Comments I'm bored of reading: "Of course some of these are breakable. Why would they make two separate objects for the same thing just to make one breakable and one not?" 1. They already are separate objects. Practically everything that isn't an NPC or weapon is brushwork. 2. You say this as if that takes effort. You can make a breakable thing unbreakable with one click. 3. People in the comments have said the actual reason is the Unforeseen Consequences was made first, then Anomalous Materials, so things were copied over and not made unbreakable because it didn't affect anything. "Obviously those things have a lot of health because they didn't want you to break them" At 2:30 I say there are three parts to the wall. 2 can be broken by the player. At 3:00 the 3rd part of the wall is broken. The player cannot break every breakable thing. Some of them can only be broken by certain conditions being met. This is controlled with a flag. The proper way to stop a player from breaking something is to actually make it impossible to break, not give it a bunch of health. "Some things had to be made breakable for some technical reason" No.
Wow, these are the comments you're getting? Clearly coming from people who have never used Worldcraft. Takes 5 minutes of learning to discover func_wall and func_breakable
The majority of it is hardcoded in the props config file like being breakable and such, or was likely just copy and pasted. Just like how you have different footstep sounds for different materials it comes from a config file for the prop.
Same here. I would also admittedly shoot corpses to sort of paint the area around their death with more blood to make it more gorey and/or to suit my level of immersion. This evolved later in life to creating massive scenes in Gmod where I would spend hours positioning ragdolls and particle effects, bodies, blood etc. Man I'm weird.
@@AbeTweakin I would always gib bodies with the crowbar. It was especially satisfying with the glitchy way it would swing 50 times a second when hitting a corpse. I also did stuff like that in Halo CE, where I'd smack dead bodies and produce so much blood, the game would start lagging.
As we've seen from the alpha builds of Half-Life, the ceiling in the cafeteria being breakable is a leftover artifact from early versions of the map where you'd crawl through the space up there and need to stick to metal beams cause the tiles you'd just fall through. Except it sucked and was very easy to softlock yourself so amongst other parts they cut that chunk.
The zombie breaking through the boarded off door with 9999 health made me question how fucking jacked the scientists in Black Mesa were the first time I played through Half Life.
I’m pretty sure that being able to pull your weight both physically & intellectually is actually a requirement for a LOT of STEM jobs IRL, so being able to do that from carrying heavy equipment around isn’t too much of a stretch. The alterations that the zombification process does to the host probably also play a part
@@lyokianhitchhiker Yeah I could understand that. Now please explain at what point a scientist would need to have the strength to break through a solid piece of wood that is seemingly immune to all forms of damage (including gunfire, explosions, alien weaponry, etc) and exactly how much stronger you'd have to be after zombification to do it.
@@spineappletea I'm not saying they’d need the strength to do that, just that having it is a side effect of all the heavy lifting they already do. As to the zombie thing? That’s just me spitballing.
@@lyokianhitchhiker Normal people generally don't put 100% of their strength into any action, unless they're fully aware that their life depends on it. But a headcrab has no reason not to use all of the host's resources in order to get another victim that is within reach.
@@NotWendy3yes, even when people assume they're using 100% o their strength it usually isn't. The body actually puts limits on the amount of strength used to stop your muscles from tearing themselves apart. The limit are only released when someone is in a life or death situation. This is what allows people to get the strength to lift entire cars off of trapped children, etc.
At the beginning it's the wrong security guard, the one you can kill is found right before you enter the control room of the test chamber. From there you push him to the rotating elevator and line him up at the right spot and then activate the elevator to crush him. Lymphoid made a video about it a while back.
@@BlueNeon16GD It may not be relevant, but from testing I found that it doesn't work at all if you have the "HD" models enabled, which until recently was the default.
@@yless42 but I'm playing it on mobile devices and i downloaded the hd version of xash it's still work at first then after i tried it second time it doesn't work like the video
I remember breaking that wooden door with the zombie and gonarch's lair floor manually, because when i was little i usually played using cheats. So with enough time to waste, i eventually did it. Years later when i replayed the game, i forgot that i used cheats and tought "but i could swear i broke it before". Now i understand why.
Some of these can be explained as copy-pasted prefabs (a feature of Hammer Editor, its basically a library of assets) that happened to be breakable. Like the note board or trash can, they were made with specific scale and breakable properties, and then imported in other maps. As for glass, maybe they scripted their editor to always make glass textured objects be breakable, thus making the workflow on maps faster.
You have to make the glass into a func breakable or wall. Then you have to set the texture to be rendered differently. It was probably just a habit to make make the glass a breakable.
@@Underqualified_Gunman Ngl its goofy to imagine that dev's muscle memory made them unnecessarily assign func breakable to every single glass window, aside being less plausible than a simple script to automate the process.
It might have been necessary to make the glass func_breakable (or func_wall) for it to be semitransparent. There are obviously other transparent (but not breakable) surfaces in the game, but the pixels of those textures are always entirely see-through (alpha 0) or entirely opaque (alpha 1 or 255). So it's not out of muscle memory or because of some script, but manually done out of necessity.
A lot of those seen in anom materials is due to Unforseen consequences being made first then a few valve devs worked on a pre disaster intro to the game making anomalous materials.
The early levels are easy to explain. Since you'd need to backtrack thru them anyway, only one copy was made, with breakable objects all in place. Then just copy pasted level geometry into a later level. The later like broken filing cabinets, probably has to do with triggers and duplicate entity names. All func_breakable can be assigned names for designing set pieces with their help, and in that case, the entity names were duplicates as a result of being copy pasted. And since they have the same entity names, the seemingly unrelated objects break at the same time. From my small time mapping for counterstrike, I remember this system was called prefabs. You just made a bunch of small objects that would be useful throughout, and you could subsequently just paste them around all your maps as needed.
