game title meanings

[NeptuneUK]

as many of you know the game titles have scientific meanings

half-life - the radioactivity jobby (i know what it means but cant explain it in a short sentence)
blueshift - something to do with the movement of stars located in the colour spectrum or something, if a star is in a state of blueshift it is moving towards us.

does opposing force mean anything? like anything to do with phsyics?

and would anyone like to post the proper definitions of these words?

 

[craigahart]

Every force has an equal and opposing force. Newton.

 

[Lanthanide]

Only physical thing I can think of that Opposing Force would represent would be a magnetic interaction of opposing fields (or similar electro-magnetic opposition situation).

Edit: And as Craig just posted above, Newton's laws of gravity.

Half-Life: a measure of time (minutes, hours, years) of how long a radioactive element/isotope will take to decay to 1/2 of it's initial mass.

eg, if something had a half life of 8 hours, and it weighs 1 kg, after 8 hours it will weigh 0.5 kg, after another 8 hours it will weigh 0.25 kg and so on.

Blueshift: when (any) object is moving towards you -very- quickly, the light it gives off will be shifted to a higher waverlength, and appear more blue. This is generally only seen with stars/galaxies/celestial bodies because the speeds have be very fast - significant fractions of the speed of light for example.

Redshift is the opposite, when objects are moving away the wavelength gets stretched so things appear more red.

Doppler-shift with sound is pretty much the exact same phenonenum, which you can witness as a train goes past you quickly, it sounds high-pitched as it's approaching, then once it's gone past it sounds very low.



BlueShift and OpFor are great names for games - the BlueShift is what Barney worked on, and all the guards wore blue uniforms, and it's sciency. OpFor has the magnet connection and you play a soldier who is Opposing gordon. Pity the name Half-Life itself doesn't really have much to do with the game.

 

[cadaveca]

BlueShift and OpFor are great names for games - the BlueShift is what Barney worked on, and all the guards wore blue uniforms, and it's sciency. OpFor has the magnet connection and you play a soldier who is Opposing gordon. Pity the name Half-Life itself doesn't really have much to do with the game.

It does when you think of resonance cascade, and the lambda symbol. What is lambda?

 

[MadHatter]

I've always wondered how the game is relevant to a half-life as well.

 

[Headwires]

i thought it was called opposing force because you play as the opposing force of Gordon :s

 

[Gotter]

Half-life does have something to do with the game, though. The game pretty much revolves around what happens in the Lambda Complex, hence the games logo (The Greek letter Lambda)

Lambda is the symbol for the Radioactive Decay Constant. The equation that you use to get Lambda is ln 2/h, where h = half-life.

 

[PooSlice]

Uhmm riight...

Blue shift, you are a security gaurd on a shift with a blue uniform?
Opposing forces, you are the opposing forces to gordon perhaps?

 

[Raz]

It means both those things, Pooslice. Thats the beauty of it.

 

[BrimStone04]

in OP u are the opposing force, ur the ones against(opposing) freeman
is it that hard lol
u guys all think its scientific, whats blue shift mean, so scientific....im just taking a wild guess and saying it has to do with the blue uniform of a security guard....i just threw that one out there lol

 

[Bait]

Half-life does have something to do with the game, though. The game pretty much revolves around what happens in the Lambda Complex, hence the games logo (The Greek letter Lambda)

Lambda is the symbol for the Radioactive Decay Constant. The equation that you use to get Lambda is ln 2/h, where h = half-life.

I thought lambda was the symbol for wavelength?

 

[God[TM]]

I thought lambda was the symbol for wavelength?

If you study physics you'll notice that they re-use symbols all the time... It means both wavelength and radio-active decay...

 

[cadaveca]

calculations on correlations of averages using lambda can lead to "canonical vectors", or what was on the steam site...and that raven/robin/bird

 

[God[TM]]

If you study physics you'll notice that they re-use symbols all the time... It means both wavelength and radio-active decay...

I found more definitions online:

The lower-case letter λ is used as a symbol for:

The wavelength of a wave in physics.
The radioactive decay constant.
The Lambda phage virus in biology.
Eigenvalues in linear algebra
The definition of anonymous functions in lambda calculus and, by extension, some programming languages.
The language Unlambda is made up completely of lambdas, but they cannot be stored, hence the un-.
Gay pride (explanations for this usage vary).
The Half-Life computer game.
Air to fuel ratio in an internal combustion engine.

