Hey guys, I just thought I would bring it to the greater communities attention that there is a port of the open sourced Half-Life engine to Xbox, and I have been beta testing it for the past few days for the developer. Well today he has decided to release an open beta for people running consoles with stock 64mb of ram. Before it was only possible to play it on 128mb system, but all of that has changed now. This is an older video, but you can see what he got working on 128mb ram systems. He kind of needs some help squeezing every last ounce of ram out of the console to be able to run the full thing with all textures, as right now we are forced to run with the null texture on character models, so it needs to be fixed some more. I am unsure if I am able to post a link to the actual thread, so somebody please tell me that is an admin. It is at a popular Xbox emulation site if you catch my drift. Here is the post from the developer which I am copying in full. Click to expand for download links of the beta.
Has he looked into downsampling? Downsampling ambiant sounds and dialogs with scientists would be an obvious choice. As far as memory goes, some of the textures could be made smaller, either by palette reduction or actual resizing, or using a more compressed format, but that might be a lot of work.
I didn't think about downsampling audio, that is a great idea. I did mention to him about how the Dreamcast version was possible much in part due to the great texture compression. He then added some basic texture compression. We have been brainstorming for better ideas on how to get it under 64mb. I think another thing the Dreamcast version had done was split up some of the larger levels into smaller areas, and he discussed going that route as a last resort. Actually, I wonder, if he were to use the Dreamcast versions levels, if that might actually help it run better since they were already split up in many cases? I think I will discuss this with him. I still think it is incredible how they got it running on the DC with 16mb of ram, while using more detailed textures and models than what this port is using. We will eventually be able to use either DC or PS2 models with it, but that will further tax the resources. Full mod support will also hopefully come in the future when he can get the game to load custom dll's, but much like the Dreamcast version, basic mods can be ported much like They Hunger, Paranoia and U.S.S. Darkstar.
Well, they probably spent a good amount of time building an optimized version of the GoldSrc engine for the Dreamcast, with some low-level optimizations and dedicated filetypes. You often have a tradeoff of portability vs optimization. As good as it is, Xash is a multiplatform project; this often means it's not optimally optimized on targets other than the most popular ones (e.g. modern-ish windows pc in Xash case).
They were already split up in the pc version. You just don't notice it as much because modern pcs load hl levels in less then a second.
You're partially right. Levels were split in the PC version, but they split some levels further into parts for the Dreamcast version. And if you played HL1 on a Pentium II with a contemporary platter HDD, you noticed the 20s loading times between the level parts .
Yeah, I know the levels were all connected and split, but yeah what I meant was that they split some in half to make them load on a system with much more limited ram than could fit them on a PC. So the Dreamcast versions maps might actually be the key to getting it running better on Xbox, but you would just have more frequent loading sections. And since it would be loading from a HDD in most cases, loading wouldn't be as slow as on the DC version either.
Don't quote me on that, but I think HLDC BSPs are different than the PC ones. If that's the case, it wouldn't be as easy as a simple swap.
Well, not sure if this would help or not, but one of my friends ported all assets from HLDC to PC and created the mod Half-Life Dreamcast. Perhaps those could be looked at since I am sure they might already all be converted and everything? Not sure about the loading sections on the mod or how frequent they were, but I did play it from start to finish about 2 years ago. http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-dreamcast
I used to have a demo version of half life years ago and played the hell out of that game. Awesome to see this port, never aware of this so thanks for posting!
I sincerely doubt that, this should be a last resort. Just like the author said. As I it, see the code is very unoptimised in and of itself. Then there's resources like textures which can be downsampled or compressed. I really think that level size is the least of the problems with this port.
Oh, you should play Half-Life again, it's still a fantastic game. And some of it's free mods, such as USS Dark Star, Azure Sheep, the They Hunger trilogy, etc, are really good. Plus it received two expansion packs, Opposing Force (which is excellent, my favourite of all the Half-Life games, including Half-Life 2), and Blue Shift (which isn't much good, and it's very short, you're better off playing the mod Azure Sheep, as Azure Sheep and Blue Shift have the same premise - you play as a security guard (probably Barnie, who you (as Gordan Freeman) meet again in Half-Life 2) and have to escape the dangers of Black Mesa, but whereas Blue Shift is bland and short, Azure Shift is often fantastic, and even lets you fight through the levels that you see as you ride on the tram at the start of the original Half-Life game.
im pretty sure if the guy doing this has enough skill to port the thing to Xbox (unless its really simple and nobody has done it yet besides him) then he's not stupid enough to not consider the smaller map sizes, audio downsampling, as you guys have mentioned. its most definitely a matter of difficulty i think the poor performance is due to the fancy bells and whistles added to Xash. like the fancy lighting, they have some physics added, probably a crapload of other stuff under the hood. half-life itself might not use these, but it still creates memory bloat, and i'd imagine a crapload more instructions to execute per clock cycle hopefully this guy continues working on this, and completes it i've never tried running a DC BSP on PC, but in many cases PC BSPs work on Dreamcast by dragging and dropping into the game PAK. the only cases when a map needs to be recompiled for DC or PC is when there's a map entity for a function\event that does not exist in the Dreamcast binary. The entity must be removed and\or map needs to be reworked so the game can proceed without crashing, or being stuck because of a NULL scripted sequence. this is one of the many reasons i spent so long on the Dreamcast HLSDK extension library stuffs. new entities are defined there