@@CallOfCutie69 technically, a trigger calling for an activation of a function of an entity, and since entities have duplicate names, they all trigger by the same trigger.
The unbreakable door behind the breakable door reminds me of a great book I read (I can't remember which one sadly, maybe Going Postal?) where the main character digs through a block in their jail cell wall with a plastic spoon, only to find behind it another new wall with a new spoon.
If I had to make a random guess, the door was a wall texture but they couldnt get it to react properly to being hit so they just put a real door on top of it
Wooden board at 2:14 can be broken "legally" if you get grenades from "secret" in next level and backtrack, door have small gap where grenade can slip trough. Also another really amusing thing on this level, in second room where twitching zombie sits on chair and looks at blinking laptop, there two ways to kill the zombie, first one is... just kill it, and second one is break laptop and zombie will die.
1:35 I've been playing this game since it came out, and until now I had no idea that the scientist says 'quick!', I could never hear him say it over the sound of the console breaking.
I remember looking at the source file for that early intro map with the laser and thought man that was clever how they cut that body in half. Since there wasn't an actual dismemberment system and clearly they REALLY wanted to cut that body in half, they had to get creative. It's actually two bodies set to play two different animations, with one having the upper body in the floor and the other one, the lower body. The breakable triggers a very slight movement to separate the two bodies as well, though it's been so long since I've looked I can't remember if that's an additional animation or the two parts actually moving. It's also why if you look closely, the texture stretches weirdly at the separation, those polygons are still connected to the other half, the animation just stretches out a very thin part of the model into the ground where the other half of either is. I think. The last time I opened any of the Half-Life models, let alone the source file for this map was quite literally over 15 years ago.
honestly it would be more unsettling if you could kill him and he just reappeared the next time regardless. Especially if there was a flag that checked if you did so that would have him comment on the futility of stopping what has been set on motion by him during the end sequence but the game is old, so that would've taken more space, and old games needed to conserve that
@@Pandalka That's cool to know! Sadly OF isn't officially canon, but I prefer to act like it is. The Combine Advisors look like they're from dimension X, to me. Either way the G-man definitely doesn't seem human.
@@Rolan7196 I don’t think the advisors are related to Race-X. I say this because most of race-X either has 1 eye and 6 limbs (shock troopers, voltigores) or 2 eyes and 4 limbs (pit drones) and all of them have a sideways mouth, while the advisors presumably have no limbs (arms are robotic) no eyes and just a hole for a mouth.
Fun fact: If stacked objects were made as func_pushable entities with the Breakable flag enabled, ones on top would fall down once the ones underneath have been broken... but instead they were made using the func_breakable entity which has no physics implementation and therefore they remain static in mid-air.
@@absolutehuman951 Potentially, although there's still other ways to implement it better than what Valve did. Honestly some of the levels just seem kind of rushed or made by inexperienced level creators when you look at the finer details.
Last year, I challenged myself to get through the entire game without picking up a single weapon besides the crowbar, and I found myself discovering/utilizing breakables in maps to get past roadblocks. In Surface Tension, I couldnt blow up the transformers to get onto the roof without blowing myself up, so I just whacked the transformers myself. I discovered the breakable floor in Gonarch's lair after I realized I wouldn't be able to kill it normally
My favorite discovery when I first played this was the scripted table that collapses after you fall on it from a broken pipe. I managed to survive without landing on the table and found, to my amusement, you can crouch under the table, jump and get smashed
You know what's weird Being able to break the window between you and Gman if you have a weapon at this point, but not being able to break it with your crowbar after the resonance cascade while seeing a scientist dies to a Headcrab in the same room
My favorite breakable is always the tanks. It's always amusing to watch people play HL for the first time when I usually beat it to death with a crowbar or a 9mm pistol.
While a lot of these are part of the "behind the scenes" of building a world, I'm guessing a lot of these (where aplicable) are part of that Gabe's philosophy of "the world should acknowledge the player's input"
almost every weird breakable in Half Life has something to do with a Scripted Sequence, the 9999hp door is supposed to be broken by the zombie making a custom animation for example. In a dev interview they stated that every level part they made had to be tested again and again, so I guess there was a moment where the map devs played the initial levels with weapons, and added the extra detail of breakable props, such as windows and stuff where normaly the player doesn't have weapons. Its a nice detail they kept on for people that likes to experiment how well made the map design is done in general, messing around with breakable stuff is always fun.
Reminds me of my experiments as a kid by using noclip and impulse 101. So many objects can break, there are even stages for some. There's a real difference between this, and say, a vending machine in most mods which is just a solid box object without a script attached to it (so it can't heal you or break).
