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A time-travelling door bug in Half Life 2

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Re: A time-travelling door bug in Half Life 2

#71

Post by phantasmish »

Agentlien wrote: post #54
phantasmish wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HL3 exclusively in VR is likely the only thing that’d get me to increase my “time spent in VR” from the current about-ten-minutes to about six hours.

Interesting that Half-Life: Alyx exclusively in VR wasn't enough, then. I love VR and that game is the best VR experience I've had.

It’s something I keep meaning to play. My wife got a decent headset for free through work about three or four years ago, and after we both played a collective 15 minutes of Beat Saber it’s been gathering dust on the top shelf of a closet ever since. We used to play tons of DDR and Wii Sports so we like moving-around games but the thing just didn’t interest either of us, at all.

Alyx just hasn’t been quite enough motivation for me to take on the project of figuring out how to get it hooked up and working, though I did at one point do the few minutes of googling to confirm it might work (I think it’s one of those Facebook ones, and as I recall it is supposed to work for Alyx but I’ll need some cable or other). Especially since it’s a fairly short side-story, it’s just not enough juice to be worth the squeeze.

The conclusion of the series (until it’s not the conclusion any more—yeah, I know how franchises work, lol) though? That’d do it.

If I already had it out and used it regularly I’m sure I’d have played Alyx by now, but with that being the only thing I have any interest in doing with it, just not enough to get me to set the thing up for that alone.

Re: A time-travelling door bug in Half Life 2

#72

Post by lomase »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #62
lomase wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is funny because the only code I have read that flushed denormals was in synth code.

Denormals in audio code are kind of the "perfect storm", because they take ages to deal with - you're suddenly back into softfloat land - and because you have to deal with many thousands of them in a few hundred microseconds. We take how fast hardware floating point is for granted. I suspect it would be interesting to compare something compiled with softfloat with a normal benchmark and see just how bad it is. It's a…

Fixed floating point has been a mistery to me, and to be fair floting point is too. I know digital synths like Virus or Waldorf all used 24 bit fixed point math DSP.

I remember this dps site with lost of c and delphi code, there is where I found what denormals are.

Nowdays I dont see DPS code dealing with denormals. Maybe the CPU does not have to do it in software anymore? I don't really know.

Re: A time-travelling door bug in Half Life 2

#73

Post by Philpax »

phantasmish wrote: post #71
Agentlien wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that Half-Life: Alyx exclusively in VR wasn't enough, then. I love VR and that game is the best VR experience I've had.

It’s something I keep meaning to play. My wife got a decent headset for free through work about three or four years ago, and after we both played a collective 15 minutes of Beat Saber it’s been gathering dust on the top shelf of a closet ever since. We used to play tons of DDR and Wii Sports so we like moving-around games but the thing just didn’t interest either of us, at all. Alyx just hasn’t been quite enough moti…

Alyx has implications for 3, and 3 will almost certainly follow on from Alyx, if that helps :-)

Re: A time-travelling door bug in Half Life 2

#74

Post by account42 »

Shekelphile wrote: post #53
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #6

Wait, so is that "beta" of Half Life 2 VR a thing I can play? If it is, how did I not know about this, and if not... why not? I'd also love to play Portal, actually. They say it makes you sick, but to my knowledge I'm immune from VR motion sickness, so worth a try...

It was publicly released in 2013 and you can enable it with -vr in args IIRC. Not sure if it would work with modern VR hardware since steamvr wasn't a thing back then.

It did work with the Index at some point. Valve have been neglecting VR though (especially on Linux) so I wouldn't bet on it still working.

Re: A time-travelling door bug in Half Life 2

#75

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Shekelphile wrote: post #53
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #6

Wait, so is that "beta" of Half Life 2 VR a thing I can play? If it is, how did I not know about this, and if not... why not? I'd also love to play Portal, actually. They say it makes you sick, but to my knowledge I'm immune from VR motion sickness, so worth a try...

It was publicly released in 2013 and you can enable it with -vr in args IIRC. Not sure if it would work with modern VR hardware since steamvr wasn't a thing back then.

Ah, it predates SteamVR! Thanks, that explains why I didn't know about it.

