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LikeYouMeanIt

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Please do not flame this, though I can see some flamage is inevitable!

I'm a pretty silent reader...I browse the forums almost daily and I haven't seen any information so far on the specific question I have to ask. If you guys know the answer please let me know, but don't go nuts and tell me to search around because I honestly haven't seen the answer anywhere.

I know that the source engine is very modable and the things that can be done are versitile. In the E3 2003 video (not 2004), there is one part where a strider shoots through a bridge with its beam and then proceeds to walk under the bridge. I'm curious as to the extent that thats been scripted, or, if its been scripted at all. The reason I'm not sure is because if you watch closely the top of the bridge catches on fire and the schrapnel and debris fly out in a very haphazard way. Would that scene be different every time you played that part, or was the destruction of that specifc event completely scripted? Are the destructive beams that the striders fire always producing scripted damage or is the damage very dynamtic to inanimate objects such as buildings, pillars, trees and the like. Do all things catch on fire...

basically my question is how much of the environmental damage to prefabs (such as buildings trees cars walls whatever) is scripted and how much is done dynamically through the engine.

Wow thats really scatterbrained but...meh. Its late and im tired :D
 
as far as i kno, e3 2k3 was VERY scripted, but 2k4 was NOT.
 
That instance of the strider shooting the bridge is most likely quite scripted. That's not going to happen to your average building.
 
guise said:
as far as i kno, e3 2k3 was VERY scripted, but 2k4 was NOT.
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Don't listen to the nay-sayers who have played the stolen build. They're highly exaggerating the situation
 
I suspect the way the bridge gets blown up is scripted in part, to what extent I don't know.

The way that the three metal letters on the bridge fly off and and spin down so symmetrically and perfectly, for a 'wow' effect, indicates that this part was scripted. I guess we'll find out when we come to that part of the game, and see if it happens again.

Also, in the 2004 E3 video the stone columns get destroyed by two different Striders, but the same destruction happens on both of them each time.
 
The AI is programmed to do 'cool' things, like blow up bridges and stuff. That may be the case here.

I read somewhere that a strider attempting to blow up a bridge and then crawl under was an unanticipated feature of the strider AI.
 
Shuzer said:
Don't listen to the nay-sayers who have played the stolen build. They're highly exaggerating the situation
Click to expand...

no theyre not.

they said that the stuff we saw in the e3 2003 video was scripted.

what conclusions you draw from that are up to you, but the fact remains that the video and scenes were scripted.

(no doubt ill get flamed by fanboys but meh.) im not saying the games AI wont be like that when its finished but just that what we saw was scripted.
 
LikeYouMeanIt said:
Please do not flame this, though I can see some flamage is inevitable!

I'm a pretty silent reader...I browse the forums almost daily and I haven't seen any information so far on the specific question I have to ask. If you guys know the answer please let me know, but don't go nuts and tell me to search around because I honestly haven't seen the answer anywhere.

I know that the source engine is very modable and the things that can be done are versitile. In the E3 2003 video (not 2004), there is one part where a strider shoots through a bridge with its beam and then proceeds to walk under the bridge. I'm curious as to the extent that thats been scripted, or, if its been scripted at all. The reason I'm not sure is because if you watch closely the top of the bridge catches on fire and the schrapnel and debris fly out in a very haphazard way. Would that scene be different every time you played that part, or was the destruction of that specifc event completely scripted? Are the destructive beams that the striders fire always producing scripted damage or is the damage very dynamtic to inanimate objects such as buildings, pillars, trees and the like. Do all things catch on fire...

basically my question is how much of the environmental damage to prefabs (such as buildings trees cars walls whatever) is scripted and how much is done dynamically through the engine.

Wow thats really scatterbrained but...meh. Its late and im tired :D
Click to expand...
Somebody from Valve made comments on that specific scene.

They've included something in the game called "contextual AI".

Here's the article actually, that was surprisingly easy to find. I love Google.