Most of these breakables are from lazy mappers, or for use in cutscenes / scripted events. Going from the start of the video: 0:08 - Glass brush is tied to incorrect entity (should be func_wall, not func_breakable.) 0:21 - Lazy mapper. Should have used monsterclip and had Barney obey the monsterclip flag to avoid going in the elevator shaft. 0:29 - Same as first, glass should be func_wall. 0:44 - Those wall objects like the cork board, dryerase board, pictures, etc. are generic prefabs set to be breakable. Doesn't matter if they're used in a place they can't be broken. 0:55 - Same as first, glass should be func_wall. 1:08 - More prefabs. 1:19 - These breakables are used as part of the cutscene with the overloaded equipment. 1:47 - Mapper oversight. 1:59 - Breakable used for a scripted event. Scripted events in the HL engine are very primitive and rely on nonsense entity setups to work. The invisible breakable here is used to trigger gibs and the dead barney model animation to split. 2:09 - This is what the "unbreakable glass" material type does that should be used in most other places where you want glass to make sounds when hit, but not break. 2:14 - Another breakable prefab. 2:18 - This breakable is used to spawn the gib that fell in the water, that's what its purpose was. The high health is because it's a scripted event where a trigger makes it break. 2:28 - Scripted event using the zombie. Lots of scripted_sequence entities used to make the zombie break the stuff in the room, and eventually the door. 3:05 - Lazy mapper. These file cabinets are groups of func_breakable brushes that have a named hierarchy with each other. If you copypasta these, or use them as prefabs, they need to be renamed or you'll end up with duplicate named entities. This creates weird behavior like this where other random breakables that are supposed to be unrelated also break. 3:42 - Mapper oversight (for the glass ceiling tiles). I think there is also a scripted sequence in this room where monsters spawn above the ceiling tiles and drop down, but don't remember for sure. 3:58 - Mapper oversight for not using triggers properly. That whole freezer section is a bit buggy. 4:29 - Used for simulated garg damage. 4:38 - Same thing. breakable used to spawn gibs. 4:48 - Mapper oversight, used for gibs for the track train breaking the wall. Should be only set to break on trigger of a path_track when the train passes it. 4:53 - Same as earlier, lazy mapper incorrectly using prefabs. 5:19 - Mapper oversight for not telling the lower func_breakable to break the one on top when it breaks. 5:22 - Valve used a func_tank as a stand-in for a sniper here, because it has a predictable behavior. The faux soldier breakable is used as a trigger to disable the func_tank when it's destroyed. It also fires an ambient_generic to play the fake soldier death sound. 5:52 - Known problem with monstermakers, they will not spawn their intended monster if they're blocked. 6:09 - The alien grunt not dying is caused by the fact it is locked by an scripted_sequence with the "don't allow interruptions" flag. So it can't die before the actions its supposed to do are done. Mapper oversight for allowing the breakable tank to be broken with weapons, instead of only trigger from the console button. 6:30 - Mapper oversight. Breakable should be set to only break on trigger. 6:46 - Unsure about this specific door. It's probably a func_door with erroneously set breakable health. If you have a door that is impassible, but you want it to make a locked sound when you touch it, you generally put a fake locked func_door there to make the sound. In any case, mapper oversight. 7:15 - Breakables used to spawn gibs. Also mapper oversight with the sign above the door, the wall isn't clipped properly, so you get Z fighting from the faces both being in the same location. 7:28 - LOL. And used for a scripted sequence. 7:36 - This whole area uses a bunch of really ugly entity setups for the mortar launcher to work properly. The electrical boxes are made part of the same entity, because explosions in the HL engine are very buggy and very unpredictable. The nonsense origin locations are there to make it easier for the mortars to more reliably hit. 8:20 - Same thing here, really ugly entity setups. Breakables are for the gibs for the falling blocks out of the ceiling. 8:31 - Mapper oversight. The floor is supposed to open up after the Gonarch dies and explodes after a scripted sequence in the middle of the room. The breakable should have been set to trigger only. 8:43 - Mapper oversight. Should be func_wall since the player is never intended to interact with the glass. 9:00 - Ugly entity setup to make it easier to take out the func_tankrocket. 9:03 - Mapper oversight, Should have set the lower func_breakables to break the upper func_breakables when they break.
2:34 About this part tho. You can trigger that zombie yoo break all those parts bh itself, and then get the hidden ammunition. Otherwise after you kill the zombie BEFORE it break all those part the player won't get the extra ammo. 1:09 And man, that was...savage?
Thre's a valid reasoning for most of the breakable items: Why make special unbreakable instances of props when you can just reuse the original breakable ones
The teleport below Gonarch in the pit (and some other portals) is funny looking. Just recently I have realised that it shows the pictur of the other side.
The way cabinet faces break when another is shot reminds me of my StreamDeck Bitfocus Companion buttons when I copy and paste but forget to edit the feedback sources. Then a whole row of buttons will light up when using the first, and only the first.
Good stuff as always. You could make a follow-up called "The Weird and Broken Breakable Things in My Life", except it's about me and uses clips of HL being borked to illustrate it. (IDK. Therapy is expensive.) Dumb jokes aside, thanks for continuing to put things like this out. There's been plenty of HL content and dedicated channels crop up on the site in the past five or so years, but yours is unique. It sure beats the "lore" videos on extremely specific elements that are only 10% actual lore and 90% wild speculation.
the door at 2:29, when I was kid, I saw it can be breakable by zombie. I've killed the zombie before it breaks it. I used crowbar and hit every point of that door. When it gets fullly damaged, it brokes. I don't know am I hit enough damage but it worked. This could be a another interaction too.
Hey man, just want to let you know that I actually like it more when your videos have a voiceover. I often do other things while watching videos. It's nice to not have to read too much onscreen text for context. Otherwise, interesting video as always 👍
You know... you realize how much we long for Half-Life 3 when you see videos like these being made... but you actually only true realize how much we long for, that you yourself enjoy these videos and don't even question about it...
6:57 I wonder why they put a destructible door then a indestructible door....? Also how the heck do people find this stuff? LOL A lot of these are probably behind some trigger so they make sense and continue to the story, but some of them.... don't make sense at all?
The barney that is cut in half by the laser is literally two barney models shifted at the midsection and clipped into the floor. You learn a lot more about why things are the way they are when you make maps in the hammer editor. Edit: BTW this was the first video I saw on this channel. It appears you're very knowledgeable on this subject. I feel like an idiot now.