Re: A time-travelling door bug in Half Life 2

#76

Post by sigmoid10 »

Lammy wrote: post #44
sigmoid10 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't move them (apart from the opening and closing animation), but they can move other objects that are in their way. Both need to be physics objects for that to work, even though the door is just kinematic (i.e. it won't react to forces applied to it). Although if I remember correctly, they are not even fully kinematic. I think you could get them stuck halfway closed by cramming something in the door frame that…

> I think you could get them stuck halfway closed by cramming something in the door frame that would get the whole thing jammed. This was a popular griefing tactic when TF2 first came out where you could trap everyone in spawn by crouch-jumping into the spawn door as Scout: https://youtu.be/JUPzN7tp7bQ?t=243

Yeah this seems to be exactly the same issue that Valve eventually discovered in the Mastodon thread linked by OP.

Re: A time-travelling door bug in Half Life 2

#77

Post by RobKohr »

account42 wrote: post #74
Shekelphile wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was publicly released in 2013 and you can enable it with -vr in args IIRC. Not sure if it would work with modern VR hardware since steamvr wasn't a thing back then.

It did work with the Index at some point. Valve have been neglecting VR though (especially on Linux) so I wouldn't bet on it still working.

Considering the upcoming release of Frame, a VR headset based on Linux, I feel this couldn't be a more untrue statement.

The real truth is they moved out of the game development space and embraced the game platform space letting their old products wither and die.

Re: A time-travelling door bug in Half Life 2

#78

Post by phantasmish »

Philpax wrote: post #73
phantasmish wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s something I keep meaning to play. My wife got a decent headset for free through work about three or four years ago, and after we both played a collective 15 minutes of Beat Saber it’s been gathering dust on the top shelf of a closet ever since. We used to play tons of DDR and Wii Sports so we like moving-around games but the thing just didn’t interest either of us, at all. Alyx just hasn’t been quite enough moti…

Alyx has implications for 3, and 3 will almost certainly follow on from Alyx, if that helps :-)

Maybe when I get that new Steam gaming computer (day 1 purchase… assuming the price isn’t crazy-high) I’ll get around to it.

Re: A time-travelling door bug in Half Life 2

#79

Post by Ericson2314 »

adastra22 wrote: post #56
Ericson2314 wrote: post #19

It's a goal of mine to get Valve using Nix. (I hope our in-progress Windows support would make this especially compelling.) One advantage of this is that it will become very easy to not only build the original source of the game, but also build it with the original toolchain and dependencies, the toolchains for those dependencies, etc. etc., all the way down. Hopefully something like that at your finger trips would h…

Maybe I'm not seeing it. How would the bug finding be easier here? Seems like the same setup. They could compile with recent tools, and they already had the compiled version with old tools (hosted on Steam).

You could quickly rule out non-determinism by reproducing the build with the new and old tools.

You could also try the newer version of the codebase with the older tools (assuming nothing broke / no newer C++ features) if you like.

Re: A time-travelling door bug in Half Life 2

#80

Post by Ericson2314 »

bpye wrote: post #50
Ericson2314 wrote: post #19

It's a goal of mine to get Valve using Nix. (I hope our in-progress Windows support would make this especially compelling.) One advantage of this is that it will become very easy to not only build the original source of the game, but also build it with the original toolchain and dependencies, the toolchains for those dependencies, etc. etc., all the way down. Hopefully something like that at your finger trips would h…

> I hope our in-progress Windows support would make this especially compelling. What is the current story for using Nix to build Windows binaries?

On Nixpkgs master, you can cross compile to MinGW and Cygwin.

Native Cygwin builds are also currently in progress: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/447520. I would expect this to be done very soon, there year even (holidays permitting).

There is a MinGW build of Nix but it is missing some features. There has been MSVC build of a fork in the past and I would like to revive that also.

There some some open questions relating to Nixpkgs's heavy use of Bash, but longer term I would like to compete for Windows in all ways:

- Support all cross (MinGW, Cygwin/MSYS2, MSVC ABI with LLVM, MSVC with Wine) - Be Cygwin packages - Be https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages / https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages - Be VCPKG

All these things have slightly different trade-offs, and Nixpkgs is very good at portability, so we should simply do them all.

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