Half-Life Preview from E.C.T.S

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(Serious Health Warning: This document contains many instances of the word impressive)

   OK, first things first, this is essentially a rundown on what I saw at E.C.T.S and not any private preview I had with Valve. Having said that, very little of what I'm about to tell you has been on the net and will be new to most people.

Ughh, get on with it.

   I visited E.C.T.S on the first day (Sunday), unfortunately it took about 4 hours for me to get to London and when I got there it took ages for me to get my pass, and so I didn't get into the show until 2:00pm :( Well I thought I'd make the most of it (by going to the Cendant stand ;) Rang my buddy Far2cool and we met at the Cendant stand, he had gotten there much earlier in the morning and had seen the 45! minutes of the unfortunately but understandably rolling demo. (I'm cutting this short by getting rid of the talking and getting drinks :) man was it hot in there)

   What I'm basically going to do now, as this is (obviously) my first foray into the world of previewing, is just list each of the sections of the rolling demos that I can remember and particularly the ones that really stood out to me. This first one has been mentioned already by Atlaz (whom I met there) but its worth re-iterating as its quite impressive.

   You walk onto a platform at the top of some stairs and look over the railings at a "squad" of three human grunts facing the other way and going through their idle animations. The player selects a grenade and pulls the pin, tossing the grenade down behind them, this grenade doesn't just fall like a round physics model like in Quake 2 and other games with grenades, it tumbled and bounced just like an object of that shape would do in real life. On hearing the grenade bounce against the post next to them one of them looks down to his side at the grenade an yells "GRENADE" as he runs and they all try to take cover, one of the grunts gets the flak and flies forward flat on his face dead, the other two have taken cover and started returning fire from a crouched position behind the post.

    All the time this animation was so smooth and fluid it was almost to good to be true.

   The next demo I saw was from the office Mpeg. The scene starts in my memory with the Barney NPC at the beginning with the lip-sync sorted it looks very impressive as he talks to you, the final voices appear to have been implemented now. The first thing I notice is that the Gun sounds have been finalized and instead of the kinda strange sound you get from the Glock in the mpeg, it is now a full on BANG, very satisfying, as I found out all the gun sounds played sounded very realistic and powerful. I found out later while speaking to Gabe Newel that they were all sampled sounds from the real weapons.