I think stuff like the corkboards/billboards and small objects like toilet rolls being breakable makes sense, since making these objects func_breakable will prevent them from splitting faces when the map is built and also for preventing it from splitting pvs spaces as well. On Dario Casali's channel, during the hazard course section he mentioned they placed light fixtures and such 1 unit away from walls to prevent the wall's brush faces from being split into more. I'm assuming later on they realized they could turn them into brush entities instead 😁
Yeah I actually made a comment that they could have simply made anything that touches a surface that they didn't want to split, a func_wall entity. Same as the func_breakable stuff in this video, where stacked objects don't react when ones underneath have been destroyed... in this case they should have used a func_pushable entity with the Breakable flag enabled.
The realism is astonishing given the level of detail. I'd forgotten that debris disappears but I'm sure that can be turned off or modded away. This was the first game since super Mario that made me feel like I'd just stepped into another world, and shooting Barney during the tutorial and having the entire world react really made it feel alive. Hl2 by contrast was kind of a letdown, especially when compared to the first reveal (much as with doom3).
7:31 Well those are on the end of Surface Tension with the Airstrikes which hit a much larger area than most guns, so their hitboxes can be in just their general direction.
i played this game a long time ago back on a win98. i had no idea this game had this many breakable objects. i never attempted to break the filing cabinets or the white boards. most games wouldn't let you do that kind of thing, so i never even thought to try it.
![Saving Mars! Again... [DOOM (2016) EP. 2]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/NwwRAAvxWXQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Comments I'm bored of reading:
"Of course some of these are breakable. Why would they make two separate objects for the same thing just to make one breakable and one not?"
1. They already are separate objects. Practically everything that isn't an NPC or weapon is brushwork.
2. You say this as if that takes effort. You can make a breakable thing unbreakable with one click.
3. People in the comments have said the actual reason is the Unforeseen Consequences was made first, then Anomalous Materials, so things were copied over and not made unbreakable because it didn't affect anything.
"Obviously those things have a lot of health because they didn't want you to break them"
At 2:30 I say there are three parts to the wall. 2 can be broken by the player. At 3:00 the 3rd part of the wall is broken. The player cannot break every breakable thing. Some of them can only be broken by certain conditions being met. This is controlled with a flag. The proper way to stop a player from breaking something is to actually make it impossible to break, not give it a bunch of health.
"Some things had to be made breakable for some technical reason"
No.
Sup
Wow, these are the comments you're getting? Clearly coming from people who have never used Worldcraft.
Takes 5 minutes of learning to discover func_wall and func_breakable
Some of these make me question if they were placed accidentally or as an inside joke among the devs- like the 999hp ceiling void.
they were probably made specifically to create gibs once broken
I bet that the 9999hp door was definitely on purpose
Likely related to the scientist hanging from it?
The majority of it is hardcoded in the props config file like being breakable and such, or was likely just copy and pasted. Just like how you have different footstep sounds for different materials it comes from a config file for the prop.
A better example would be the room with a houndeye in it and the texture of gabes face on all the walls
0:43
>destroys whiteboard with probably important research notes on them with a shotgun
"i must remember to report that..."
LoL report that the board broke XD
To be fair, the board just had Newton’s theory of gravity written on it, which Freeman can recite in his sleep.
You beat me to the joke congratulations
"I'm getting a narcissistic injury when the world is ignoring me" - Gabe Newell
"I make lists of things to buy when I go to the store." - Gabe Newell
@@poke548actual genius shit
my main takeaway from the documentary is that gabe newell wants you to quote “suck him forever”
"um... no." - gay ben
*nobody know about these in 25 years?*
The metal clanking/breaking sound that happens you damage the stuff is very satysfing in this game.
Gaben very specifically stated recently that whacking walls with a crowbar was profoundly satisfying to him personally, at the time
Kelly Bailey just doesn't miss
@@jcdenton6427he did voice Gordon, right?
@@itdobelikedattho8112xd
Same in Source games as well, I could spend hours whacking stuff when I was a kid lol
When I was younger, I had like this OCD where I had to break absolutely EVERYTHING that can be broken in a level.
Same here. I would also admittedly shoot corpses to sort of paint the area around their death with more blood to make it more gorey and/or to suit my level of immersion. This evolved later in life to creating massive scenes in Gmod where I would spend hours positioning ragdolls and particle effects, bodies, blood etc. Man I'm weird.
@@AbeTweakinI did that too
@@AbeTweakin I would always gib bodies with the crowbar. It was especially satisfying with the glitchy way it would swing 50 times a second when hitting a corpse.
I also did stuff like that in Halo CE, where I'd smack dead bodies and produce so much blood, the game would start lagging.
You would love to play LEGO games.
Ratchet and clank and actual OCD did this to me
A moment of silence for the poor MFer that broke the wall in the laser shield chamber by hand, because they couldn't find how to do it otherwise.
i did that many times to save energy
They probably realized you could when they read the code
@@SeanKulanot the code, but decompiled map in hammer editor
@@sebashtundakeng8683 "to save energy"?!? What the hell are you talking about, it costs 0 energy to break that wall the intended way
@@Narcan885its an adhd thing
As we've seen from the alpha builds of Half-Life, the ceiling in the cafeteria being breakable is a leftover artifact from early versions of the map where you'd crawl through the space up there and need to stick to metal beams cause the tiles you'd just fall through. Except it sucked and was very easy to softlock yourself so amongst other parts they cut that chunk.
I had to do that in the pirated version I had.
@@peterjohnson9438 FBI open up!!!!!!
The ceiling being breakable serves a purpose in the final game, which is so that headcrabs can fall from it as you approach.
I love how in opposing force devs let you fall throuth those celling tiles)
@@peterjohnson9438That's quite interesting.
1:10
Wow, a real bullet in board!
boo!
Dad?
