Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#121

Post by TheAceOfHearts » Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 6:16 PM UTC

austin-cheney wrote: post #111

So, this begs a rather obvious question. What makes that team different? Is it the talent, the leadership, the focus on product? As a long time JavaScript developer I honestly believe, and I really mean this, that maybe 4% of the people employed primarily doing JavaScript work actually know what they are doing. Just 4%. It seems at the beginning many of the early Valve team had a lot of passion but almost no real exp…

Most developers probably don't care and just want to get paid. Beyond that, I imagine you're not usually empowered to make big changes unless you're relatively senior, and even if you decide to be the kind of developer that's always striving towards self improvement your job is unlikely to reward you for your skill development. I think there's just a lot of diminishing returns.

Have you ever tried playing a competitive multiplayer game? There's people that will play games for thousands of hours without ever improving.

Sometimes I think people encounter bottlenecks and they're not sure how to overcome them.

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#122

Post by squeaky-clean » Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 6:19 PM UTC

butz wrote: post #88

Valve has video distribution service on Steam, why put up this documentary on Youtube, of all the places?

Can you stream videos on steam? I thought you had to download the whole file?

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#123

Post by butz » Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 6:29 PM UTC

squeaky-clean wrote: post #122

butz wrote: post #88

Valve has video distribution service on Steam, why put up this documentary on Youtube, of all the places?

Can you stream videos on steam? I thought you had to download the whole file?

Now I'm not sure, their wording is a bit unclear: "Click Watch to add {video_title} to your account. The streaming version will be added to your Videos Library instantly. Complete the download wizard to install the downloaded version."

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#124

Post by kingkawn » Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 6:31 PM UTC

incahoots wrote: post #100

kingkawn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ill bet after the game of thrones debacle nobody wants to take on IP that doesn't have a conclusion already written.

I swear I recall Martin stating that he had given the show-runners a conclusion to put in the show, but they bin'd it. The conclusion was a dumpster fire for so many issues, and it wasn't for lack of original content to derive from I'd argue.

And yet the books remain unwritten

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#125

Post by kingkawn » Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 6:32 PM UTC

guyomes wrote: post #112

kingkawn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ill bet after the game of thrones debacle nobody wants to take on IP that doesn't have a conclusion already written.

Marc Laidlaw, who worked on the game's story of Half-life and Half-life 2, published a script online [1] that could have been the outline of the plot of Episode 3. That could be sufficient for a serie. [1]: https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Epistle_3

I read this some years back when it came out. Pretty weak I think, suffering from the same loss of sense of place that most stories get once they start doing time and space meta jumping

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#126

Post by ajmurmann » Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 6:33 PM UTC

all2 wrote: post #113

kar1181 wrote: post #87

I was heavily involved with the australian team fortress (quake 1 version) community in the late 90s and 'bro' (Robin Walker) and John Cook were gods to us, regularly involved in the RMIT/Melbourne Lan scene and online even when back then mostly it was 28.8/33.6k modems with a few LPBS on East coast uni isdns. The struggle for them to move on from qwtf to 'tf2' was probably for the best as a lot of the lessons they l…

> Also find it somewhat amusing was that TF2 was originally going to be a much more 'realistic' modern miltary shooter before the scope creep killed it. Instead we got Counterstrike. I'm not complaining as CS:Source is one of those games that I spent hours upon hours honing my skill.

I don't understand this comment. The original Counter-Strike mod came out around the same time as TF got ported to HL. Unlike TF, CS had pretty much consistent releases of some kind from CS up to 1.6 to Condition Zero and then Source and Go. I don't think there was any salvaging of TF stuff into CS.

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#127

Post by Blackthorn » Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 6:36 PM UTC

chucky_z wrote: post #73

hypercube33 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a video somewhere where gaben is really self destructive about how half life 2 turned out and I think it's why we don't see half life 3 or any other new games - I think he's overly critical about his work. Watching this 25th documentary really felt like the team had a nostalgia trip making it and fond memories of the game. I wonder if the spark is gone with that teams weird dynamic.

As someone who just got the OLED Steam Deck the spark is not gone!! Valve is still the same company, they’re just succeeding in very different ways. I think this is the benefit of not being a public company. They’ve pivoted over and over and over. They’re still in the same space (video games) and the breadth of the areas they’re in are immense!

Yeah, this. They don't have a ton of releases, but their batting average is insane. I can think of only one really notable failure (Artifact). So many of their other releases have been industry changing in many different ways.

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#128

Post by ajmurmann » Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 6:41 PM UTC

AndriyKunitsyn wrote: post #24

epolanski wrote: post #2

One thing I have found extremely interesting was how Valve hit the jackpot with many early hires. It was literally people that often didn't even have a CS or let alone gaming background and yet so many of them proved to be relentlessly resourceful, creative and hard working. The guy who wrote most of the HL code wasn't even a developer and at the time was studying to become a lawyer or accountant iirc. I can't but th…

Because technically, they didn't. As they say in the documentary, the version of the game that they made after the first year or so was bad, and they acknowledged it, and they changed their processes and introduced the "cabal" - so they basically paid that first year to gather experience. And what's important, their publisher Sierra was okay with it. I don't see that happening today, to be honest, in "AAA" titles at…

I think time and trust is so critical. I remember a talk by the people who made FoundationDB about their approach to testing. They spend a year just creating a variant of C++ that allowed them to control concurrent execution order and build a framework to simulate/mock network, disc access etc. It's incredible work and AFAIK more than paid for itself. Yet, at most places it would be impossible to get a year-long testing effort of that scale funded or really any engineering effort that produces nothing shippable. All too often you might get 3 months and after 2, a urgent product request comes up and the work sits and rots away till it's useless and nobody gets back to it

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#129

Post by dagoodboy » Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 6:42 PM UTC

kar1181 wrote: post #87

I was heavily involved with the australian team fortress (quake 1 version) community in the late 90s and 'bro' (Robin Walker) and John Cook were gods to us, regularly involved in the RMIT/Melbourne Lan scene and online even when back then mostly it was 28.8/33.6k modems with a few LPBS on East coast uni isdns. The struggle for them to move on from qwtf to 'tf2' was probably for the best as a lot of the lessons they l…

I was in the same scene (Clan PlanetFortress FTW). Robin and those guys saved us from the annoying cheaters that were exploiting the old qw code. I was so excited for them when they got hired by Valve to make TFC and then HL2.

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#130

Post by sbarre » Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 6:50 PM UTC

austin-cheney wrote: post #111

So, this begs a rather obvious question. What makes that team different? Is it the talent, the leadership, the focus on product? As a long time JavaScript developer I honestly believe, and I really mean this, that maybe 4% of the people employed primarily doing JavaScript work actually know what they are doing. Just 4%. It seems at the beginning many of the early Valve team had a lot of passion but almost no real exp…

Valve did have a few key people (not to mention complete access to the best 3D engine source code at the time) who really did know what they were doing.

Keep in mind that building video game levels, models, animations and such back then was dramatically simpler than it is now.

One person did all the texture work for the whole game. One person did all the sound effects and music, and also coded the DSP engine to add real-time sound manipulation based on the environment.

You can do a lot with a few very talented people who are willing to guide a whole bunch of smart, eager and motivated folks.. which I think is what happened at Valve.