Half-Life 2 & Machinima

To start, I'll mention my latest freetimekiller - Half-Life 2. I haven't carved out time to play a game since the DOOM 3 release, but I managed to steal some hours this weekend to play Half-Life 2. Simply said, what a wonderful beast. While you can read the numerous "what a fantastic game!" reviews - mine would be no different, so in order to keep things efficient I'll leave it at that. However, I will say that the one item I'm impressed with the most is the environments and the atmospheres they create. In playing the game, you're given a variety of locales - be it squirming through ventilation ducts or racing along a desolate shoreline with a modified dune buggy - each location gives you a "you are there" feeling. Its Valve's excellent attention to detail that makes this possible (not to mention a kick-ass engine).

While I could easily while away the hours trying to complete HL2, I wouldn't do my creative yearnings justice if I didn't focus some on HL2's Machinima capabilities. After coming across one more yet beautifully made map, I decided to call up the console and test out HL2's demo recording. I was glad to see that it was both intact and working.

What impressed me the most, though, was a new utility Valve included called "DemoUI." DemoUI is an interface for demo playback and editing. Yep, you read that right, folks - editing. While this doesn't give us a Keygrip2 for the Source engine (this is one Machinima filmmaker who would love to see that!) it does give you the ability to post-produce your demo files. This includes adding fades, changing FOV (zooming), parsing commands during playback, changing playback speed, etc. Also of note - DemoUI includes "DemoSmoother" which allows you to modify the recorded camera (aka first-person) paths in a demo file.

All of this isn't documented yet in the latest SDK, but word from on high (Yahn) is that it will be at some later date. In the meanwhile, I've started putting together some HL2 demo recording tutorials, which I will post once they're in some sort of legible form.

One final note: its great to see Valve embrace the demo recording feature and add to its functionality. Clearly, they see the advantages of demo recording and know how useful it is for Machinima-related projects. A standing ovation to Valve on this. I personally hope that other game developers follow their lead and implement similar demo tools in their 3D engine technology.