That was a stupidly good one, I'm proud of you!
bulletin board
nice joke dad
the security guard looking over his shoulder at the beginning lol
1:08 The intrusive thoughts won
I was looking for someone to mention that 😅
The zombie breaking through the boarded off door with 9999 health made me question how fucking jacked the scientists in Black Mesa were the first time I played through Half Life.
I’m pretty sure that being able to pull your weight both physically & intellectually is actually a requirement for a LOT of STEM jobs IRL, so being able to do that from carrying heavy equipment around isn’t too much of a stretch. The alterations that the zombification process does to the host probably also play a part
@@lyokianhitchhiker Yeah I could understand that. Now please explain at what point a scientist would need to have the strength to break through a solid piece of wood that is seemingly immune to all forms of damage (including gunfire, explosions, alien weaponry, etc) and exactly how much stronger you'd have to be after zombification to do it.
@@spineappletea I'm not saying they’d need the strength to do that, just that having it is a side effect of all the heavy lifting they already do. As to the zombie thing? That’s just me spitballing.
@@lyokianhitchhiker Normal people generally don't put 100% of their strength into any action, unless they're fully aware that their life depends on it. But a headcrab has no reason not to use all of the host's resources in order to get another victim that is within reach.
@@NotWendy3yes, even when people assume they're using 100% o their strength it usually isn't. The body actually puts limits on the amount of strength used to stop your muscles from tearing themselves apart. The limit are only released when someone is in a life or death situation. This is what allows people to get the strength to lift entire cars off of trapped children, etc.
At the beginning it's the wrong security guard, the one you can kill is found right before you enter the control room of the test chamber. From there you push him to the rotating elevator and line him up at the right spot and then activate the elevator to crush him. Lymphoid made a video about it a while back.
I tried but I didn't find the video, can you send the link please?
@@CoolF41lur3 th-cam.com/video/ZK2uSeJfAYM/w-d-xo.html
Nah that security guard on normal elevator can be killed too i tried at my first attempt at playing this game after 2 years but I can't do it anymore
@@BlueNeon16GD It may not be relevant, but from testing I found that it doesn't work at all if you have the "HD" models enabled, which until recently was the default.
@@yless42 but I'm playing it on mobile devices and i downloaded the hd version of xash it's still work at first then after i tried it second time it doesn't work like the video
Func_breakable has to be top 10 best hammer entities.
Followed very shortly by Func_vehicle
@@lispy0nline tbh func_vehicle is the top 1 best hammer entity, the top 2 i would say is trigger_hurt
What about physics trap in the source engine? Its pretty cool. Otherwise id say brush is the best or worldspawn
im glad in hl2 they made all breakables with items one model
its annoying having to worry that any brush could have something inside it
0:48 I must remember to report that
ANOMALY REPORTED!!!
I remember breaking that wooden door with the zombie and gonarch's lair floor manually, because when i was little i usually played using cheats.
So with enough time to waste, i eventually did it.
Years later when i replayed the game, i forgot that i used cheats and tought "but i could swear i broke it before".
Now i understand why.
Some of these can be explained as copy-pasted prefabs (a feature of Hammer Editor, its basically a library of assets) that happened to be breakable. Like the note board or trash can, they were made with specific scale and breakable properties, and then imported in other maps. As for glass, maybe they scripted their editor to always make glass textured objects be breakable, thus making the workflow on maps faster.
You have to make the glass into a func breakable or wall. Then you have to set the texture to be rendered differently. It was probably just a habit to make make the glass a breakable.
And cabinets break as they do because the names of their func_breakable is duplicate. So the same trigger triggers all of them.
@@Underqualified_Gunman Ngl its goofy to imagine that dev's muscle memory made them unnecessarily assign func breakable to every single glass window, aside being less plausible than a simple script to automate the process.
@@512TheWolf512 quantum collapse
It might have been necessary to make the glass func_breakable (or func_wall) for it to be semitransparent.
There are obviously other transparent (but not breakable) surfaces in the game, but the pixels of those textures are always entirely see-through (alpha 0) or entirely opaque (alpha 1 or 255).
So it's not out of muscle memory or because of some script, but manually done out of necessity.
7:30 I'll take these mismatched hitboxes are there to make the airstrikes easier to land correctly.
That cabinet has clearly mastered quantum entanglement, far more than the scientists have. 3:23
A lot of those seen in anom materials is due to Unforseen consequences being made first then a few valve devs worked on a pre disaster intro to the game making anomalous materials.
The early levels are easy to explain. Since you'd need to backtrack thru them anyway, only one copy was made, with breakable objects all in place. Then just copy pasted level geometry into a later level.
The later like broken filing cabinets, probably has to do with triggers and duplicate entity names. All func_breakable can be assigned names for designing set pieces with their help, and in that case, the entity names were duplicates as a result of being copy pasted. And since they have the same entity names, the seemingly unrelated objects break at the same time.
From my small time mapping for counterstrike, I remember this system was called prefabs. You just made a bunch of small objects that would be useful throughout, and you could subsequently just paste them around all your maps as needed.
>seemingly unrelated objects break at the same time
Quantum collapse
@@CallOfCutie69 technically, a trigger calling for an activation of a function of an entity, and since entities have duplicate names, they all trigger by the same trigger.
@@512TheWolf512 Just a wild guess, but you'd have to go through and rename each one to work properly?
The unbreakable door behind the breakable door reminds me of a great book I read (I can't remember which one sadly, maybe Going Postal?) where the main character digs through a block in their jail cell wall with a plastic spoon, only to find behind it another new wall with a new spoon.
Yes, it's in Going postal by Sir Terry Pratchett.
Thought the exact same thing mate, it's right at the beginning of the book
Wdym "wall with a new spoon"?
