Half-Life 4/20/01 Dreamcast prototype Found!

You can find scans of that one here:
https://www.retromags.com/files/file/3341-official-sega-dreamcast-magazine-issue-008-november-2000/

I remember that issue, good times.

 

Sweet thanks man! I forgot about a lot of the issues being scanned. Been meaning to redownload them all since I had a HDD crash.

 

Hmm maybe iam blind but all the character models are the dc version. I dont see a ps2 model. they all have basic hands , no cuffs or in some instances modeled faces.

 

I don t think a physical disc including multiplayers exist. The Half life cancelling was early to found this second disc.

The code for sure exist. The best way to have this is to found who have leaked the games in 2003 (The original source)

 

@TerdFerguson if thats difficult let it be. at least we can all have a good pc version. @accel99 dont know why this happen i dont remember ps2 version that well edit
@accel99 remember now not all ps2 models are going to be compatible thats why. here are all the ps2 models, if anyone want to get his hands dirty http://www.mediafire.com/file/otngh2zhkjy/PS2_models.rar

 

Yep, I feel the same way. I was speaking with my friend who is a WAY bigger Half-Life fan than pretty much anybody else I know, and we discussed the same thing. It was canceled way too soon for a disc like that to exist, however for sure the code for that potential build would most certainly exist on a devkit somewhere, but not on a physical disc.

If something like this beta you ripped for us can exist, and have been lost and out in the world unbeknownst to most fans, then why not the code for the MP build on a devkit? Problem is, we may never see it released or found in our lifetime, but I do remain optimistic.

Again Laurent, thank you for dumping this GDR for us. I speak for all of us here I think, when I say we can't thank you enough for all the betas you have given us over the years, as well as this.

 

I think a guys from gearbox have this code in his archive. A Dev save generaly some of his works but in secrets

Its the way to follow for found a days this code...

 

well its not Too difficult. its just a matter of play testing to find which sections of the map crash the engine. inspect those portions of the map for Worldcraft entities that are not referenced in the halflife-dc binary and remove them. this could require skipping entire portions of a map and the story (the code for end boss). but it is possible to get MOST of opposing force playable all the way through the best we can

all 3 expansions can sit on one CDR too. when i said i made a mod with the valve logo\valve sound and PS2 menu bacground image and music, the purpose of that was to create "Half-Life+" for DC. but i knew opposing force required more man power and not many people at all were interested when i was doing my deep ass half life dc research (probably best on the internet)

if there were a few people interested in making a team project of getting opposing force working on dreamcast, not caring at all about important segments that will most definately require to be skipped, i will be very willing to help with the entity removal, i just don't have a GDEMU or similar to test each map revision

then there's the whole thing of, if half life could "see" an internet connection; we can set masterlists and connect to whatever server we want. and if the legitimate dll mod extensions could be used like pc the possibility are endless. largest elephant in the room for the dc scene in my opinion, its like right there in front of our faces

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edit: the "half-life+" release i mentioned
https://dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=9869&p=95521#p95521
http://dreampipe.net/hldc/mods/plus/

needs a lot of work but everyone can agree its a really exceptional start

 

yes i agree such projects cant be done by one person. adding all three senarios the size can go up to 700+mb but wont take full gd space. you can use the latest demul for testing, demul compatibility for wince games getting better and better. some freezes here and there but it can be used for testing. the good thing is if a wrong file is used the game will freeze in loading giving error that can help you track the problematic file (most of the times). i just revisit your hl+ it has 4 problems is uses models that were in the very first pc half life game. the game freeze in loading screen at the map the hazardrous suit is located (no error message though) the scientist doent speak when action button is pressed. the menu music not the one that starts with the valve logo but the one in the main menu if you pause the game that music will not start. if you stay long in the pause menu and exit it will play for long time during game play. in my custom release that keeps those menu customs additions i removed that sound for that reason.

 

yes, i also used the maps from PC. but i assume its too large for DC memory and freezes on memory overflow. i tried to make it like a perfect PC port but for obvious reasons i just left it as-is, i also wanted to see if there was any noticable framerate increase with the reduction of model geometry

yes that's because i changed the "menu main" string in the binary to something else, then set an "alias" in the CFGs to play the menu bgm on both pause and main menu. from what i can tell, when you pause then un-pause the sound will only play in the area you were standing in, like a map entity was generated, once you move away the sound fades and stops. it was the only way to get the music to play

i used a similar method to get opposing force to start using a THIRD gamedir

to fix the model and map crashes, it would be a simple fix of replacing the models with the DC models again and the same with the maps

if i'm derailing the thread someone let me know

 

no i dont think you derailing the threat. we are speaking about mods and enchantments for half life (my humble opinion) i had test that, to place the original models back in valve\pak0.pak (thats original half life but impacts blueshift and o.f too) i see difference in models in o.f that way but crashes radomly again.

