Half-Life

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15 comments, last by Ryback 19 years, 7 months ago
The HL SDK is basically the game code, but not the engine code. This means it contains things like weapon code/item code/AI behaviour code/gamemode code etc. It doesn't contain stuff like the base rendering code and netcode, that'll be in the engine.

For the definitive answer of what the HL engine is actually based on see Here
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The half-life developers have gone on record stating that half-life was developed from the Quake 1 engine.

"It is fundamentally just a heavily modified Quake 1 engine. There are about 50 lines of code from the Quake 2 engine, mostly bugs fixes to hard problems that Carmack found and fixed before we ran into them." - Ken Birdwell

-neurokaotix
MindEngine Project Administrator
I'll throw this in as well:

"At its core, it's a Quake 1 engine. You can tell this by comparing Half-life's map compiling tools with those shipped with Quake1. You'll find very minor differences -- none of them are fundamental. The core rendering is architecturally identical to Quake1, the only "significant" change is removing the fixed palette, making map lighting RGB instead of 8 bit, and converting software rendering to be 16 bit color instead of 8 bit color, which was pretty easy and only required minor code changes. Our skeletal animation system is new, though it was heavily influenced by the existing model rendering code, as were a lot of our updated particle effects, though less so with our beam system. Decals are totally new, our audio system has some major additions to what already existed, and at ship time our networking was almost totally Quake1 / QuakeWorld networking but about a year later Yahn rewrote most of all of it to be very different in design. The most highly changed sections are the game logic; ours being written in C++ and Quake's being in written interpreted "Quake C". Our AI system is very very different from anything in Quake, and there's a lot of other significant architectural changes in the whole server and client implementations, though if you look hard enough you can find a few remnants of some nearly unmodified Quake1 era entities buried in places."

Jay Stelly adds, "We also took PAS from QW and/or Q2 and a couple of other minor routines I can remember (no more than 100-200 lines of code there). There was some feature overlap (as Ken mentions) like game code DLLs and colored lighting, but we developed our own solutions to those independent of Q2."

-neurokaotix
MindEngine Project Administrator
^^^^^^^ Both AP's posts are quoted from Monder's link ^^^^^^
Quote:Original post by BosskIn Soviet Russia, you STFU WITH THOSE LAME JOKES!
Quote:Original post by grekster
^^^^^^^ Both AP's posts are quoted from Monder's link ^^^^^^


Hah... I didn't even notice that until just now. The lazy people will thank me none the less.
its a combination of q1 and q2 that was ported to c++ and then valve worked thier magic on it.
Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
its a combination of q1 and q2 that was ported to c++ and then valve worked thier magic on it.


I've never played q1 nor q2. Are they inferior to HL in terms of the 3d engine?

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