@@absolutehuman951 read going Postal, you'll love it
@@absolutehuman951I think they mean that they dug into another cell with a spoon inside
Placing an indestructible door behind one with thousands of HP. Kinda hilarious but also, why?
Probably level got redesigned, and that door wasn't removed
To laugh at that meme where the guy with a pickaxe is closing onto diamonds
It's reference to Sisyphus.
If I had to make a random guess, the door was a wall texture but they couldnt get it to react properly to being hit so they just put a real door on top of it
@@mouthwide0pen never used func_wall myself but doesnt that have some material property?
Wooden board at 2:14 can be broken "legally" if you get grenades from "secret" in next level and backtrack, door have small gap where grenade can slip trough. Also another really amusing thing on this level, in second room where twitching zombie sits on chair and looks at blinking laptop, there two ways to kill the zombie, first one is... just kill it, and second one is break laptop and zombie will die.
he cannot live without internet
1:35 I've been playing this game since it came out, and until now I had no idea that the scientist says 'quick!', I could never hear him say it over the sound of the console breaking.
I remember looking at the source file for that early intro map with the laser and thought man that was clever how they cut that body in half. Since there wasn't an actual dismemberment system and clearly they REALLY wanted to cut that body in half, they had to get creative. It's actually two bodies set to play two different animations, with one having the upper body in the floor and the other one, the lower body. The breakable triggers a very slight movement to separate the two bodies as well, though it's been so long since I've looked I can't remember if that's an additional animation or the two parts actually moving. It's also why if you look closely, the texture stretches weirdly at the separation, those polygons are still connected to the other half, the animation just stretches out a very thin part of the model into the ground where the other half of either is.
I think. The last time I opened any of the Half-Life models, let alone the source file for this map was quite literally over 15 years ago.
1:39 "what the hell is going on with our equipment"
I wonder...
I love how the G-Man is invincible regardless of context. That's some meta programming right there.
Why would they spend time implementing the death of a character whose ai is limited to basic scripts and animations?
honestly it would be more unsettling if you could kill him and he just reappeared the next time regardless. Especially if there was a flag that checked if you did so that would have him comment on the futility of stopping what has been set on motion by him during the end sequence but the game is old, so that would've taken more space, and old games needed to conserve that
he's not human, the barnacle in OF doesn't recognize him as a living being
@@Pandalka That's cool to know! Sadly OF isn't officially canon, but I prefer to act like it is. The Combine Advisors look like they're from dimension X, to me.
Either way the G-man definitely doesn't seem human.
@@Rolan7196 I don’t think the advisors are related to Race-X. I say this because most of race-X either has 1 eye and 6 limbs (shock troopers, voltigores) or 2 eyes and 4 limbs (pit drones) and all of them have a sideways mouth, while the advisors presumably have no limbs (arms are robotic) no eyes and just a hole for a mouth.
Fun fact: If stacked objects were made as func_pushable entities with the Breakable flag enabled, ones on top would fall down once the ones underneath have been broken... but instead they were made using the func_breakable entity which has no physics implementation and therefore they remain static in mid-air.
Maybe it was a measure of optimization?
@@absolutehuman951 Potentially, although there's still other ways to implement it better than what Valve did. Honestly some of the levels just seem kind of rushed or made by inexperienced level creators when you look at the finer details.
7:48 YOU'RE KIDDING ME, YOU CAN DO THAT?
I KNOW RIGHT!!! AND I'M OVER HERE WASTING MY TIME WITH THE STUPID BROKEN AIRSTRIKE!
Ok I'm actually kinda pissed because that level took me 2 f..king hours and I didn't know that
It took you guys 2 hours? You serious? That’s just… wow
@@user-en6px3og2l it is lol
Snipers being just a person-shaped func_breakable sounds oddly appropriate...
Last year, I challenged myself to get through the entire game without picking up a single weapon besides the crowbar, and I found myself discovering/utilizing breakables in maps to get past roadblocks. In Surface Tension, I couldnt blow up the transformers to get onto the roof without blowing myself up, so I just whacked the transformers myself. I discovered the breakable floor in Gonarch's lair after I realized I wouldn't be able to kill it normally
My favorite discovery when I first played this was the scripted table that collapses after you fall on it from a broken pipe. I managed to survive without landing on the table and found, to my amusement, you can crouch under the table, jump and get smashed
2:56 "Screw the whole world! I don’t need them!"
- Tommy Wisaueaeu
You know what's weird
Being able to break the window between you and Gman if you have a weapon at this point,
but not being able to break it with your crowbar after the resonance cascade while seeing a scientist dies to a Headcrab in the same room
My favorite breakable is always the tanks. It's always amusing to watch people play HL for the first time when I usually beat it to death with a crowbar or a 9mm pistol.
While a lot of these are part of the "behind the scenes" of building a world, I'm guessing a lot of these (where aplicable) are part of that Gabe's philosophy of "the world should acknowledge the player's input"
Babe wake up, new pinsplash video about useless half life trivia just dropped
1:09 I love the single fucking frame of him shooting barney with no sound.
func_breakable moment
1:14 Nooo! Not the toilet paper! That's for... errr... "emergencies". Ahem. 😛
10k hp, yet the zombie punches through that door with ease
That zombie must be fking jacked
Or the door has a low resistance against zombies.
@SzaraSzarancza Zombie beats door, door beats Freeman, Freeman beats zombie. New Rock paper scissors game just dropped.
@@MisterBurgerBeachball yoooo
@@Michi_Exiled Yooo wuddup?!
