Good morning Mr.Freeman. You're arrived just in time...
your scientists colleagues have made a major discovery :
according to them...
Pee is stored in the balls.
couilles
"Vulve" intro (Vulve means "Vulva" in French)
As you can guess
Today we gonna talk about Half-Life.
And I know what you're thinking :
What ? Another video about Half-Life ? AGAIN ?
I don't care about this game !
This game is so old... !
Pause ! I just noticed something...
I'm doing this gesture *finger in a hole*
I just want to clarify : that's not something vulgar or rude.
That's just a gesture to explain something in the past.
When I want to talk about "a long time ago"
I make this gesture. This means "something old" or "a long time ago".
A LONG TIME AGO
Nothing rude.
So : Even if you're not a Half-Life fan, you should like this video.
And, for a 1998 game, you will see it's pretty impressive !
Half-Life contains many communication systems.
And I'm going to talk about them, to show you how conversations works.
The first one : the lip sync system.
You can play Half-Life in English, French, Deutsch,
The lips synchronisation will be always perfect.
The mouth moves perfectly with the dialogues lines.
Thanks to a really simple, but ingenious system :
The mouth is opened with the amplitude of the sounds.
Here's an example to see how it works :
In fact, the engine of the game, GoldSrc, do that in REAL TIME.
The engine can play any 8bits sound, WAVE format, at 11025Khz, mono, and animate the lips of any character.
That's why the quality of the sound isn't perfect
Today, this feature does'nt looks so impressive, but at the time it made all the difference.
At the same time : Zelda Ocarina of Time... Using only text !
Turok 2, without any lips animation :
Same thing on PlayStation with Resident Evil 2...
Metal Gear Solid too :
*french snake*
And, on PC, the best we had was Solider of Fortune, without any real animation.
That was just an animated texture, no real animation. And everything was scripted, so...
Lip sync wasn't really perfect.
But with Half-Life, the lip synch is PERFECT, with real animation.
But there's more than lip synch in Half-Life !
In an old video, I told you that AI works with differents states.
And differents behavior in these states
A character can be "idle", "alert", "fighting"...
And in each of these states, there are specific behaviors.
He can be feared, patrol to find the player, panic...These kind of things.
And every non-scripted sentence is linked to the AI state.
For example, if the AI is calm :
AI Fear :
AI Fighting :
So, you can't hear a sentence that doesn't match with the character behavior, and the situation.
A scientist can't talk about his tie if he's attacked. If he's attack, he's gonna say something like "I don't want to die !"
and run away from combat.
Because he will have the "Fear" behavior. And this behavior has specific actions, and specific lines.
So : characters has differents states, and differentes lines according to these states.
That's pretty cool. But there's more :
At the beggining of the game, we can meet scientists chatting :
And that's an important detail : these conversations are always different.
If I reload the game :
In fact, VALVe made a random chatting system.
Rather than script every thing : YOU gonna say THAT at THIS time, and YOU gonna ANSWER THAT next,
They planned simple sentences, like YES/NO questions, and they planned answers to these sentences.
And they leave the AI use them.
The result : every conversation in the corridors aren't planned.
Scientist are free, they just navigate between waypoints, and when they meet another scientist
the AI start to chat, because the AI is in "calm state", and when the AI meet another "calm state", they start chatting.
using random lines to fake a real scripted conversation.
And this system has been made just for the 15 first minutes of the game...
Because, next, scientist are killed, HECU comes at Black Mesa, and you know the story...
Yeah, that's a transition about HECU speech system.
If you played Half-Life in French, you played without these system, and that's really sad...
But you didn't noticied anything strange. Because these soldiers talk in French, and there's nothing wrong...
But when you play Half-Life in English, the HECU soldiers have MANY MORE lines.
Because VALVe didn't recorded full sentences, like in our french shitty version.
But only WORDS. Around 150 words have been recorded, in "normal" and "shouted" version.
And VALVe made a kind of "TTS" system to make these soldiers speak.
So : they haven't recorded full sentences, but only WORDS, and they used these words to build a speech system
Like Google or Siri, except it doesn't works with sounds or syllables, but with words. So, if the world "barbapapa" hasn't been recorded...
you will not be able to make a soldier say "barbapapa".
So, in Half-Life, every sentences of the soldiers (except some scripted) are written, and the engine, GoldSrc
can read each text word to play they sentence in a "speaked version".
But why VALVe made that ?
Because they can do it.
VALVe always tried to make something new for Videogame Industry.
About gameplay, or tech.
Their goal : demonstrate that's possible to make something different in a videogame.
Even if it's not perfect, somebody has to start at some point.
And another thing : that's easier to record 150 words, and compose 100 sentences with them,
rather than record 100 complete sentences.
And during the development, you can add sentences, or edit them easily.
And there's another reason for this system : VALVe always think about the future of their games.
This allows community to use that to create content,
And VALVe can re-use this system for other games.
For example, VALVe use a similar thing in HALF-LIFE², but in a different way :
In HALF-LIFE², every line is fully dubbed by comedians, and the Source Engine use a text version
to "read" the phonems and animate the lips correctly.
But we will talk about Half-Life² in another video, maybe.
So, in Half-Life, the engine is able to :
Lip sync
Give specific lines according to the AI state
Make small talks with random sentences
Soldiers use Text To Speech system
And, finally : the Speaker
Again : In French, you can't hear it...
In the Black Mesa Research Facility, speakers announce differents kinds of events.
In french, it's sounds like this :
And in English, the voice is different. It's a kind of TTS system, like the DECtalk from the 80s, and it works like the soldier speech system.
Again : different works are recorded, and sentences are written on text.
And that's really sad, because in French, this system is unused too ! The purpose was
to show how Black Mesa is an high tech Research Center, using a synth-voice system controlled by a computer.
But in French, it's sounds like a scientist is speaker in a microphone...
And, that's really dumb, at some point in the game, the HECU soldiers take control of the system :
That's sounds okay ! We can just imagine a soldier, hacking the system, and using it to make military announces
But in French, that's a human speaking ! And the same voice all along the game, even before the disaster...
We can just imagine a soldier, taking a scientist hostage, and forcing him to speak in the microphone...
Finally : the French Version of Half-Life cuts many features from the original game
But that's not the worst, because the deutch one has robots instead of soldiers.............
Half-Life is a great game with great details, and some of them are really impressive.
In 1998 that's was huge ! And today, we can still find some great details
really really really better than horses testicules reacting to temperature...
And that's why Half-Life is a classic game !
Because Half-Life has so many details, not always noticeable or really useful
but all these details have opened the way to a new era in videogames.
In fact, VALVe showed : "Hey, it's possible to do it, so : do it !"
"Stop making videogames like others. Try something new, and new techniques".
Here's an example :
I don't have a good example right now...
Just : think about a videogame with robots.
I don't have one. I will add a picture later.
So, this videogame has robots.
okay.
In this videogame, the robots voices are not "ROBOT" voices.
That's just an actor, talking like a robot, with a voice effet.
==H3ll0, 1'm a r0b0t==
That's an old technique... We're in 2020 !
Why devs don't make a custom "real" robot voice using a custom text-to-speech system ?
That could be really cool, and more realistic !
But... Nope. Today, when a robot is speaking, it's just a human with a voice effect...
End of the video ! Sorry, I don't speak english, I can't make good subtitles. Feel free to correct me.
