Half-Life is a great game, and also has many fantastic free addons made by fans (such as USS Darkstar, the They Hunger trilogy, Azure Sheep, etc, from www.moddb.com), and you really should play the fantastic first official addon, Opposing Force. The other official addon, Blue Shift, isn't much good at all, being very short, addng nothing of interest, and being just all-round disappointing. Azure Sheep is actually based on almost the same premise as Blue Shift, but is a thousand times better, and is free.

I hear Decay is pretty good. It's a two-player co-op mode originally included in the PSX release, but it's been ported back to the PC.

Dont listen to all the haters. Blue shift is alright.

d1stortion wrote:

Also MiniGL crashes when the resolution is set to >1024x768.

Understandably, since that particularly MiniGL driver was specifically designed for Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo2.

Later Banshee drivers don't have to use it 😀

So if I have a high resolution monitor, the better option would be a Geforce at 1600 x 1200 with OpenGL?

Kerr Avon wrote:

The other official addon, Blue Shift, isn't much good at all, being very short, addng nothing of interest, and being just all-round disappointing.

The only thing that disappointed me about Blue Shift was how short it was. Other than that, I enjoyed it.

Of course, I also liked the Xen levels of Half-Life while most people seem to hate them.

Awesome game and you're in for a real treat. I originally played it on a P4-2.4/Voodoo5 and it was very playable but occasionally got sluggish in massive energy-weapon fights. When I upgraded to a 9700pro/128mb it ran smooth as silk at 1280 IIRC. I ran it on the final official patch.

The final level is brutal...

Nah, the final boss is a crybaby - a big, bad crybaby 😁 😁 😁

If you play Black Mesa instead you don't have to worry about the shitty Xen level.

Nihilanth can be killed quickly. There is a easy way to do this. 😎

Black Mesa is still unfinished. It's a fine game, but rather overrated.

DosFreak wrote:

If you play Black Mesa instead you don't have to worry about the shitty Xen level.

The thing I liked about the Xen levels is that they're environments that you won't find in the real world. Granted, you probably won't be running around a huge, underground base in real life, but 99% of it still looks like any other real-life building. I like that games can take me to new and exotic alien worlds that don't exist in reality.

I'm with you there. I can't stand real-world location in games unless there is something different about it. Ex: Duke Nukem 3D, Half-Life.

Still didn't like Xen tho. 😀

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

So if I have a high resolution monitor, the better option would be a Geforce at 1600 x 1200 with OpenGL?

Direct3D for overbrights. HL's OpenGL support clamps that for legacy compatibility.

It's intact in the original CD version.

leileilol wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

So if I have a high resolution monitor, the better option would be a Geforce at 1600 x 1200 with OpenGL?

Direct3D for overbrights. HL's OpenGL support clamps that for legacy compatibility.

What are "overbrights", please?

Kerr Avon wrote:

What are "overbrights", please?

Doubled lightmap sampling which causes light samples above full bright to appear much brighter. This can give out more volumnous appearances of light.

This feature goes back to Quake v1.00 starting July 1996. It wasn't implemented in GLQuake (clamped) and Quake2's GL renderer (that shifted darker) but it returned in Quake3.

leileilol wrote:

Kerr Avon wrote:

What are "overbrights", please?

Doubled lightmap sampling which causes light samples above full bright to appear much brighter. This can give out more volumnous appearances of light.

This feature goes back to Quake v1.00 starting July 1996. It wasn't implemented in GLQuake (clamped) and Quake2's GL renderer (that shifted darker) but it returned in Quake3.

I see, thanks.

Ditto, and I'm continually in awe of the technical knowledge of Vogoners.

I'm also playing Half Life ( 98se); and Opposing Force. Only patched it with Blueshift-Opposing Force CD's included patch (not using highdef package). Game doesn't run good with Opengl on my end (pcx5750 with unofficial 82.69 drivers has focus and slowdown issues with opengl). Direct3D runs a treat however (1280x960 and 8x anisotropic filtering) and using A3D+EAX as well (live! value with WDM drivers).

When I tried A3D on my Vortex2 it sounded incredibly muffled and horrible in Uplink. Though I've read they made some changes to it in a later patch.

A3D on Live! is just a software emulation of 1.x AFAIK which a lot of sound cards have. The game uses 2.0 though so in theory an Aureal card should be better at that positioning stuff. Too bad A3D in practice has nasty clicks and pops going on which make it not all that enjoyable when using headphones.