 

[vorinoch]

Physics aside (I really don't understand how the decay constant figures into the theme of the game, other than drawing attention to the fact that its writing is much more scientifically literate than the average game), I always figured it was kind of a braggy joke, talking about how lifelike the game is.

 

[BrownTown]

well, theres a bunch of radioactive stuff everywehrre and half-life is related to radiation, so its is connected somewhat. Plus, it kinda sounds cool. I mean, the name "Gordon verse the aliens and marines" would be more descriptive but it just doesnt have the ring to it that "Half-Life" does.

 

[Fuzzy-_-Muff]

who cares why valve chose the name, i for one think its a good suitable name. Like browntown said it has a beautiful ring to it.

 

[Lanthanide]

Sorry, but "lots of radioactive waste" doesn't cut it when you compare it to OpFor and BlueShift which actually meant things to the main characters who were involved. What does Half-Life have to do with Gordon?

I find the Lambda Reactor link fairly weak as well - it's an exceptable explanation, but it's pretty dull.

Possibly Half-Life could be related to Gordon in that, now that this event has happened, he's never going to have a normal life again, and he was only 28 when it happened, so he's only had 'half a life'. Pretty far-fetched and doubtful because they never knew how successful HL would be and this is tying it in with the sequal more.

 

[God[TM]]

Possibly Half-Life could be related to Gordon in that, now that this event has happened, he's never going to have a normal life again, and he was only 28 when it happened, so he's only had 'half a life'. Pretty far-fetched and doubtful because they never knew how successful HL would be and this is tying it in with the sequal more.

That's a good observation. His life has been extended somewhat if we are to assume hl2 takes place in the future...

 

[Brian Damage]

I'd like to see what VALVe are going to call the expansions to HL2... they could just go with OP4 2 and BS 2, but it'd be neat if they had names like "Zero Point", "Uncertainty" or "Entropy".

 

[AGPVincent]

BlueShift and OpFor are great names for games - the BlueShift is what Barney worked on, and all the guards wore blue uniforms, and it's sciency. OpFor has the magnet connection and you play a soldier who is Opposing gordon. Pity the name Half-Life itself doesn't really have much to do with the game.

When was Barney working on a Blueshift?!?! and can someone remind me when there was a magnet connection in Opposing Force... I haven't played either games in ages. I might play them again just for the sake of it.

And lambda is the greek letter. A lot of things come from the Greek and Latin language, but not many people know of them, such as the first Greek Letter, Alpha, The second letter, Beta, then Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa, Lam(b)da, Mu, Nu, Zi, Omicron, Pi, Rho, Sigma, Tau, Upsilon, Phi, Chi, Psi, Omega.

I dunno if that's in the right order or not... I started doing Greek at school this year.

 

[Wildboyz]

Blue Shift - Shifting to Barney ( Shifting the game character mode in the story. first was gordon, then opposing forces, then barney. )
It gives a different perspective to the half-life story in each game, with a different character that has an initial role, don't you think?

 

[Lanthanide]

The lambda security forces had names such as Blue Shift, Green Shift, Yellow Shift and Red Shift. Barney worked on Blue Shift. You can see it on a map near the beginning, IRC. I also think it says it in the manual?

There isn't any magnet in OpFor, I was just pointing out how it could be a sciency-reference in addition to actually meaning something about the game. Unlike Half-Life, which, as far as I can tell, the name doesn't really have much to do with the storyline or characters in it (lambda complex is pretty arbitrary, it could have been called anything else).

 

[DEATH eVADER]

I've always wondered how the game is relevant to a half-life as well.

-It was a nuclear missile complex
-You have to deal with a lot of radioactive material ingame
-The resonance Cascade (Although I'm not quite sure what the connection is, somebody explained it a long time ago)
-The Lambda symbol that has already been mentioned
-Gordon has a geiger counter :cheese:
-"the purest sample we've seen yet" I'm guessing when they refered that to the specimen, it was probably the radioactive decay of the sample