New Half-Life 2 development lore drop!
It’s a wild ride to read. It’s about a very niche bug that softlocks the game but somehow the bug can travel back in time and even affect the original retail version of Half-Life 2.
TLDR: the bug
The softlock happens because an NPC is standing in the way of a door. This didn’t happen in the original because it was compiled using the old-school Intel x87 floating point handling and not the (relatively) more modern SSE behaviour, which does cause the softlock. The bug managed to time travel to the retail build because modern compilers use SSE instead of x87.
I like this one:
Also, whacking the manhacks with your crowbar goes from being a panicked flailing in flatscreen, to being an elegant one-swing home-run hit in VR.
It makes me like the fact that there are no melee weapons in Half Life: Alyx even less, though.
I’m watching a playthrough of HL: Alyx right now and I’m about two hours in, and it’s really disappointing that there’s no crowbar. Or similar. What a staple to miss in such a game.
Floating point values: making your software misbehave out of nowhere since the year
NaN.Very cool.
Also Valve is legitimately one of the only devs who kept original source code from 2004.
Even Blizzard lost the original World of Warcraft code.
Sadly it was said that valve lost the source code to Prospero, the other game they were working on alongside Half-Life.
I also think they had vaporized Gunman Chronicles because they don’t have the source code.
That was a pretty neat and fun story :) Thanks for sharing it. I never new that hw is also active on mastodon :)
This is actually an incredible coincidence; I love reading these stories but it’s usually in the context of a speedrunner exploiting them rather than a poor dev asking “how did this ever work!?”
That was a fun read, thanks for sharing!
