Half-Life 2 SDK Capabilities.

[Smawg]

I was thinking of getting a mod team together.

But I'm not sure what the Half-Life 2 SDK is capable of.
Is it possible that someone can code an RPG into Half-Life 2?
I'm talking physics and all that good stuff with a fast paced RPG.
Open ended, say for instance, you could walk the entire planet.
You can gain experience by certain things you do.

Is any of that possible?

 

[The Dark Elf]

I was thinking of getting a mod team together.

But I'm not sure what the Half-Life 2 SDK is capable of.
Is it possible that someone can code an RPG into Half-Life 2?
I'm talking physics and all that good stuff with a fast paced RPG.
Open ended, say for instance, you could walk the entire planet.
You can gain experience by certain things you do.

Is any of that possible?

No, you couldn't walk the entire planet. It would take you years and years, full time work to build such a thing, and the entire game would end up larger than most hard drives that'll exist at the time.

In other words no

But a simple RPG like others are doing, you could do that. Just remember that RPG's are complex beasts and not easily created, I'd suggest looking at the amount of work that went into Morrowind for an example as to how complex a good RPG is. Same goes for Baldurs Gate II.

 

[Smawg]

There has got to be a way though.

Maybe say, you could mix the source engine with a world of warcraft engine.

You can walk the planet in world of warcraft. I was thinking, what if it was like that, cept a fast paced first person shooter? I mean, if you had to. You could make a large amount of maps and has them loop each other depending on where you when. Like how the old games were made. Remember King's Quest the first one. They just had a bunch of zones that looped around.

I think it could be possible. One day, hopefully by the time I get out of the army and into a game design college. I will be able to make one.

 

[The Dark Elf]

There has got to be a way though.

Maybe say, you could mix the source engine with a world of warcraft engine.

You can walk the planet in world of warcraft. I was thinking, what if it was like that, cept a fast paced first person shooter? I mean, if you had to. You could make a large amount of maps and has them loop each other depending on where you when. Like how the old games were made. Remember King's Quest the first one. They just had a bunch of zones that looped around.

I think it could be possible. One day, hopefully by the time I get out of the army and into a game design college. I will be able to make one.

Source just isn't geared towards doing it correctly or very well. WOW isn't a whole planet neither, its a few islands. Daggerfall had a huge map but 95% of that was randomly generated and sparse, taking two weeks realtime to walk from one end to another.

To do something on the scale you want to do it, your gonna need to write your own engine. Or take your chances with the morrowind engine. But nobody seems to ever know just HOW many cells that is capable of. Atleast I've never found out. I know the internal map has a hard coded limit on how much it can show, but the game map I don't know. There's a team working on the Tamriel Isle's which will make it around Daggerfall size, but I don't know if they even know for sure it can do it, or that they may just stall half way through, which would suck cause from what I've played on their Tamriel rebuilt mod so far is very impressive.

You could do an island though, just forget now any idea's of something on such a grand scale. Kadayi Polokov will agree with me on this one, and we don't like each other, which should prove to you I'm not lying about this. It would be too much work and entirely wasted. Stick with something smaller, target your RPG on a single island, you can still do a HELL OF A LOT on even a small island. It's almost impossible to get that same level of depth in something like the size of a planet. It would be suicide, Source just couldn't handle it correctly and you'd be stuck with so much work you'd long since have given up before its even 10% completed with a scale such as that.

 

[Smawg]

They did it in star wars galaxies, cept that wasnt a first person shooter.

 

[Hazar]

How can you just mix different engines together?

wouldn't you have to reprogram the whole thing?

 

[babywax]

Those engines are designed from the ground up with the emphasis on large scale worlds. They dynamically load the massive terrain from a compressed file, in a radius around the player. That's atleast close to how SWG does it. However, SWG doesn't have physics enabled on almost all the objects in the world. To save that information alone would be VERY difficult. You would almost have to discard all information about physics when you left the level. (It will be interesting to see just how VALVe saves the physics information for barrels etc... when leaving the level, if they do it at all).

SWG isn't a first person shooter either, which enables much more CPU power to be allocated to the world instead of hit detection and things like that, which are required in a first person shooter.

Now, if you were clever enough, you technically COULD do this, but it would require lots of load zones. SWG *probably* uses heightmaps, which makes it very easy for them to generate lots and lots of terrain. HL2 however is sticking with BSP format, so although it gives you much more control over the map, it isn't exactly ideal for making terrain. Another downside to the BSP format is it can't LOD (level of detail) very well. With heightmaps you can use the computer to automatically generate LODs so less polygons are rendered when you're farther away from the objects. You can't do this with BSPs.

You mentioned World of Warcraft. Blizzard's engine is hardly high-tech (no offense to them, it's designed to work on older computers which is great). It has very low polycounts, whether or not you like the way the world looks it is very low on geometrical detail.

One more note: You would be better off using something like the Unreal engine or the Far Cry engine for a project like this. They are much better suited for large outdoor areas, and if your mod will likely take place almost all outdoors, they will much better suit you. It is possible for HL2 to do this, but it isn't exactly ideal.

I hope this clears some things up for you.

 

[ComradeBadger]

They did it in star wars galaxies, cept that wasnt a first person shooter.

Except thats a bloody MMORPG. Source isn't built for that.

Just wondering.. do you have any game modding experience at all...

 

[Smawg]

Nope, but I'm desperate.

 

[Sprafa]

hehe.

One of my projects is making something of the size of Portugal, but that would be mostly a desert (post global warming) Portugal, which means that you would have max 5 cities in a vast desert. I guess that can be made with a 50x50 km maps or something right?

 

[ComradeBadger]

Behold! As the physics break!



Anyway, I'd suggest getting some experience in game-modding first.

 

[Smawg]

Does anybody know if collins college is good for game design? Cause I'm gonna get down to business. I'm tired of this, I'm gonna make some damn good games.

 

[Argyll]

My theory:

If it's possible in Half-Life, it will be possible in Half-Life 2.

Other capabilities of Half-Life 2 can be found through watching the demos, reading Valve interviews/forum posts, and reading the HL2 FAQ.