Half-Life 2: In Action
Valve gives us a deeper glimpse into Half-Life 2, including our first look at live gameplay.
By Sal "Sluggo" Accardo | 5/15/2003


Last week, we presented our massive Half-Life 2 preview, based on a trip to Valve Software during which we saw roughly a dozen short demonstrations of the company's new Source engine in action. This week at E3, in a theater at the ATI booth, Valve Managing Director Gabe Newell took us another tour, showing us a (mostly) new series of roughly a dozen demos, as well as a very brief look at the game being played live in front of us.

To open, Newell gave the group a short primer on the new engine and its strengths. "The Source engine gives up capabilities in four main areas: (1) believable and realistic human beings; (2) graphics that were previously only possible in a Hollywood movie studio; (3) integrated materials and physics systems that create an unprecedented level of interactivity; and (4) artificial intelligence that welds these characters, these effects and this world into an experience that gamers have never had before."

The G-Man Cometh

To start the presentation, we were treated to a full-screen glimpse of the newly remodeled G-Man (deep blue eyes, heavy bags and all), and cycled through a series of facial expressions. As mentioned in our last preview, Valve has dedicated a lot of time and research to creating characters that can express a wide variety of emotions, however subtle.

"An enormous number of details go into creating a character like the G-Man," said Newell. "The eyes glint based on a radiosity calculation and local illumination. They self-shadow and follow you as you move. He has 40 separate muscles in his face, and his emotions are based on the taxonomy of facial expressions created by Dr. Paul Ekman, a research psychiatrist at the University of California."

Newell continued by explaining how the Source engine automatically ties audio to lip-synching, first showing the G-Man speaking in English. "His capabilities are language independent," continued Newell, "so it's just as easy for him to speak in Chinese as it is in English." On cue, the G-Man started speaking in Chinese, his lips moving along with the words.

How does all this technology tie in with the game? "This character technology gives us a broad emotional palette," said Newell. "You will hate your enemies, and fear for yourself and for your friends. And perhaps, you'll discover feelings you've never had before." To punctuate the point, the G-Man slyly raised an eyebrow, eliciting laughter from the crowd.

I Feel The Earth Move

Now finished with the G-Man display, the demo shifted to a new location, beginning with a small outdoor area being deformed and reshaped before our eyes. "With characters that can react emotionally, we need a world that's similarly flexible and interactive," explained Newell. "The world of Half-Life 2 is very dynamic, and each surface can have a displacement map that can be altered dynamically along with its collision hull. This terrain system gives us very large outdoor areas, that due its LOD based system, can run on even low-end hardware."

Moving indoors, the demo shifted to an area that we'd seen in our prior visit to Valve, using the anti-gravity "manipulator" gun to move around barrels and pick up bodies to show off the engine's rag-doll physics.

We were given a brief explanation of how the Source engine handles physics for different items. "In Source, worlds are made out of materials," said Newell, taking out a shotgun and shooting a few planks of wood standing up a few yards away. "If something looks like wood, then it sounds like wood, and if you shoot it, then it will fragment like wood." Sure enough, the wood broke up into a few larger chunks, and then smaller ones. In a nearby body of water, a series of barrels rested on a floating wooden palette; when shot, the palette fell apart, dropping the barrels into the water where they bobbed up and down realistically.

From there, the demo shifted to a nearby wall with a series of wooden planks sticking out, with a series of barrels sitting on a platform on top. "And of course," said Newell, "what tech demo would be complete without a giant pachinko machine?" After shooting the wooden platform, the barrels fell through the series of planks, bouncing around in varying patterns.

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