that generation of hardware, and then their next game had meaningfully higher system requirements despite coming out only a year later. The hardware capabilities were changing so fast that there simply wasn't time to iterate on a specific target.

Re: Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

#48

Post by sho_hn »

its_magic wrote: post #38
jjordan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone did something interesting to them and shared it with the world. That you feel is a waste of time does not add to the conversation and more broadly acts as a chilling effect on others who might want to share their interests. When it comes to something like this, mom's advice is golden: "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything."

It's a waste of time made necessary ONLY because of copyright law. As I explained. As is THIS ENTIRE COMMENT THREAD. And 10,000x other comment threads exactly like it, with you fools arguing back and forth for 300 pages about the subject. What a complete waste of time and energy. Thanks, copyright law.

Nonsense. People reimplementing stuff to see if they can is unrelated to copyright. See the many implementations of vi.

Re: Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

#49

Post by brynnbee »

sdwr wrote: post #47

What does clean room mean in this context? They built it from the assets with the game as a reference , but didn't look at the engine source code?

It means they didn't reference any existing or decompiled code from the original client. None of it is directly infringing on any copyright, though it may be doing so indirectly since there have been plenty of lawsuits for tools that contain no copyrighted information can but can used to facilitate infringement (e.g. a tool that decompiles a game ROM)
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