Redwood's Half-Life Preview Page 5
Levels"Levels" in Half-Life do not exist as you know them from Quake. Though there are about 90 BSPs in Half-Life, the seamless nature of the world means that you barely notice the transitions from one to the next. The details in the levels makes them shine. Touches such as papers with print stuck to bulletin boards, detailed soda machines, element charts, and others make the whole world believable.The varied environments include canyon/outdoors, office area, industrial, and the alien world. The outside levels are amazing. Brett "Thanos" Johnson showed me some of his outside work and it is very impressive. One area has you walking along a cliff while an Apache helicopter attempts to make you one with the buzzards. Even though the level was not actually extremely high, I got the feeling that the drop was very far and did not want to venture near the edge. Another had Osprey transports dropping off troops to take me out. If the Ospreys are not taken out, they will keep supplying more troops to bring you down at all costs.
Sound/MusicThe sounds in Half-Life are nothing short of excellent. Kelly Bailey is programming the sound engine as well as creating the sound effects and music for the game. To date, Unreal has the best sound effects of any game released, but Half-Life will use DSP effects to dynamically change the sounds depending on motion, location, and other factors. Things such as firing a gun inside a heating duct have a tin-ish, echoic sound to them, just like you would expect. Footsteps sound different depending on what you are stepping on and sound placement was done very well, allowing easy locating of sound sources. This kind of feature is something the player may not notice, but it serves to immerse the player even more in the Half-Life world, even if he or she did not realize that the sound played a part in that.The music being worked on is not the play-straight-through-the-whole-CD, repeat-as-necessary kind of music. I do not know about everybody out there but after awhile I tend to turn that kind of music off. Half-Life will instead spare the constant music and use it when it counts. If you get into a suspenseful or fight situation, the music will appear. If you later go back to an area you explored and cleared of monsters, you would not want the same music to play, so the game will not play the music. This is definitely a refreshing approach. Valve is not alone in this thinking but it is refreshing nonetheless. Unlike other games in development though, Half-Life's uses Redbook audio for the music arrangements for a very clear sound.
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