In the early designs, the Striders were going to walk on the sea floor in a big open area where it's pretty easy to have them cruising around. But once we built those cities, somebody ran the tests and said, "What if we run the Strider through there?" And then the contextual AI surprised us, because when the Strider came up to the bridge in the demo, it obviously made him stop. His AI assessed the situation and he tried to blow it away, but he couldn't. So then he crept down, went underneath it and popped back up. It was like, holy [grit - Ed], that's really cool.

So the game starts to develop itself at a certain point. Then you've got to say, "Okay, let's make sure the player doesn't get lost in a bunch of random stuff that keeps happening." You've got to build parameters around things to make sure it's not this completely open-ended piece of gibberish. But at certain points the technology takes over and all you have to do is set up circumstances and let the scene and the player do the rest. It's really about putting the game in the player's hands, this idea of combining the contextual AI and the physics and allowing you to play scenes in multiple ways.
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Source: http://gamesradar.msn.co.uk/feature...onid=1639&pagetypeid=2&articleid=27384&page=2
 
According to the valve info thread, Source doesn't have a scripting language. Based on that information, I would very much doubt the scripted-ness of that scene :).
 
The bulk of the AI uses AI hints. It doesn't give a strict path for the NPC characters to follow (like the way points did in HL) instead it just gives the NPC a small hint as to where it can go.
 
Well they have said that the AI uses path-finding and points to move, but somewhat differently than in HL1 and overally better.
 
ScopeD said:
Well they have said that the AI uses path-finding and points to move, but somewhat differently than in HL1 and overally better.
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They haven't said anything about using waypoints as far as I know.

Just the AI hints which are a bit different.
 
chris thanks for that quote about the strider AI, thats really cool! :thumbs:
 
Chris_D said:
They haven't said anything about using waypoints as far as I know.

Just the AI hints which are a bit different.
Click to expand...

Well they said, I try to dig it. :|
 
And then the contextual AI surprised us, because when the Strider came up to the bridge in the demo, it obviously made him stop. His AI assessed the situation and he tried to blow it away, but he couldn't. So then he crept down, went underneath it and popped back up.
Click to expand...
OMG!!1 It is real artificial intelligence! Striders will taek over teh world! :eek:
 
In the E3 2004 demo (the two strider scenes), while the strider took different routes, and the fighting was definately different, the pillars got destroyed in the same way. True, the strider was given an A.I hint to so something cool like destrying the pillars, so A.I working there however the pillars collapsed in the way Valve coded them to. So I don't think you'll see them break in a different form.

As far as I can see, things will get destoryed in the same way. So maybe the strider might attack that bridge from the other side, even furthur away but the three letters and the bridge would collapse in the same way.

Hope that answers your question.
 
Unless they had a Red Faction-esque deformation system then the world will be made of solid objects and (assuming it's the same as HL1) func_breakable objects. PC Gamer for some reason started a rumour that whole buildings could be destroyed - which isn't true.

Yeah, sure both videos showed the pillars being destroyed but I can guarentee it won't do it every single time. Either there's an AI hint telling the Strider that it can do something cool with it or the Strider's AI detects it is breakable itself and makes the choice to do so or not.
 
Chris_D said:
Unless they had a Red Faction-esque deformation system then the world will be made of solid objects and (assuming it's the same as HL1) func_breakable objects. PC Gamer for some reason started a rumour that whole buildings could be destroyed - which isn't true.

Yeah, sure both videos showed the pillars being destroyed but I can guarentee it won't do it every single time. Either there's an AI hint telling the Strider that it can do something cool with it or the Strider's AI detects it is breakable itself and makes the choice to do so or not.
Click to expand...

Chris, I'm sure those pillars won't break untill the strider isn't hinted to, and I understand your point. However, the person who started this thread said would they break in the same manner?

e.g: the bottom of one pillar collapses, the other breaks into two smaller pieces. Would the same destruction animation happen again?

That's his question, I suppose.
 
