5-19-98 7:05 PM
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Half-Life
Created by Valve Software
Published by Sierra
Fixed-Action Set in Motion dea
The first Valve-r I ran into was none other than Gabe Newell, the
company's Founder and Managing Director. 
As we walked into his
office, I immediately noticed something out of the ordinary (at least in a
PC game developer's office): a TV with a Nintendo
64 plugged into it. Being a bit of console game freak (and a freak
in general), I commented on how cool I thought Super
Mario 64 - that game that was in the N64' s cartridge slot - was. I
couldn't stop there, though; hoping to wow the presumably newbie-console
gamer with my feats of derring do, I shared the fact that I had also
completed the game with all 120 stars. Gabe nodded his head and said
"Yeah, I've beaten it three times with all 120 stars and am now in the
middle of my fourth time. I'm constantly amazed at just how fun Shigeru
Miyamoto (the game's designer -ed.) made it. As I play through, I try to
learn from some of the things he's doing with the game: why is it fun to
play through the same levels time after time? I'm hoping Half Life will
grip gamers in the same way." While my wacky hi-jinx on the N64 had been
dwarfed by Newell, my fragile ego wasn't bruised - I was too pre-occupied
at the notion of a game, a PC game no less, being more fun than Super
Mario 64.
After chatting for a bit about the N64, games in general, and the
Communist influence on Easter European elections, I was introduced to Ken
Birdwell, Valve's Senior Software Development Engineer. This is one of the
guys (Jay Stelly is the other...more on him later) responsible for
creating the Half-Life game engine. He also owns a Harley, which would make him
cool even if he programmed Gooch Grundy (which
he didn't, by the way). We got into the technical stuff almost
immediately. Birdwell began telling me about a new modification he made to
the skeletal animation system that would now allow a 6,000 polygon
character animate at 30 frames per second on hardware - using
interpolation, of course (until this recent breakthrough, the poly limit
on a baddie in Half Life was 3,000 - which is still amazingly complex).
Before we got much further, I wanted to understand exactly what the hell
the skeletal animation system did. I mean,
it sounds cool, but how does it
improve gameplay? In answer to the question, Birdwell pulled up a model of
the Alien Grunt. "OK, this guy is made up of a whole bunch of polys; if we
were to manipulate those polys in order to animate the character, the
frame rate would be unacceptable. So, I decided to use a skeletal
animation system in the hopes of getting more detailed baddies without the
unacceptably-high frame rate hit - by the way, I didn't invent the
skeletal animation system. You'll find info on it in just about any
computer animation text book - for some reason, no one has really picked
up yet."