 

Awesome find I really love HalfLife the PC ver is my favorited game ever since I played that amazing uplink demo all those years ago*Controversial but I think OpFor is the tighter experience it took everything that was awesome in HL and packaged it up so well and added some awesome enemies and weapons and lots of awesome grunt solider chatter.

*Interesting also that uplink is available on the PS2 version from a demo disk of sorts.

I've played the "Gold Ver" on off for several years even getting close to the end struggling through the load times and memory crashes. In the end I really wanted to love the DC version too but the framerate is just a little to janky I even splurged years after the DC's death to find a ps2 mouse converter and a JPN keyboard to try it again.

Is there anyway to force a lower rendering resolution for this title? I'm guessing if it was a conf.ini of sorts it would be trivial to do.

Is the framerate a little better in this older build?

Is it possible to downsample audio and or non-essential textures so some maps wont crash?

My guess is from nothing more than the Worldcraft documents that shipped with HL that the nav and the CPU AI calculations is what IMO kill the FPS on this game. I remember reading that I need to put lots of nav points in my maps so entities could successfully travers my maps.

 

the new improve version i upload doesnt crash. but if you using stock gdrom forget it, it wont be enjoyable.

 

yes, there are an abundance of graphics related cvars that can potentially improve the framerate, but you'd have to figure them out on your own. and yes the new cvars can be set in CFGs like PC half-life

i've played about 2/3+ of the 2003 leak, and i've never gotten one crash. i honestly don't understand the framerate complaints considering most people with PCs in the late 90s struggled to run HL, and there's probably plenty of 7th and 8th gen games that take longer to load than HLDC, just my opinion, i think its just placebo of people saying "bad framerates and load times" but its not that bad

 

The framerate and load time itself isn't bad to be honest. The games lack of brightness and fluctuating framerate makes me feel physically ill. Only other game that does that quake 3 on PC at 60 fps but the DC version is fine for me especially in third person. I don't actually understand what makes half life so demanding to be honest, can't be graphics so IAM guessing ai or something else under the hood like ram usage.

Btw does half life DC support 3rd person view?

 

It is due to trying to get a game like that working with such paltry 16mb ram. Plus they upgraded the graphics a fair bit for the DC, more like what a remaster is nowadays vs the original 1998 PC release. Remember, Windows CE didn't leave a whole lot of overhead to run the game very well. That is why we didn't see more games use it I believe. You have to run the OS, then the game on top of that. Not as low level as say with the Katana developed games. There was a much earlier build of the game discovered which was developed with the Katana SDK, but in the end they decided to go the easier route and port with Win CE. That Katana build has surfaced a few times in the past years for exorbitant prices on eBay but nobody has ever bought and dumped it.

As much as this is my favorite FPS on DC I won't sugar coat it. It suffers from some pretty bad framerate issues and loading times can be considered too frequent due to some levels being split up, but compared to Soldier of Fortune's up to 2.5 minute load times, 15 seconds for HL pales in comparison. However it isn't unplayable by any means. Sure it can dip under 20fps at times, which is what sucks the most, but when it runs well and frames are consistent it is a great experience on the DC and pretty different still compared to the PC original, PS2 version, AND modern Steam releases with HD models from PS2. So it does deserve to be played. Especially since the weapons are so completely different in many cases from PS2 and PC original models.

What Gearbox pulled off here is nothing short of amazing since they updated the visuals and other things. Blue Shift has much better performance though since it was created from the ground up with the Dreamcast's specs in mind.

If we can blame anything here for the poor performance, it is the low ram, as I fully believe if the DC would have had 32mb of ram, it would have given many games a huge boost in performance.

That version of HL made a few years back for DC where the PC models were modded in actually should make performance much better. The early HL mods like They Hunger run amazingly on the Dreamcast, as well as U.S.S. Darkstar. So if we can take and make just 1 more super optimized release by using more of the PC models to free up resources, we could have a much more complete and optimized game. We just need to sacrifice visuals a tiny bit. Levels should stay though as they are already optimized.

 

I always wondered if there was any truth to them wanting to retool it using the Katana SDK instead.

 

in other news blue shift is ported by a fan to ps2, and the stable release is less than a month ago. i play it yesterday it has 3 builds to play with. one with ps2 models one with dc models and one with pc models. an opposing force port is highly demanded too. https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-blue-shift-playstation-2-mod

 

We can see the two kind of models, so you have replaced the first by the second ones ?
I try to see some differences between gold and your patched version and I notice anything. The new models are only for blue shift ? There are others patched models than we can see in your link ?
It"s why you have called it "blue" ?

 

not sure what you asked. the customized gdi that i released compared with the half life gold.