Yeah it is. npcs don't magically crawl under things unless they're specifically coded to know how to react to a smaller arpeture. The Strider ducking would have been cool to see, but shouldn't have surprised the developers at all.
 
it would have surprised me if i had helped to create it! basically, i would expect them to be excited to see such a thing
 
FictiousWill said:
Yeah it is. npcs don't magically crawl under things unless they're specifically coded to know how to react to a smaller arpeture. The Strider ducking would have been cool to see, but shouldn't have surprised the developers at all.
Click to expand...


They would have programmed it to say something like:

If you see rubble that is above this hight, walk over it.

If you see Rubble this hight, walk around it.

You are this hight, if you find an obstruction, lower leg joint C and advance for a distance of 4 meters to clear overhead obstical.

Obviously, not in Lay terms like that, but the coding would be something like that.

The designers obviously would know that it can do it, but were probably just suprised that it would be able to do it so flawlessless. Obviously they can only code so much into its judging ability so there are limits. Trying to incorporate every situation it might encounter would be completly impossible, and if it was, it would declair itself self aware and launch nukes at Russia.
 
I see think it would be pretty impressive to see the AI adapt to walk through a city. AI may not have been programmed like this: if(objectheight < striderheight) duck; most likely it would've tried to adjust itself for smaller areas. The Strider is controlled in a different way to just using animations, look at the way its feet are always on the ground, even on unlevel ground.

As for the pillars, the pillars are set up to break when they get shot. The player moves between the pillars and the Strider shoots at him. This isn't a scripted event, it's just the same as blowing up a wall in the first Half-Life. I bet if you got a rocket launcer and shot the pillars, they would fall down.

It could be seen as a scripted event in the way that "every time the pillars are shot they fall down" but that's just a board definition of scripting you may as well say "Evertime Gordon gets shot he loses health, so the game is definately scripted".
 
I cant remember, but how does the strider stay standing when he skiwers that guy. Does he rock back and lean forward so that he lands the 3rd leg on the target and retains balance, or is it just magic.
 
can't remember myself, and am at work so cant check but hope someone else knows?
 
It just leans back a bit on its hind legs.
 
ahhh thats cool to know, thanks for the tidbit...
 
HL2 doesn't even have a scripting language, per se, so nothing we have seen so far is scripted. They do have AI hints and so on, however, to tell the AI when it can do something cool.
 
mrchimp said:
I'm glad that valve really did say that and I didn't imagine it :farmer:
Click to expand...

Same here. :D

Striders apparently have extremely good balnce, or their spike feet just anchor them to the ground, since they can stand on two feet and use the thrid to kick stuff or fling it. Gyroscopes, maybe.
 
Humans can stand on 2 legs too :D With a 3rd leg, everything would be much easier ;) On the other hand, standing on 1 leg ain't that hard either.
 
Chris_D said:
They haven't said anything about using waypoints as far as I know.
Click to expand...
A screen of the new VHE showed yellow boxes exactly the same as path nodes in hammer for HL1 all down coridors.

In the early designs, the Striders were going to walk on the sea floor in a big open area...
Click to expand...
Now THAT is cool. Who would ever have though that would happen? We'd see it and fall out of our chairs! :D
 
Wow

Haha. I found out a lot of really cool info in this thread. Chris, thanks for taking the time to search that up mate...but a lot of people looked at my post and assessed the kind of "side question" that I was asking.

I did want to know about the AI and how they reacted to objects that had a sort of 'breakable' tag associated with them, but my main question was about the actual destructiveness of the environemnt. I knew that it wasn't going to be like red-factions geomod system (that game had so much potential and that ended up being major suckage), but I wanted to know if all the things that are breakable in the city are broken the same way.

Valve has had five years to do this game up. The terrains found in the game are absolutely huge. LIke...the scope of the game (to me) is ginormous. I wonder if someone from valve could give us an estimate of how many virtual miles of map are in the final game (haha I hope the big guy above is watching ;)

But thanks for taking the time to find that, it was an interesting read (though I think I read it ago a long time ago).
 
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