Oct 31, 05:00 AM
So I finally got around to posting this video of our newest Half-Life 2 Aleph mod. The embedded video is below, although the quality’s really bad so you should probably grab the 30MB video here.
What you’re seeing is our real-time bullet metrics, as opposed to our precalculated metrics. You walk through a level and you see, locally rendered, bullet paths from previous run-throughs of the level are rendered alongside paths from this run-through. Red lines are enemy bullets that hit the player, blue lines are player bullets that hit an enemy, and black lines are bullets that missed their targets.
You don’t see it in the video, but if you stop and take a look at a bullet path it’s actually an arrow so you have a sense of direction in addition to orientation.
— Darius Kazemi
Oct 3, 11:51 AM
Well, I’ve implemented a “live replay” in Half Life 2. This means that as I run around the level, I see all my previous plays running around with me.
It sometimes feels very strange, because I presciently predict myself. I’ll blow up some crates and watch my former selves dive through the gap as if responding. I’ll watch my former selves leap onto moving platforms before (or after) the platform actually goes by, or run around stacking bricks that refuse to move.
It’s a very strange feeling – these previous play-throughs feel more “alive” than the ghost cars or race markers you typically see. Its not something that you really understand through a screenshot.
Fortunately, I heard about these things called “movies”...
Here’s a thirty second clip I call “counting sheep”. The Google version below is slightly painful in its compression-ness, so you can get a nicer version direct from us on our own servers.
There are a lot of other interesting places, too. Any place with a lot of enemies or a puzzle is interesting. I watch myself fall into the water far too much.
This exact form of playback probably isn’t terribly useful, but the methods used here can also support several other kinds of visualization that are useful, like an overhead replay or a moment-to-moment heat map of where players usually are right now. Watching that would be like watching a wave roll through the level. It would be really interesting.
— Craig Perko
Sep 24, 03:01 PM
We’ve been working on Half-Life 2 metrics for a few weeks now. We wrote a mod for the game which integrates events that occur with our Aleph Metrics Suite. So we put Aleph code in the game to capture events in the game like gunfire and put them in a database. Then we use the Aleph readers to grab the data back out of the database.
This is different from our Quake III visualizations, because we’re doing these in the game engine itself and not in an editor. So you load up the game, go into a level, and then send a command to enable visualization of what’s happened to other people who have played the level.
In this picture, you really get a sense of the frantic gunfights going on here. You can even look up and see where enemies were perched, since there’s clearly points up there where someone was standing and firing from:
I love this picture because it reminds me of abstract art:
And in this one you can clearly see perch points again, and also kind of eyeball the level and see all the gunfire that happened in the trench below:
— Darius Kazemi