I love destructible environments in games. always so satisfying
i love your attention to detail, the text you added over the video looks EXACTLY like the text that shows up in game!!
almost every weird breakable in Half Life has something to do with a Scripted Sequence, the 9999hp door is supposed to be broken by the zombie making a custom animation for example.
In a dev interview they stated that every level part they made had to be tested again and again, so I guess there was a moment where the map devs played the initial levels with weapons, and added the extra detail of breakable props, such as windows and stuff where normaly the player doesn't have weapons. Its a nice detail they kept on for people that likes to experiment how well made the map design is done in general, messing around with breakable stuff is always fun.
Reminds me of my experiments as a kid by using noclip and impulse 101. So many objects can break, there are even stages for some. There's a real difference between this, and say, a vending machine in most mods which is just a solid box object without a script attached to it (so it can't heal you or break).
Most of these breakables are from lazy mappers, or for use in cutscenes / scripted events.
Going from the start of the video:
0:08 - Glass brush is tied to incorrect entity (should be func_wall, not func_breakable.)
0:21 - Lazy mapper. Should have used monsterclip and had Barney obey the monsterclip flag to avoid going in the elevator shaft.
0:29 - Same as first, glass should be func_wall.
0:44 - Those wall objects like the cork board, dryerase board, pictures, etc. are generic prefabs set to be breakable. Doesn't matter if they're used in a place they can't be broken.
0:55 - Same as first, glass should be func_wall.
1:08 - More prefabs.
1:19 - These breakables are used as part of the cutscene with the overloaded equipment.
1:47 - Mapper oversight.
1:59 - Breakable used for a scripted event. Scripted events in the HL engine are very primitive and rely on nonsense entity setups to work. The invisible breakable here is used to trigger gibs and the dead barney model animation to split.
2:09 - This is what the "unbreakable glass" material type does that should be used in most other places where you want glass to make sounds when hit, but not break.
2:14 - Another breakable prefab.
2:18 - This breakable is used to spawn the gib that fell in the water, that's what its purpose was. The high health is because it's a scripted event where a trigger makes it break.
2:28 - Scripted event using the zombie. Lots of scripted_sequence entities used to make the zombie break the stuff in the room, and eventually the door.
3:05 - Lazy mapper. These file cabinets are groups of func_breakable brushes that have a named hierarchy with each other. If you copypasta these, or use them as prefabs, they need to be renamed or you'll end up with duplicate named entities. This creates weird behavior like this where other random breakables that are supposed to be unrelated also break.
3:42 - Mapper oversight (for the glass ceiling tiles). I think there is also a scripted sequence in this room where monsters spawn above the ceiling tiles and drop down, but don't remember for sure.
3:58 - Mapper oversight for not using triggers properly. That whole freezer section is a bit buggy.
4:29 - Used for simulated garg damage.
4:38 - Same thing. breakable used to spawn gibs.
4:48 - Mapper oversight, used for gibs for the track train breaking the wall. Should be only set to break on trigger of a path_track when the train passes it.
4:53 - Same as earlier, lazy mapper incorrectly using prefabs.
5:19 - Mapper oversight for not telling the lower func_breakable to break the one on top when it breaks.
5:22 - Valve used a func_tank as a stand-in for a sniper here, because it has a predictable behavior. The faux soldier breakable is used as a trigger to disable the func_tank when it's destroyed. It also fires an ambient_generic to play the fake soldier death sound.
5:52 - Known problem with monstermakers, they will not spawn their intended monster if they're blocked.
6:09 - The alien grunt not dying is caused by the fact it is locked by an scripted_sequence with the "don't allow interruptions" flag. So it can't die before the actions its supposed to do are done. Mapper oversight for allowing the breakable tank to be broken with weapons, instead of only trigger from the console button.
6:30 - Mapper oversight. Breakable should be set to only break on trigger.
6:46 - Unsure about this specific door. It's probably a func_door with erroneously set breakable health. If you have a door that is impassible, but you want it to make a locked sound when you touch it, you generally put a fake locked func_door there to make the sound. In any case, mapper oversight.
7:15 - Breakables used to spawn gibs. Also mapper oversight with the sign above the door, the wall isn't clipped properly, so you get Z fighting from the faces both being in the same location.
7:28 - LOL. And used for a scripted sequence.
7:36 - This whole area uses a bunch of really ugly entity setups for the mortar launcher to work properly. The electrical boxes are made part of the same entity, because explosions in the HL engine are very buggy and very unpredictable. The nonsense origin locations are there to make it easier for the mortars to more reliably hit.
8:20 - Same thing here, really ugly entity setups. Breakables are for the gibs for the falling blocks out of the ceiling.
8:31 - Mapper oversight. The floor is supposed to open up after the Gonarch dies and explodes after a scripted sequence in the middle of the room. The breakable should have been set to trigger only.
8:43 - Mapper oversight. Should be func_wall since the player is never intended to interact with the glass.
9:00 - Ugly entity setup to make it easier to take out the func_tankrocket.
9:03 - Mapper oversight, Should have set the lower func_breakables to break the upper func_breakables when they break.
I've been working with the HL engine since 1999, so I know the fine nuances of nonsense with the GoldSRC engine.
6:26 *dies from cringe*
great video :D
5:26 wasnt expecting a surf tutorial :))
a little bhop and kz too 🤣
7:10 devs knew what where doing when they created this troll door
func_breakable my beloved
2:34 About this part tho. You can trigger that zombie yoo break all those parts bh itself, and then get the hidden ammunition. Otherwise after you kill the zombie BEFORE it break all those part the player won't get the extra ammo.
1:09 And man, that was...savage?
This project ended on December 7th.
I just realised Half-Life 1 doesn't use the breakable glass too much
i didnt appreciate just how much detail there is
especially the room where the zombie breaks some stuff before it gets out
3:39 oddly satisfying
0:34 PHEW l almost thought that you could do something VERY unthinkable.
