Half-Life: Alyx’s movement system was changed because tall testers kept getting stuck
Half-Life: Alyx contains a trio of locomotion choices, letting you progress via the surroundings usually, blink teleport, or shift teleport. The 2 teleportation types are functionally the identical, however one takes you to your vacation spot nearly instantly, whereas the opposite jumps there. These motion programs are the topic of a brand new deep dive video from Valve.
Valve’s builders showcase a bunch of prototypes and among the issues they needed to resolve which can be distinctive to VR video games. Participant top, as an example. Valve determined it wished to replicate the peak of a participant within the recreation itself. There is a sensible implication to this, because it impacts hows paths are computed.
“Early on, we might get hard-to-reproduce bugs from gamers banging their digital heads on low-hanging pipes as a result of they have been unable to teleport via sure areas,” says Valve’s Greg Coomer. “It was solely later that we realised all these bugs have been coming from our taller colleagues.”
On this model of Alyx, gamers needed to duck earlier than they teleported if there was any impediment of their path, however Valve discovered that gamers typically did not discover the obstacles as a result of they have been too targeted on their objective. The answer was to create an ordinary minimal physique measurement when teleporting, successfully making each participant the identical top whereas they’re shifting from A to B.
Gamers specializing in their vacation spot above all else was one thing Valve apparently seen all through testing, in addition to gamers having very excessive expectations concerning the extent of their talents.
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“Playtesters would fortunately inform us that sure, in actual fact they might attain that spot by squeezing via a spot, catapulting over an object or sliding below an impediment,” says Coomer.
Testers would peer below gaps and round corners and attempt to discover novel methods to get via the maps, so Valve needed to be sure that the top place of the gamers physique was a legitimate one and that there was a transparent path for them to achieve it. You possibly can’t slide via a metallic grate or via a tiny crack within the wall, however you may contort your physique to get via slender areas that an individual would conceivably be capable of slip via.
Elsewhere, the video explores how Valve used audio to assist motion, why it created partial motion and an entire host of different issues the studio discovered and experimented with all through Alyx’s growth.
