Counting Sheep in Half Life 2
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.
Kinda some meta-consciousness play going on – your succesive ghosts are increasingly influenced by prior patterns, so the notion of objective data goes out the window.
I wonder how this applies to the “challenge integral” phenomena I experienced playing games on emulators. In that sense, its a parrallel ghosting instead of concurrent, where you save at finer and finer intervals, playing over an over, until even the most exacting challenge can be met through iterative replay.
— Patrick · Oct 5, 02:22 PM · #