8:31 is speedrunner tech btw
If you place every tripmine you have and a couple satchels, you can break that floor without having to kill the Gonarch
Thre's a valid reasoning for most of the breakable items:
Why make special unbreakable instances of props when you can just reuse the original breakable ones
*Breaks down door*
*Reveals identical door*
Okay.
06:50 Зажимал кнопку стрельбы грузом, чтобы взломать дверь кочергой - пальцем нереально выдержать столько.
Autoclick mement
The teleport below Gonarch in the pit (and some other portals) is funny looking. Just recently I have realised that it shows the pictur of the other side.
The way cabinet faces break when another is shot reminds me of my StreamDeck Bitfocus Companion buttons when I copy and paste but forget to edit the feedback sources. Then a whole row of buttons will light up when using the first, and only the first.
Good stuff as always. You could make a follow-up called "The Weird and Broken Breakable Things in My Life", except it's about me and uses clips of HL being borked to illustrate it. (IDK. Therapy is expensive.)
Dumb jokes aside, thanks for continuing to put things like this out. There's been plenty of HL content and dedicated channels crop up on the site in the past five or so years, but yours is unique. It sure beats the "lore" videos on extremely specific elements that are only 10% actual lore and 90% wild speculation.
Interesting description. Great interesting videos as always.
Black Mesa in house custom quantum entanglement filing cabinet system for use in office environments.
Man, this game has really been analysed deep. Great video!
I'm not surprised they have some quantum-entangled filing cabinets
the door at 2:29, when I was kid, I saw it can be breakable by zombie. I've killed the zombie before it breaks it. I used crowbar and hit every point of that door. When it gets fullly damaged, it brokes. I don't know am I hit enough damage but it worked. This could be a another interaction too.
Hey man, just want to let you know that I actually like it more when your videos have a voiceover. I often do other things while watching videos. It's nice to not have to read too much onscreen text for context. Otherwise, interesting video as always 👍
Fascinating stuff. Well done.
in 5:54, you can do the same thing by timing the jump on the breakable floor
0:32 D'oh!
Best thing i've ever heard in my life
You know... you realize how much we long for Half-Life 3 when you see videos like these being made... but you actually only true realize how much we long for, that you yourself enjoy these videos and don't even question about it...
6:57 I wonder why they put a destructible door then a indestructible door....? Also how the heck do people find this stuff? LOL
A lot of these are probably behind some trigger so they make sense and continue to the story, but some of them.... don't make sense at all?
I want to thank you for still giving life and new content to such a classic aged game!
?
@@Charun2021 Still new content coming out on game mechanics of an over 25 year old game.
I dig your style/editing
i remember a version of black mesa where the outside artillery control part was funny, when i aimed directly at the door and it just bounced off lol
5:43 Receiver (2012)
Very strange seeing these would of had no idea they were there. So many odd secrets in this game.
The barney that is cut in half by the laser is literally two barney models shifted at the midsection and clipped into the floor. You learn a lot more about why things are the way they are when you make maps in the hammer editor.
Edit: BTW this was the first video I saw on this channel. It appears you're very knowledgeable on this subject. I feel like an idiot now.
Everytime I go postal while playing half-life I feel like my child hood is still going on, it was just on pause.
I think stuff like the corkboards/billboards and small objects like toilet rolls being breakable makes sense, since making these objects func_breakable will prevent them from splitting faces when the map is built and also for preventing it from splitting pvs spaces as well.
On Dario Casali's channel, during the hazard course section he mentioned they placed light fixtures and such 1 unit away from walls to prevent the wall's brush faces from being split into more. I'm assuming later on they realized they could turn them into brush entities instead 😁
Yeah I actually made a comment that they could have simply made anything that touches a surface that they didn't want to split, a func_wall entity. Same as the func_breakable stuff in this video, where stacked objects don't react when ones underneath have been destroyed... in this case they should have used a func_pushable entity with the Breakable flag enabled.
Those cabinets are fascinating.
Sound of this half life game make me bring back nostalgic
The realism is astonishing given the level of detail. I'd forgotten that debris disappears but I'm sure that can be turned off or modded away.
This was the first game since super Mario that made me feel like I'd just stepped into another world, and shooting Barney during the tutorial and having the entire world react really made it feel alive. Hl2 by contrast was kind of a letdown, especially when compared to the first reveal (much as with doom3).
I'm too tired to make a joke about this secretly being a MarphitimusBlackimus upload but pretend I did that please
way more stuff is breakable than I had realized - impressive
“Broken breakable things”
Hmm yes the floor here is made of floor
I never knew so much of that stuff was destrucable, like the filing cabinets.
breakable function goes brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
func_breakable go brr
@@officialromanhours how could i have been so foolish😞, i must return to my studies
7:31 Well those are on the end of Surface Tension with the Airstrikes which hit a much larger area than most guns, so their hitboxes can be in just their general direction.
3:08 (breaks cabinet open)
“it appears the containment system has completely failed.”
0:30 I played this map so much on Natural Selection when I was a kid.. The FEELS D:
"Absolute lunatic shoots the tau cannon at every surface imaginable for 9 minutes straight"
It's great they scripted so many props to be destructible. It makes the game's world seem very responsive.
6:46 "Behind this door....is another door, pretty cool huh?"
1:21 Im pretty sure there are two because when your playing the game that computer breaks in two "stages"
i was hoping for this
i played this game a long time ago back on a win98. i had no idea this game had this many breakable objects. i never attempted to break the filing cabinets or the white boards. most games wouldn't let you do that kind of thing, so i never even thought to try it.